Acting Up: Staging the Modern Subject in Eighteenth-Century France explores how the theorization of the actor's art influences the Enlightenment conception of the subject as a self-conscious social performance. Theories of acting hypothesize interpersonal relations and class markers as performances enacted before an audience rather than as inherent, preordained corollaries of birth and station. Acting becomes the vehicle for a reevaluation of the political, social, and moral definition of the individual in eighteenth-century France. Chapter 1, Performance Anxiety: Acting and the Public Sphere in France, 1630-1750, places the moral and religious dispute over acting into historical and political context. In response to the religious condemnation of theatre in the seventeenth century, apologists for the stage developed the first modern theories of acting, substituting esthetic criteria of excellence for moral condemnation. Chapter 2, Bourgeois Actors: Staging Sensibility in Nivelle de la Chaussee 's Comedies Larmoyantes posits the eighteenth-century stage as a crucial site for a reorganization of bourgeois values in which acting is redeemed as a necessary attribute of virtuous conduct in the domestic interiors of wealthy non-nobles. Chapter 3, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Political Esthetics: Le Paradoxe du Republicain, questions Rousseau's apparently unequivocal condemnation of theatre. Read in the context of his more canonical works, I propose that the denunciation of performance in the Lettre a d'Alembert masks a paradoxical movement to recuperate acting in Rousseau's ideal republic. Likewise, Chapter 4, Fourbum Imperator: Diderot's Sovereign Actors suggests an alternative interpretation of Denis Diderot's paean to performance, examining the specter of political demagoguery that haunts the figure of the dispassionate actor in his Paradoxe sur le comedien. Acting Up concludes by looking at the Revolutionary suspicion of the actor's craft in the newly volatile realm of politics. In La Mere coupable, Beaumarchais stages both the apotheosis and defeat of acting, the culmination of the Enlightenment obsession with the stage. At the cataclysmic end of the eighteenth century the actor stands at center stage in a devastated social landscape, emblem and initiator of an uncertain future.