By John Istel

Molière’s classic satire Tartuffe almost cost the playwright his life.

As hilarious as Tartuffe has proved in productions over the centuries, its satirical look at a con artist who uses false religious piety to swindle and cheat a family of its property wasn’t so funny to some members of Molière’s audience. From the playwright’s point of view, he was ridiculing hypocrisy not devout faith. But in 17th century France, religion was no laughing matter.

Even before the play was first produced in 1664, an ultraconservative aristocratic Catholic group, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrament, wanted the work censored. And, after its initial court performance for Louis XIV and his court entourage at Versailles, it was made illegal to perform on order of President de Lamoignon. The ban lasted five years, even though the king and his brother, the Duc d’Orleans, were staunch supporters of Molière’s theatre company. Their royal patronage didn’t prevent one outraged critic from writing to Louis to suggest that the playwright was "un démon" who should be burned at the stake. Such threats weren’t idle: the year before, upon the order of the same President de Lamoignon, Simon Morin was burned for heresy.

One of the reasons Tartuffe provoked such a phlegmatic response was that the characters were based, however loosely, on reality. Molière and his audiences—like us today—didn’t have to look far to spy predatory Catholic priests and crooked financiers, some of whom happened to be the most powerful members of society. Criminal charges and malicious gossip may be survived, but public ridicule, especially via Molière’s sophisticated rhyming Alexandrines was hard to ignore.

• Stealing From The State: Nicholas Fouquet •

In August 1661, three years before Molière composed Tartuffe, the playwright was commissioned to present a play for the entertainment portion of Nicholas Fouquet’s week-long housewarming party. In fact, it was a grand fete for six thousand "friends," including the King himself and his court. The host was a handsome dashing man born into an aristocratic family who since 1653 happened to be France’s finance minister or surintendant des finances. He had worked with Cardinal Mazarin, who like Richelieu before him, was instrumental in actually running France’s government on behalf of the monarchy (Louis XIV inherited the throne when he was five).

The year 1661 was an auspicious one. In March, Mazarin died. The next day Louis XIV decided that at 23 he was old enough to take over the reins of government. One of the first things he did was appoint Colbert to audit the finance ministry’s books.

Nicholas Fouquet

Fouquet, according to one historian, was an "acknowledged leader of intelligent society, a discerning patron of artists, a lover of fine buildings and women." Indeed, he’d commissioned the country’s foremost composer Lully and supported writers such as La Fontaine. But he apparently had the "dangerous habit of confusing the credit of the state with his own." The result was an increasingly ostentatious wealth, the display of which would compete with any compensation package a disgraced 21st-century CEO might acquire.

Fouquet spent part of his embezzled gains on buying an island, garrisoning a fort, and erecting a chateau, Vaux-le-Vicomte, that some said inspired Versailles. At the August housewarming in 1661, the 6,000 guests were treated sumptuously. Party favors included "diamond tiaras and saddle-horses." The grounds were dotted by a thousand orange trees. Table settings were made of gold. Fouquet built an outdoor amphitheatre of silver fir to house the spectacular entertainments prepared by Molière and other artists. Fireworks lit up the sky each night.

The young king was furious and, less than two months after attending the eye-popping celebration, arrested Fouquet and bustled him off to the Bastille. La Fontaine and other nobles who’d enjoyed his wit and favors urged clemency. One sympathetic lady of the court, when hearing that one of the case’s judges had recently increased his church visits during the three year trial, suggested that he’d turned from a clown into "a Tartuffe." While such empathetic remarks didn’t spare Fouquet a life sentence in prison, it does suggest Molière’s play had mirrored society enough to create an enduring cultural archetype.

•True Devotion: One Way To Pray •

In Molière’s France, religious devotion was not to be mocked. Its practice was carefully circumscribed by the Catholic church. Protestants were begrudgingly tolerated, and during the course of the reign of Louis XIV, persecutions increased as the monarch who loved conformity tried to eliminate competing methods of worship. In fact, a dozen years after Molière’s death, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had assured the Calvinist Huguenots the right to practice their religion.

King Louis XIV

In addition to Protestants, the Catholic authorities didn’t particularly care for theatre artists either. The "Ritual of Paris," instituted in the 16th century still held sway. It put actors in the same league with magicians, money-lenders, pimps, whores, and heretics, all of whom were "forbidden to receive communion during their lives or Christian burial after their deaths," according to Jonas Barish, in his book The Antitheatrical Prejudice.

Molière, who at his death in 1673 was France’s most renowned—and notorious—playwright, performed his plays publicly in Paris and privately for the king, his court, and in the private homes of artistocrats. Yet he only escaped a burial in a roadside ditch by dint of royal interdiction. Even so, the funeral had to be held at night, with little pomp or circumstance. Mikhail Bulgakov’s biography fancifully reports that Louis XIV, responding to the entreaties of Molière’s wife, Armande, for proper burial, asked the Archbishop of Paris how far down consecrated ground extended in a church cemetery. When told the soil was sacred to four feet, the king replied, "Be kind enough, Archbishop, to bury him five feet deep."

In another act undertaken in 1661, Louis XIV consolidated his power by attacking the Jansenists, a devout Catholic group. Their schools were closed and members fled. To the absolute monarch, they represented a nonconforming Catholicism and their puritan-like embrace of simple comforts clashed with Louis XIV’s own munificent emphasis on splendor.

French Theatre 1600's

Molière’s contemporary, the playwright Jean Racine, was educated by the Jansenists and only broke with them after they began writing bitter attacks on the morality of the theatre. Blaise Pascal, the brilliant mathematician and satirist, followed a particularly harsh brand. According to Molière scholar H. Gaston Hall, "...toward the end of his life in 1662 Pascal, to whom the scientific method is as much indebted as French comic style, is said to have nourished himself deliberately without tasting his food (a singular sacrifice for a Frenchman). Beneath his hairshirt he seems to have worn an iron belt with spikes pointed inward. Whenever he felt he had sinned through pride, he struck it with his elbow to drive the points into his flesh."

Many mistook Molière’s ridicule as an attack on Christian piety. But it was false piety that was clearly his target. In fact, Hall writes, "If we believe another contemporary, La Bruyère, the ‘faux dévot’ was also a familiar social type. One such man, Charpy de Sainte-Croix, a forger and the author of an unsanctioned mystical treatise, had recently seduced the wife of one of Molière’s neighbors after receiving shelter in the household."

Whether Tartuffe was inspired directly by Charpy, or was more likely an amalgam of various shysters and swindlers, the character has made centuries of audiences laugh—and cringe—at his audacious behavior.

Paris 1657

When the ban on Tartuffe performances was lifted five years after its initial composition, Molière had added two acts. The exact nature of the changes are unknown, but most agree that the fifth act, highlighted by the entrance of the royal officer, sent by King Louis XIV himself to save Orgon and his family, was added. Clearly, Molière knew where the support for his work lay. For by making the Sun King’s representative a deus ex machina, a god-like answer to the play’s conflict, he demonstrates his belief in the beneficence of Louis’s rule.

To combat the church’s charges of immorality, Molière himself asserted in a preface to the first published edition: "To expose vices to everyone’s laughter is to deal them a mighty blow. People easily endure reproofs, but they cannot at all endure being made fun of. People have no objection to being considered wicked, but they are not willing to be considered ridiculous." Tartuffe, for all the real life models he explicitly could have used, endures because it’s the title character’s gross wickedness that gets laughed at last.

BACK