Molière, a 400-year-old contemporary

Little is known about Molière. What was his life like between the day Jean (soon to be called Jean-Baptiste) Poquelin was christened on 15 January 1622 and the evening of his death on 17 February 1673? For such an outstanding personality, when you can’t know, you invent. A lot. Indeed, a lot was invented by his first biographers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which everyone else copied while adding new anecdotes, each more fictitious than the last. Fortunately, the celebration of Molière’s bicentenary in 1822 ushered in an era of documentary research. Hordes of enthusiasts, who soon proclaimed themselves “Moliéristes”, scoured the archives of the towns where he had lived and performed; and over the years, right up to the second half of the twentieth century, discoveries were made, debunking most of the false knowledge built up around anecdotes and legends.

Starting with the accounts of the author’s death. It suffices to consult contemporary testimonies to realise that Molière did not die on stage at the end of the fourth performance of Le Malade imaginaire, but at home, a few hours later; that he was not consumed by a long illness, but succumbed abruptly to an epidemic of pulmonary infections that had cut down dozens of other Parisians. Our understanding of Le Malade imaginaire is utterly changed as a result, whereas the play is traditionally presented as a testamentary work in which the playwright vents his pain in the face of an imminent death.

More generally, what can we learn from the authentic documents that have emerged over the last two centuries? These sources encompass notarial archives, account books and other theatre ledgers, the tabloids of the time (the gazettes), memoirs and some correspondence, not forgetting the editions of his plays published during his lifetime. There is nothing about the private Molière, since his correspondence has disappeared, depriving us of insights into his loves, friendships, desires, tastes, readings, thoughts, loyalties and hates. However, there is a lot about the social Molière, the actor, the troupe leader, the artist, which helps us reconstruct his career and analyse his choices. Especially if we combine this historical approach with an archaeological approach that looks at the “making” of his comedies in order to try to understand the Molière the Author.

The Jean-Baptiste Poquelin revealed in these documents was the son of a wealthy merchant, whose clientele came from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and who, in the early 1630s, had also acquired the position of “Tapissier Valet de Chambre du Roi” (valet and upholsterer of the King’s chamber), which statutorily gave him – and his son – access to the foot of the King’s bed every morning, for three months of the year. In short, it was an upwardly mobile family, which justified the efforts to further elevate the social standing of Jean-Baptiste, the eldest of the family, by enrolling him in a renowned school in the Latin Quarter and thereafter sending him to study law in Orléans, since the father’s business was to go to his younger brother. Molière’s abandonment of his studies, at the turn of 1642-1643, to embrace a life in the theatre with Madeleine Béjart and her siblings, stands out all the more clearly as a deliberate rupture with the family trajectory.

And the archives reveal that, yes, the actor spent a few hours in prison in 1645 due to the failure of his first troupe, the Illustre Théâtre, but that the responsibility did not lie with his father, a loyal supporter, despite the legends, but more generally with the poor attendance of Parisian audiences. And they have us discover Molière barely a year later as a member of the best “country troupe” in France, the company of the Duc d’Épernon, criss-crossing the south of the Kingdom and performing in fitted-out jeux de paume and the large halls of castles, to privileged audiences who understood the French language (the common people only understanding Occitan), living in comfort and travelling at his ease in a carriage or a horse-drawn boat, while valets transport the troupe’s equipment. It has to be emphasised, therefore, that there is nothing here that even remotely evokes the popular images of a destitute troupe. Finally, the same documents show us this troupe, which Molière soon took control of – thanks to his aura and his ability to write small “farces” – was protected, after the Duc d’Épernon, by the three most powerful barons of the rich Languedoc region, then by the Prince de Conti, the king’s cousin. All this foreshadowed the extraordinary income that his Parisian triumphs would bring him fifteen years later, making him a rich man, as well as the protections of a growing number of nobles, soon to be supplanted by King Louis XIV himself.

In Molière, we now discover a man of the theatre who has nothing of the “people’s author” imagined by the twentieth century. Indeed, at the time, to attend a new play, the price of a standing place in the stalls was one and a half livres (about 17 euros) whereas a Parisian worker earned 60 livres a year (660 euros). Apart from a few lackeys who accompanied the lords and ladies, the audience was made up of the high aristocracy in the main boxes (and the chairs placed on the stage), the educated bourgeoisie in the balconies, and prosperous merchants standing in the stalls during the week and often sitting with their wives in the cheaper boxes on Sundays. The answer is, as we can see, partly sociological.

One year after his return to Paris at the head of his troupe (October 1658), the extraordinary success Molière enjoyed with a small one-act comedy, Les Précieuses ridicules (November 1659), can be attributed to the fact he had “found” a particular audience, one of socialites dazzled by his ability to express, through comedy, the subjects of salon conversations (equality of the sexes, the necessary education of women, marriage, jealousy and infidelity). He had struck the chord of self-mockery, considered a virtue by high-society, and thereby created a connivance with it; he had seduced admirers of satirical parody, numerous among the literati; and he had appealed to the audience of the stalls, who delighted in the burlesque caricatures of codes that were almost completely foreign to them. One can understand why, six years later, the “salon comedy” of Le Misanthrope was an immediate success – contrary to future legends.

At the same time, Molière had won over the high-society audience in another comic vein. In the most prominent salons, run by refined ladies advocating the equality of the sexes and the discreet and personal practice of a natural religion, there was an abhorrence for opposing ethical and social categories, such as backward-thinking bourgeois (obsessed with the superiority of the husband, the frivolity of women and the fear of cuckoldry), “zealous” puritans, pedants and their female counterparts, or so-called “learned women”: Molière offered them Sganarelle, Arnolphe, Orgon, Tartuffe, Philaminte, and even Argan to make them laugh. Indeed, the transition from the religious zealot Orgon to the medical zealot Argan reveals a sceptical Molière who shares with his freethinking friends the idea of an equivalence between religion and medicine, two interchangeable forms of superstition and manifestations of human credulity that are exploited by impostors. Are we to understand that this Molière is primarily an author of moral comedies and a describer of “temperaments”? As it happens, the idea that the aim of comedy is to correct morals was a posture Molière abruptly adopted in the summer of 1664 to defend his first Tartuffe in three acts by making it seem that, far from having wanted to satirise obtuse puritans and their spiritual advisers, he had, as a moral author, denounced the vice of hypocrisy.

This Molière has a lot in common with the humourists of our time; but he was also a showman gifted with an extraordinary sense of theatre and an exceptional flair for writing. It is easy to understand why, four centuries later, he is still so present.

Georges Forestier
theatre historian (Sorbonne Université)
author of Molière (Gallimard)