The Poet and the Prince: Revising Molière and Tartuffe in the French Revolution

Abstract

Le paradoxe de Moliere, a l’apogee de sa vie, fut d’etre a la fois homme de pouvoir et de contestation. Personnage officiel en meme temps que marginal, il se trouva sans cesse au centre de luttes, dont les negociations pour obtenir son enterrement chretien ne constituerent pas le dernier episode. Michel Delon An array of contradictory elements surrounded Moliere, but the paradox of his having been both powerful and persecuted acquired special resonance during the French Revolution. Moliere’s legendary association with Louis XIV and the royal patronage long deemed integral to his artistic success came to the fore in the context of revolutionary anxiety about the culture inherited from the Old Regime—culture at once useful and stained by its association with a rejected past. Moliere’s ties to the monarch emerged in published debates that raged early in the Revolution about the proper relationship between government and theater. This literature suggests the construction of a new narrative of the poet’s life story in which he owes little or nothing to his sovereign. Documents also reveal that performance texts of Tartuffe were altered during the revolutionary period to excise the role of the monarch. Together, the reconfiguration of Moliere’s relationship to Louis XIV and the modifications to Tartuffe may be interpreted as complementary processes of revision—one historical, the other literary. They are parallel efforts by revolutionaries to void their cultural inheritance of all