Abstract
Molière’s Tartuffe was premiered on the evening of May 12, 1664, in a makeshift theatre at Versailles before Louis XIV and his court. It is commonly understood to be a play about religious hypocrisy, the controversy it provoked owing to the alleged possibility that its audience might subsequently be unable to distinguish off stage between a hypocrite and a true believer. The particular concern was that true believers might be mistaken for hypocrites and that the reputation of the Church might thereby be unjustly tarnished or even seriously damaged. The debate is typically couched in terms of vrais and faux dévots, who correspond to true believers and religious hypocrites, respectively. In the course of the controversy, Molière also established a rhetorical correspondence between opponents of his play and the faux dévots it supposedly denounces, arguing—ingeniously but quite unfairly—that to oppose his play was in practice tantamount to an admission of personal religious hypocrisy. These assumptions and arguments will be reexamined and challenged (or at least nuanced) in the course of this book. In this chapter, I shall outline the origins of the vrai-faux paradigm that has dominated discourse regarding the Tartuffe controversy from 1664 onward, before turning my attention specifically to the notion of the faux dévot, focusing on its primary meaning as a religious hypocrite.
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Notes
For an interesting account of some of the vagaries of seventeenth-century conceptions of religious hypocrisy (including, even, some good uses to which it could be put), see Georges Couton, “Réflexions sur Tartuffe et le péché d’hypocrisie, cas réservé,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France 69 (1969): 404–13.
Père Coustel, Sentimens de l’Eglise & des SS Peres pour servir de discussion sur la Comedie et les comediens, Paris: Coignard, 1694.
H. Gaston Hall reminds us of the “aphrodisiac quality of the exercises hypocritically evoked” by Tartuffe when he mentions his scourge and his hair shirt. Hall also notes that François de Sales in his Introduction à la vie dévote, the most widely read devotional guide of the day, warns of such dangers in his chapter on “mortification extérieure.” H. Gaston Hall, “Some Background to Molière’s Tartuffe,” Australian Journal of French Studies 10 (1973): 110–29 (121).
For a discussion of Elmire’s techniques, see Julia Prest, “Elmire and the Erotics of the ménage à trois in Molière’s Tartuffe,” Romanic Review 102 (2011): 129–44. See also Gilles Declercq, “Equivoques de la séduction. Elmire entre honnêteté et libertinage,” Biblio 17: 181 (2009): 73–127.
Abby Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997 (14). Zanger suggests that Louis XIV’s scandalous relationship with Marie Mancini prior to his marriage (but following a life-threatening illness) “may have been utilized or even staged by Mazarin in order to demonstrate to the country that the king’s body was once again in good working order” (30).
See Francis Assaf, La Mort du roi. Une thanatographie de Louis XIV, Biblio 17: 112, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1998, Part I (“le corps du roi”).
Jean-Marie Apostolidès, “Le Spectacle de l’abondance,” Esprit créateur 19: 3 (1981): 26–34 (27).
See also Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le roi-machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV, Paris: Minuit, 1981.
See Kathleen Wine, “Honored Guests: Wife and Mistress in ‘Les plaisirs de l’île enchantée,’” Dalhousie French Studies 56 (Fall 2001): 78–90 (78).
Although her analysis is lacking nuance, Béatrix Dussane is not wrong when she insists on some of the parallels between Bourdaloue’s and Molière’s repeated condemnation of religious hypocrisy. Béatrix Dussane, “Molière et Bourdaloue,” Revue universelle 38: 12 (September 1929): 641–56.
Cardinal Chigi, 1 Relation et observations sur le royaume de France (1664), ed. E. Rodocanachi, Paris: Leroux, 1894 (9).
Isaac de Benserade, Benserade. Ballets pour Louis XIV, ed. MarieClaude Canova-Green, 2 vols., Toulouse: Société de littératures classiques, 1997 (II, 607). On the dangers of Louis’s weaknesses being revealed in this way, even in the relatively contained forum of court ballet, see Julia Prest, “Conflicting Signals: Images of Louis XIV in Benserade’s Ballets,” in Culture and Conflict in 17th-century France and Ireland, ed. Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique Desnain, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004: 227– 41.
For an interesting account of how Molière’s constructed Louis cannot be taken seriously, see P. Muñoz Simonds, “Molière’s Satiric Use of the Deus Ex Machina in Tartuffe,” Educational Theatre Journal 29: 1 (March 1977): 85– 93. See also Francis L. Lawrence, “Tartuffe: A Question of honnête behavior,” Romance Notes 15: Supp 1 (1973): 134– 44. Lawrence wonders how to interpret the ending of the play and asks, “What credit can actually be given the King for seeing through the hypocrisy of a crude impostor who has fooled only Orgon and Mme. Pernelle?” (143).
Mémoires complets et authentiques du duc de Saint-Simon sur le siècle de Louis XIV et la Régence, ed. M. Chéruel and A. Régnier, 20 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1856 (VII, 46).
Mémoires du marquis de Sourches sur le règne de Louis XIV, ed. Michel Chamillart et al., 13 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1882 (I, 209n2).
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© 2014 Julia Prest
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Prest, J. (2014). What Is a Faux Dévot?. In: Controversy in French Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344007_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344007_3
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