The Struggle for Influence

Abstract

It was seen in Chapter 1 that the newly incumbent Louis XIV was faced with a number of potential threats to the stability of his country and a number of fronts on which he would seek to assert his kingly authority. Above all, Louis had to avoid what was understood to be a genuine threat of schism within the Church. Although the Jansenist controversy and the Tartuffe controversy are not one and the same, they are intimately bound up in chronology and context and, crucially, to the extent that one needed to be resolved before the other could be. For, as will be seen, the crucial moments in the unraveling and subsequent resolution of the Jansenist controversy in the 1660s coincide almost exactly with the unraveling and subsequent resolution of the Tartuffe affair. The two controversies also involved two of the same protagonists: the Archbishop of Paris, Péréfixe, and Louis XIV himself. According to Salomon, Bazin was probably the first critic (in 1848) to note the relationship between the Peace of the Church and the lifting of the ban on Tartuffe.¹ In Molière et le roi, Rey himself has more recently and for the most part very convincingly pushed the link further than anybody else. While my own reading is indebted to Rey’s, my emphasis is on interpreting those events via the notion of what I have called throughout this book the struggle for influence in the early reign of Louis XIV.