A Bit Of Literary History
“Le devoir de la Comédie [est] de corriger les hommes en les divertissant […]”
“les plus beaux traits d’une sérieuse morale sont moins puissants, le plus souvent, que ceux de la satire; et rien ne reprend mieux la plupart des hommes que la peinture de leures défauts. […] On souffre aisémenet des répréhensions; mais on ne souffre point la raillerie.” (Préface du Tartuffe)
Under Louis XIV, the sun king, the court wants to have proper and honnête fun. But the traditional comic genre of farce needs some “cleaning up”. With the support of the king, Molière turned around the tradition of French comic theater to create a fairly uncharted literary genre: the comédie (as opposed to farce). His plays have proper meter (alexandrines), poignant and charming characters, and emotional depth.
But behind the laughter, often laid a humanistic (and rather modern) criticism of a patriarchal order that was becoming obsolete under the sunny rule of its young king. Molière’s mockery of the marquis; the Précieuses; the cocus; the hypocrites and the Médecins with their unnatural behaviors had more castigating power than a moral reprimand and fell in line with that new social ethics of “polite” behavior (l’honnêteté) that the court was so fond of. He made it his role to “attack the perversions of his time by painting them ridiculous” (“attaquer par des peintures ridicules les vices de [son] siècle”).
In various placets au Roi (prefatory letters to the king), Molière explained himself so:
“l’emploi de la Comédie est de corriger les vices des hommes […] et les plus beaux traits d’une sérieuse morale sont moins puissants, le plus souvent, que ceux de la satire; rien ne reprend mieux la plupart des hommes que la peinture de leurs défauts. […] On souffre aisément des répréhensions; mais on ne souffre point la raillerie.” (“One suffers more from mockery than from reprimand”).