\u201cLe devoir de la Com\u00e9die [est] de corriger les hommes en les divertissant [\u2026]\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cles plus beaux traits d\u2019une s\u00e9rieuse 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 d\u00e9fauts. [\u2026] On souffre ais\u00e9menet des r\u00e9pr\u00e9hensions; mais on ne souffre point la raillerie.\u201d (Pr\u00e9face du Tartuffe)<\/em><\/p>\n Under Louis XIV, the sun king, the court wants to have proper and honn\u00eate fun<\/em>. But the traditional comic genre of farce needs some \u201ccleaning up\u201d. With the support of the king, Moli\u00e8re turned around the tradition of French comic theater to create a fairly uncharted literary genre: the com\u00e9die<\/em> (as opposed to farce). His plays have proper meter (alexandrines), poignant and charming characters, and emotional depth.<\/p>\n 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. Moli\u00e8re\u2019s mockery of the marquis; the Pr\u00e9cieuses<\/em>; the cocus<\/em>; the hypocrites<\/em> and the M\u00e9decins<\/em> with their unnatural behaviors had more castigating power than a moral reprimand and fell in line with that new social ethics of \u201cpolite\u201d behavior (l\u2019honn\u00eatet\u00e9<\/em>) that the court was so fond of. He made it his role to \u201cattack the perversions of his time by painting them ridiculous\u201d (“attaquer par des peintures ridicules les vices de [son] si\u00e8cle”<\/em>).<\/p>\n In various placets au Roi<\/em> (prefatory letters to the king), Moli\u00e8re explained himself so: A Bit Of Literary History \u201cLe devoir de la Com\u00e9die [est] de corriger les hommes en les divertissant [\u2026]\u201d \u201cles plus beaux traits d\u2019une s\u00e9rieuse 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 d\u00e9fauts. [\u2026] On souffre … Continue reading A BIT OF LITERARY HISTORY<\/span>
\n“l\u2019emploi de la Com\u00e9die est de corriger les vices des hommes [\u2026] et les plus beaux traits d\u2019une s\u00e9rieuse 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 d\u00e9fauts. [\u2026] On souffre ais\u00e9ment des r\u00e9pr\u00e9hensions; mais on ne souffre point la raillerie.”<\/em> (“One suffers more from mockery than from reprimand”).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"