Moliere

From Philosopedia

Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin (15 January 1622 - 17 February 1673)

Molière was a French playwright and actor, the creator of high French comedy, the forerunner of the Comédie Français. An upholsterer, he joined the Béjan troupe of actors when young, toured the provinces for thirteen years, and received the patronage of Louis XIV. His farces, comedies, masques, and ballets ridiculed a vice or a type of excess by caricaturing a person who incarnates it: Tartuffe (1664), the religious hypocrite; Le Misanthrope (1666), the antisocial man; The Would-be Gentleman (1670), the parvenu; The Learned Women (1672), affected intellectuals; The Imaginary Invalid (1673), the hypochondriac.

When he produced Don Juan, a religious writer described it as “a school of atheism in which, after making a clever atheist say the most horrible impieties he entrusts the cause of God to a valet who says ridiculous things.” Similarly, Tartuffe, a satire on religious fanatics and hypocrites, resulted in the clergy’s demands that Molière be burned as a heretic and led to his excommunication.

Molière’s father had been valet to the King, and this as well as his skill in writing comedies got him royal protection. His farces, contemporaries also find, remain uproariously amusing. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Molière as being only a “possible” atheist. Joseph McCabe labeled Molière a freethinker.

In a monolog by Cleante in Tartuffe, Moliere writes,

• . . . there is nothing, I think, so odious as the whitewashed outside of a specious zeal; as those downright imposters, those bigots whose sacrilegious and deceitful grimaces impose on others with impunity, and who trifle as they like with all that mankind holds sacred; those men who, wholly given to mercenary ends, trade upon godliness, and would purchase honour and reputation at the cost of hypocritical looks and affected groans; who, seized with strange ardour, make use of the next world to secure their fortune in this; who, with great affectation and many prayers, daily preach solitude and retirement while they themselves live at Court; who know how to reconcile their zeal with their vices; who are passionate, revengeful, faithless, full of deceit, and who, to work the destruction of a fellow-man, insolently cover their fierce resentment with the cause of Heaven

Martin Greif relates that when Molière was in his own late forties, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old Michel Baron, “the talented young actor whom he had taken into his own home after removing him from a company of child actors of which he was the star.” Molière’s wife, twenty-one years his junior, screamed bloody murder. The boy, not exactly dumb, moved out. Molière ordered him back. The wife said, “Choose! It’s either him or me.” According to Greif, Molière chose and “three years later, when the playwright died, Michel Baron was at his side.” Curtain . . . except that there was a Catholic funeral despite any last confession and without his ever repudiating his profession of being a comedian.

Molière was buried at night, for no priest in Paris would escort the body to the cemetery and no cemetery would accept him. Louis XIV, however, intervened, pointing out that Church law defined burial to be four feet and asking that Molière, then, be buried five feet but without pomp or scandal. As a result, a non-religious ceremony resulted. The casket was covered with the upholsterers’ embroidered banner, not something related to comedy. When 150 gathered and became noisy, Madame Molière dispensed coins and requested that those present escort the body to the cemetery. Here, the playwright was buried in a section reserved for suicides and unbaptized children. Later, the body was moved, and today Molière’s tomb is in the huge Père-Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris, near the tombs of Chopin, Bizet, Proust, and Oscar Wilde.

The Catholic Encyclopedia blandly describes Molière as a Catholic, yet he died as McCabe points out, excommunicated, and the priests whom his wife summoned refused to come, giving in only when the King said that some sort of burial service should be arranged.

{CB; CE; EU, Aram Vartarian; FFRF; JM; RAT}