A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  A tout ce que les faux doivent donner d’horreur.

  (Sir, all is well; rest easy, and be grateful.

  We serve a Prince to whom all sham is hateful,

  A Prince who sees into our inmost hearts,

  And can’t be fooled by any trickster’s arts.

  His royal soul, though generous and human,

  Views all things with discernment and acumen;

  His sovereign reason is not lightly swayed,

  And all his judgments are discreetly weighed.

  He honors righteous men of every kind,

  And yet his zeal for virtue is not blind,

  Nor does his love of piety numb his wits

  And make him tolerant of hypocrites.)

  The preceding précis of the play’s royalist theme suffices to underline the modernity of the position Molière stakes out for himself as champion not only of the new secular order of which theater serves as both mirror and agent but also of a new vision of political sovereignty. Despite his sacred anointment as God’s surrogate, one as capable, on Tartuffe’s showing, of seeing into the darkest corners of his subjects’ hearts as the Almighty himself, the king Molière portrays is a conspicuously rational figure whose chief duty is no longer the defense of religion but rather that of the secular society of which theater is the flower. But Molière’s modernity is also and more profoundly seen in the unmistakable ambiguity of the play’s denouement. For though the king does rescue Orgon from the consequences of pious excess and folly, the chances of anything comparable happening in real life are infinitely remote. The vraisemblance brought to the portrayal of the comic undoing of the bourgeois household is violated by the means of sparing it the fate it has brought on itself: the kind of deus ex machina that period theorists proscribed precisely on the grounds of its utter implausibility. Molière’s embarrassingly extravagant encomium of the king is thus undermined by the miraculous character of the event that occasions it, pointing in the process to a much darker vision of the political order it is the monarch’s duty to govern.

  That there was ample room for doubt is underscored by the fate of the play itself. Though the king reportedly loved it, and professed himself mystified by the fuss the devout party at court made about it, Tartuffe was banned from the stage within weeks of its premiere. It subsequently took five years, at least two rewrites, and a string of petitions before Molière’s company was allowed to stage it as a regular part of the repertoire. As absolute as Louis XIV’s personal rule was taken to be, he apparently felt powerless to intercede at least until the death of his mother, Anne of Austria—a woman whose own late turn to rigorous piety after a gaudy youth recalls Orgon’s mother.

  That Molière keenly felt the sting of the king’s desertion in the Tartuffe affair is evinced by the next play in the sequence, Don Juan. In act 5, shortly before the arrival of the statue of the murdered commander that sends the title character to hell for his misdeeds, Molière’s version of the legendary reprobate takes an unmistakably topical turn. Increasingly beset by angry representatives of every sector of society, from peasants and shopkeepers to sword-bearing nobles, the don announces his intention to wear the mask of religious devotion. He justifies this decision to his horrified valet, Sganarelle, whose role Molière played, by asserting that, despicable as such a course may be, “there is no longer any shame in it; hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues. The character of a good man is the best of all roles one can play today, and the profession of a hypocrite has wonderful advantages. It is an art the imposture in which is always respected; and even if you’re found out, nobody dares say anything against it. All other human vices are exposed to censure, and everyone is free to rail against them at the top of their voices. But hypocrisy is a privileged vice whose hand shuts everyone’s mouth, and peacefully enjoys a sovereign impunity.” It is above all in Don Juan’s subsequent account of the source of this “sovereign impunity” that we meet the link to Tartuffe. For, as he explains, while all other vices involve isolated individuals, each given over to his or her private vice, hypocrites have formed a tight conspiracy, working in concert to shield each other from retribution: “If I were to be discovered, without stirring a finger, I’d see the whole cabal take up my cause, and its members would defend me against one and all. This is, in sum, the true means of doing with impunity everything I want. I’ll set myself up as censor of other people’s actions, judge ill of everyone, and retain a good opinion only of myself.”

  The “cabal” Don Juan mentions has an inescapable contemporary reference. It alludes to the “cabal of the devout,” a political pressure group whose spearhead was the Company of the Holy Sacrament: a semi-secret, lay-religious association devoted to infiltrating secular society in order to rectify public morals by punishing people its members deemed wicked and by attacking worldly pleasures they judged inimical to Christian life. A prominent figure in the group was Molière’s sometime patron, the reformed rakehell, Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti, in whom scholars have followed period commentators in seeing a model for Molière’s don. With Don Juan, then, the poet widens the attack launched in Tartuffe by targeting not just an isolated hypocrite but the semi-official party of hypocrisy of which he saw himself the victim.

  However, as broad as this new front in the literary wars that L’école des femmes touched off may be, Don Juan strikes still deeper. When asked, in act 1, why he continues to serve a master he vehemently denounces as “a madman, a dog, a devil, a Turk, a heretic, who believes in neither heaven nor hell nor werewolves,” Sganarelle replies both simply and directly: “a great lord who’s a wicked man is a terrible thing. I’m compelled to remain loyal to him, whatever I wish; fear fills in me the office of zeal, bridles my tongue, and very often reduces me to applauding what my soul abhors.”

  It is impossible to understate this remark’s significance, placed as it is in the opening scene of exposition in which the play states the comic agon, or “dramatic conflict,” it will rehearse. A member of the circle of the “libertine,” freethinking atomist, Pierre Gassendi, as well as an habitué of the socially as well as morally marginal world of the stage, Molière was a materialist, committed as such to a systematically naturalistic picture of reality. It was therefore not entirely without reason that one of his adversaries labeled him a “devil incarnate” bent on ridiculing the conventional pieties of the age. Nevertheless, like other libertines of the time—including Thomas Hobbes, author of The Leviathan (1651), and the Spinoza of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), works that sought to found political science on a thoroughly demystified material basis—Molière worried about the consequences of the demoralized vision of human community freethinkers advanced. It is important, then, that, just as in Tartuffe, where Orgon’s family is rescued from catastrophe by the secular miracle of royal intervention, the core problem Don Juan addresses is that, barring something like the arrival of the stone guest, sent by God himself to restore not only justice but the civil order the title character disturbs, there is literally nothing in the world as Molière knew it to protect us from monsters like Don Juan. A grandee as well as an atheist, entitled, as he threatens at one point, to bullwhip his servant for one word of reproach, and protected from paying the price for his sins by the credit his noble father has at court (at least until the son’s depredations affect other grandees like himself), Don Juan stands beyond the reach of human justice just as certainly as he proves immune to ordinary moral feeling.

  To make matters worse, any attempt to argue otherwise by invoking the higher authority of Church teaching or the inherent nobility of human nature winds up sounding like sentimental nonsense. Whence the play’s most brilliant as well as scandalous move, provoking howls of rage in pious quarters. The only consistent spokesperson for justice and morality the play provides is the comic servant, Sganarelle. The defense of the right is accordingly allotted to a clown.

  Sganarelle’s first attempt to convert his master takes the form
of a parody of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man in which, whirling his body in circles to demonstrate the miraculous power of free will, Sganarelle gets his toe caught in the hem of the doctor’s robe he wears as a disguise and falls flat on his face. His second issues in an astonishing anticipation of Lucky’s speech in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The speech needs to be cited at length to convey its full weight. Appalled by his master’s plan to escape into the impunity of membership of the cabal of the devout, Sganarelle produces a comic masterpiece of scrambled proverbs and grotesquely garbled literary echoes whose nonsensical associative leaps betray at once the urgency and logical inconsequence of his apology for belief:

  Know, sir, that if you take the crock to the water often enough, it will break; and as that author whose works I don’t know put it so well, man, in this world, is like a bird on a branch; the branch is attached to the tree; who attaches himself to the tree obeys good precepts; good precepts are worth more than handsome words; handsome words are found at court; at court are courtiers; courtiers follow fashion; fashion springs from fancy; fancy is a faculty of the soul; the soul is what gives us life; life ends in death; death makes us think of heaven; heaven is above the earth; the earth isn’t the sea; the sea is subject to storms; storms torment vessels; vessels need a good pilot; a good pilot has prudence; prudence isn’t found in young people; young people owe obedience to the old; the old love riches; riches make rich people; rich people aren’t poor; poor people suffer want; want knows no law; who knows no law is a brute beast; and, in consequence, you’ll be damned to all the devils.

  The amazing thing here is how comic vraisemblance inspires delighted laughter even as it measures the extremity of the situation the play sets before us. On one hand, there is no other way for a clownish valet to speak: as Sganarelle confesses, he has had no formal education and, besides, it is his job to make us laugh. Yet, on the other hand, to what would even the most polished and learned apology for belief amount if not to a more plausible yet nonetheless equally helpless appeal to inchoate feeling? It is worth noting that Sganarelle’s central argument resembles the one that Blaise Pascal invokes in the apology for Christian religion sketched out in the Pensées (first, highly imperfect posthumous edition, 1670). “The heart has reasons reason doesn’t know. This is what faith is: God as felt by the heart, not reason.” Neither Sganarelle nor Molière has of course any interest in defending religious belief. Still, for all the heartless accuracy of Don Juan’s cynicism, feeling clamors that there just has to be an alternative if we are not to sink into the state of bestial chaos to which Molière’s own materialist leanings seem to condemn us. If Don Juan is so convincing, it is in part because, legendary seducer of women who ought to know better, he is a supreme confidence man. But he is also convincing because he is simply right about the way the world works; and if he is right, what is the social order itself if not a confidence trick whose promise of justice is just as empty as the arch-seducer’s professions of love?

  Given Don Juan’s underlying violence, it will come as no surprise that it was shut down after a mere fifteen performances, not to be staged again, or even printed in an unbowdlerized edition, until the nineteenth century. Molière’s next move was accordingly in part an act of propitiation—an attempt to lower the temperature by staking out some sort of middle ground between himself and the general public in order to recruit allies against his increasingly virulent enemies. The result was the play the era regarded as his masterpiece, Le misanthrope.

  Le misanthrope achieves many things, in particular the perfection of the “comedy of character,” the genre for which Molière is most famous, and to which the subsequent history of world as well as French theater remains indebted to this day. With only a few exceptions, like the classically based Amphitryon (1668), the brooding George Dandin (1668), and a late return to knockabout farces, all of the plays he wrote from this time until his death in 1673 are comedies of manners featuring a central character type round whose absurd obsession the action revolves: a miser, a social climbing bourgeois, a bluestocking, or a hypochondriac, set in the bosom of a modern nuclear family whose robust normality invariably triumphs in the end.

  Though no family is actually involved in his case, Le misanthrope’s Alceste sets the tone. Doubtless a prickly man to start with, Alceste has the misfortune of falling in love with the rich, beautiful, and dangerously witty young widow Célimène. Célimène’s merry widowhood is important. The fact that she has already married not only means she is no longer a sexual novice like L’école des femmes’s Agnès; it has freed her from the contemporary marriage market. Taken together with her wealth, freedom from the need to marry grants her an independence expressed by the enviable number of suitors drawn to her boudoir by her wit as much as her beauty. She thus presides over a salon one of whose attractions is her gift for drawing satirical word-portraits of the members of her wide acquaintance at court. She thereby embodies everything that is both most glamorous and most frivolous in the Parisian high society of the day—a circumstance that heightens the contrast with her morose lover, Alceste, whose character it is to pose as being the sole honest man in a world of chattering coxcombs and sycophants.

  The contrast formed by the lead romantic pair defines the play’s agon, laid out in the opening dialogue between Alceste and his friend Philinte. In the face of what he portrays as the hollow insincerities of court life, where everyone pretends to be everyone’s friend even as they betray each other at every turn, Alceste demands unyielding plainspokenness. Commenting on a recent example of Philinte’s shameful pliability, he exclaims:

  Une telle action ne saurait s’excuser,

  Et tout Homme d’honneur s’en doit scandaliser.

  Je vous vois accabler un Homme de caresses,

  Et témoigner, pour lui, les dernières tendresses;

  De protestations, d’offres, et de serments,

  Vous chargez la fureur de vos embrassements:

  Et, quand je vous demande après, quel est cet Homme,

  A peine pouvez-vous dire comme il se nomme,

  Votre chaleur, pour lui, tombe en vous séparant,

  Et vous me le traitez, à moi, d’indifférent.

  Morbleu, c’est une chose indigne, lâche, infâme,

  De s’abaisser ainsi jusqu’à trahir son me:

  Et si, par un malheur, j’en avais fait autant,

  Je m’irais, de regret, pendre tout à l’instant.

  (I call your conduct inexcusable, Sir,

  And every man of honor will concur.

  I see you almost hug a man to death,

  Exclaim for joy until you’re out of breath,

  And supplement these loving demonstrations

  With endless offers, vows, and protestations;

  Then when I ask you “Who was that?,” I find

  That you can barely bring his name to mind!

  Once the man’s back is turned, you cease to love him,

  And speak with absolute indifference of him!

  By God, I say it’s base and scandalous

  To falsify the heart’s affections thus;

  If I caught myself behaving in such a way,

  I’d hang myself for shame, without delay.)

  Alceste’s demand for sincerity is not unconnected with his equally unconditional demand that others—and of course Célimène in particular—single him out in the way he himself does, honoring the attitude of scornful isolation he affects. Yet as the play hilariously demonstrates in pretty much every scene, he is right about the petty hypocrisies of the world in which he lives. The question is whether these hypocrisies are avoidable, or even quite as bad a thing as Alceste asserts.

  Whence the thrust of Philinte’s rejoinders. He concedes his friend’s major point: for all the empty politesses they shower on each other, people are, as a rule, every bit as despicable as Alceste says. But it is surely the part of a wise man to accept people as they are without tormenting h
imself about it, since nothing will change them. Responding to Alceste’s indignation at the “phlegm” with which he is content simply to “reason” about human depravity, Philinte resorts to animal imagery of great topical resonance when read against the background of the emergent political science of Hobbes and Spinoza:

  Oui, je vois ces Défauts dont votre âme murmure,

  Comme Vices unis à l’Humaine Nature;

  Et mon esprit, enfin, n’est pas plus offensé,

  De voir un Homme fourbe, injuste, intéressé,

  Que de voir des Vautours affamés de carnage,

  Des Singes malfaisants, et des Loups pleins de rage.

  (Why, no. These faults of which you so complain

  Are part of human nature, I maintain,

  And it’s no more a matter for disgust

  That men are knavish, selfish and unjust,

  Than that the vulture dines upon the dead,

  And wolves are furious, and apes ill-bred.)

  Echoing Hobbes’s notoriously bleak characterization of homo homini lupus, or “man as a wolf to other men,” Philinte playfully yet unmistakably poses the core question Don Juan’s Sganarelle does in response to the problem of what happens when a “great lord” turns out to be a “wicked man.” What would the world be like if everyone were indeed “sincere,” as true to their inner natures as Alceste demands? Would we in fact be better than we are, or would we descend into a state of anarchy in which human predators openly wage the Hobbist “war of all against all” that the hollow conventions of social hypocrisy at least mitigate even if only by disguising its underlying horrors?

  The central issue Le misanthrope joins is thus the value of the courtly system of honnêteté, which was one of the most distinctive features of contemporary French social conduct. The French upper classes of the day prided themselves on their worldly savoir faire and, at its heart, a highly developed art of conversation in which wit, good manners, and the stylish gallantries of polite flirtation enabled people to enjoy each other’s company, regardless of their hidden motives. Despite the period name for it, there was nothing honest about honnêteté. People continued to scheme, hate, and betray each other, by Philinte’s estimate every bit as much as Alceste’s, as they always have and always will. Yet, in conforming to an artificial code of polite good breeding that tamed at least the outward displays of their underlying bestiality, people’s behavior was better than their characters—and, in the world that Tartuffe and Don Juan depict more candidly, if less disarmingly, than Le misanthrope, that is a good deal more than nothing.