Molière

• 1. Introduction

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  Molière collapsed on stage on the 17th of February 1673, mid-performance, coughing and haemorrhaging blood. He was playing Argan, a hypochondriac obsessed with his own imaginary ailments, in a play he himself had written called The Imaginary Invalid. He insisted on finishing the performance anyway. Hours later, he was dead. Two priests refused to visit him, and a third arrived too late. No last rites. The man who had made France laugh for decades was denied a burial in sacred ground, his body laid instead in the section of the cemetery reserved for unbaptised infants.

  His full name was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, baptised on the 15th of January 1622 in Paris. The world would know him by his stage name: Molière. He spent thirteen years wandering the provinces with a theatre troupe, went bankrupt, and spent time in prison for debt before he ever found real success. When he did reach Paris, he would write 31 of the 85 plays performed on his own stage in just 14 years. He drew the rage of the Catholic Church, the Parlement, the Jansenists, and a loose coalition of moralists who called themselves the parti des Dévots. He also drew the personal favour of Louis XIV, who became godfather to his first son and whose protection kept Molière working through the worst of the attacks.

  How does a man born into a prosperous upholstery business become the figure after whom the French language itself is named? What made his satires so threatening that a play was banned not once but twice? And what does it mean to die, in full costume, playing a fake sick man, when you are genuinely dying? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Nose and the Name

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  When Molière was born, a maid reportedly looked at the infant and exclaimed simply, "Le nez!" The boy's large nose became a family nickname that stuck: he was called "Le Nez" for years. His mother, Marie Cressé, came from a prosperous bourgeois family. She died when he was 10, and by his own apparent disposition, he was never especially close to his father.

  The family home sat above the Pavillon des Singes on the rue Saint-Honoré, an affluent quarter of Paris. His father, Jean Poquelin, had in 1631 purchased from the court of Louis XIII the posts of valet of the King's chamber and keeper of carpets and upholstery. The title required only three months of work each year and cost 1,200 livres upfront; it paid 300 livres annually and opened doors to lucrative contracts. Jean-Baptiste assumed those same posts in 1641.

  His education ran through a Parisian elementary school and then the prestigious Jesuit Collège de Clermont, where he got his first taste of stage performance and mingled with nobility. Around 1642, he studied as a provincial lawyer, probably in Orléans, though there is no record of him ever qualifying. He had followed his father's blueprint carefully, and everything pointed toward a career in office.

  Then, in June 1643, aged 21, he walked away from all of it. He left his father, joined the actress Madeleine Béjart, and co-founded a theatre company called the Illustre Théâtre with 630 livres. Madeleine's brother and sister joined them shortly after. The reason he later changed his name to Molière was, most likely, to spare his father the social shame of having an actor in the family. Actors, though no longer condemned by the state under Louis XIV, were still forbidden from burial in sacred ground. The name may have been borrowed from a small village called Molière in the Midi near Le Vigan.

• 3. Twelve Years on the Road

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  The Illustre Théâtre went bankrupt in 1645. The troupe had racked up debts, including 2,000 livres owed for the rent of a court converted from a jeu de paume. Molière, by then head of the company, spent 24 hours in prison before the debts were settled, either by his father or by the lover of another troupe member. Historians disagree on which.

  After his release, Molière and Madeleine Béjart rebuilt with a new company and began touring the provinces. This circuit lasted roughly twelve years. He initially played under Charles Dufresne, then built his own company. During these travels he met Armand, Prince of Conti, who governed Languedoc and became his patron, lending the company his name. That friendship eventually soured: Armand contracted syphilis from a courtesan, turned toward religion, and joined the Compagnie de Saint Sacrement, a coalition that would later count among Molière's enemies.

  In Lyon, an actress known as Marquise, born Mademoiselle Du Parc, joined the company. Pierre Corneille had courted her without success. She would later become the lover of Jean Racine, who had actually offered Molière his tragedy Théagène et Chariclée. Molière declined to perform it, though he encouraged Racine to keep writing.

  The plays that survive from these years are few. The most notable are L'Étourdi ou les Contretemps and Le Docteur Amoureux. In these two works, Molière began moving away from the improvisational methods of Italian Commedia dell'arte toward something sharper and more distinctly his own. His full five-act comedies in verse, including L'Étourdi, staged in Lyon in 1654, and Le dépit amoureux, staged in Béziers in 1656, were built partly on the gags of contemporary Italian troupes. But they were also part of a deliberate plan: win aristocratic patronage and secure a position in a Paris theatre. The company eventually obtained the patronage of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, and that connection would open the door to the capital.

• 4. The King's Favour

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  Molière reached Paris in 1658, but not directly. He spent several weeks outside the city first, cultivating connections among society gentlemen and letting his reputation travel ahead of him. When he finally performed before Louis XIV at the Louvre, he presented a tragedy by Pierre Corneille, Nicomède, and his own farce Le Docteur Amoureux. The performance earned his company the title Troupe de Monsieur, after the king's brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans.

  His company was allowed to share the Petit-Bourbon's large hall with the Italian Commedia dell'arte troupe of Tiberio Fiorillo, famous for the character of Scaramouche. The two companies performed on alternate nights. On the 18th of November 1659, Molière premiered Les Précieuses Ridicules, his first major Paris satire, at that same venue. The play primarily targeted the Académie Française, the body created under Richelieu to establish rules for French theatre, which preached unity of time, action, and verse style. Molière asked Fiorillo himself to teach him Commedia technique, and his 1660 work Sganarelle, ou Le Cocu imaginaire appears as a direct tribute to the lessons.

  When the Petit-Bourbon was demolished to expand the Louvre, Molière's company was given the abandoned theatre in the east wing of the Palais-Royal. They opened there on the 20th of January 1661. Louis XIV would go on to become the godfather of Molière's first son, to grant his troupe the title Troupe du Roi, and to supply a royal pension. On the 20th of February 1662, Molière married Armande Béjart, whom he believed to be Madeleine's sister, though she may have been Madeleine's illegitimate daughter with the Duke of Modena. The king's protection became load-bearing when the attacks on Molière's work intensified, and it was Louis who eventually imposed respect for the banned Tartuffe after gaining enough leverage over the clergy.

• 5. Enemies and Bans

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  Tartuffe, ou L'Imposteur first appeared at Versailles in 1664 and set off the greatest scandal of Molière's career. Its portrait of religious hypocrisy in the dominant classes was taken as an outrage. The Jansenists were furious. The play was banned. When the king left Paris for a military tour, officials including Lamoignon and the Archbishop acted immediately to suppress even a revised version titled Panulphe ou L'Imposteur when Molière tried to restage it in 1667. The king only managed to impose the play's rehabilitation years later, after accumulating more power over the clergy.

  Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre was written rapidly to replace Tartuffe in the schedule. The play was derived from a work by Tirso de Molina and written in prose that critics still regard as strikingly modern. It depicts an atheist who becomes a religious hypocrite and is punished by God. This work was also quickly withdrawn and was never restaged by Molière himself.

  A loosely organised opposition called the parti des Dévots formed in French high society, objecting to what they characterized as Molière's excessive realism and irreverence. The Prince of Conti, once a patron, joined them. The Jansenists were already hostile. Writers including Donneau de Visé, Edmé Boursault, and Montfleury lined up on the opposing side of what became known as the Guerre comique, the War of Comedy, triggered by L'École des femmes and its accusation that Molière had married his own daughter.

  Molière's response to the literary attacks came through La Critique de "L'École des femmes", a piece that imagined the play's critics sitting at dinner together after watching it, then dismantled their objections one by one in front of the audience. His supporter Boileau backed him in writing, in the Art poétique. The king agreed to be godfather to Molière's son. But the personal cost mounted. By 1667, the strain of working simultaneously as playwright, actor, director, and court entertainer had forced him to take a break from the stage.

• 6. The Comedies-Ballets

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  In 1661, Molière was asked to mount both a play and a ballet in honour of Louis XIV. He did not have a cast large enough to do both. His solution was to merge them. The form he invented, the comédie-ballet, wove dance directly into the drama so that performers could catch their breath and change costume between scenes. The first was Les Fâcheux, staged on the 17th of August 1661 during a series of parties that Nicolas Fouquet threw in the king's honour. Those very parties led Jean-Baptiste Colbert to demand Fouquet's arrest for wasting public money; Fouquet was condemned to life imprisonment.

  The experiment paid off so well that Molière was commissioned to produce twelve more comédies-ballets before his death. His primary choreographic collaborator was Pierre Beauchamp, who codified the five positions of feet and arms in classical ballet and was largely responsible for creating the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system.

  Jean-Baptiste Lully was the other central figure in these collaborations. A dancer, choreographer, and composer, Lully would go on to dominate the Paris Opéra for 15 years. The comédies-ballets demanded that both dancers and actors drive the story forward, which set them apart from the court ballets of the period, where spectacle often outweighed drama. Louis XIV himself performed in some of these productions: he played an Egyptian in Le Mariage forcé in 1664 and appeared as both Neptune and Apollo in his retirement performance in Les Amants magnifiques in 1670.

  The collaboration with Lully eventually ended with the tragédie et ballet Psyché in 1671, written jointly with Pierre Corneille and Philippe Quinault. In 1672, Lully patented the opera in France and claimed most of the best available singers for his own company. Molière was forced back to traditional spoken comedy. The result was Les Femmes savantes, staged in 1672, which is regarded as one of his masterpieces.

• 7. The Language He Left Behind

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  By the time Molière died, the French language had absorbed him. A tartuffe, derived directly from his banned play, came to mean a hypocrite who hides vice behind performed piety. A harpagon, named after the miser in L'Avare, describes a man obsessively greedy and cheap. The phrase "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?", spoken by the character Géronte in Les Fourberies de Scapin, asking what on earth his son was doing on that galley, became a common way to describe self-inflicted trouble. The word galère itself, meaning galley, shifted in French to denote any chaotic, difficult situation.

  From Tartuffe comes another phrase that survived centuries of use. In act 3, scene 2, Tartuffe tells Dorine to cover her bosom, saying "Couvrez ce sein que je ne saurais voir." The line is now regularly quoted, often with substituted words, to call out hypocrisy or censoriousness in any context.

  In Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, the character Monsieur Jourdain is astonished to learn that because all speech that is not poetry is prose, he has been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. The phrase "je parle de la prose sans le savoir" passed into everyday French to describe anyone who discovers they were already doing something well before they had a name for it.

  Molière is considered the creator of modern French comedy. The French language is sometimes called "the language of Molière." His plays are performed at the Comédie-Française more often than those of any other playwright alive or dead. Scholars who once focused on the religious and philosophical arguments embedded in his work have increasingly shifted attention toward his comic technique itself. His remains were moved in 1817 to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, close to those of La Fontaine. The 2023 musical Molière, l'Opéra Urbain opened at the Dôme de Paris on the 11th of November 2023, closing on the 18th of February 2024, just one day after the 351st anniversary of his death.