Controversy in French Drama: Molière's 'Tartuffe' and the Struggle for Influence by Julia Prest (review)

It is a remarkable achievement to have opened up new perspectives on one of the most famously ambiguous, and most frequently commented works in the whole of French theatre. In this important new monograph, Julia Prest sets the five most intense years of the Tartuffe controversy — the period of its banning, from 1664 to 1669 — in the context of the varied interests competing for authority in society and, especially, for influence over the young king. The book situates Tartuffe, in its successive versions, as a point of convergence in the complex power struggles of the decade: between groups with radically different views of the kind of society that they hoped would develop, but, no less, between the mutually hostile factions within these groups, and the personal ambitions that often drove them. Such competing ideals and personal animosities were, as usual, most intense within the Church. This study includes perceptive discussion of the crucial contributions to the ongoing struggles around Tartuffe of, most obviously, the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, the Querelle du théâtre, the zealously anti-theatrical prince de Conti, the rise of archbishop Péréfixe, the Jansenist controversy, and the deepening concern about the flexible morality of the king's private life. Such wide-ranging and well-informed contextualization is complemented in the central chapters by the close analysis of key passages of the play, again set in the context of contemporary concerns with the points at issue. The discussion focuses particularly on the key concepts of the nature of religious hypocrisy, the 'faux dévot', the 'vrai dévot', who, though appealed to by Molière in his 1669 preface, seems not to feature in the play itself, and the character who appears instead as the ideal, the 'véritable homme de bien'. This close analysis is genuinely illuminating, and crucial to the success of the whole book. (One tiny quibble: the fault that prompted Tartuffe's hypocritical self-accusation in I. 5. 309–10 was that he killed a flea not accidentally (p. 85) but with excessive indulgence in the deadly sin of wrath.) By 1669 everything had changed. The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement was out of action, Conti dead, archbishop Péréfixe discredited, the Jansenist problem settled (for now) by the Peace of the Church, and the king confident of imposing his will and confirmed in his adulterous liaisons. The final version of Tartuffe received its first triumphant performance at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal on 5 February 1669, and was published later that year. Julia Prest's attractively written monograph is now essential reading for understanding the text of the play itself, and the whole controversy that surrounded it.