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4. Function: Retooling Moli
- University of Iowa Press
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It is a real shame the Revolution was so atrocious. If it were just ridiculous, nothing could have come close to its bounty. There was enough there for ten Molières and a century on all the stages in the world.—Jean-François de La Harpe to the marquis Louis-Jean-Pierre de Fontanès, November 22, 1799 Revising Tartuffe and its resonating biographical associations with Louis XIV worked to dislodge the memory of Molière from monarchical France and resituate him in a republican context. Another element embedded in his reputation, more elusive but equally important, troubled his revolutionary reception. Despite some contemporary productionsthattrytoproveotherwise ,Molière’splaysarecomedies;fromtheir first appearance on the stage in the seventeenth century, they provoked controversies about the form and function of comedy and the comic, of laughter and ridicule. Indeed, emergent neoclassical theories about the various types of comedy, comic characters and subjects, and the purpose of comedy were unthinkable without Molière. For admirers or detractors ,hewasFrenchcomedy,andhisreputationwassubjectedthroughout the eighteenth century to changing ideas about the social function of laughter. In contradictory and complex ways, laughter was both rejected and embraced during the Revolution. As followers of the Rousseauian ideal of sincerity, revolutionaries disdained ridicule as an Old Regime aristocratic obsession.1 At the same time, they deployed it freely as a weapon in the propaganda war between revolutionary factions and between France and its foreign enemies. In this context, the Molièrean comic aesthetic, abstracted and extracted from his oeuvre as theme or character, was put into the service of the Revolution. Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers saw powerful connections between classical French comedy and the moral decadency of 41 function Retooling Molièrean Laughter French society. The old formula castigat ridendo mores (laughter corrects socialmorals),whichattributedasocialpurposetothefunctionoflaughter , lost credibility under the pressure of eighteenth-century sentimentalism and the rise of bourgeois drama.2 We do not know what Molière really believed about comedy’s corrective function, but he surely appreciated the efficacy of the argument, stating in the preface to Tartuffe that the“purposeofcomedyistocorrectthevicesofman.”3 Forencyclopedist Jean-François Marmontel, Molière was a master ofcomédie de caractère, a style of comedy that “renders contemptible the vice it portrays.” In plays likeL’Avare,Marmontelwrote,Molièrecombinedcharactercomedywith situationcomedy;thiswasa“genresuperiortoallothers,”inwhich“charactersareengagedbyvicesofheartormindinhumiliatingcircumstances that expose them to the ridicule and contempt of the audience.”4 For some prominent moralists, philosophers, and theatre reformers of the eighteenth century, however, the spectacle of humiliation and ridicule was a mode of comedy that, instead of serving a social good, only catered to the tastes of France’s elite classes. According to Diderot, comedy had a “monarchical character.” A society of equals, he argued, would find ridiculing compatriots distasteful.5 In the Lettre à M. d’Alembert, Rousseau chargedthatMolière’splayssatisfythedecadentmoralsofFrenchsociety by subjecting to ridicule any deviations from its superficial standards of behavior.6 For Louis-Sébastien Mercier, laughing at the behavior of an immoral character does not warn an audience off such behavior but only makes the spectator the happy “apologist or accomplice” to vice.7 Germaine de Staël later argued in De la littérature that Old Regime comedy never truly addressed the “real faults of character and mind” but only cateredtothe“frivolousandentrenchedprejudices”ofmonarchicalsociety . “Often it was necessary, under the monarchy, to know how to reconcile one’s dignity with one’s interests, the appearance of courage with the secret strategies of flattery, an insouciant attitude with the advancement of personal interests, the reality of servitude with the pretense of independence . Those who did not understand the art of dodging these difficulties were quite easily rendered ridiculous.”8 Comedy, in the eyes of its eighteenth-century critics, was deeply antisocial. As Jean Goldzink summarizes in Les Lumières et l’idée du comique, laughter was imputed with “hard[ening] the hearts of men, leaving them hopeless. Instead of correcting them, as one claims it does, instead of advancing morals, it harms Retooling Molièrean Laughter 4 75 and wounds them, isolates man from man, destroys the foundation of sociability. Laughing comedy is a school of misanthropes, a hellish machine of dehumanization, of denaturation.”9 Whilethevilificationoflaughterwasalreadyinplacebefore1789,under the Revolution it reemerged in a political framework. Seriousness, sincerity , and transparency became the marks of good citizen comportment in a climateinfluencedbythephilosophyofRousseau.10 Politicalconversations, as one early pamphleteer of the Revolution wrote, were “a disaster for the laughing nature of the French.”11 “One must agree,” wrote Grimod de La Reynière, “that nothing...