Moliere and Louis XIV

It is not widely known that Molière’s comedy Le Tartuffe existed in three versions. Each version represented a different stage in a conflict that brought the playwright up against the great secular and religious forces of seventeenth-century France. The protagonists were Molière, on the one hand, and the party, or cabale, of the dévots on the other. Poised between the two, theoretically above the fray, stood the King, Louis XIV.

The story opens with the comedy’s performance before the Court on May 12th, 1664. The King was enchanted, finding it all ‘highly amusing’; but, on the advice of the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr. Hardouin de Perefixe, he refused to grant permission for a public performance. Moreover, the official Gazette de France called the play ‘wholly injurious to religion, and capable of having very dangerous effects’. More lay behind these attacks on Le Tartuffe and its author than was immediately obvious. The King was under pressure from the dévot party, which had a powerful ally in his Spanish mother, Anne of Austria, the most devoutly orthodox Catholic at Court.