Moliere

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris on January 15, 1622, the eldest son of Jean Poquelin, a prosperous upholsterer, and Marie Cresse ^[1]. The family lived near the markets of Les Halles, in a busy commercial quarter of the capital. His father held the office of upholsterer and valet de chambre to the king, a hereditary post that promised the boy a comfortable, respectable future in trade and royal service ^[2].

His mother died when he was about ten years old, a loss that biographers have long noted as the first rupture in an otherwise secure childhood ^[1]. The young Poquelin received an excellent education at the College de Clermont, the Jesuit school in Paris that later became the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, where he studied Latin, rhetoric, and the classical authors whose comic structures would echo through his mature work ^[2].

After Clermont he appears to have studied law, and some accounts place him at Orleans for his legal qualification, though the documentation is thin ^[3]. What is certain is that by his early twenties he had every advantage a Parisian bourgeois family could provide, and that he threw nearly all of it away for the stage. In 1643 he formally renounced his claim to his father's royal office, a decision that separated him from the settled life planned for him since birth ^[1].

In June 1643 the twenty-one-year-old Poquelin joined with the actress Madeleine Bejart and members of her family to found a theatrical company called the Illustre Theatre ^[2]. Around this time he adopted the stage name Moliere, a choice he never explained, and the origin of the name remains a genuine puzzle in every Moliere biography written since ^[1]. Acting was then a socially suspect profession, condemned by much of the church, which makes his career change all the more striking.

The Illustre Theatre failed. Paris already supported two established companies, and the newcomers could not compete. By 1645 the enterprise had collapsed under its debts, and Moliere was briefly imprisoned for the company's unpaid bills before his father apparently helped settle them ^[3]. Rather than abandon the theater, he left Paris with the Bejarts and spent roughly thirteen years touring the French provinces, playing towns across the south and learning every practical aspect of the trade: acting, management, and eventually writing ^[2].

Those provincial years, from about 1645 to 1658, turned him into a complete man of the theater. He absorbed the physical, improvised style of Italian commedia dell'arte, wrote farces to fill out his company's repertoire, and rose to lead the troupe ^[4]. His first substantial comedies, including L'Etourdi (The Blunderer), were performed in Lyon during the 1650s ^[2]. The company found a protector in the Prince de Conti, though the prince later underwent a religious conversion and withdrew his patronage, an early taste of the pious hostility that would shadow Moliere's whole career ^[3].

The turning point came on October 24, 1658, when the troupe performed before the young Louis XIV in Paris. A tragedy by Corneille left the court cold, but Moliere's own short farce delighted the king, who granted the company use of a Paris theater ^[1]. The following year, the one-act satire Les Precieuses ridicules, mocking the affected refinement of fashionable salon culture, made Moliere famous almost overnight ^[2].

Any honest account of Moliere achievements begins with a simple observation: he raised comedy to the artistic standing that tragedy alone had enjoyed in France. Between 1659 and 1673 he wrote roughly thirty plays while simultaneously acting, directing, and managing his company, which performed first at the Petit-Bourbon and then, from 1661, at the Palais-Royal theater ^[2]. The School for Wives (1662) was his first great full-length verse comedy, a study of an aging man who tries to raise a wife in ignorance, and its enormous success provoked a pamphlet war that Moliere answered with witty short plays defending his art ^[1].

His most dangerous work was Tartuffe, a comedy about a religious hypocrite who worms his way into a credulous bourgeois household. First performed for the king at Versailles in 1664, it was promptly banned from public performance under pressure from devout factions, including the influential Company of the Holy Sacrament ^[3]. Moliere fought for five years, rewriting and petitioning, before the full play was finally licensed in 1669, whereupon it became one of the most profitable productions of his lifetime ^[2]. The word tartuffe entered the French language as a common noun for a pious fraud, which may be the plainest measure of the play's force ^[4].

The major comedies followed in an astonishing run: Dom Juan (1665), a prose treatment of the Don Juan legend that was quietly withdrawn after fifteen performances; The Misanthrope (1666), a verse portrait of a man who cannot tolerate social falsehood; The Miser (1668), built on a plot from the Roman playwright Plautus; and The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), a comedy-ballet with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully that mocked a merchant's hunger for aristocratic polish ^[2]. In 1665 the king made the troupe his own company, the Troupe du Roi, with a royal pension ^[1]. Moliere also collaborated with Lully and later Marc-Antoine Charpentier on the comedy-ballet form, a mixture of spoken comedy, music, and dance created largely for court entertainments ^[4].

In February 1662 Moliere married Armande Bejart, a young actress in his own company who was about twenty years his junior ^[1]. She was officially the sister of Madeleine Bejart, his longtime professional partner, though contemporary enemies spread the claim that she was Madeleine's daughter. That rumor became the fuel for uglier slanders against Moliere himself, none of which was ever substantiated, and modern scholars generally treat Armande as Madeleine's much younger sister ^[3].

The marriage was reportedly unhappy, marked by periods of separation, and the couple's domestic troubles have tempted critics into reading plays like The School for Wives and The Misanthrope as veiled confession, a temptation biographers now handle with caution ^[1]. Of their three children, only a daughter, Esprit-Madeleine, survived to adulthood; their first son had Louis XIV himself as godfather, a public sign of royal favor ^[2].

Moliere's health deteriorated through the 1660s. He suffered from a chronic lung condition, most likely tuberculosis, and from about 1667 his illness repeatedly interrupted his work ^[3]. He responded on stage the way he responded to everything, by making comedy of it: physicians and their Latin jargon are among the most consistently ridiculed figures in his plays, from Doctor Love (1665) to his final work ^[2].

The early 1670s brought losses. Madeleine Bejart, his collaborator of nearly thirty years, died in February 1672 ^[1]. In the same period his profitable partnership with Lully broke down when the composer secured a royal monopoly over sung theater, which restricted the music Moliere could use in his productions and pushed him toward Charpentier for his last play ^[4].

That last play was The Imaginary Invalid (Le Malade imaginaire), a comedy-ballet about Argan, a healthy man obsessed with his ailments and enslaved to his doctors. Moliere, genuinely ill, played the hypochondriac himself. On February 17, 1673, during the fourth performance at the Palais-Royal, he was seized by a coughing fit and hemorrhage on stage, insisted on finishing the show, and collapsed afterward. He died at his home on the rue de Richelieu that night, without formally renouncing the actor's profession before a priest ^[2].

Because actors were denied Christian burial unless they abjured the stage, his funeral became a final controversy. Only after his widow appealed to Louis XIV did the Archbishop of Paris permit a burial, and even then it took place at night, on February 21, 1673, in the cemetery of Saint-Joseph, with minimal ceremony ^[3]. In 1817 remains attributed to him were transferred to Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where his tomb stands beside that of the fabulist Jean de La Fontaine ^[1].

Seven years after his death, in 1680, Louis XIV merged Moliere's old troupe with a rival company to create the Comedie-Francaise, the national theater of France that still performs today and is affectionately called the House of Moliere ^[2]. No other playwright is so completely identified with a living institution. His comedies remain the most performed works in the French repertoire, and French itself is routinely described as the language of Moliere, a phrase that pairs him with Shakespeare's relation to English ^[4].

His influence runs through the whole later history of comedy. English Restoration playwrights borrowed his plots within years of his death, and writers from Henry Fielding to Oscar Wilde worked in traditions he shaped ^[4]. Character types he perfected, the hypocrite, the miser, the social climber, the hypochondriac, became durable instruments for examining human self-deception. Among the most repeated Moliere facts is that several of his coinages, including tartuffe, function as ordinary words in modern French ^[3].

Scholarship on his life continues, partly because so many personal documents are missing: no manuscripts of his plays survive, and no letters in his hand have been authenticated, which leaves his inner life largely a matter of inference from the plays and from hostile or admiring contemporaries ^[1]. The 400th anniversary of his birth in 2022 was marked by productions, exhibitions, and new studies across France and beyond ^[5]. Three and a half centuries on, an audience watching Tartuffe or The Misanthrope still recognizes its neighbors, and sometimes itself, which is exactly the effect he claimed comedy should have: to correct men by amusing them.