4

Chapter 2

What Is a Faux Dévot ?

I. The Hypo cr ite

M olière’s Tartuffe was premiered on the evening of May 12, 1664,

in a makeshift theatre at Versailles before Louis XIV and his court. It
is commonly understood to be a play about religious hypocrisy, the
controversy it provoked owing to the alleged possibility that its audi-
ence might subsequently be unable to distinguish off stage between
a hypocrite and a true believer. The particular concern was that true
believers might be mistaken for hypocrites and that the reputation
of the Church might thereby be unjustly tarnished or even seriously
damaged. The debate is typically couched in terms of vrais and faux
dévots, who correspond to true believers and religious hypocrites,
respectively. In the course of the controversy, Molière also established
a rhetorical correspondence between opponents of his play and the
faux dévots it supposedly denounces, arguing—ingeniously but quite
unfairly—that to oppose his play was in practice tantamount to an
admission of personal religious hypocrisy. These assumptions and
arguments will be reexamined and challenged (or at least nuanced)
in the course of this book. In this chapter, I shall outline the origins
of the vrai-faux paradigm that has dominated discourse regarding the
Tartuffe controversy from 1664 onward, before turning my atten-
tion specifically to the notion of the faux dévot, focusing on its pri-
mary meaning as a religious hypocrite. (Its additional meaning, as a
religious zealot, will be examined in Chapter 3.) That the character
Tartuffe is some kind of religious hypocrite is not in dispute, although
a brief examination of some contemporary views on religious hypoc-
risy will reveal that the concept is more multifaceted and highly com-
plex than is sometimes acknowledged.1 It will be seen that Tartuffe’s

J. Prest, Controversy in French Drama

© Julia Prest 2014
36 Controversy in French Drama

hypocrisy is revealed primarily by means of his sensuality, which is

incompatible with the austere lifestyle that he preaches but does
not himself practice. The nature of Tartuffe’s weaknesses in this way
aligns him with the enduring literary trope of the lascivious cleric that
is as old as satirical literature itself. This is not to say that Tartuffe is
wholly unoriginal or that he does not resonate with the people and
events of 1660s France, for he emphatically does. Here, however, my
aim is to begin to unpick the notion of the faux dévot and to focus on
the role that sensuality plays in establishing personal hypocrisy.
I shall argue furthermore in favor of some surprising and striking
parallels between Tartuffe’s sensuality and that of the young Louis
XIV at the time of the play’s premiere at Versailles and during the
first two decades of the king’s personal reign.2 While Jerry Kasparek
lists Tartuffe’s faults as being “ambition, greed, pride, [and] lust,”3
Burke lists the principal failings of which Louis XIV was accused by
his contemporary critics as “the king’s ambition, his lack of moral
scruple and of religion, his tyranny, his vanity, and his military, sexual
and intellectual weaknesses.”4 The overlap is considerable, and like
Tartuffe, Louis XIV’s reputation was based more on his image than
on his actual person; Tartuffe, meanwhile, has to perform his role and
his religion in a way that is not dissimilar to Louis’s performance of
kingship and religion. In both cases, there exists a tension between a
public image and a (more) private reality. While the question of Louis’s
adultery has received adequate attention,5 its centrality to the Tartuffe
controversy has been underestimated, and the insights it brings to the
discussion have been largely overlooked. While I am emphatically not
suggesting that the character or role of Tartuffe is in any way modeled
on the king, I shall demonstrate that just as Tartuffe’s sensuality made
the dévots uncomfortable in 1664, so also—and more significantly,
as well as more enduringly—did Louis XIV’s. Among other reasons,
then, Molière’s play was met with hostility in dévot circles because
it coincided, temporally and temperamentally, with a mondain and
overtly sensual Louis. In Chapter 1, the general context of the early
reign and some of its struggles were outlined; here the specific context
of May 1664 and the significance of the courtly fête during which Tar-
tuffe was premiered will be emphasized, as will the related controversy
over the king’s mistresses. Both controversies are understood to be
touchstones in the struggle for influence.