Molière, the matchless Mozartean writer of comedies, is, however improbably, at the heart of a new debate in Paris. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, to use his real name, was born, or at least baptized, in 1622; his status remains beyond dispute and his bas relief medallion still lights the way into the Comédie Française. (Though his peculiarly prescient personal life—he married his longtime actress-mistress’s daughter, who, while not his own, still had grown up around him—might have annulled him in our time.) The question turns on his potential installation in the Panthéon, that great domed building high up in the Fifth Arrondissement, where the grands hommes and, as of 1995, femmes of France are entombed. Close followers of all things French may recall that the Panthéon has been, for what is essentially a cemetery with statues, a lively place lately. There was the fight over the potential interment of Rimbaud and Verlaine, the Bonnie and Clyde of Symbolism, and then the radical news of the interment there of Josephine Baker, brought about, in part, through the good offices of the French (and Americanophile) philosopher Pascal Bruckner, which, with fearful symmetry, happened on the same day that the far-right hypernationalist (and anti-American) Éric Zemmour announced his presidential bid.
As it happens, despite some forty years of irregular residence in Paris, this writer had never made a tour of the Panthéon until recently, when a cold day came up and one escaped the wind by going inside. Visiting the Panthéon is both a mixed and surprisingly moving experience. Mixed because those interred include some very minor and morally dubious figures among the Napoleonic aristocracy and military, which essentially means Napoleon’s family. But one must be incapable of being moved to tears by anything literary if one is not moved to tears by the existence of a vault containing the remains of Émile Zola and Victor Hugo, those two great and brave figures of humanist struggle. (They share a space with Alexandre Dumas, a great man in his way, too, and more Musketeerishly fun to read.)
The Molière quarrel is immediately keyed by the celebration of his four-hundredth birthday, or more exactly the four-hundredth anniversary of his baptism—as with Shakespeare, that’s the first date we have for him—this past January 15th. Last year, the actor Francis Huster passionately made the case for the reinterment of Molière within the Panthéon, Molière’s remains having had a long and slightly hair-raising cultural history of their own. Denied burial by the Church with any pomp upon his death—which occurred on an evening when, on stage, during a production of “The Imaginary Invalid,” he had portrayed a man faking his death, a joke only he could have written—as punishment for being an actor, his remains were discreetly interred in a church graveyard in Paris. Then, during the Revolution, hard as it is to believe, Molière’s coffin was dug up and, it is said, shown off in Paris, as a kind of morbid celebration of his modest origins and as a rebuke to the Church for its previous persecution of him.
So, this isn’t the first time his corpse has had its politics, but politics has once again come to his corpse. Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, who is running for president from the left, spoke up for the cause of Molière-to-the-Panthéon and so did Valérie Pécresse, the regional leader of Île-de-France (where Paris sits), who is also running for president, from the respectable right. Even Éric Zemmour, running for president from the nineteen-forties—and who is trailing in the polls even as he dominates the news—has weighed in. On a recent television appearance, he emphatically called for Molière to the Panthéon, and urged that Montaigne and Pascal get in there, too, threatening to make the building as crowded as a metro car at 5 p.m. He also, in another interview, responded to a leading question about his close relationship with his mother by referring to the relationship as “Proustian,” and then instantly quoting Philip Roth that any man loved by his mother is a conquistador. In truth, Roth said, “loved by his parents,” a distinctly different idea, to which Zemmour unwittingly applied a French, or, yes, Proustian, twist. (Despising a man who quotes both Proust and Roth in a single response is difficult, but it may be that it is Zemmour’s penchant for literary quotes—his one virtue—that’s responsible for his dip in the polls, Zemmour having been much mocked in the same roundtable interview for his passion for “citations.”)
The case for Molière in the Panthéon is obvious: no one disputes his supremacy as a writer of comedy, though with France being a more neatly ordered civilization than our own, he splits his supremacy with his contemporary Racine, who takes the laurels for tragedy. (We force poor Shakespeare to serve as both.) President Macron, in fact, is perhaps the leading Molière-maniac in the country, having once spit off a famous dialogue from the opening of Molière’s “The Misanthrope,” in response to an impromptu challenge. The case against Molière is both historically sensitive and mildly bureaucratic and administrative. As one of Macron’s counsellors, Bruno Roger-Petit, tried gently to explain, “The Panthéon is a temple of [the nation’s particular brand of secularism], a child of the Republican homeland, itself engendered by the Enlightenment, and so all the figures who are honored there are posterior to the Enlightenment and the Revolution.” As a pre-Enlightenment figure, Molière, like Racine, or for that matter Rabelais, just doesn’t make the cut.
As the harmless drudge recently put to work anthologizing Molière’s plays in their skillful English translations by the American poet Richard Wilbur, I have, as we say, un chien in this bagarre. And the fight is best waged on metaphysical than temporal grounds, simply, by insisting that though Molière wasn’t a figure of the Enlightenment, he uniquely anticipated its best values in a way that demands he be honored alongside Rousseau and Voltaire and the rest. (We are blessed, in truth, to have the Wilbur translations of Molière in front of us because they show us exactly why Molière matters.) There is a certain class of writers who, before the Enlightenment appeared, and before modernity was modern, propagated the Enlightenment values of pluralism and tolerance, of the right to privacy and the danger of fanaticism. Molière is not our contemporary in some facile and fatuous way. Not a radical, nor even a romantic, in the nineteenth-century sense—he is a common-sense realist, opposed to putting ideas and obsessions and idées fixes in place of people and relationships, and believing not in an ordered but a balanced world. What he is almost uniquely good at doing—perhaps only Jane Austen among the world’s masters equals him here—is conveying that quality of unschooled intelligence we call common sense. Common sense these days is condemned as a conspiracy by the privileged against the excluded; the suspicious circle of what counts as “common” is, we’re told, an indictment against the sense. But Molière reaches out across the centuries to remind us that common sense has legs as long as laughter itself.
In all his comedies, and most resonantly in his two masterpieces, “The Misanthrope” and “Tartuffe,” his subject is what happens to social groups—the micro-society of a family or the larger society of a social class—when an unbalanced figure appears. In “The Misanthrope,” the proudly plainspoken Alceste sets off in search of perfect candor and absolute truth, refusing all the little social lies that dot our lives. (Having offended a literary acquaintance by failing to praise his poetry, he is asked if he could do as well. “I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy,” he admits. “But then I wouldn’t show it to everybody.”) Alceste has to be instructed by the woman he courts, the beauteous and brilliant Célimène, and by his friends that too much candor is egocentric and vain, not admirable. In “Tartuffe,” a family is upended by the arrival of a holy man, Tartuffe, who impresses all with his piety, until his piety turns out to be neatly inflected with lechery (and cupidity).
The continuities to our own time are apparent. Having an uncomfortable truth-seeker and -teller in our midst provokes the same mixture of exasperation and admiration today in Los Angeles as it did in seventeenth-century Paris. Larry David, ideal casting for a modern-dress “Misanthrope,” has made a brilliant career as a comedian on this very basis. In David’s long-running show, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he incarnates the man who will innocently say the uncomfortable truth—that a parent’s death, for instance, suddenly creates an all-purpose excuse for avoiding obligatory socializing. An unplugged fanatic like Tartuffe is always going to have an unsettling effect on a family—though today our fanatic may as easily be a yoga enthusiast or a New Age seer as a puritanical hypocrite. (There is no more memorable description of a modern Tartuffe than that in Michael Downing’s account in “Shoes Outside the Door” of the Zen roshi who, while dazzling his adepts with Americanized Zen, turned out to have a lecherous interest in at least one of his women students.)
The world of Molière is what we would now call “patriarchal,” or male-dominated. Yet the patriarchal order in the plays is impotent. More than that—the common sense of the other characters, their knowledge of actual human possibility, leaves that hierarchy instantly disregarded as absurd. In both “The School for Wives” and “The School for Husbands,” the protagonists are men so terrified of femininity and the power of women’s minds that they bend their worlds out of shape to keep their wards and fiancés ignorant and subordinate. Molière’s point, first made in “Husbands” and italicized in “Wives,” is that this is not only a repugnant activity but a ludicrous one, doomed to comic failure. The repressed, cloistered women are instinctively aware of their own repression, and respond to it by making their own clear-eyed choices of suitors and potential husbands. Sganarelle and Ariste in “The School for Husbands” are counterpoised as bad and good suitors, a Grand-Siècle Goofus and Gallant: Sganarelle treats his intended as both prey and potential danger; Ariste treats his intended as a full human being. One ends ridiculously; the other happily. In “The School for Wives,” Arnolphe’s paranoia about feminine choice is so extreme that it compels him to isolate Agnès, his object of desire, from her childhood onward. Both Arnolphe and Sganarelle get schooled by the very women they thought they were schooling. The common sense of the women X-rays the patriarchal hypocrisies and then obliterates their absurdities.
Molière’s great theme is the folly of fanaticism of every kind: the religious fanaticism in “Tartuffe” or the mania for truth in “The Misanthrope.” Molière is no philistine; he is the poet of common sense, not merely in his ridicule of the idea that life can be lived by a rule of excessive piety, or in his exposure of erudition for its own sake, but by making his characters most appealing when they are being most sensible.
He does hold, what every professor wants for a satirist, a set of positive ideas, made more positive by not being ideas. Molière loves natural actions and affections, including that of lust. In “The Learned Ladies,” Molière’s feminist point is not that the ladies should not be learned, but that their natural wit, all that they know already from their experience, is more profound than what their lecherous tutors, with their extravagantly abstract ideas, wish to teach them. Molière escapes fatuity with his candor that what restores a universe unbalanced by intellectual obsession is, most often, normal erotic appetite. In Molière, sex is always the rejuvenating source of common sense. In “The Misanthrope,” Alceste loves Célimène, in part because she is clearly his intellectual equal, but also because he is sexually infatuated with her, and the intensity of his desire, though it makes him miserable, humanizes him. She, in turn, cannot understand his raging jealousy at the attraction she offers to other men; she is not being flirtatious or “coquettish” in her insistence that her raft of suitors isn’t a sign of bad faith but an extension of the same sincerity of affect that Alceste claims to admire as a virtue. Being flirtatious with many, she is being true to herself. Tartuffe is shown as a hypocrite in his lecheries, but a human being in his appetites. (Those who have been tracking the Tartuffean exploits of the traditional-values preaching Zemmour, may recognize the type.) A more truly radical feminism, a better form of family piety, emerge when we recognize the folly of trying to live by maxims and morals and principles and plans, instead of by responding to the equilibrium of actual existence.
Molière to the Panthéon? Why not? (And with him, surely, that other pre-Enlightenment enlightened one, Montaigne.) The temple’s chief ornament, after all, is Foucault’s famous pendulum, turning slowly in space from high up in the dome, demonstrating, as it first did in 1851, that the Earth really does rotate, slowly but surely and steadily. That idea—that the world is exterior to ourselves, and moves irrevocably at its own pace, beyond our wills to alter it—is a more empirical version of Molière’s moral vision. Molière to the Panthéon? Sure. But he is already inside the only pantheon that matters, the interior of our minds and manners.