REINVENTION OF OBSCENITY: SEX, LIES, AND TABLOIDS IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE, THE

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Braider, Christopher

To which DeJean adds this further twist: already the product of the dialectical relation between authors and a repressive apparatus that constitutes authors by constituting its authority over them, Molière is also the celebrity product of the tabloid press-in this case, Donneau de Vise's Mercure galant. France's first modern newsman, Donneau helped prolong and intensify the scandal surrounding L'Ecole des femmes in order to sell copies of his now gazette. In the process, he not only defined modern tabloid journalism, with its characteristic prurient interest in the private lives of public personalities; he also manufactured celebrity authorship in the person of Molière, who in turn exploited the controversy Donneau stirred up to sell copies of his plays.

I confess that Dejean's account leaves me uncomfortable on a couple of points. Much as one would like to see Molière as defining the essential paradigm of French authorship, the honor surely belongs to Pierre Corneille, whose collected Theatre of 1660 forms the model to which both Molière and Racine conform. Nor is it a coincidence that "le grand Corneille" figures among the enemies L'Ecole des femmes earned its author: infuriated by the satire on his brother Thomas, the self-styled "Monsieur de l'Isle," when Molière's protagonist attempts to replace his given name "Arnolphe" with the grandiloquent "Monsieur de La Souche," Corneille could not have failed to spot the malicious reference to himself in the same episode, where Arnolphe's foolish model is called "gros Pierre." Similarly, a survey of the furious querelles that rocked literary France throughout the seventeenth century indicates that obscenity was not as crucial as the present book suggests. The storm of criticism provoked by Corneille's Le Cid, an affair that cemented the authority of the Académie Française, whose role in shaping French authorial canons was far greater than that of the book police; Chancellor Segrais's frantic efforts to identify the author of Pascal's clandestine Provinciales during the debate concerning the five "heretical articles" attributed to the Jansenist Arnauld; the vicious polemics surrounding the "morality of theater" reignited by Tartuffe', or the "quarrel of ancients and moderns," to which DeJean herself has devoted a major commentary-all of these outweigh the condemnation of Théophile, the suppression of L'Ecole des filles, or the question of obscenity in L'Ecole des femmes. And even in this last case, significant though the charge of obscenity may have been, it was hardly the most pointed focus of debate. If indeed, as DeJean notes, the controversy inaugurated Molière's six-year entanglement with civil authorities, a period in his career that includes Tartuffe (1664-69) and Le Festin de pierre (Dom Juan) (1665) as well as L'Ecole des femmes, it is because Molière had other powerful adversaries in sight-in particular the notorious cabale des dévots associated with the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, a body DeJean curiously overlooks even though Molière expressly fingered it as the source of the most virulent attacks he suffered in the Ecole affair. Nor was the cabale chiefly outraged by L'Ecole's "obscenities," large as these certainly loomed. The main offense was rather the parodie sermon in which the play's protagonist lends his selfish views of conjugal right the muscle of hellfire-a caricature of orthodox piety for which Molière was branded "un démon incarné."