Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme
Our Reading Journey
Our session followed Monsieur Jourdain, a Parisian textile fortune's heir, hiring a small battalion of tutors in music, dance, fencing, and philosophy to scrub the merchant off himself and pass as a nobleman. He is delighted to learn, mid-lesson, that he has been speaking prose his entire life without knowing it, one of the most quoted moments in French theater. Meanwhile, his daughter Lucile wants to marry Cléonte, a match Jourdain refuses solely because Cléonte lacks noble birth, even as the actual aristocrats circling the household, the count Dorante and the marquise Dorimène, borrow his money and flatter his vanity without much intention of repaying either. Cléonte's servant solves the standoff with a disguise: a fake Turkish ceremony that inducts Jourdain into an invented rank grand enough to satisfy him and clear the way for the marriage he'd been blocking.
The reading group spent time on where the play came from: Louis XIV commissioned it for the court at Chambord in 1670, reportedly after a Turkish ambassador seemed unimpressed by Versailles and the king wanted something at his expense. Molière obliged, but he built the deeper joke on a bond that had nothing to do with foreign relations: Jourdain has the fortune but not the name, while the nobles feeding off him have the name but increasingly need his fortune to keep it. Neither side comes out of the play especially well, and the group didn't fully agree on where Molière's own sympathy lands: is Jourdain simply ridiculous, or is there something genuinely painful underneath the ridicule? We left it there.
About the Author
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born in Paris on January 15, 1622, the son of a royal upholsterer, a background not far from M. Jourdain's own merchant father. He trained in law at Orléans before abandoning his father's trade in 1643 to found a theater company with the Béjart family, taking the stage name Molière to spare his family the shame of a profession the Church considered disreputable. The company failed within two years, and Molière spent the next thirteen touring the provinces before returning to Paris in 1658 under royal protection. Tartuffe was banned in 1664 and Dom Juan withdrew the following year, but Le Misanthrope and L'Avare secured his reputation, and from 1661 he collaborated with the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully on a new hybrid form, the comédie-ballet, culminating in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in 1670. He died on February 17, 1673, collapsing during a performance of Le Malade imaginaire; the Church initially refused him burial in consecrated ground, and it took Louis XIV's personal intervention to have him buried, quietly, at night.
