Molière

Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin on January 15, 1622 (the date of his baptism), in Paris, in the prosperous Saint-Honoré district, he was the eldest son of a successful upholsterer who held the honorary title of tapissier du roi to Louis XIII. Educated at the Collège de Clermont (now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand), where he studied under Jesuits and likely encountered the philosophy of Gassendi, he was well positioned for a comfortable bourgeois life. Instead, at twenty-one, he renounced his inheritance, adopted the stage name Molière, and co-founded the Illustre Théâtre with the Béjart family in 1643, a venture that failed so quickly it landed him briefly in debtors’ prison. He then spent thirteen years as an itinerant actor touring the provinces, an apprenticeship that taught him to read audiences and sharpened the comic instincts visible in every play he would write. Returning to Paris in 1658, he won the patronage of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, and then of Louis XIV himself. He produced a succession of comedies that remain the summit of French dramatic literature: The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1664, banned for five years for its satire of religious hypocrisy), Don Juan (1665), The Misanthrope (1666), The Miser (1668), and The Imaginary Invalid (1673). His genius lay in combining the physical energy of commedia dell’arte with devastating social observation, creating comedies that convulsed audiences while exposing vanity, avarice, and pretension with surgical precision. On February 17, 1673, while performing the title role in The Imaginary Invalid, he collapsed on stage in a fit of coughing and hemorrhaging and died at home later that evening , the supreme irony of a comic playwright dying in a play about a hypochondriac.

In 1664 he staged Tartuffe, a comedy about a religious fraud, before Louis XIV at Versailles. The archbishop of Paris moved to excommunicate anyone who watched, performed, or read it. The king privately admired the play but bowed to the Church, and Molière spent five years fighting to get it onto a public stage.