SOURCE: “Context: Genre and Occasion,” in Molière: Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1992, pp. 15-26.

[In this excerpt from his book-length study of The Bourgeois Gentleman, Whitton discusses Molière's role in the development of the uniquely French genre of the comedy-ballet.]

Il a le premier inventé la manière de mêler des scènes et des ballets dans les comédies, et il avait trouvé par là un nouveau secret de plaire.

(21, p. 4)

GENRE

It is interesting that in an age which affected to mistrust originality—or at least to prize it less than manner and style—Molière was valued for his absolute originality. That originality had many facets. To mention only two: as a playwright, Molière's creation of ‘serious’ comedy is completely without precedent. By serious comedy I mean comedy which is consistently funny, yet at the same time deals with major topical and human questions. And secondly, as an actor-manager, Molière created for himself and his fellow-actors a new style of acting. In opposition to the rhetorical style of delivery prevalent in the theatre of the day, and to the highly stylised performance of farce, he created a more detailed realistic style based on observation of how people behave in real life. Contemporaries remarked on this style with expressions such as ‘naturel’ or ‘pris sur le vif’. Jealous rivals and high-minded critics may have condemned it as popularist and vulgar, but it was enormously popular with his public. The success of his company in Paris undoubtedly owed as much to the appeal of this novel style of performance, as to the comic vision of the author. To these things must be added a third claim to absolute originality in the invention of the new genre of comédie-ballet. In the ‘oraison funèbre’ cited above, Donneau de Visé rightly laid stress on this sometimes neglected facet of Molière's originality, which he evoked with the felicitous phrase ‘un nouveau secret de plaire’.

But what was comédie-ballet, and where did it come from? In one sense it is inseparable from a single creative genius. It was Molière himself who created the genre, and developed it in partnership with the Court musician Jean-Baptiste Lulli, and it effectively ceased to exist with his death. Its inspiration lies in Molière's own passion for music and dance as well as his own non-academic, non-literary idea of a theatre of action and spectacle. But, of course, no artist works in a vacuum, and no art is created out of nothing. Looked at from another point of view, comédie-ballet was a genre simply waiting to be discovered. The ingredients, comedy, music and dance, were already loosely associated, or at least juxtaposed, in entertainments of the period. It required only an artist of vision to weld them together in a coherent art form. Moreover, comédie-ballet was the product of a particular set of circumstances, created by the demands of the moment in a specific milieu. But since its generic origins lie in the ballet de cour, it is here that our discussion must begin.

Theatre-going and dancing were two of the great passions in Louis XIV's Court, but before Molière ballet and theatre evolved alongside each other as entirely separate arts. Until the later seventeenth century the name ballet was applied loosely to a wide variety of entertainments involving song and dance in various combinations. Whatever is understood by the term, however, it was emphatically not a dramatic genre. It would also be anachronistic to think of ballet in the seventeenth century as something presented on a stage for a passive audience as modern ballet is. It was, rather, a participatory activity, a ritualised display whose participants, in baroque fashion, were simultaneously both actors and spectators. Although the 1660s witnessed the development of professional ballet, particularly after the founding of the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661, dancing was still an essentially courtly and aristocratic accomplishment, attaining its most elaborate expression in the ballet de cour.

Dance had long been one of the major pleasures of the French Court, becoming a veritable mania in the early years of Louis XIV's reign. Any event from a royal birth to a military victory was automatically celebrated by a major entertainment, and it was inconceivable that any Court entertainment should be planned without a ballet for its climax. Nor was it only at Court that dancing was all the rage: any household with the least social aspiration would have a dance at the slightest excuse. Even the provincial social climbers whom Molière depicts in Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) have their little bal. The young King himself was largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in ballet. He was a keen and, by many accounts, remarkably talented and graceful dancer. The ballet de cour gave the King an opportunity to display his skills in a context whose refinement and splendour appropriately reflected the Sun King's magnificence. The political system of absolutism also favoured the development of such courtly entertainments. The nobility, deprived of real political power and prevented by their social status from engaging in work, trade, or any other productive activity, had the leisure to indulge in aristocratic social pastimes. Indeed, it is possible to see in Court ballet a perfect image of the privileged, decorous and impotent existence to which the aristocracy was reduced under the absolute monarchy.

In the ballet de cour the element of spectacle predominated, with costumes, choreographed movement, ingenious machine-driven scenery and other amazing technical effects all combining to impress and delight the eye. Often the ballet was just one component of a much larger programme which included feasting, fireworks and waterworks. The grandest of such divertissements at Versailles lasted several days. The ballet itself, which could last for anything up to ten hours, combined vocal and instrumental music, recitation, ceremonial processions and formal dances. It was built round a certain number of major choreographed items called entrées, each depicting a poetic or allegorical subject. By the 1660s the Court ballet had established a conventional pattern: an overture, leading to a succession of entrées punctuated by poetry and song, culminating in a grand ballet. One can see a distant but distinct echo of this pattern in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme with its four intermèdes (corresponding to the entrées) and Ballet des Nations (corresponding to the grand ballet).

Although a poet would be involved to supply a libretto, any dramatic content would be minimal or non-existent. Rather than a narrative structure or plot, it was the mythological or allegorical motifs that connected the various parts of the spectacle. From an artistic point of view the ballet de cour may be said to be superficial and incoherent. But that is really beside the point, since Court ballet never pretended to be an artistic phenomenon, despite the large number of artists who were commissioned to work on it. Their role was simply to supply specialist skills to enhance the entertainment. No unified artistic vision controlled its creation; the operation was masterminded by the nobleman or dignitary who supervised the ballet (when he did not delegate it to a servant). As one writer of the time put it, ‘il [i.e. ballet] n'est tenu que de plaire aux yeux, de leur fournir des objects agréables … et de belles images’ (15, p. 210). Its sole object, then, was entertainment, and its motive was a desire for self-representation by the Court. It is against this unpromising background that Molière's venture into theatrical ballet must be appreciated.

In 1661 Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV's finance minister, planned to entertain the King and Court at his newly-reconstructed chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The festivities involved a programme of unprecedented extravagance and splendour which set the pattern for the King's entertainments at Versailles later in the decade. It was natural that Molière, whose recent triumphs in Paris with Les Précieuses ridicules and L'Ecole des maris had made him the most talked-about new star, should be summoned to contribute. As a result Molière found himself working alongside the royal ballet master Beauchamp. The play he wrote, Les Fâcheux, was not especially memorable in itself but it may be considered a landmark in the development of French theatre, for it was to all intents and purposes the first comédie-ballet.

Les Fâcheux involves the efforts of a lover trying to keep an amorous rendezvous but constantly being detained by a succession of bores. The situation (in which one can detect an embryonic version of a later masterpiece, Le Misanthrope) is a vehicle for comedy of the kind at which Molière excelled: satirical sketches of character types observed in a contemporary social milieu and drawn with devastating accuracy. It was just such a formula, deployed in the context of a one-act farce, that had established Molière's comic reputation in 1659, with Les Précieuses ridicules. In Les Fâcheux, appropriately, the targets are society bores (the ostentatious theatregoer, the huntsman, the gambler), minor nuisances of a kind which the Court audience would recognise as a common occupational hazard. What is remarkable and new, however, is that the same basic situation which provides the plot is also represented through the nonverbal medium of dance in the entrées de ballet which follow each of the acts. In these, the lover becomes embroiled in a further series of choreographed obstacles in the shape of a game of boules, a brigade of Swiss guards and so on.

According to Molière, this novel formula combining comedy with ballet within a dramatic framework was more the product of circumstance than artistic vision, an improvised solution to a practical problem. In the play's Preface he writes:

Le dessein était de donner un ballet aussi; et comme il n'y avait qu'un petit nombre choisi de danseurs excellents, on fut contraint de séparer les entrées de ce ballet, et l'avis fut de les jeter dans les entr'actes de la comédie, afin que ces intervalles donnassent temps aux mêmes baladins de revenir sous d'autres habits.

In other words, a shortage of dancers dictated a need for something to occupy the stage during costume changes, and ‘it was decided’ (he does not say by whom) that Molière should write something to fill the gap. Such a brief, it should be remembered, was not unusual. The Court ballet was a collaborative enterprise, and the role of a poet was limited to composing the necessary morceaux to flesh out the ballet and separate its various entrées. Nor could anything more have been expected in the circumstances: Molière had been recruited to the production team at extremely short notice, two weeks before the date set for the entertainment. It is at once remarkable yet absolutely characteristic of him that, instead of merely supplying the requisite trifles, he sought to reconcile the requirements of the courtly entertainment with his own self-imposed artistic demands. He explains:

pour ne point rompre aussi le fil de la pièce par ces manières d'intermèdes, on s'avisa de les coudre au sujet du mieux que l'on put, et de ne faire qu'une seule chose du ballet et de la comédie.

(Preface, Les Fâcheux: my italics)

The matter-of-fact tone could blind us to the reality that what Molière is describing is something absolutely new: not a ballet de cour with intermittent verse, nor a play punctuated with danced intermèdes, but a hybrid spectacle in which comedy, music and dance unite to illustrate a single dramatic idea. At least, that was the principle. In practice, it can be argued that the fusion of elements in Les Fâcheux is not complete. Molière himself was the first to acknowledge, in his Preface, that the danced intermèdes, while they extend and complement the action, are not a fully integral part of it, as they would be in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. But it was a pleasing mixture which certainly heralded an original art form, and whose potential evidently intrigued Molière:

Quoi qu'il en soit, c'est un mélange qui est nouveau pour nos théâtres … et comme tout le monde l'a trouvé agréable, il peut servir d'idée à d'autres choses qui pourraient être méditées avec plus de loisir.

(ibid.)

By ‘tout le monde’, in this case, Molière can be taken to mean both la cour and la ville. A few days later Molière was summoned by the King to perform the new play en visite at Fontainebleau, but it also enjoyed a long run of forty-two consecutive performances in the playwright's Paris theatre. La Grange's register shows that it was a popular success—always a major consideration for a company which was heavily dependent on box-office receipts. Indeed, the fact that a taste for music and spectacle was not confined to Court audiences but was becoming increasingly popular with the theatre-going public, thus creating a second lucrative outlet for the comédies-ballets, must have weighed heavily in Molière's attitude towards the new genre.

The most immediate impact of Fouquet's celebrations, however, was on the development of Court entertainments. Inspired by the spectacle and sumptuous setting of Vaux, Louis XIV resolved to create a new palace and gardens of unrivalled splendour, where Court life would be transposed into perpetual fête. Pausing only to dismiss Fouquet for embezzling the State to fund his high living, he immediately set to work to realise this ambition. Versailles, which underwent a major reconstruction between 1661 and 1664, became the setting for divertissements of unparalleled extravagance and to which Molière would be summoned to contribute with increasing frequency.

From about 1664, therefore, comedy-ballet came to occupy an increasingly important part of Molière's output. Versailles was inaugurated in 1664 with ‘Les Plaisirs de l'Ile Enchantée’, a four-day baroque celebration to which he contributed a spectacular musical fantasy called La Princesse d'Elide. The following year his company was adopted by the King and took the title of Troupe du Roi. The first play he composed for the King in his new capacity was L'Amour médecin, another comédie-ballet of sorts. Before that, in January 1664 at the Louvre, he had staged Le Mariage forcé in which Louis XIV himself took a role. That play was also significant in marking the first full collaboration between Molière and Lulli, who were to work together on a further nine comedy-ballets. Of Molière's output of fifteen plays between 1666 and 1672, no less than eleven were comédies-ballets.

But to speak of comédie-ballet as if it were a single genre is misleading. As an experimental artist, Molière was constantly modifying the formula according to the demands of the moment and in the light of earlier successes and failures. Certain principles, however, remain constant, and they can be traced back to his earliest experiments with the genre. One is the resolve to make of the comedy-ballet an essentially theatrical work, i.e. one where music and spectacle are incorporated into theatre, not the other way round. In this concept, dance, music and song are to be considered as an expansion of the language of theatre. Here Molière's ideas were at variance with those of Lulli, who believed the future lay with opera. They were also at variance with those of the Court audiences, who almost certainly regarded the comédie as merely the pretext for the ballet. Not surprisingly, there is no evidence that Molière ever subscribed to this view. The other key principle is the notion of an artistic fusion—not a mere juxtaposition of elements, but one where ballet and song are naturally integrated in the play. Reflecting on his first such experiment, he admitted that the blend was far from perfect, that there were ‘quelques endroits du ballet qui n'entrent pas dans la comédie aussi naturellement que d'autres’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, there is a clearly stated intention to ‘ne faire qu'une chose du ballet et de la comédie’. In Chapter 3 we shall see with what success these ideas are implemented in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

OCCASION

By the mid-1660s Louis XIV had assembled a team of loyal and talented specialists well versed in providing the royal entertainments. Among them were Benserade, the official Court poet and librettist who supervised Court spectacles until he was succeeded by Molière, and Carlo Vigarani, an Italian designer and brilliant inventor of stage machines, the technical mastermind behind the royal celebrations. Beauchamp was the leading choreographer; it was he who was largely responsible for the eventual pre-eminence of French ballet throughout Europe. There was also, above all, the Florentine Jean-Baptiste Lulli, an extraordinarily talented and ambitious musician, dancer and producer who collaborated with Molière on many productions before eventually supplanting him in the King's favour and becoming the superintendent of Louis XIV's entertainments. Molière, who first came to the King's notice in 1661 and quickly became one of his favourites, played an increasingly prominent role in the Court entertainments during the 1660s. Following Benserade's retirement in 1670 he received the title of divertisseur du roi.

In September 1669 the company performed Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, another comédie-ballet, at the Château de Chambord near Blois, which at that time served as a hunting lodge for royal parties. The following autumn they were again required to perform there. The commission to write Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was probably issued early in the summer of 1670. The King himself suggested the play's subject, as he had done six months earlier for Les Amants magnifiques. The Chevalier d'Arvieux, in his Memoirs, records the circumstances thus:

Le roi, ayant voulu faire un voyage à Chambord pour y prendre le divertissement de la chasse voulut donner à sa cour celui d'un ballet, et comme l'idée de Turcs, qu'on venait de voir à Paris, était encore toute récente, il crut qu'il serait bon de les faire paraître sur la scène.

(7, vol. IV, pp. 252-53)

It is possible, as Lancaster conjectures, that Molière was already working on what was to have been a character comedy in the familiar mould of L'Avare but involving a social climber (10, pp. 724-25). This would then have provided the substance of Acts III and IV, adapted to accommodate the required turquerie and to form the framework of a comédie-ballet. If this is so, the blend is seamless. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was written during the summer of 1670, a more leisurely period of composition than the overworked actor-manager usually enjoyed. It permitted him to compose a play of outstanding finish and structural perfection, though it has not always been recognised as such.

D'Arvieux, a specialist in Turkish affairs, joined the habitual team of Molière, Lulli and Beauchamp as consultant on oriental manners and dress. The designer was Carlo Vigarani. Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was presented in one of the large rooms adjoining the central open staircase in the château on 14 October, with three more performances the following week. A further Court performance was requested on 8 November, this time at Saint-Germain, before a scaled-down production of the play opened at the Palais-Royal theatre on 23 November.

A number of legends surround the play. One anecdote, to which D'Arvieux refers in the quotation above, concerns the official visit of Soliman Aga to Louis XIV in November 1669. It is said that the Ottoman emissary insulted his hosts by affecting to be unimpressed by the regal splendours of his reception in the French Court. According to one tradition, therefore, the chief minister Colbert proposed the play to ridicule Turkish customs and so avenge the insult to his master. But, as Lancaster points out (10, p. 725), the revenge could hardly be effectual, since the Turks had left Paris ten months earlier. Nor, in fact, does the play satirise the pseudo-Turks: the joke is entirely at the expense of M. Jourdain. It would probably be closer to the truth to say simply that a topical fascination with Turkish manners, reinforcing an existing fashion for things exotic, lay behind the King's suggestion for a turquerie. The same vogue gave rise to a wave of oriental récits, plays and operas, from Mairet's Le Grand et Dernier Solyman (1639) to Racine's Bajazet (1672) and Lulli's own Turkish ballet (performed at Court in 1660, now lost).

It has been suggested that M. Jourdain was intended to be a satirical portrait of Colbert himself. It is true that Colbert, like M. Jourdain, was the son of a draper. And it is possible to detect similarities between Molière's would-be gentleman and the Finance Minister, a snobbish parvenu, anxious to forget his humble origins, susceptible to flattery, aspiring to sophistication yet infallibly behaving at Court with, in the words of the King himself, ‘l'air d'un bourgeois de Paris’ (40). Molière does seem on (rare) occasions to have based satirical portraits on specific individuals. Moreover, Louis XIV not only tolerated but positively appreciated satire of his courtiers, provided he himself was not in the firing line. However, for the Court entertainer to have attacked a Minister as powerful and close to the King as Colbert would seem extremely imprudent. Molière's contemporaries, in any event, do not appear to have remarked on the likeness. An early biographer of Molière, Grimarest, reports (or, more probably, surmises) that when Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was performed in Paris, ‘chaque bourgeois y croyait trouver son voisin peint au naturel’ (24, p. 82). It might be added that there is no shortage of contenders for the dubious distinction of having served as a model for M. Jourdain, amongst the more far-fetched being a wealthy draper of the rue aux Fers named Guillaume Jourdain (1557-1608) (42)! But it would be fruitless to pursue these speculations further. The type of nouveau riche represented by Jourdain is so universal that it is both futile and unnecessary to think of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme as a pièce à clef. Molière's stated position was to stress the general nature of comedy: ‘Ces sortes de satire tombent directement sur les moeurs, et ne frappent les personnes que par réflexion’ (La Critique de l'Ecole des femmes, scene vi).

On a different scale of unreliability is the oft-repeated tradition that Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was given a chilly reception at its first performance. Its origin—‘Jamais pièce n'a été plus malheureusement reçue que celle-ci’—is again Grimarest (24, p. 81). His story is that the King received the play in stony silence, causing the Court to regard the event as a flop, until, after the second performance, he delivered a favourable verdict. This is probably best treated as a piece of fanciful embroidery. In any event, contemporaries of the play (of whom Grimarest is not one) speak uniformly of the comédie-ballet as an unqualified triumph.

There is something extraordinary in the fact that an ephemeral spectacle designed to amuse a restricted audience on a specific occasion should have gone on to become one of the favourite plays of the French comic repertoire. Its popularity with the general public is a measure of the theatrical skill and comic vision of a Court entertainer who contrived to imbue a commissioned piece with universal interest. But it also remains a perfect model of Court entertainment as it had developed under Louis XIV. At every level it bears the stamp of the occasion for which it was devised. On a material level, a lavishly expensive spectacle on this scale would have been unthinkable without royal support. At a deeper level, Court taste is reflected both in the exuberant but graceful tone of the comedy and in the social perspective whereby the oddities of the mercantile class are viewed with bemused indulgence. Above all, of course, the divertissement de cour was designed primarily to entertain. The same may well be true of every one of Molière's comedies. After all, one of his most famous and persuasive statements of dramatic principle is the rhetorical question he poses in La Critique de l'Ecole des femmes: ‘Je voudrais bien savoir si la grande règle de toutes les règles n'est pas de plaire’. Nevertheless, when Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is compared with Molière's dramatic comedies, there is a readily discernible difference of emphasis. Comédie-ballet appeals more strongly and immediately to a desire for escapism. This shows not only in the use of music and dance to appeal to the senses, but also in Molière's treatment of the dramatic action, where there is a stronger tendency towards fantasy and a more relaxed approach to dramatic logic.

Bibliography

background studies

7. Arvieux, Laurent d', Mémoires du Chevalier d'Arvieux, Paris: Delespine, 1735, 6 vols (vol. 4).

10. Lancaster, H. C., A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Baltimore/London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929-42, 10 vols (Part III: The period of Molière).

15. Pure, Abbé de, L'Idée des spectacles anciens et modernes, Paris, 1668.

studies of molière

21. Donneau de Visé, Jean (and others), Molière jugé par ses contemporains, ed. A. Poulet-Malassis, Paris, 1877.

24. Grimarest, Vie de Monsieur de Molière (1705), repr. Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1930.

on comédie-ballet and le bourgeois gentilhomme

40. Marion, Jean, ‘Molière a-t-il songé à Colbert en composant le personnage de M. Jourdain?’, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, XLV (1938), pp. 145–80.

42. Maxfield-Miller, Elizabeth, ‘The Real M. Jourdain of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), pp. 62–73.