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This Saturday marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of Molière, the famous French playwright. During his career, the one who was also a performer and poet dedicated his pieces to the criticism of the upper class and the bourgeoisie of the 17th century, in addition to positioning himself against the values of the Church, a revolutionary act for the time.
This Saturday marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of the artist who marked French society: on January 15, 1622, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin was born into a bourgeois family in Paris.
Son of the royal upholsterer Jean Poquelin and Marie Cressé, little is known about this historical figure who would become the favorite interpreter of the royal court of King Louis XIV. Under the stage name of Molière, he carved out a career marked by fierce criticism and satirization of the upper class and the bourgeoisie, with works such as “The Misanthrope”, “The Bourgeois Gentleman” or “The Miser”.
Molière is surrounded by mystery. The day of his birth is not known with certainty: in fact, January 15 was the day his baptism was registered. Neither the specific conditions of his death nor where his remains are known.
Playwright, actor and poet, the 17th century prodigy managed to gain a foothold in the court of Louis XIV, while defying the Church -an extremely important institution at the time-, which repeatedly censured him to the point of excommunicating him.
With a very risky style and an unprecedented vocation for comedy, Molière became the director of the company ‘El Ilustre Teatro’ after renouncing the family inheritance. The troupe he traveled all over the country and conquered the French public from different social strata.
Such was his passion and vocation for the theater that, as a result of the debts accumulated by ‘El Ilustre Teatro’, he spent two years in prison. When he was released in 1645, Molière claimed that the incident had only increased his “passion” for the itinerant profession.
However, his destiny pointed towards the wealthy royal court. Under the protection of Louis XIV as a member of entertainment, the artist’s fame was consolidated.
“Louis XIV saw in Molière’s theater a form of embassy, an export product, but at the end of the 19th century his figure took on a greater dimension and people spoke of the patriotic, secular, republican Molière…”, said Martial Poirson, curator of the exhibition planned in Paris for its anniversary, to the EFE agency.
But not even the support of the monarch managed to escape the author’s reprisals from the Church. When he died in 1673, Louis XIV asked the religious authorities to give him an official burial. However, it is believed that his remains were buried elsewhere in the royal cemetery.
With an equally mysterious end, Molière died relatively young for the time, at the age of 51. Minutes after interpreting one of his works, precisely ‘The imaginary sick person’, he said he felt unwell and died of alleged pneumonia.
Molière’s legacy, in French theaters
After his death, Molière went down in history with a name with as much weight as that of Miguel de Cervantes or William Shakespeare. However, unlike other authors who marked history, Molière left no trace of his work: no annotations, no manuscripts, no diary. Any.
Something that did not prevent him from being a benchmark in France and throughout the world. Reason why the French Comedy – a company founded by Louis XIV seven years after the comedian’s death – begins this Saturday with performances of the play “Tartuffe”, one of his most acclaimed pieces, but which could only be performed once before undergoing censorship.
In it, Molière mocked the pious and the hypocrisy of their lifestyle. After its premiere, he had to rewrite it up to three times to be able to interpret it again.
In this line, the playwright’s genre par excellence was the moral comedy. With this he attacked the upper class figures and the bourgeoisie of France in the 17th century, with great criticism that made the public laugh.
If in his day he generated controversies, 400 years after his supposed birth he still does. Conservative Valérie Pécresse and other voices have called for the playwright’s remains to be transferred to the French Pantheon. Something that the Government of Emmanuel Macron has already said will not happen, under the argument that this location is only intended for post-Enlightenment artists.
For the moment, and in his memory, the works performed by the French Comedy, directed by the Belgian Ivo Van Hove, will also be broadcast live on television and in cinemas. An act so that the French do not forget the figure that marked an entire era and challenged the most powerful strata in France.
With EFE and local media
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