SOURCE: “Molière and Tartuffe: Recrimination and Reconciliation,” in The French Review, Vol. 62, No. 5, April, 1989, pp. 749-63.

In the following essay, Phillips examines the changing attitudes towards Molière's drama, focusing on the criticisms of the church.

The year 1922 marked the three-hundredth anniversary of Molière's birth. An occasion, one might think, to celebrate unequivocally the life and work of one of the three great dramatists of the seventeenth century in France and indeed one of the great figures of French literature. After all, the controversies over Tartuffe and Dom Juan, and especially over L'Ecole des femmes had surely abated by then, leaving the way open for the consecration of a supreme representative of the culture of France. Everybody could at least agree on that. Not quite.

The tercentenary revived, in a particularly acute fashion, arguments over Molière's Tartuffe, which had raged fitfully throughout the nineteenth century...