Working through an official system of academies, as well as through a more informal institution known as the Little Academy (Petite Académie), Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert controlled a wide-ranging propaganda of absolutism or, in the language of the time, a memorialising of the monarch’s gloire. This chapter investigates the strategy and mechanisms by which Colbert and his collaborators deployed the arts as an instrument of the state. It explores the ways in which Molière’s comedies and comedy-ballets developed out of an established system of courtly propaganda in the court ballet of the 1650s and 1660s, and examines changes instituted by Colbert in the 1660s. Finally, it examines Molière’s ambivalent response to the absolutist enterprise as expressed through these changes.

Seventeenth-century France was not a place of religious tolerance or inclusion. Jewish people were permitted to settle, under certain restrictions, in parts of the country, and France enjoyed trading and diplomatic relations with, notably, the Ottoman Turks. But both Judaism and Islam were regarded with great suspicion in a country that claimed to base its unity on having one faith, one law and one king. For this reason, the French Protestant (or Huguenot) community came under increasing levels of persecution in Molière’s lifetime. Even within the Catholic Church, there was considerable tension. Louis XIV’s authority was threatened by that of the Pope in Rome and, in France, by the Jansenists, who did not recognize the King’s right to pronounce on matters of individual conscience. More generally, France was steeped in a wider conflict between those who believed that religion should guide all areas of daily life (the dévots) and those who adopted a more relaxed view (the mondains). Although there is no reason to think that Louis XIV objected to Molière’s portrayal of religion and religious hypocrisy in his famous comedy Tartuffe (1664–9), the play thus became caught up in a much broader struggle for religious and political authority.