D’un Tartuffe à l’autre : Molière s’est-il renié ?

After recalling the circumstances surrounding the composition of Tartuffe, we refute the recent hypothesis that the first version (1664) was an attack against excessively pious individuals, of whom Tartuffe is a polemical incarnation, before, for convenience’s sake, becoming a knave in the following versions. In the place of chronological ambivalence between two conceptions of Tartuffe, we substitute an internal comic ambiguity from the outset: the false devotee can, in this guise, be mocked in order to ridicule the truly pious with impunity. [519]