Molière premiered Tartuffe in 1664, was immediately banned by Louis XIV under pressure from religious factions, and spent five years revising and fighting for the right to perform it. Orgon, a wealthy Parisian bourgeois, has been so thoroughly taken in by the false piety of Tartuffe that he is prepared to give him his daughter in marriage and deed him his house, over the active protests of his entire family. Tartuffe himself appears only in Act III, a structural delay that builds expectation precisely, and immediately makes advances to Elmire, Orgon's wife. She contrives a scene where Orgon, hidden under a table, hears Tartuffe's second attempt, and the play moves toward resolution through a royal deus ex machina.
Molière's target is not religious piety but its performance as a tool of social manipulation, a distinction the play makes carefully and that his religious opponents either could not or would not acknowledge. Tartuffe's hypocrisy works because Orgon has a genuine appetite for devotion; he wants to believe in Tartuffe's saintliness because it makes him feel part of something spiritually elevated. The play suggests that this hunger for transcendence makes otherwise intelligent people available for manipulation, not because they are foolish but because the manipulator offers them something they genuinely desire. Cleante, the voice of rational moderation, explains this to Orgon repeatedly and is entirely ineffective.
The play works because every era produces its version of the Tartuffe problem, the figure who weaponizes the moral vocabulary of a particular moment to control those who sincerely share that vocabulary's values. The social currency varies; the mechanism is consistent. Molière built the play's structure to demonstrate the mechanism with maximum clarity: Tartuffe's behavior is visible to almost every character from the beginning, the play's dramatic irony relies entirely on Orgon's refusal to see what is directly in front of him, and the resolution requires a literal king-as-deus-ex-machina because Molière could find no internal logic by which Orgon's family could extract themselves from the legal trap he has built.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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