Painting Molière as an act of rebellion: Honoré Daumier, censored speech, and revivals of theatrical satire

Abstract

Abstract Best known as a caricaturist who skewered the politicians and social mores of nineteenth-century France, Honoré Daumier also had a deep and abiding engagement with the seventeenth-century playwright Molière. This article examines Daumier’s paintings of Molière’s plays Le Malade imaginaire (1673) and Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671), initiated shortly after Daumier was fired from a thirty-year position working for the illustrated press. Rather than understanding these paintings in relationship to his broader political project, scholars tend to interpret them in isolation from his lithographs, with the inadequate justification that the formality of the stage diverges from the humor of his cartoons. Daumier—who, like Molière, had negotiated shifting censorship restrictions throughout his career—painted Molière’s plays when they were being revived by nineteenth-century theaters because new material was heavily censored. In moments of intense repression, audiences and playhouses used these plays to stage oblique attacks on the government. This article examines the legal frameworks linking a caricatural style of painting to theatrical performance and argues that, by turning to Molière as a subject in paint when explicitly political material was being censored in print, Daumier’s works intervene in the contested space of speech in Second Empire France.