The distinctive tradition of French satirical writing, from classical comedy to the radical cartoon press and its consequences

By Dr. Ingrid Gustafsson, Ph.D. — satire.info

French satirical culture is among the richest in the world, distinguished by its philosophical ambition, its commitment to absolute artistic freedom, and its willingness to accept the most extreme consequences of that commitment. From Moliere’s comic anatomy of social hypocrisy through Voltaire’s savage philosophical comedy to the cartoon press of the nineteenth century and the contemporary tradition represented by Charlie Hebdo, French satire has consistently pushed harder against the limits of the permissible than most national traditions.

Moliere: The Comedy of Social Hypocrisy

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known as Moliere (1622-1673), created in his theatrical comedies the definitive satirical portrait of French social hypocrisy. His targets were the specific social types of seventeenth-century French society: the religious hypocrite (Tartuffe), the miser (The Miser), the social climber (The Bourgeois Gentleman), the misanthrope (The Misanthrope). Moliere’s comedies operate in the Horatian mode, exposing the gap between social performance and private reality through the mechanism of the comic reversal: the moralizer exposed as the most immoral, the wise man revealed as the greatest fool. Moliere’s influence on subsequent comic writing — in France, Britain, and across the Western theatrical tradition — has been enormous.

Voltaire and Beyond

Voltaire (1694-1778) represents the apex of French satirical philosophy. Candide (1759) attacks philosophical optimism through the device of the accumulating disaster: the apparently innocent Candide is subjected to an escalating series of catastrophes, each of which his philosophical mentor Pangloss cheerfully explains as the best of all possible outcomes in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s satirical method — the philosophical tale deploying narrative absurdism in the service of pointed ideological critique — influenced the entire subsequent tradition of satirical fiction in France and beyond. The French satirical tradition reached a particularly defining moment with the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015, when gunmen attacked the offices of the French satirical magazine, killing twelve people including the editor and several cartoonists. The attacks provoked a global debate about the limits of satirical freedom and the relationship between comic expression and social responsibility that has not resolved itself. The history of satire in literature consistently returns to Voltaire as a pivotal figure who demonstrated that philosophical argument and comic entertainment need not be in tension. French humour and its cultural context provides useful background for understanding both the tradition’s achievements and its consequences.

Source: satire.info | Political Satire History