Conférence : Comment parlaient les personnages de Molière: une plaisante stratigraphie sociale dans le théâtre et la langue du XVII° siècle

By Pierre-Alain CLERC, concert organist in French-speaking Switzerland. He taught musical rhetoric and worked as a researcher and educator in the field of French declamation. He directed a historically informed production of Molière's "School for Wives." Seventeenth-century grammarians, as well as many other witnesses to social life, provide us with information on the dramatic action of this period, namely the way actors spoke, moved, listened, directed their gaze, and gestured. Treatises on rhetoric, particularly for preachers, are very important. According to these testimonies, according to the very text of the plays, according to the terrible quarrels they sometimes engendered, we realize that Molière's troupe had a special status. They did not see "actors on stage, but the real people they wanted to represent." Molière, who was an exceptional imitator, was famous for criticizing clothing, doctors, marquises, but especially the way people speak. And we can try, through testimonies from very diverse sources, to reconstruct the whole pleasant linguistic hierarchy of poets, pedants, précieuses, courtiers, doctors, people of the robe, marquises, bourgeois, valets, soldiers, peasants, all the way to the Swiss guards. At 6 p.m., Salle Taillefer, Sauzon

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