The Marquis In The Mirror: Molière And Today's Cultural Elite

Moliere remains relevant considering the pretensions of today's academic world.

Joan Mounteer | September 27, 2026

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, whom audiences know as Molière, remains the most celebrated comic playwright of seventeenth-century France.

His sophisticated comedies skewer human pretension, affectation, hypocrisy, and social self-deception.

In 1659, he wrote The Precious Ladies (Les Précieuses ridicules), a short one-act play in which he aims his incisive wit at the highly educated, aristocratic ladies of the Parisian salons, whose pursuit of refinement had tipped into pretension. These women adhered to a wider cultural movement called préciosité, or "preciousness," which exalted refined conversation, elegant language, sophisticated manners, literary taste, and disdain for vulgarity. It also sought to improve women's intellectual and social standing and to demand more elegant forms of courtship.

Behind the elaborate manners and exaggerated language lay a legitimate desire for a more civilized social world.

In this comedic gem, Molière shows how cultural and intellectual pretension, taken to an extreme, leads to airs of superiority over others. The protagonists are two privileged young sisters, Magdelon and Cathos, who have embraced the codes of préciosité so completely that their vaunted refinement has devolved into absurdity. When two respectable young men, La Grange and Du Croisy, attempt to court them, the women reject them as hopelessly unsophisticated: no flattery, no elaborate language, none of the refined gestures and carefully staged emotional encounters their courtship model demands.

Their scorn offends the young men deeply, and they decide to retaliate. They send their valets, Mascarille and Jodelet, to court the sisters—disguised as fashionable gentlemen. The sisters' refinement fantasies run so deep that they imagine themselves of more illustrious birth than their father........

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