Martin T urnell
THE WRITER AND SOCIAL STRATEGY
If
we made a rough list of the principal European writers
of the last three hundred years, we should find that the vast majority
of them belonged to what are loosely called the middle classes. The
list would include a few aristocrats like the Duc de La Rochefoucauld
and the Duc de Saint-Simon and a few writers of proletarian origin
like John Bunyan or D. H. Lawrence; but they are exceptions and
represent only a tiny minority. Since this is so,
it
seems at
first
surpris–
ing that many writers should have spoken so
ill
of the class from which
they came, should have been so bitter in their denunciation of the
"bourgeois." Now the use of the expression "bourgeois" as a term of
abuse was not the invention of
Karl
Marx or of the nineteenth-century
anarchists. It is much older and, I feel tempted to add, much more
respectable. In 1666 the French novelist, Antoine Furetiere, published
a work called
Le Roman bourgeois
which was a satirical picture of
middle-class manners in the seventeenth century. Three years later
Moliere's comedy,
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme,
was played before
Louis XIV at the chateau of Chambord. Nor was this quite the be–
ginning of the story. The bourgeois had been a stock figure of fun
in the old French and Italian farces and it was from
this
source that
Moliere took his
bourgeois gentilhomme.
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme
is not of course among Moliere's
supreme achievements.
It
was written for the purpose of light enter–
tainment; and it is in his other works like
l'Ecole des femmes, Tartuffc
and the
Misanthrope
that we must look for his most radical criticisms
of contemporary society. I shall suggest that the whole of his work
was an onslaught on the bourgeoisie, but before doing so I want to
look at the position of the middle classes in the seventeenth century.
They were, as their name suggests, a fluctuating body and we
can detect three main groups. There was an upper stratum which
