Tartuffe (1664) and Enlightenment Justice

"If the purpose of comedy is to correct men's vices, I see no reason why any should be exempt."  -- Moliere

Banned By King And Church

Today, this play likely strikes us as quite harmless and innocent, and it is difficult to imagine that it was initially banned for four years (1664-1668), due to its controversial content.  Basically, the play itself fell victim to essentially the same abuses of power that it critiques. 

Within this context consider that the Enlightenment did not simply bring about a political revolution in terms of making government the realm of secular, republican democracies; it also revolutionized European and North American legal systems.

The characters in Tartuffe must determine whether or not Tartuffe is a hypocrite or a man of true faith, or, more simply, whether or not he is telling the truth.  The play argues that even a religious question like this can be settled in Locke-ean terms: thru observation, evidence – and, maybe even more radically, that regardless of Tartuffe’s religious (or even irreligious) practices, he is due a fair trial (toleration: equal treatment under the law and respect for universal civil liberties).

What we’re interested in is how the legal reforms we now take for granted – protection from torture, equal treatment under the law, the right to know one’s accuser, trial by one’s peers, and, most importantly, being assumed innocent until proven guilty (burden of proof on prosecution, not defense) and the entire concept of evidence and guilt innocence “beyond a reasonable doubt” are nearly all predicated on Locke’s tabula rasa.

And then we are interested in how Tartuffe represents an argument in favor of these reforms – which, it turns out, will not come about in France for nearly another 150 years, under the reign of Napoleon.

Medieval Legal Justice

Before the Enlightenment legal reforms, based on Locke’s tabula rasa and "toleration" (separation of church and state), crime itself was perceived of in religious terms, and largely as the result of a malicious spirit world, and so it was treated accordingly:

-- Criminal behavior resulted from demonic possession or the work of the devil (consider how it's Locke's tabula rasa that ends this belief, especially under Rousseau).

-- Guilt and innocence was therefore determined largely by the church and through confession via torture or by “trial by ordeal”.

-- Trial by ordeal varied between trial by water (cold or hot) and trial by fire.

Trial By Ordeal In The Bible
Numbers 5:11-22, trial by ordeal was the prescribed method for testing a wife's fidelity to her husband:

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Speak to the Israelites and say to them: 'If a man's wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him by sleeping with another man, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), and if feelings of jealousy come over the husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure--or even if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure--then he is to take his wife to the priest. . . .

The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, "If no other man has slept with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have defiled yourself by sleeping with a man other than your husband"--here the priest is to put the woman under this curse of the oath--"may the Lord cause your people to curse and denounce you when he causes your thigh to waste away and your abdomen to swell. May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells and your thigh wastes away."' (New International Version, Numbers 5:11-22)

In the presence of the temple priests, the woman would be required to drink water mixed with the dirt from the tabernacle floor after calling upon God to strike her with sickness if she were guilty of adultery. If she grew ill from drinking this contaminant, and her womb swelled or she later lost muscle tissue in her thigh, this was considered clear evidence of her guilt, and she would then be stoned to death. (No similar testing method existed for testing adulterous husbands, however.)

If you would like to be more horrified, here are a couple first had accounts of torture from the 16th and 17th centuries:
1757, Damiens the Regicide (From Discipline and Punish)

1597, John Gerard, a Jesuit Priest in England

Religious Tolerance
Notably, Tartuffe is neither tortured nor executed for his religious beliefs, and so the play can be seen as a critique of the Inquisition, writ both large (in general terms: using force to convert belief) and small (a critique of the actual Catholic Inquisition (1184-1860)).

Recall as well that even here, in North America, torture was used to determine and punish heresy, even outside of the Catholic Church.  For example, the Salem Witch Trials, which took place in 1692, nearly 30 years after Moliere wrote Tartuffe, and led to the execution of 28 (and 5 more deaths in imprisonment).