Recommendations
Books Like Le Tartuffe by Molière
Works that analyze how intelligent people are deceived by obvious frauds
Orgon is not stupid — his credulity is produced by a psychological need that Tartuffe skillfully feeds. These works share that same analysis: the fraud succeeds not because the victim is weak but because they have a need that the impostor satisfies, and the need is stronger than the evidence.
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Buy on AmazonDom Juan
by Molière
The companion play — Dom Juan adopts religious hypocrisy as his final strategy in exactly the way Tartuffe uses it from the start; reading both together covers Molière's analysis of the uses of false piety across the bourgeois and aristocratic classes
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Buy on AmazonLe Misanthrope
by Molière
The moral complement — Alceste's sincere moral rigor is the opposite of Tartuffe's fraudulent piety; the three plays together (Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope) form Molière's systematic analysis of moral sincerity and its corruption
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Buy on AmazonCandide
by Voltaire
The 18th-century comic continuation — Voltaire inherits Molière's satirical project and extends it to institutional religion as a whole; the Inquisition and the Jesuits in Candide are Tartuffe systematized at the level of institutions
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Buy on AmazonElmer Gantry
by Sinclair Lewis
The American 20th-century parallel — the evangelical preacher who is himself the embodiment of everything he preaches against; the Tartuffe structure applied to American Protestant revivalism
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Buy on AmazonLes Caractères
by Jean de La Bruyère
The moralist companion — La Bruyère's portrait of the dévot (the falsely pious) in 'De la mode' is a prose version of the Tartuffe analysis; La Bruyère and Molière are analyzing the same phenomenon from the gallery and the stage
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Buy on AmazonThe Alchemist
by Ben Jonson
The English parallel — Jonson's alchemist Subtle is the Tartuffe of English Renaissance theatre: a fraud who exploits the credulity of marks who need to believe in the philosopher's stone; the classic comedy of imposture before Molière
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Buy on AmazonConfidence Man
by Herman Melville
The American novel of imposture — Melville's shape-shifting confidence man on the Mississippi riverboat exploits the same psychological mechanisms as Tartuffe: the victim's need and the impostor's perfect adaptation to it
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Buy on AmazonOthello
by William Shakespeare
The tragic version — Iago is a Tartuffe who succeeds; the analysis of how a persuasive fraud destroys an intelligent man through his greatest virtue (love, trust) is the tragic version of the comic mechanism Molière exposes
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