Farces et moralités

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Farces et moralités

Author	Octave Mirbeau
Original title	Farces et moralités
Language	French
Genre	comedy
Publisher	Fasquelle
Publication date	1904
Publication place	France

Farces et moralités (Farces and morality plays) is a collection of six comedy plays in one act, written by the French novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau and published by Fasquelle in 1904: Vieux ménages (Old couples), L’Épidémie (The Epidemic, Bloomington, University of Denver Press, 1949), Les Amants (The Lovers), Scrupules (Scruples, New York, Samuel French, 1923), Le Portefeuille (The Purse) and Interview.

Commentary

As usual, Mirbeau demystifies and ridicules all that stupid people blindly respect: the law, which is oppressive by nature, and the police, which is arbitrary and repressive by definition; love, a deception, and marriage, a quagmire; wealth, ill-acquired, and social success, a deceptive façade; the newspapers, which anaesthetize people and provide false information, and the politicians, who are quite indifferent to social misery and concerned only with their own emoluments. Its great originality is to extend the challenge to language itself, thanks to which the dominant classes obtain the submission and the respect of the dominated and perpetuate an inegalitarian social order.

Mirbeau succeeds however in making us laugh at that which should really drive us to despair, in the hope that the spark of conscience will help us to live better, to exercise better our liberty of mind, and to rebel against social institutions.

Although placing itself in the continuity of medieval morality plays, which had a pedagogical and moralizing purpose, Mirbeau deliberately chose the mood of farce, in which exaggeration, acceleration of the rhythm, caricature, plays on words, the grotesque, and the absurd are acceptable and assure the indispensable distancing effect, without any realism. He anticipates all at once the theater of Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Aymé, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco.

External links

Octave Mirbeau, The Interview, translated by Walter Wykes (2009).
(in French) Octave Mirbeau, Farces et moralités.
(in French) Pierre Michel, Foreword Archived 2012-02-23 at the Wayback Machine.
(in French) Pierre Michel, « Mirbeau, Ionesco et le théâtre de l’absurde », Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, n° 13, 2006, p. 163-174.

v t e Octave Mirbeau
Novels	Le Calvaire (1886) Abbé Jules (1888) Sébastien Roch (1890) Dans le ciel (1893) Les Mémoires de mon ami (1899) The Torture Garden (1899) The Diary of a Chambermaid (1900) Les Vingt et un Jours d'un neurasthénique (1900) Dingo (1913) Un gentilhomme (1920)
Drama	Les Mauvais Bergers (1897) Business is business (1903) Farces et moralités (1904) Home (1908)
Other works	Lettres de l'Inde (1885) La 628-E8 (1907) La Mort de Balzac (1918) L'Amour de la femme vénale (1922) Contes cruels (1990) Combats littéraires (2006)
Characters	Célestine Clara Isidore Lechat Lucien Père Pamphile Jean Roule
Miscellaneous	Cahiers Octave Mirbeau Octave Mirbeau (sculpture)

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