Molière celebrates his 400th anniversary of baptism this Saturday, January 15, 2022. And despite several requests for his induction into the Pantheon, the Élysée is opposed to it.
As Bruno Roger-Petit, Emmanuel Macron’s “memory adviser”, explained to Liberation on January 12, “the Pantheon is a secular temple, child of the republican fatherland, itself engendered by the Enlightenment, as well all the figures honored there postdate the Enlightenment and the Revolution”.
Having died in 1673, Molière therefore lived well before the Age of Enlightenment which began in France in 1715.
In 2019, the French comedian Francis Huster had brought the idea of bringing Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, his real name, into the Pantheon. According to this first, “Molière has revolutionized acting, constantly being reinvented like the French language”, he had argued in the columns of Liberation.
In 2021, during the Carcassone festival, the actor reiterated his request: “Molière is France, if we remove it from a French library, it collapses. I ask the President of the French Republic to enter the Pantheon, and I hope it will come true on January 15, 2002, for the 400th anniversary of his birth,” he said.
In February 2021, it was the turn of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, to wish the entry into the Pantheon of the one she had described as “the greatest genius of French theater”. More recently, the president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, for her part affirmed to Le Figaro that “Molière is the heritage of France”, promising “to inspire its cultural policy by the spirit French of Molière”, if she became President of the Republic.