ial dynamic, reinforced by the royal absolutist ethos, that the crown was a class by itself. Moore describes France in the period before the Revolution as "an illuminating mixture of competing traits . . . feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy," and its most important political attribute was the fact that the crown tried to increase its control over all by selling or granting positions in the royal bureaucracy. This had the effect of institutionalizing royal patronage and of maintaining royal control over all:
The bourgeois drive toward property found considerable satisfaction through the royal bureaucracy, while any drive toward political independence was blunted by converting the bourgeois into an aristocrat. Later this aspect was to limit very severely the power of the monarchy to adapt itself and French society to ever more pressing problems (Moore 59).
Now MoliFre died 106 years before the French Revolution, but the dynamic of social criticism that is embedded in his plays is consistent with a society defined by the competing traits of which Moore speaks, not least by the competition for the institutional benefits of royal licensing across a variety of social segments. In other words, in seventeenth-century France, and in the case of MoliFre, the creative process was experienced as something of a social construction. However, in MoliFre's hands, the subtext of social organization served as the basis for forceful social commentary. For in his choice of subject matter and in dramatic construction he appears to have tested the tolerance of everyone from the crown to the aristocrats to the intelligentsia, by taking the contemporary social environment as his subject and personifying idiosyncratic expressions of its manners, mores, and attitudes in characters conceptualized as figures of fun. As Hartnoll says, by the time he had returned to Paris from the province MoliFre was engaged in "viewing the life of Paris with an acutenes...