Sheryl Kroen

To me, this book's title does it a disservice. While in part it discusses fascinating original research about how some French people used demands for Molière's play "Tartuffe" — featuring a hypocritical religious zealot as its titular villain — as a way to protest the perceived religious zealotry of the Bourbon Restoration, the overall focus of the book is a broader history of religion and resistance in the Restoration, not a narrow cultural history of the Restoration theater. It tells the story of the Catholic religious revival under the Restoration, the backlash this sometimes provoked, and the bind this created for state officials who supported the aims of the religious revival but abhorred the unrest their methods provoked.

This is not a book for people without any background in the history of the Restoration, but is not as limited to specialists as its title might imply.… (mere)