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Originally, it combined two of Paris' existing dramatic companies, one of which was Molière's own Troupe du Roi. Molière himself was at the time seven years dead. But in his lifetime he had been recognized as a great playwright and, unlike Shakespeare, as a great actor too. It was in his spirit that the new theatrical enterprise got under way. State funds offered actors great prestige, security and high incomes, and through the centuries Le Françiase has presented such alltime greats as Talma, Rachel, Mounet-Sully and Bernhardt. But where state funds are involved, so are political favors. In the early part of the 20th century, the mistress of an influential politician had a better chance to get into the Comédie Française than a talented actress. In unimaginative hands, the great French theatrical tradition of the Comédie became musty and dull.
About 20 years ago, the old theater was revivified when the Big Four of the Paris theater (Louis Jouvet, Charles Dullin, Georges Pitoeff, Gaston Baty) swept into the House of Molière and swept out the mustiness and pedantry that had infected it. Today it consists of two theaters, the Salle Richelieu on the Right Bank, where classical plays are given, and the Salle Luxembourg on the Left Bank, where contemporary plays are given. It has a staff of more than 400 actors and technicians, and its repertoire is so immense that it could give a completely different program every day for five years. It gives its actors a chance to play in, and its audiences a chance to see, such varied fare as Shakespeare and Beaumarchais, Mauriac and Montherlant. It combines the best of the old and the best of the new in France. Actor-Producer Jean-Louis Barrault once said: "I have a god: the theater. When I entered Le Franç I entered a religion whose temple was La Comédie and whose pope was Molière."
* A "comedie-ballet," Le Bourgeois Gentil-homme, when first produced in 1670, was less important for its Molière text than for its Lully music, while most important of all (with Orientalism the rage) was its Turkish ballet.