Molière makes the audience wait two whole acts before showing them Tartuffe. When he finally enters, in Act Three, scene 2 of Tartuffe, or the Impostor (Molière, first staged in 1664 and in its final version in 1669), the first thing he does, the moment he sees the maid Dorine, is tell his servant Laurent to put away his hair shirt and his scourge, and announce that he is off to share his alms among the prisoners. The second is to hand Dorine a handkerchief: “Cover that bosom, which I cannot bear to see.” That entrance holds the whole character, a virtue performed for whoever is watching. The wealthy bourgeois Orgon has taken him into his house as a model of devotion. The whole family sees he is a fraud, except Orgon and his mother. Orgon decides to marry his daughter Mariane to him, although she is engaged to Valère. Tartuffe, meanwhile, tries to seduce Elmire, Orgon’s wife. Damis, the son, catches him and accuses him; Orgon does not believe him, throws him out, disinherits him and signs a deed giving all his property to Tartuffe. He also entrusts him with a box of a friend’s compromising papers. Elmire then sets a trap: with Orgon hidden under the table, she lets Tartuffe declare himself. Orgon finally sees. But Tartuffe already owns the house, and denounces Orgon to the king with the papers from the box. Only the final intervention of the king, who recognizes him as a wanted swindler, saves the family.
// The theoryHow to switch off one’s own conscience
Albert Bandura developed from 1986 onwards, and summarized in Moral Disengagement (2016), the theory of moral disengagement. People have moral standards that regulate their behavior, but they can selectively switch them off through eight mechanisms: moral justification (the harm serves a higher end), euphemistic language, advantageous comparison, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization and attribution of blame to the victim. One need not lack morals to do harm: it is enough to know how to switch them off at the right moment.
The religious justification
Tartuffe’s method is moral justification in its purest form. When he tries to seduce Elmire, he does not deny it is a sin: he explains that heaven allows arrangements, that intention purifies everything and that a sin in secret is no sin. When he accepts Orgon’s property, he says he does so to keep it out of bad hands and to use it for the glory of God. Every abuse comes with a lofty reason. That is what Bandura describes: moral justification is the most powerful mechanism, because it turns harm into virtue and lets the person doing it feel a better person for doing it.
// The subjectA swindler with a prayer book
Molière does not make clear whether Tartuffe believes in anything. What he shows is his effectiveness: he knows what Orgon wants to hear, exaggerates his humility, accuses himself of tiny sins to seem scrupulous and turns every criticism into proof that he is persecuted for his virtue. He is a swindler, and the ending confirms it: the king recognizes him as a criminal wanted under another name. But his fraud only works because Orgon needs to believe. The dupe and the impostor form a pair: one supplies the mask and the other the will not to look behind it.
Act Three, scene 6 is his masterpiece. Damis has just told his father that Tartuffe tried to seduce Elmire. Tartuffe does not defend himself: he accuses himself. “Yes, brother, I am wicked, guilty, a wretched sinner full of iniquity,” he says (our translation), and asks to be thrown out like a criminal. It is the truth told so that it looks like humility, and it works: Orgon turns on his son, curses him, disinherits him and hurries off to sign everything he owns over to Tartuffe. Bandura has no mechanism for this, because here the conscience being switched off belongs to someone else: Tartuffe uses the language of guilt so that Orgon stops seeing it. In the fourth act, alone with Elmire, he completes the method by explaining that sinning in silence is no sin. And when Orgon, his eyes opened at last, orders him out of the house, the reply turns theft into a crusade: “It is for you to leave, you who speak as master.” The house is his, he adds, and he will know how to avenge offended heaven.
Tartuffe
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// The crackDisengagement or plain lying?
Bandura’s theory explains how someone with a conscience manages to act against it. But it is not clear that Tartuffe has a conscience to switch off. If he is a professional swindler feigning a faith he does not have, his justifications are not mechanisms for deceiving himself, but arguments for deceiving others. Moral disengagement then becomes rhetoric, and that changes the diagnosis.
Where the theory fits better is Orgon. He does have principles, and yet he disinherits his son, breaks his word to his daughter and hands over his house, convinced he is acting piously. His justifications, unlike Tartuffe’s, are sincere. The play suggests that the real danger is not the impostor, but the good conscience of the one who follows him.
Affinity fraud
Tartuffe practises what is today called affinity fraud: a scam that exploits a shared identity, religious, ethnic or communal, to win the victims’ trust. The great frauds of this kind have flourished in congregations and closed communities, where questioning someone who seems to be one of us feels almost like a sin. Prevention means separating personal trust from financial decisions: checking, seeking second opinions and distrusting anyone who turns doubts into a lack of faith.
Three key ideas
- Bandura’s theory explains how people switch off their moral standards with mechanisms such as moral justification, euphemism or blaming the victim.
- Tartuffe feigns devotion to seize Orgon’s property and justifies seducing his wife with religious arguments: “one finds ways of coming to terms with heaven”.
- The crack: if Tartuffe is a swindler without faith, his justifications are rhetoric, not disengagement; the one who truly disengages is Orgon, convinced of his piety.
Sources · further reading
- Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.
- Bandura, A. (2016). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. Worth Publishers.
- Fairfax, L. M. (2001). “The Thin Line between Love and Hate: Why Affinity-Based Securities and Investment Fraud Constitutes a Hate Crime”. UC Davis Law Review, 36, 1073-1143.
- Molière (1669). Le Tartuffe ou l’Imposteur. Paris.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Tartufo?
Tartufo is a villain from Tartuffe, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Heaven forbids certain pleasures, he explained to his protector’s wife.
Why does Tartuffe become a villain?
Bandura’s moral disengagement finds its star pupil in Tartuffe: every abuse arrives wrapped in a pious reason, and heaven, he explains, can always be negotiated with.
Which criminological theory explains Tartufo?
Tartufo's case is analysed through Moral disengagement. Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement explains how people with principles commit harmful acts without feeling guilty: they justify the behavior with lofty ends, disguise it with euphemisms or blame the victim. Tartuffe, the protagonist of Molière’s comedy (1664-1669), settles into the house of wealthy Orgon by feigning extreme devotion. Orgon promises him his daughter, disinherits his son in his favor and hands over his property, while Tartuffe tries to seduce his wife, Elmire, with religious arguments. When he is unmasked, he claims the house and denounces Orgon to the king. His religion is not a belief: it is a technique for not feeling guilt.
