“Mon cher ami”: Friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme KIRK WEEDEN Abstract Molière’s ideological position in regard to the nobility and bourgeoisie of his era is a hotly contested subject. This article contributes to this ongoing debate by offering a reading of friendship in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. In particular, it analyses the relationship between the bourgeois protagonist, Monsieur Jourdain, and the count Dorante. It seeks to understand this relationship in terms of friendship by referring to the infuential philosophical construction of friendship proposed by Cicero in Laelius de amicitia. It argues that both characters fall short of the conditions required for such a friendship, leaving them equally open to criticism. While there appears to be weightier judgment reserved for Dorante’s conduct, this is problematized by considering the cultural phenomenon of honnêteté in seventeenth-century France, which complicates the Ciceronian conception of friendship. The analysis suggests the need for a wider reading of Molière’s works to further explore this socio-cultural tension. The interpretation of Molière’s works along ideological lines has long been a point of contention among scholars. In the twentieth century, John Cairncross contended that Molière was essentially anti-noble, in that he promoted a libertinism that fundamentally sought to undermine feudal values. 1 In contrast, by highlighting the mediocrity and moral inferiority of his bourgeois characters, Paul Bénichou argued that the playwright was most certainly anti-bourgeois. 2 Toward the end of the century, James Gaines made the case that Molière was neither anti- aristocratic nor anti-bourgeois. Rather, for Gaines, Molière’s ideological interest rested in defending a polymorphous view of seventeenth-century French society where comedy maintained “the validity, but not the equality, of each condition”, 3 potentially calling into question the legitimacy of individuals to a particular order, but not the social structure itself. The same debate has continued in recent scholarship, with an increasing number of cultural analyses of Molière and Lully’s masterpiece, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. On the one hand, Georgie Cowart argues that the genre of the 1 John Cairncross, Molière bourgeois et libertin (Paris: Nizet, 1963), pp. 7–8. 2 Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 285–289. 3 James Gaines, Social Structure in Molière’s Theatre (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984), pp. 126, 242, 246–247. AJFS 54.2/3 2017 DOI:10.3828/AJFS.2017.20