Considerable changes occurred in French social attitudes during the course of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. France, the very epitome of Western absolute monarchy, gradually became infused with the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment. During the reign of Louis XIV, the established order seemed God-given. Louis himself was after all, le Dieudonne. It was taken for granted that the king stood at the apex of a strictly hierarchical society. The king controlled both government and society, all France revolving around him as the planets around the sun. Louis' other appellation of le roi soleil reflected this concept, as it confirmed also the firmly-held belief that the patterns of society were almost unchanging; natural in their rhythms and progress. This apparently stable and well-ordered world was brought to life in the writings of the day. Moliere's plays, and Madame de Sevigne's letters, reverberate with the sentiments of le Grand Siecle. Nevertheless, the "perfect" world of Louis XIV began to change as war and bankruptcy wreaked their effect on French society. The reign of the Sun King's great-grandson, Louis XV, witnessed the flourishing of an entirely different mode of thought. Writers like Montesquieu and Diderot were also philisophes - enquiring into the hidden truths of the world around them. They, among others, discovered a society that beset by problems, filled with inequities, and far removed from anything resembling a state of natural perfection. Rather than accept things as they were, they argued for dramatic change, urging the overturning of the established order. .

             The court of Louis XIV was intended to represent a microcosm of the world - a model of how the good society should be structured and the good life lived. Yet, as Moliere clearly recognized in his Le Misanthrope, there was much that was false in that world of courtly elegance and grace. While Moliere did not openly question the guiding precepts of Louis XIV's France, inasmuch as he accepted the principles of divine right monarchy and absolutism, he did; however, lampoon the false social facades that seem to conceal the realities of human behavior.