Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules premiered in Paris in 1659 and made his reputation as a comic dramatist. The play satirised fashionable salon language and social pretension. It emerged from a culture in which conversation, wit and performance shaped literary status.

The comedy matters because it dramatises the power and absurdity of refined speech. It also points to women's salons as important literary spaces, even while mocking the social forms associated with them.