Satire can be redefined as the comic misrepresentation of another discourse, through the misappropriation of genre. Satirical works can undermine different discourses engaged in dialogue, and develop other potential positions within the discursive field. Three cases suggest how satire during the early reign of Louis intervened in discursive struggles, negated especially those positions authorized by the Church, performed an absolutist discourse, and anticipated positions that would later be appropriated as modern. In a mock-epic poem, Le Lutrin (1674, 1683), by belittling two discourses opposed during the long Counter-Reformation in France, Nicolas Boileau developed an anticlerical position that contributed to defining the presentist discourse of the monarchy (Chapter 1). Molière and company, in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), made a mockery of diverse ways of perceiving the Ottoman Empire as the royal government pushed for trade in the East Mediterranean, and made way for the secularized racist discourse now known as Orientalism (Chapter 2). In the “Relation curieuse” (1686), Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle meddled in both Catholic and Protestant positions following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and performed a radical third discourse from which French subjects might look into their state as strangers, which would later be recuperated as a universalist position (Chapter 3). Appropriating discourses like these as reflections of the period, and dismissing the positions they excluded, shaped what has been known as “le Grand Siècle.” The task of French Studies consists in part in reclaiming those other discourses, which exclusive discursive modes like satire dismissed, as also constitutive of seventeenth-century France. The discursive framework of this dissertation offers means for renewing this contrary and complementary work of differentiation that characterizes the discipline.