(obsolete), a stage role in which an actor played the role of a rationalist who tended toward rhetorical pronouncements and edifying maxims. The raisonneur generally expressed the author’s own views on the play’s events and gave moral appraisals of the characters’ actions. The role was encountered most frequently in European plays of the 17th and 18th centuries; examples are Cléante in Molière’s Tartuffe and Starodum in Fonvizin’s The Minor.