Rétif, Sade, and the Origins of Pornography: Le Pornographe as Anti-Text of La Philosophie dans le boudoir

Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne's 1769 Le Pornographe—the work from which the term pornography is derived—is not in itself pornographic, and scholars working on the history of pornography emphasize the work's lack of substantive links to the modern pornographic genre. In this article, I will elucidate the role that Le Pornographe played in the development of pornography—and in particular in Sade's literary production— by proposing a reading of Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) as a parody and perversion of Rétif's text. Sade's dramatic dialogue, which presents a perverted family tale, subverts the sentimental model that Rétif 's text explicitly elaborates. The Revolutionary pamphlet that it frames, which presents plans to establish houses of prostitution for men and women, appropriates and distorts elements of the reform treatise in Le Pornographe, as Rétif himself perceived. By reading the two texts in concert, I show not only how Sade may have been less revolutionary than reactionary in his writing, but also how Rétif's work can be inserted into the history of pornography as a pivotal text.