Le Libertinage et l'histoire: politique de la séduction à la fin de l'Ancien Régime (review)

This original study, on the borderline between literature and history, provides a comprehensive and masterly analysis of the libertine novel's role on the political scene of the revolutionary period, with particular reference to works appearing between 1782 and 1802. Composed with precision and elegance, Stéphanie Genand's detailed and extensive excavation of this neglected genre represents a major contribution to scholarship on libertinage, not least because it helps to lift virtually unknown works out of obscurity, many of which are of aesthetic value, and all of interest from a political and ideological perspective. Establishing clear and unprecedented links in this period between literary expression and historical circumstance, Genand explores the political and social decline of an aristocratic elite and its depiction in the libertine novel, demonstrating the latter's surprising adaptability in response to historical events and changing reader class, taste and expectation. The author offers plenty of textual evidence in support of her claim that representations of libertinage are symbolic spaces, replete with powerful ideological values, arguing with some credibility that the libertine genre is a better weather-vane of social change than any other because of the appeal of 'livres philosophiques' to a new and diverse reading public, vastly expanded by the democratization of French society at the end of the eighteenth century. This newly expanded and more socially diverse readership called for a similar extension of authorship to the lower classes, to those whom Voltaire had some years earlier dismissed as 'Rousseaux du ruisseau'. Literary libertinism thus survives the ostracization and eventual removal of the aristocracy in one of two ways: it either has a negative presence as associated with the ancien régime in works such as Julie philosophe; ou, le Bon Patriote by writers of middle- or lower-class origins and broadly republican sympathies, or else it becomes a vehicle for the expression of counter-revolutionary attitudes, for example in the novels of Nerciat and Sade. The former category includes the pastoral novel and the roman sentimental in both of which libertines play villainous roles and are ultimately defeated, and the gothic novel, whose emphasis on sequestration and physical abuse in the châteaux of the nobility is argued to be a powerful metaphor for the decadence and moral and material bankruptcy of pre-revolutionary France, while in the latter category, libertines withdraw into a closed world, cut off from historical events, a world in which aristocratic hierarchies and privileges are preserved, societies in miniature where the outside has little or no purchase. The breakdown of boundaries between genres which includes the extensive use of dialogue in the novel — Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir representing the best-known instance—is less convincingly argued to constitute a new development reflecting the social disorder of the period (the novel's contamination by theatrical and other forms dates back to the first half of the century at least), but the examples given do help to bring out the intertextuality and durability of a genre so dangerously allied to the ancien ré gime and yet which managed to survive in one guise or another until Sade's death in 1814.