Libertines

Michel Delon’s recently translated The Libertine: The Art of Love in Eighteenth-Century France examines one of the main cultural values of eighteenth-century France. It documents, in the words of the NYTBR reviewer, “the dazzling breadth and depth of the 18th-century obsession with pleasures of the flesh. In the final decades of ancien rgime France, an unsentimental, frankly hedonistic brand of thrill-seeking called libertinage an enterprise in which, according to the playwright Pierre de Marivaux, ‘one still said to a woman: I love you, but this was a polite way of saying: I desire you infused every genre from fiction to poetry, theater to philosophy, memoir to popular song (all well represented in short, artfully selected excerpts). It also preoccupied Frenchmen and -women from every walk of life as Delon emphasizes in his introduction when he compares his book to ‘a ball attended by seducers and seductresses from all levels of society.’”

Philosophes put their minds to rationalizing sexual liberty: “Some characters, mouthpieces for radical freethinkers like Denis Diderot and the Marquis de Sade, extol debauchery as a political statement, a defiant challenge to the oppressive pieties and gross hypocrisies of the Catholic Church. (The word ‘libertine’ derives from libertinus : Latin for freed slave.) Other libertines, empirically oriented philosophes , class the joys of sex among natures ‘most striking phenomena,’ as arresting and morally neutral as sunsets and moonbeams. Still others, like the jaded, aristocratic rous of Choderlos de Laclos, suggest that the moral bankruptcy of Frances preposterously idle, pampered and self-indulgent nobility is leading nowhere good.”

Sexual liberation was one of the not-so-secret agendas of the Enlightenment. It still is.