Whose Sexual Revolution?

TH

E

A

Y M O UTON OF

E R U S PLEA

LI B ERT I N E S , LIC EN SE , A N D SEXUA L R EVOLU T ION

J

AMES

A. ST

ER G A R EINT

Introduction

Whose Sexual Revolution?

remarks at the end of the manuscript of Les 120 journées de Sodome that he began work on October 22, 1785, and finished thirty-seven days later. He was at the time imprisoned in the Bastille and not supposed to be composing obscene fiction. To facilitate secrecy, he wrote in a minuscule hand on both sides of a makeshift scroll of four-and-a-halfinch-wide sheets that he had glued together. When, just days prior to the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, Sade was abruptly transferred to an insane asylum at Charenton on the outskirts of Paris, the manuscript was left behind. (He had been haranguing passersby about the treatment of the inmates—his discontent bellowed out a window via makeshift megaphone: a funnel intended for the discharge of waste.)1 While Sade, much to his chagrin, was never to see the scroll again, it was recovered by a certain Arnoux Saint-Maximin and managed to pass into the care of the Villeneuve-Trans family for a century; it was bought by a German collector in 1900, resold in 1929 to the avant-garde arts patron Viscount Charles de Noailles, and eventually ended up the property of Gérard Nordmann, Genevan, heir to a department store fortune and architect of a world-class library of rare erotica.2 In the prologue to Les 120 journées de Sodome, we learn that Sade’s heroes, four libertines extraordinaire, do not use their wealth to buy books about debauchery but rather to plumb its depths. To guarantee the absolute

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isolation required for their plans, the protagonists leave France, arrive at Basel, cross the Rhine, and climb high into mountains deep in the Black Forest. With them is an entourage of servants, guards, and victims. Their destination is the Teutonic-sounding Chateau Silling. In the French imagination of Sade’s day, this part of the German-speaking world in particular was considered extraterritorial, primitive, and cloaked in darkness. It was the perfect void onto which the author could project his sordid fantasies.

With everyone in place, snow severs Silling from any possible connection with civilization.

The organizing principle of the narrative that follows is this: four female storytellers, each experienced libertines in their own right, will detail cases of the simple, complex, criminal, and murderous passions. Thirty days are allotted to each single type; each day details a specific permutation, although a single day may contain multiple instances. The hosts will use these tales to generate their own activities, carried out on the bodies of their mostly unwilling guests. Sade only wrote out in detail the prologue and first thirty days, with the remainder sketched for future completion.

Before the festivities begin in earnest, he warns, “And now, friend-reader, you must prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began, a book the likes of which are met with neither among ancients nor amongst us moderns.”3 If you have not read Les 120 journées de Sodome, the admonition probably rings of selfaggrandizing hyperbole. If you have, the claim will likely sound merely descriptive. After the representation of hundreds of so-called passions— the etymological sense of “suffering” usually all too present—the work ends with a detached numerical breakdown of the mayhem. Of the fortysix people to enter Silling, all but sixteen are killed either during the course of the orgies (ten) or afterward in a systematic and deadly coda (twenty).

The survivors include the four libertines, the storytellers, the principal fouteurs, that is, male servants who generally speaking serve the libertines’ sodomitical penchants, and the cooks.

The cumulative effect of reading page after page of all variety of sexual activity linked to rape, torture, murder, and psychological abuse is disorientation. And while there is something to be said for simply dismissing the work as vile, it also cries out for intellectual explanation: we need to place this work that so displaces us.4 Critics over the years have offered a variety of interpretations (often ingenious): a taxonomy of perversions invented by INTRODUCTION:

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a precursor of the scientific study of sexual aberrations that would flower in the nineteenth century; the utmost version of a tendency toward utopianism in pornographic writing—the epitome of “pornotopia”; a text in which pornography operates less as sensual stimulation and more as formal play, as a language game with its own pleasures for the reader; an exaggerated reflection of the new emphasis on privacy that marks the emergence of the bourgeois world.5 More conventional attempts to situate and explain the work point to genre and psychology. The setting of Silling and the doings therein are transmogrified commonplaces of gothic fiction: sublime isolation, hidden and horrific depravity. Or the whole should be considered an example of prison writing, in which the author identified with his captors at the same time he expressed in convoluted form outrage at the agencies—family, crown, law, religion, and mores—that oppressed him.6 I will engage more specifically with these interpretations in the course of this study. None of them are mutually exclusive, and in many respects each is, I believe, correct. At this point I simply want to draw attention to an issue common to all. This is the notion that in Sade’s work there is a system at play: whether it be the social system of his day implicit in his scenarios or a literary or philosophical system he imposed on them. Let me approach this topic in a way that may seem oblique and even callous in light of the gut-wrenching brutality described. Along with the tally of passions and murders, we find occasional reference to the number of cups of coffee consumed within the walls of the fortress. On the very day that the odious machinery begins to grind inexorably toward the apocalyptic conclusion, we are told that our “champions” first entered the salon and that a quartet of boys and girls served them three varieties of coffee.7 On the fourth day, it is noted that one libertine finds his “brain all afire” thanks to the coffee he has imbibed.8 On the seventh day and at coffee time, several of the young detainees are stripped and molested; we infer that the heady brew is partly responsible for this behavior. On the twenty-second day, nocturnal bacchanals having taken their toll, we learn that “it was not until coffee was served” that the protagonists “began to come somewhat to their senses”—an ironic way of saying that they are once again prepared for further derangements thereof.9 In these citations, we see laid out the usefulness of coffee for the libertine. It is recuperative, countervailing excessive alcoholic consumption, lack of sleep, and other rigors of felonious debauchery. Further, it is a stimulant to both body and mind, actually INTRODUCTION:

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encouraging salacious comportment. How exactly do you keep an orgy running for four-odd months? To the latent query of the title of Les 120 journées de Sodome comes a simple, albeit only partial, answer: frequent and punctual coffee breaks.

Many of us today indulge in coffee with an eye to similar—if less lubricious and sanguinary—ends. And if we listen to the place names associated with premium coffees such as Ethiopia, Yemen, and Java we can still conjure the beverage ’s African roots, its spread into Arabia, and eventual transportation to far-flung colonies. But although originally closer to home than Oriental tea or New World chocolate, to the end of the eighteenth century coffee was a relatively novel bit of exotica in Western Europe.

Moreover, while we are aware of caffeine ’s antisoporific properties, the ubiquity of cafés and our unexamined quotidian habits obscure the extent to which coffee and its relations were thought of more as drugs than as simple drinks. Juxtaposing the beverage to opium and alcohol, the materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie in L’Homme-machine (1748) considered that it is by “lashing the imagination that coffee . . . dissipates our headaches and sorrows without, like wine, saving them for the morrow.”10 The terms are very similar to those chosen by Sade, who likely appreciated La Mettrie ’s metaphorical use of the term “lashing” to describe coffee’s powers. And Sade and La Mettrie were hardly alone in their attributions.

To take a celebrated instance, and one that appeared some eighty years before the composition of Les 120 journées de Sodome, Alexander Pope in his poem “The Rape of the Lock” (1712–13) gave coffee a pivotal role. In this mock epic a baron ravishes a curl of hair from a young beauty with dire and humorous consequences. Exhausted from battle at the card table, Belinda and her suitors turn their attention to porcelain cups filled with the steaming elixir. Its recuperative function is thus clear, but it is the stimulating impact of the beverage that fuels the central crime: Coffee (which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes) Sent up in vapours to the Baron’s Brain New stratagems, the radiant lock to gain.11

Pope’s poem is not Sade’s gory extravaganza. Still, however satirical the aims and displaced the object, it pinpoints coffee as ancillary to violent INTRODUCTION:

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sexual conquest. But whereas Pope preaches that good nature and good sense on the part of both Belinda and her admirer might have led to a happier conjunction, in Sade the push is rather toward viciousness and immoderation. Far from trying to find a happy compromise between prude, coquette, and strumpet, everything in Les 120 journées de Sodome is geared toward the production of pleasures for the four protagonists, for their pleasure is the sole and self-imposed end of the little society in the Black Forest.

While the four libertines have amassed considerable wealth to fund their endeavor—they have hired help, bought comestibles, paid the agents who kidnap their victims, and so forth—economics, trade, and the marketplace are abandoned at the threshold. Any remnant of them is reconstituted as part of the internal functioning of the chateau, reconfigured as an element of the orgy.12 Les 120 journées de Sodome tends to be entirely consistent on this point. The gravitational field of the pleasurable draws in everything in the text and functionalizes it—in the way one says a chemical or pathogen may be weaponized—for this purpose. Food is thus always gourmet, tailored to titillate the palate and prepared with an eye to its aphrodisiac qualities.13 Similarly, alcohol is used to inflame passions: in addition to coffee, wine and liqueurs are the other beverages of choice in the work. Moreover, things and acts that are not always or not usually considered enjoyable are converted into pleasures and simultaneously marked as stimulants for more: other people ’s pain, most famously, but this hardly exhausts sadism in its original instance.

One of the more insistent themes and disquieting aspects of Les 120 journées de Sodome is coprophagy. Not that feces is the only distasteful fodder that the libertines, their victims and those debauchees about whom the storytellers spin their tales consume: spittle, snot, toe jam, and vomit all feature on the menu. Nonetheless, the entrée of choice is without a doubt shit. As with the more traditional fare, so too it is gourmet and aphrodisiac. Diets are carefully administered to ensure this. Food in all its guises is transformed from basic bodily requirement into an element of a self-reproducing social system. Rather than treating ingestion and excretion as part of the infrastructure of pleasure—processes without which the body would wither and die, and thus clearly not be able to enjoy itself—these processes are moved from the environment to the system itself. Specifically, outputs are reentered as inputs, and so forth, in order to guarantee complete closure and self-sufficiency.14 Nothing escapes; INTRODUCTION:

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nothing is wasted. All the bodily “marginal stuff” that Mary Douglas described as symbolizing the danger of boundary disintegration, points of vulnerability for idea systems, and in need of ritual control is here dealt with by being brought within the boundaries of the system.15 We must read seemingly innocent enjoyments such as a cup of coffee along with the most repulsive of practices as counterintuitive metaphors for the absolute self-referentiality and totalization of the pleasurable. Likewise, the isolation and claustrophobic horror. Completely closed, however, there is no way to reenergize the system once it has used up its resources, recycling notwithstanding. In keeping with the second law of thermodynamics and with no Maxwell’s demon to redirect the elements—no outside force to counteract entropy—the orderly narrative of the passions ends in a literal chaos.16 Sade is careful to preserve, however, those elements that will be essential to the production of new orgies in the future: the libertines, those who will tell the stories that incite them, the men who will service them, and, of course, those who will prepare their meals.17 Silling is an extreme case of autopoeisis, a term coined to designate systems that reproduce themselves out of their own elements and determine their own borders.18 But what did Sade really know of systems? He uses the term frequently enough to describe his characters’ behavior. In this sense, a system is a simple principle or algorithm the consequences of which can be unfolded at length. To take a case from Les 120 journées de Sodome, once murder is admitted to be a source of voluptuous enjoyment, then the varieties of this pleasure, its intersections with other passions, and its cryptic manifestations (for example, in the guise of justice so called) can be explored and explained. Beyond this, the usefulness of constructing systems and thinking in terms of them were ubiquitous topics in eighteenth-century natural philosophy and metaphysical speculation. There was a general trend against the esprit de système: the rationalist, deductive reasoning associated above all with scholasticism. Francis Bacon famously attacked the mindset in the Novum Organum (1620) under the rubric of the “idols of theater”: ingrained falsehoods attributable from “various dogmas of philosophies” and “wrong laws of demonstration” that receive their name “because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds after an unreal and scenic fashion.”19 Notwithstanding such disdain—which only became more intransigent and focused with the passage of time—rationalism of the sort INTRODUCTION:

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continued to hold sway above all in German territories well into the eighteenth century (Christian Wolff was the major figure here, and Kant was still very much clarifying his own position on system building and a priori reasoning in The Critique of Pure Reason in relation to this tradition; German idealism in fact retained a good deal of esprit de système, as anyone who has cracked Hegel’s oeuvre can attest).20 Opposed to this—at least in the self-justifying accounts—was the systematic mindset: the inductive reasoning and experimental methodology of empiricism.21 It is with the latter that we associate the great taxonomical impetus in the eighteenth century: the classificatory schemes of botany, zoology, mineralogy, chemistry, economics, demographics, and so forth.22 I borrow the term esprit de système from Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s preface to the Encyclopédie, where we find the principal merit of a natural philosopher is “to have a mind for systems but never to create any.”23 The Encyclopédie itself was a work that d’Alembert and his coeditor Denis Diderot saw as very much against system building, but, as the citation indicates, the line between positions was not particularly neat. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s intricate edifice of knowledge, built up from the premises of sensationalist, empirical psychology, would probably have struck its tutelary spirit John Locke as preposterously close to scholasticism.24 Meanwhile, it was Condillac who had produced the critical attack on systems building that had so inspired d’Alembert.25 Many other thinkers similarly advertised a deep skepticism regarding any attempt at system building and yet in other respects indulged the widely acknowledged “taste for systems.”26 The great naturalist and preponderant voice in France on the animal and other kingdoms Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, while himself constructing an enormous descriptive and analytic catalogue of the world’s fauna and flora, was highly critical of the elaborate, hierarchical nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, which first appeared in 1735 and was greatly expanded over the course of many years.27 Diderot seems to have been the most consistent: preferring in his own philosophical works open-ended forms such as dialogue, aphorism, and in general experimental gambits to either complex chains of reasoning or taxonomies.

Sade seems to have been tempted in various directions. Clearly, the taxonomical impulse is present in Les 120 journées de Sodome.28 Moreover, his penchant for putting into characters’ mouths extended defenses of the principles of libertinage reveals a scholastic bent. Yet there is often a seemingly INTRODUCTION:

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deliberate inconsistency of philosophical arguments and a taste for disrupting the very systems that he builds. One might say that Sade adds his own noise to the information he transmits.

By using terminology such as closure, entropy, and noise, I want to suggest that Sade ’s knowledge of systems went beyond the debates and discussions on the topic of his time. In particular, rather than simply presenting his reader with a taxonomy of passions, his work evinces a grasp of certain characteristics of dynamic systems—a grasp not just of structure but of process. Although this knowledge is largely articulated via example and implication, there is still something uncanny about the way Sade foreshadows discussions that later took place within general systems theory, in cybernetics, and even in theoretical physics. Yet we probably ought not be too surprised that an author obsessed with building up and breaking down systems over hundreds of pages would notice, intuit, or unconsciously formulate certain ahistorical constants. What interests me more than Sade as either taking part in the debates of his time or as a precursor, however, are the ways in which this knowledge was part of a network of communications that itself had the form of a system. Is Les 120 journées de Sodome unique, then, as Sade claimed? My argument in this book is that it is not. It was the outcome of an algorithm—of a system in a sense close to Sade ’s usual application of the term—that might be expressed thus: Let pleasure be the monarch. I borrow the wording from La Mettrie ’s defense and illustration of sensuality L’Art de jouir (1751), which begins “Pleasure, sovereign master of men and gods, before whom all is annihilated, even reason itself ” and goes on to posit climax—“that divine ecstasy”—as the monarch of monarchs: “the sovereign pleasure ” (le souverain plaisir).29 La Mettrie, while radical in his materialism, was more tempered in his libertinism: he worried about wallowing in mere animality, and voluptuousness was for him a modulated and more admirable enjoyment than orgasm. Such cautionary notes aside, he did express in fairly unabashed terms a widespread intellectual tendency in the eighteenth century to consider pleasure as an organizing principle for individual ethics and social relations. Radical libertines such as Sade not only pushed this tendency, however, they disrupted the lingering philosophical alignments of pleasure with morality, beauty, nature, and other constraints, for constraints they were—and unnecessary ones at that—from the libertine point of view.

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Libertine Roots and Radical Libertinage

To appreciate Sade ’s relation to the intellectual tendency to treat pleasure as an organizing principle, we must first understand a bit about the complex genealogy of his works and of his commitments—a genealogy and set of core values, so to speak, that he largely shared with his radical brethren. Granted, no author reaches the level of violence or mines so deeply the repulsive as did Sade in his clandestine writings. Notwithstanding, while engaging a number of genres, from Socratic dialogue to picaresque fiction, these writings were easily recognizable in their day as part of a long—if not venerable—tradition: libertinage. The term was not limited to the world of print. It also characterized a lifestyle, replete with specific habits and accouterments. For example, a proper libertine might own—and probably should—a snuffbox fashioned by the Swedish artist Karl Gustav Klingstedt, who specialized in miniatures, often of a ribald or erotic nature. But libertinage was not just a lifestyle in the sense of a fashion, it was also something like a Weltanschauung and a philosophical self-fashioning or ethics in its original sense: the development of a character, of a second nature.30 In a celebrated letter from prison to his wife, Renée Pélagie, née de Montreuil, Sade bitterly and ironically explains his refusal to mend his behavior: “These principles and these tastes, I am their fanatic adherent; and fanaticism in me is the product of the persecutions I have endured from my tyrants. The longer they continue their vexations, the deeper they root my principles in my heart, and I openly declare that no one need ever talk to me of liberty if it is offered to me only in return for their destruction.”31 In other words, libertinage was so firmly part of Sade’s identity, so much his system, that he refused to change even if it meant that his mother-in-law would relent. She had had him imprisoned with a lettre de cachet, a legal device requiring the monarch’s signature, which allowed for indefinite incarceration without trial, that aristocrats might use to control unruly or uncooperative relatives. As Sade ’s plight attests, not everyone thought that libertinage was something to declare with pride. Both libertine writings and the behavior they advocated—the two linked in a feedback loop of mutual information—were widely considered pernicious: threats to religion, family, health, and the state.

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But what exactly did the label libertine mean? True, we frequently find an emphasis on sensual and more precisely sexual pleasure. This facet links the cynical poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester in the reign of Charles II in seventeenth-century England to the nihilistic prose of Sade a hundred years later in revolutionary France. Even if one grants this emphasis as a common denominator—and not all libertinage even included this element—there are degrees, various configurations, different formations that respond to changes in governing and social organization, to historical events, to the rise of new media technologies, and to developments intrinsic to libertinage itself. It might be better not to try to define libertinage once and for all but rather see how partisans and detractors used the term and to examine how it was linked to other discourses and social practices. This is particularly true of libertine literature. Are such writings pornography?

On the one hand, many works called libertine in their day are much too mild to deserve the appellation. Racy, humorous, vaguely titillating, but never graphic—these are some of the characteristics of the light libertine novels, comedies of manners with a ribald tinge, that appeared throughout the eighteenth century. On the other hand, even the distinctly lurid material that is my focus and that I will generally be calling licentious libertine fiction is so generically impure as to defy categorization as mere pornography. In his Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, Robert Darnton remarks that the word itself “hardly existed” in eighteenth-century France, although Rétif de la Bretonne “coined the term pornographe in a work of 1769, which argued, rather non-salaciously, for a state-run system of legal prostitution.”32 While Darnton’s contention is true with respect to the circulation of the term in Rétif ’s day, coinage is not quite correct, since the Hellenistic Greek author Athenaeus in his Deiponosophistae can claim the earliest attested usage of pornographos (“one who writes about prostitutes”).33 His reservations, moreover, are a common rhetorical tactic in the historiography of licentious libertine writing and historicism more generally: a self-aware suspension of what some might otherwise take to be a relatively unproblematic category that serves to point out its very contingency and the shifting, constructed nature of conceptual categories more generally. Notwithstanding, we are soon returned to those family resemblances—obscenity, lewdness, and, most especially, explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse—that mark what we understand to be the pornographic today.34 INTRODUCTION:

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Without hunting for an eternal essence, it would be difficult—even obtusely historicist—to argue that licentious libertine writing is unrelated to what we now know as pornography. At the very least, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers of pornographic fiction and “erotica” took Sade and other licentious writers from the eighteenth century and prior as implicit and often explicit forerunners and models. Further, if we deem a mark of this sort of writing as stimulation—often but not always or necessarily to onanism, for these are the books that Rousseau described as “read with one hand”—then certainly this appears one intent of most of the works I consider.35 And were libertine fiction only or primarily an aid to masturbation, one could still study such material for its sociological or psychological interest.36 Happily for the scholar, it is a considerably more complicated phenomenon than this, and one with multiple roots in literary and intellectual history.

Pornography may well be one future of eighteenth-century licentious libertine fiction: a genealogical forebear of writings and images with circumscribed goals in a niche market. It may have and almost certainly did serve to lash the imaginations and engage the bodies of certain readers in the eighteenth-century present. Its past, however, has much less to do with sexual stimulation than with laughter and social critique. Libertine fiction here looks particularly to Roman satire in both the narrow generic sense—in Horace ’s characterization the type of censure carried out “with great freedom” (multa cum libertate) in Attic Old Comedy refigured in a different meter and format—and the later, broader understanding.37 Here we might recall that Aristophanes, the crucial figure of Old Comedy, counted both bawdry and scatology among his weapons: the sexual blackmail in Lysistrata or the lizard in The Clouds that defecates upon a doltish Socrates, standing rapt at the heavens with mouth agape. But the favorite of libertine writers among Roman satirists was almost certainly Juvenal, whose rhetorical arsenal, with its over-the-top ranting, outrage, obscenity, and threats of violence, was sure to appeal to the likes of Sade.

In Juvenal’s sixth satire the authorial persona bemoans the lack of chastity among contemporary women, all the while wondering whether such a virtue ever existed outside the mythical age of Saturn so many examples of voracious women are there. Witness the empress Messalina, an epitome of the ancient topos of female insatiability, who forsook the palace after her husband Claudius was asleep to work as a brothel harlot, always the last to INTRODUCTION:

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leave, “exhausted by the men but not yet satisfied.”38 Sade uses Messalina as an example on numerous occasions, although in a noteworthy departure from Juvenal she is always a positive one for him. Thus his heroine Juliette is advised to “model herself ” on Messalina and the Byzantine empress Theodora, another insatiable who supposedly began her social climb as a prostitute and, “like these celebrated whores of antiquity,” to procure “harems of both sexes where you can go and swim at leisure in an ocean of impurities.”39 Other ancient sources for Sade and his libertine brethren include Ovid, especially his Ars Amatoria, the Satyricon attributed to Petronius, Martial’s terse and often obscene epigrams, and the Priapeia, a collection of verse personifications of the ithyphallic herms that stood guard over gardens in Rome—frequently threatening to sodomize thieves—and that were widely misattributed to Virgil.40 The title of the last seems the likely inspiration for one of the early classics of eighteenth-century libertine writing, Alexis Piron’s poem Ode à Priape (c. 1710).41 Greek and Roman romances also provided material, as well as histories, especially of the Roman Empire, which were not short on examples of excess. The linkage of sex and violence in, for example, Suetonius may have been an inspiration to Sade in particular, but he was neither alone nor the first to be intrigued. In the anonymously published, disingenuously moralizing, curiosity-titillating, and lavishly illustrated account of the misdeeds of Caligula, Commodius, Tiberius, and others, Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars [Monuments of the Private Life of the Twelve Cesars] (1780), by the antiquarian PierreFrançois Hugues (who went by the invented title “baron d’Hancarville”), the author borrows the following description of Nero’s behavior from Suetonius: “He had persons of both sexes, stripped entirely nude, tied to posts.

Himself clothed in the skin of a savage beast, he pretended to leave his lair, and pouncing on his victims, he visited on their bodies horrifying sensual pleasures [jouissances].”42 After his depredations, the emperor retires to the arms of his “spouse ” Doryphorus. Tellingly, the name Catullus is only occasionally dropped: his amatory lyrics, often lewd enough, were not the major attraction that the broadly speaking satirical sources and historical accounts were.

Modern satirists in fact drew deeply from the well of the ancients, and it is a limited account of the Renaissance that highlights Plato, the real Virgil, or Ovid the author of the Metamorphoses—although in these cases, too, INTRODUCTION:

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there is no lack of either sex or violence. Lucian, the second-century Greek writer of Syrian extraction, was an enormous influence. In particular, his melding of philosophical dialogue with New Comedy in the “Dialogues of Courtesans” served as a paradigm for licentious writers from Pietro Aretino in the sixteenth century to Sade, whose Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) is the last great example in the tradition.43 In his fictional dialogues I Ragionamenti (1534–35), Aretino larded his ridicule of pretense and foible with obscenities, graphic descriptions of intercourse, beatings, and flatulence. Declares one of his spokeswomen on the hypocritical function of clothing: “it would be more honest to show the prick, cunt, and ass than the hands, mouth, and feet” for the former: “do not curse, bite, or spit in one ’s face as mouths do. They don’t kick like feet, or lend themselves to false oaths, belabor with clubs, steal, and murder like hands.”44 Similar to Aretino’s prose works is Antonio Vignali’s La Cazzaria or Book of the Prick (c. 1525–26), which explains, for example, that monks invented confession so that “they could investigate and discover whether there was any pleasure unknown to them that could be found among the laity” and that they forbid the latter buggery in order to keep for themselves “such a precious thing as the asshole.”45 While La Cazzaria is consistently and grotesquely scabrous, there is nonetheless kinship with now more reputable fare. Consider Rabelais’s portrayal of his giant hero Gargantua unleashing a stream of urine on a Parisian crowd, many of whom drown. The tableau was recreated by Jonathan Swift, that most canonical of eighteenth-century British writers, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the eponymous protagonist saves the Lilliputians’ city from fire in like manner. Swift was indeed a master of the satirical uses of scatology and cruelty. In the essay “A Modest Proposal” (1729), cannibalizing Irish children is not only recommended to assuage poverty and famine, but gruesome details of methods of preparation are proffered. In the poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), a beau’s delusions about his beloved’s heavenly nature are shattered when he discovers her reeking chamber pot and its contents.

But like the relation to pornography, the relation of libertinage to satire is complex. Juvenal’s jibes are conservative in tendency: the lewd and disgusting are weapons used to bemoan the decadence of contemporary values. Similarly, Swift’s targets frequently reveal his Tory affiliation and Augustan approbation of moderation, balance, and good sense. While libertine satire shares with that of a conservative bent a vociferous disdain for INTRODUCTION:

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pious hypocrisy in particular, its tendency is, generally speaking, politically progressive.46 (Sade is a curious case, and I will consider in due course the mixture of progressive politics with those tendencies in his writings that Adorno and Horkheimer in their denunciation of instrumental reason, Dialectic of Enlightenment, painted as protofascist.) Further, libertinage tended to have positive and not just critical goals and was in this regard indissolubly linked to philosophie as a banner under which a group of like-minded intellectuals gathered and which came to be the label of a partisan group: the philosophes and the so-called parti philosophique.47 Of course, philosophie in this narrow, sociological sense did not spring up ex nihilo. It was related in myriad ways to more general intellectual trends: the rise of empiricism, the debunking of scholastic thought that went along with this, and the revamping of the natural law tradition (most notably by Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, and Samuel von Pufendorf ). It was also indebted to humanism in various guises, from the skeptical outlooks of Erasmus or Montaigne to, once again, Rabelais, whose giants of appetite signified an embrace of the bodily against the Christian denial of the flesh—a model for libertines in general and certainly for Sade’s heroes, gargantuan in their own way.

Indeed, the emergence of the first wave of libertine writing and thinking in the seventeenth century, itself a branch in the genealogy of later philosophie, is part and parcel of the early modern revival of skepticism.

This libertinage érudit or “learned libertinism” may have emphasized freedom from religious prejudice in particular, but it always included a strand of social critique about love and marriage that slid easily toward sexual license. The same skeptical heritage holds for those seventeenth-century philosophers whose names conjure the Enlightenment period at its outset: Pierre Bayle ’s attack on superstition, Locke ’s defense of toleration, and the crypto-atheism of Spinoza.48 And while many such thinkers, from Hobbes and Spinoza through to the major names of French philosophie such as Diderot, La Mettrie, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, were charged with impiety and even atheism—and some, if not all, of them were not only impious but also nonbelievers—there are marked affinities too between their positions and the Protestant rebellion against the Church of Rome, its corruption, venality, and hypocrisy.

As this illustrious genealogy suggests, while we might initially suspect that libertine fiction was merely the domain of hacks and lowlifes, this was on the whole simply not the case. Of course, except for the milder INTRODUCTION:

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instances, we often know little concrete about authors because such writing was published anonymously for reasons of reputation and personal safety. Even when anonymous, however, we can infer key features of an author’s background such as degree of education. Of the names we know with certainty or probability not a few are of noble lineage, and, noble or not, many writers tested out, dabbled or indulged in licentious genres while simultaneously pursuing more respectable writing careers. After writing his phallic ode at about the age of twenty, Piron went on to become a celebrated playwright; his indiscretion may have cost him a place in the Académie Française, but otherwise did little to diminish his fame. Sade published prose works—novels and short stories—that were often wicked but substantially tamer in comparison to his better-known output, and he hoped in vain that his plays would be successfully mounted. For those of a philosophical stripe, moreover, libertine writing appealed for a number of interrelated reasons: it was associated with a critical political stance, with materialist science, and with an ethics befitting an enlightened elite, wary of superstition and of religious hypocrisy.

As an example of this appeal, consider Voltaire’s La Pucelle d ’Orléans, which circulated widely in manuscript and pirated print editions of varying correctness and completeness from the time of its composition (c. 1730) until the end of the century. In 1755, one such edition was publicly burned in Paris and Geneva, and the printer sent to the galleys for nine years. This bawdy, irreligious attack on organized religion in the guise of a spoof of the life of Jeanne d’Arc became one of Voltaire’s most popular works and one that later libertine writers frequently cited as seminal. A source of both legal concern and embarrassment for its author, who likely wanted to be remembered for weightier contributions to French letters, Voltaire nonetheless offered his own highly edited official version in 1760 (figure 0.1).

Another guiding intellectual light of the century, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, wrote the libertine-leaning epistolary novel Les Lettres persanes (1721), as well as the mildly erotic Temple de Gnide (1724), before going on to produce his magisterial study of government and mores, L’Esprit des lois (1748). Similarly, in his mid-thirties and just as he was taking on the editorship of the Encyclopédie, Diderot penned Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), his first novel.49 Drawing on a medieval fabliau entitled “Du chevalier qui fist les cons parler” (“The knight who made cunts speak”) and a novella on the same topic entitled Nocrion (an inversion of noir con, INTRODUCTION:

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that is “black cunt”) that had appeared in 1747, Diderot’s tale of loquacious female privy parts was reprinted at least six times within a few months of its initial appearance.50 At this point Diderot had already seen his Pensées philosophiques (1746) condemned by the crown; he would shortly thereafter be imprisoned for four months in Vincennes on account of the materialist implications—tantamount to an admission of atheism at the time—of his Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). While Diderot did learn to be more discreet in what he allowed to be published under his name, libertinage was not just a youthful peccadillo: there is a strong element of sexual free thinking in his later works such as La Religieuse (c. 1760) and his art criticism frequently courts the erotic; his materialist outlook, if anything, became stronger with age. Beyond these major names there is also a philosophical presence in most all licentious fiction by anonymous writers and by those of lesser renown. The connection between works of the cutting-edge intelligentsia and libertine writings was so tight at the time that the latter were usually simply called romans philosophiques or philosophical novels.51 And this brings us back to pleasure, which was a central and shared element of the genealogy of both philosophie and libertinage. The long ethical tradition of eudemonism placed the emphasis not on strict rules of conduct but on individual happiness. It is very much present in Aristotle ’s Nichomachean Ethics, where the philosopher posits happiness as the goal of ethical choice but seems doubtful whether it can be guaranteed and unsure as to what its nature might be for humans: political engagement or godlike contemplation.52 With Aristotle as example, Aquinas was eventually to Christianize happiness as the end of spiritual endeavor. He did so to the dismay of some later Protestant theologians, who found his reasoning all too practical in relation to the mysteries of faith. Eudemonism is key too in the Stoic ideal of ataraxia, that is, a reasoned detachment that underwrites a negative happiness: the absence of pain and perturbation. Stoicism did have a limited appeal for some eighteenth-century philosophers. For example, Diderot late in life wrote in praise of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Yet the dominant influence as far as libertines are concerned was Epicureanism, both as a materialist philosophical system and as a related ethics of pleasure. In the modern era, the Epicureanism of antiquity circulated primarily in the form of Lucretius’s didactic poem De Rerum Natura from the first century bce. In the seventeenth century, Pierre Gassendi led an influential revival of the central article of Epicurean INTRODUCTION:

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FIGURE 0.1. In this illustration from a collection of engravings printed circa 1765 intended to accompany editions of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans, the king inspects and confirms the virginity of the titular heroine, Joan of Arc. Licentious images of the sort were often included in editions of Voltaire’s scandalous poem, which was reprinted frequently throughout the eighteenth century. Copyright © the British Library Board, Voltaire, La Pucelle d’Orléans, P.C. 31. c.25.

physics—atomism—and wed this to Christianity. It was a surprising move, since the epithet Epicurean had long been anathema to the Church, conjuring incontinence and atheism (Dante characterizes the central belief of Epicureans—a corollary of atomism, although he does not say this— as the soul dying with the body; he puts those who hold it in the sixth circle of Hell).53 Later, La Mettrie ’s radical, atheistic L’Homme-machine divulged a profound Epicurean stamp that resonated with libertine writers. But Epicureanism is also present, if less explicitly so, in seventeenthand eighteenth-century thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, all of whom advanced ethical systems that might be broadly categorized as sentimental and egoistic—focusing on subjective feelings in relation to perceived utility—and who tended to prefer pleasure and pain as discrete, almost quantifiable elements over discussions of happiness, intangible and obscure by comparison. This was the case too for Bentham’s later attempt to produce an objective utilitarian ethics.54 French licentious libertine writers on the whole not only adopted this preference for pleasure over happiness, they also tightened the knot. Sexual enjoyment appeared as concrete and immune to criticism: who would counter its claim to sovereignty or who dare contradiction with the assertion that one ’s pleasure is not pleasurable? Yet just as libertinage shifted the concerns of satire to a positive program, the libertine lens refracted the influence of Epicureanism. If Epicurus and Lucretius emphasized so-called katastematic pleasures—intellectual freedom from fear and withdrawal from the disturbances of sensuality—over kinetic pleasures, libertines generally opted for the latter.55 Sade, for example, uses the obscure term volgivague, or “wandering,” to characterize female sexual voraciousness; while simply descriptive, on the one hand, it is also meant as high praise.56 He borrows the adjective from Lucretius, who recommends as a remedy against the wounds of love “wandering with Wandering Venus” (volgivagaque vagus Venere).57 But whereas Lucretius intends that one engage a prostitute—this is the meaning of “Wandering Venus”—in order to drain off desire and mitigate the greater danger of psychic attachment, Sade’s position on love is that it rather distracts men and women alike from full sybaritic indulgence. While Epicurean-minded libertines earlier in the eighteenth century do at times recommend moderation, this is still, generally speaking, done in the name of economizing one’s forces in order to maximize immoderation in the long run.58 There is little room in Sade’s INTRODUCTION:

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world for Epicurus’s correction to misperceptions of his teaching: “it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men’s souls.”59 The thrust of my argument in this book is not that eighteenth-century libertinage and philosophie overlap. This overlap is frankly indisputable. It is rather that they also parted ways in significant respects and that libertinage had characteristics all its own. Indeed, if libertines were able to throw off the yoke of religion and morality using philosophical reason, what is more surprising is that they ultimately came to consider reason itself as an undo restraint.

The Conditions of the Autonomy of Pleasure

If we are to grasp how the breaking of the alignment of reason and pleasure and other effects of the differentiation of libertinage came about, it is helpful to consider eighteenth-century libertine fiction in terms of distinctive if not always absolutely distinct subgenres that, with qualifications, correspond to periods. The outset of the first of these can be more or less dated to the death of Louis XIV and the Regency of Philippe II, duc d’Orléans during the minority of the new monarch (1715–23). The final twenty years of the Sun King’s long reign were marked by increased religious sentiment at Versailles and conflict between France and other European powers. The Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, which declared Protestantism illegal within the nation’s borders, and the official revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1688, which had sanctioned tolerance for the Huguenots or French Calvinists, were causes of consternation not only for supporters of religious freedom but also for France ’s non-Catholic neighbors. The War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97) involved many of those nations and was primarily intended to stop Louis’s expansionist policies. Its outcome was ambiguous and soon followed the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), which would determine whether the French monarch could extend his hegemony into the Iberian peninsula. Against the lugubrious tone of this time, the Regency was a period of happy reaction. (In this respect, it was much like the Restoration in England, also known for libertinage, which was largely an import of the seventeenth-century French version that Charles II and INTRODUCTION:

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