Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- “The Secrets of Generation Display'd”: Aristotle's Master-piece in Eighteenth-Century England
- Sexual Imagination as Revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers
- Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Moral Values in “La Suite de l'Entretien”
- Prostitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century England
- The Properties of Libertinism
- Between the Licit and the Illicit: the Sexuality of the King
- The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806)
- Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and the Gender Revolution of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent Historiography
- The Priest, the Philosopher, and Homosexuality in Enlightenment France
- The Pursuit of Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: “Utterly Confused Category” and/or Rich Repository?
- Sodomy in the Dutch Republic during the Eighteenth Century
- Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700-1750: The Police Archives
- The Censor Censured: Expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
- Chthonic and Pelagic Metaphorization in Eighteenth-Century English Erotica
- Modes of Discourse and the Language of Sexual Reference in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
- The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the Diffusion of Manuscript Pornography in Eighteenth-Century France
- Obscene Literature in Eighteenth-Century Italy: an Historical and Bibliographical Note
Summary
By the last third of the eighteenth century in France, the concept of libertinage had evolved from its earlier association with free thought to a much more specifically sexual radicalism. In a sense, this change reflected the general rise of individualism and self-awareness, but its effects were not uniformly positive. Peter Nagy has shown that while the new libertinism freed some, it enslaved others: it dehumanized sexual relationships and removed from the desiring subject all need to show genuine feeling toward the object of desire. Paradoxically, at a time when Rousseauistic sensibility was revaluing emotion, the libertine countercurrent redefined the self in narrower physical and egocentric terms. Celebrated rakes such as the Comte de Richelieu and the Prince de Conti gave a public lead; ignoring the responsibilities traditionally associated with their rank, they rode roughshod over social and moral conventions. The philosophes warned against unbridled self-interest but, like Diderot, found it difficult to draw a line between legitimate self-expression and the duties of all men to their neighbors. The liberty semantically implicit in libertinism, however, proved to be an increasingly attractive proposition. As the ancienrégime drew to a close, a preoccupation with explicit eroticism emerged as a cipher for a wider, conscious subversiveness. Thus may the French Revolution be said to have been sexual long before it became openly political.
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- 'Tis Nature's FaultUnauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, pp. 98 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988