In his uneasy dualism, Rochester is entirely at one with his age. In both France and England, libertinism was the product of a highly centralised, competitive court society whose most articulate members were conscious of the increasing marginality and powerlessness of the social class to which they belonged and with which they identified. Sir Carr Scroope's contemptuous taunt, ‘thy Pen, is full as harmlesse as thy Sword’, applied not only to Rochester but to a hereditary nobility more and more stripped of real power and reduced to displays of ritual. Though politically France and England differed greatly – one a smoothly functioning absolute monarchy, the other a bitterly divided, inefficient state obsessed with the memory of Civil War and regicide – the intellectual climate in which the court libertines of France and England moved was strikingly similar.

Art is by no means a mere precipitate of social and economic forces: as Barbara Everett has said in her essay on Rochester, ‘a work of art is recognized by its incapacity to be absorbed wholly by the society which produces it, and which it represents so admirably’. Sartre has defined the artist in existentialist terms as free in his awareness of his situation, able to give expression to a common predicament. Lucien Goldmann argues a similar position with regard to the writers of seventeenth-century France, whose works like those of Rochester presuppose a close identification between artist and audience. In Sartre's words: ‘In trying to become clear about his own personal situation, he clarifies theirs for them.