12 - Laclos: dangerous liaisons

Summary

If this book burns, it burns as only ice can burn.

– Baudelaire

Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses), by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803), caused a sensation when it was published in 1782, just seven years before the French Revolution. With La Nouvelle Héloïse, it was the most successful novel of the eighteenth century. But while Rousseau's novel offered ideals that enthused its readers, Laclos's work had a much more troubled reputation. Its success was largely a succès de scandale, and in the nineteenth century it was condemned in court for immorality and officially banned. Comparing the world of La Nouvelle Héloïse with that of Les Liaisons dangereuses, and viewing the latter as a response to the former, Peter Gay writes: ‘Where Rousseau is conventional, moral, and edifying, Laclos is unconventional, immoral, and destructive. In Rousseau everybody wins through losing: the sacrifice of gratification leads to purer, more exalted happiness. In Laclos, everybody loses through winning: insistence on gratification leads to restlessness, a sense of being cheated, and tragedy.’ Although this quotation misleadingly implies that Laclos's representation of immorality is itself immoral, it evokes very well the distinctive tenor of his novel and suggests how it embodies disillusionment with the optimistic Enlightenment faith in the ability of reason alone to create human happiness.

Sexual games

Dangerous Liaisons evokes the brittle world of the French aristocracy in the final years of the Ancien Régime. It is a realm of pretence and duplicity. Written entirely in the form of letters (one of the literary conventions of the time), the novel centres on the erotic power games played by two libertines, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Former lovers, they are now partners in crime. For the eighteenth-century reader, Valmont was a familiar fictional (and theatrical) type: the rake, the Don Juan. A female libertine such as Merteuil would have been a far less familiar (but more striking) figure.