Adam Horsley has written an engaging study of the concept of libertinage in the literary and legal history of seventeenth-century France. The heart of the book is a thorough recounting of the trials of three alleged libertine authors: Giulio Cesare Vanini (who was tried in 1618–19), Jean Fontanier (in 1621), and Théophile de Viau (in 1623–25). Scholars have known the outcomes of the trials for some time: the Parlement of Toulouse had Vanini executed, the Parlement of Paris executed Jean Fontanier after appeal, and Théophile de Viau, also tried before the Parlement of Paris, was banished from France. Horsley reexamines the trials in the light of extensive archival evidence to the end of “bridging the gap between literary and legal historical disciplines, by focusing on the legal consequences of failed attempts to deploy covert libertine strategies” (8).
Excluding the introduction and conclusion, the book has five chapters organized into two parts: “Libertines and the Law,” which fills about seventy-five pages, and “Libertine Author Trials,” which fills about 230. The first chapter discusses the history of the word libertine/libertin/libertinus. In his introduction, Horsley says, “by the late seventeenth century, [libertinage] had come to denote excessive moral, religious, or sexual licence” (2), but chapter 1 establishes that the polemical writings of the Reformation transformed the word, which had roots in the Roman law of slavery, into an “accusation” (26). It was the Jesuit François Garasse who ascribed to the libertines a “menacing collective identity” (51), conjuring up a host of subversives who threatened the faith and the state. Garasse becomes something of a menacing presence himself in this book.
The second chapter, “The Law,” covers both the relation between the printing industry and the state, and aspects of criminal law and court structure. Two of Horsley's observations in this chapter become running themes of the author trials. First, written law on criminal procedure was not always well aligned with practice; statutes and treatises may not reliably predict how trials actually proceeded. Second, at a time when printing, inward and outward religious belief, and loyalty to the state were overlapping concerns, it was often difficult to tell where the boundary separating different types of criminal offenses lay, and which court held jurisdiction over which offense. Libertinage itself does not seem to have been a crime at the time of these trials. If the concept of libertinage in literary and polemical usage was nebulous, so too was the law that would be used to prosecute libertine authors.
In his accounts of the trials, Horsley weaves together the literary and legal concepts discussed in chapters 1 and 2, respectively. Warping the letter of the law, and especially procedural law, is a crucial element of the Vanini trial: Horsley finds the court to be eager to render judgment against a suspected blasphemer, even if that meant flouting conventions of witness procedure and other inconvenient technicalities. Théophile de Viau was initially accused of lèse-majesté divine, which included religious offenses like blasphemy and impiety (the reader can consult the entry for lèse-majesté in a glossary of legal terms at the end of the book). But proving which of these offenses Théophile had actually committed became a point of difficulty in his trial. At times, the line between the legal and the literary grows very faint indeed. The Trésor inestimable, the text of Fontanier's that incurred the charge of libertinage, does not survive, but a careful analysis of it by the magistrate Nicolas de Bellièvre does. Horsley compares Bellièvre's techniques of reading and interrogation during Fontanier's trial to those of forensic linguists today.
These stories are told in meticulous detail mined from a small mountain of court records and other archival documents, many of which were written in hands that this reviewer found totally illegible (several images of archival materials appear throughout the book). Deciphering these scribbles is in itself a real service to anyone interested in early modern French literature and law—one of many such services performed by this book.
