Alibertine is a person questioning and challenging most moral principles, such as responsibility orsexual restraints, and will often declare these traits as unnecessary, undesirable or evil. A libertine is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society.[1][2] The values and practices of libertines are known collectively aslibertinism orlibertinage and are described as an extreme form ofhedonism orliberalism.[3] Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly inFrance andGreat Britain. Notable among these wereJohn Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester,Cyrano de Bergerac, and theMarquis de Sade.
The wordlibertine was originally coined byJohn Calvin to negatively describe opponents of his policies inGeneva, Switzerland.[4] The group, led byAmi Perrin, argued against Calvin's "insistence that church discipline should be enforced uniformly against all members of Genevan society".[5] Perrin and his allies were elected to the town council in 1548, and "broadened their support base in Geneva by stirring up resentment among the older inhabitants against the increasing number of religious refugees who were fleeing France in even greater numbers".[5] By 1555,Calvinists were firmly in place on the Genevan town council, so the Libertines, led by Perrin, responded with an "attempted coup against the government and called for the massacre of the French. This was the last great political challenge Calvin had to face in Geneva".[5] In England, a fewLollards held libertine views such as that adultery and fornication were not sin, or that "whoever died in faith would be saved irrespective of his way of life".[6]
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the term became more associated with debauchery.[7]Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand wrote thatJoseph Bonaparte "sought only life's pleasures and easy access to libertinism" while on the throne of Naples.[8]
Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons, 1782), anepistolary novel byPierre Choderlos de Laclos, is a trenchant description of sexual libertinism.Wayland Young argues: "... the mere analysis of libertinism ... carried out by a novelist with such a prodigious command of his medium ... was enough to condemn it and play a large part in its destruction."[9]
Agreeable to Calvin's emphasis on the need for uniformity of discipline in Geneva,Samuel Rutherford (Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews, and Christian minister in 17th-century Scotland) offered a rigorous treatment of "Libertinism" in his polemical work "A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience" (1649).
A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind is a poem by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester which addresses the question of the proper use ofreason, and is generally assumed to be aHobbesian critique ofrationalism.[10] The narrator subordinates reason to sense.[11] It is based to some extent onBoileau's version ofJuvenal's eighth or fifteenth satire, and is also indebted to Hobbes,Montaigne,Lucretius, andEpicurus, as well as the general libertine tradition.[12] Confusion has arisen in its interpretation as it is ambiguous as to whether the speaker is Rochester himself, or a satirised persona.[13] It criticises the vanities and corruptions of the statesmen and politicians of the court of Charles II.[12]
Robert Darnton is a cultural historian who has covered this genre extensively.[14] A three-part essay inThe Book Collector by David Foxen explores libertine literature in England, 1660-1745.[15]
Critics have been divided as to the literary merits ofWilliam Hazlitt'sLiber Amoris, a deeply personal account of frustrated love that is quite unlike anything else Hazlitt ever wrote. Wardle suggests that it was compelling but marred by sickly sentimentality, and also proposes that Hazlitt might even have been anticipating some of the experiments in chronology made by later novelists.[16]
One or two positive reviews appeared, such as the one in theGlobe, 7 June 1823: "TheLiber Amoris is unique in the English language; and as, possibly, the first book in its fervour, its vehemency, and its careless exposure of passion and weakness—of sentiments and sensations which the common race of mankind seek most studiously to mystify or conceal—that exhibits a portion of the most distinguishing characteristics of Rousseau, it ought to be generally praised".[17]Dan Cruickshank in his bookLondon's Sinful Secret summarized Hazlitt's infatuation stating: "Decades after her death Batsy (Careless) still haunted the imagination of the essayist William Hazlitt, a man who lodged near Covent Garden during the 1820s, where he became unpleasantly intimate with the social consequences of unconventional sexual obsession that he revealed in hisLiber Amoris of 1823, in which he candidly confessed to his infatuation with his landlord's young daughter."[18]
^abcZophy, Johnathan W. (2003).A Short History of Renaissance and Reformation Europe: Dances Over Fire and Water (Third ed.). Prentice Hall. p. 226.ISBN978-0-13-097764-9.
^Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de (2008). "Napoleon's European Legacy, 1853". In Blaufarb, Rafe (ed.).Napoleon: Symbol for an Age, A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 151.ISBN978-0-312-43110-5.
^Young, Wayland (1966).Eros Denied. New York: Grove.
^Foxen, David (1963). “Libertine Literature in England, 1660-1745,"The Book Collector 12 no. 1: 21-35 (spring); 12 no 2: 159-177 (summer); 12 no 3: 294-307 (autumn).
^Wardle, pp. 363–65.[incomplete short citation] Wardle was writing in 1971; twenty-first-century critics continue to be sharply divided. David Armitage has assessed the book disparagingly as "the result of a tormented mind grasping literary motifs in a desperate and increasingly unsuccessful (and self indulgent) attempt to communicate its descent into incoherence...", while Gregory Dart has acclaimed it "the most powerful account of unrequited love in English literature". To James Ley, "It is ... an unsparing account of the psychology of obsession, the way a mind in the grip of an all-consuming passion can distort reality to its own detriment". Armitage, p. 223; Dart 2012, p. 85; Ley p. 38.[incomplete short citation]
