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The Libertine Savoir-vivre
Publisher
:
Hachette Littératures
Parution date
:
2000
EAN
:
9782012352353
Description
We fantasize about 18th-century libertinism as a kind of forbidden utopia of refinement and pleasure. But in reality, the libertine lifestyle was in large part an indulgence of French society’s imagination under the Ancien Régime. The public was at once delighted and offended by the "scandalous" and perverse affairs of the aristocracy, but the truly licentious mores flourished mostly in literature. The libertine fell somewhere between forbidden and sinful, between dream and reality. He embodied both polite discretion and pornographic crudeness; freedom to speak and love as well as respect for society’s limits. Le Savoir-vivre libertin offers a window into the daily culture of this famous period which has so marked our concept of the masculine and feminine, of the desirable and the grotesque…
Author
Michel Delon : Michel Delon is a professor at the Sorbonne. He is the editor of Sade’s complete works for La Pléiade (Gallimard) and is most notably the author of L’Idée d’énergie au tournant des Lumières, 1770-1820 (PUF) and Dictionnaire européen des Lumières (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).
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