SOURCE: “Seductive Monsters: Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses,” The New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 7, March, 1994, pp. 24-30.

I believe that the sect of Epicurus, introduced into Rome at the end of the republic, contributed greatly to produce a harmful effect on the heart and mind of the Romans.

—Montesquieu

Sometime during the winter of 1789-90, Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, notorious author of Les Liaisons dangereuses, was impatiently cooling his heels in a London antechamber, because that paragon of dandies, George Prince of Wales, had not yet finished his toilette. So bored was Laclos at this princely levee that, although reputedly a figure of glacial reserve, he unburdened himself to Comte Alexandre de Tilly, no mean roué in his day. The dubious Tilly reported the novelist's words in memoirs published many years later. “I decided to write a work that should depart from the trodden path, make a stir, and reverberate on this earth after my demise,” confided Laclos, adding for good measure that certain characters and events in his novel were based on actual persons (indicated with tantalizing discretion), and on circumstances with which he himself was directly or indirectly acquainted. Tilly, surprised by his companion's unaccustomed eloquence, added a footnote to stress that he remembered what Laclos had said as if it were yesterday.

Deliberate, lucid, far-seeing, Laclos (as reported by Tilly) sounds as if working in fulfillment of a plan of campaign. He certainly achieved all three of the declared aims. While adopting the form of the story-in-letters employed by writers he most admired—Samuel Richardson in Clarissa and Richardson's disciple Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse—he subverted with wit and irony these lengthy moralizing works of seduction. By concentrating only upon what would advance the drama, Laclos produced a book that has been called the first well-made French novel. Drama indeed: Laclos favored the theater and theatrical metaphor. He wrote a play and the libretto for an opéra comique—both lost.

When it was published in 1782, Les Liaisons dangereuses caused a veritable sensation. Along with Tilly, the novelist's contemporaries looked for real persons behind the Vicomte de Valmont, the Marquise de Merteuil, and Cécile Volanges. Queen Marie-Antoinette had her copy bound without title or name of author. The famous actress and novelist Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni wrote to Laclos to defend French womanhood against aspersions that she felt were cast upon it by the portrayal of Mme de Merteuil and her monstrous machinations. Comtesse Félicité de Genlis, a prolific and celebrated novelist, claimed in her memoirs that no woman could publicly admit to having read so infamous a work. There would be no love lost between Laclos and Félicité de Genlis. Yet if the novel made Laclos famous, it also blackened his reputation. His contemporaries would persist in seeing Laclos—who was to prove a most devoted husband and father, of solidly conventional family views—as Valmont, the machiavellian libertine. When Laclos became secretary to the Duc d’Orléans in January 1789, a few months before the fall of the Bastille, ousting from political influence that prince's former mistress, Félicité de Genlis, he was widely conceived as a man of darkness, a conspirator capable of anything.

Are readers to take Les Liaisons dangereuses simply as a salacious work whose “moral” is tacked on for convention's sake, or does the book pursue a deeper intention? Fascination with the enigma of Les Liaisons dangereuses has endured down to our own day. The dramatized English version by Christopher Hampton, which most skillfully fillets the novel, was originally staged in 1985 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon on the intimate stage of The Other Place, with the egregious Alan Rickman as Valmont. It transferred to London, to the Barbican Pit, and then to the West End, survived various changes of cast, toured the provinces, and evolved into a popular American film. Another movie based on the novel appeared at about the same time. Hampton's stage version has often been revived, and the Royal Shakespeare Company alludes to the piece as one of its major successes of the last decade. Now an opera based on the novel is announced for the San Francisco Opera House. What is there in this tale of pleasure-loving, perverse French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution, to capture a modern British and American audience? The answer may well lie in its treatment of sexual warfare and of woman's fate, and in the hidden agenda suggested by its author's political and social views.

The resentment that inspired Les Liaisons dangereuses still burns through this singular work, the only novel produced by Laclos, a deeply ambitious soldier, inventor, politician, journalist, and wit. Born in 1741, Laclos came of a family only recently ennobled, and he thus remained on the lower rungs of the nobility. He entered the army at a time when advancement and the most prominent posts went to those of high birth, often regardless of merit. Despite various attempts that were made to reform this unjust system, Laclos never seemed to benefit from them. He was esteemed an exemplary officer, but for many years he did not rise above the rank of artillery captain, nor did he see active service in the American War of Independence and elsewhere, as he ardently desired.

Extremely well read, he passed his time in various garrisons, like the one at Grenoble (scene of the exploits of a possible model for Mme de Merteuil), composing mostly undistinguished light, satirical, or libertine verse. Some youthful adventures of his own and his sharp observation of the conduct of friends, and of the social mores of the privileged, provided him with material for his novel. His powers were reflective rather than imaginative. As he said in his long, admiring essay on Fanny Burney's Cecilia, or the Memoirs of an Heiress, he counted the essential qualities for a novelist to be observation, sensibility, and the ability to depict life truthfully. He left sweetness and light to the novels of Mme Riccoboni. The scandal of Les Liaisons dangereuses blotted his copybook in the eyes of his military superiors. So did his attack on Vauban, the great military engineer who had built fortifications under Louis XIV and who was commonly regarded as above criticism. Mere artillery captains were not expected to publish their critical views on such matters. Moreover, the experiments that Laclos undertook to develop a new kind of bullet were not pursued. In short, Laclos was a man of talent, energy, and independent mind, who was being constantly frustrated in his chosen profession.

The opportunity for Laclos to try to change the existing unfair order of things came when an aristocratic protector introduced him into the household of Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d’Orléans. This liberal, pleasure-loving, irresponsible prince, regular thorn in the flesh of his distant cousin Louis XVI, would later become notorious as Philippe Egalité. Historians differ as to how far the activities of the Anglophile Duc d’Orléans in the early months of the Revolution were influential. What matters here is that contemporaries firmly believed that there existed an Orléanist conspiracy and that Laclos, his new secretary, on leave from the army, was its moving spirit. The wealthy Duc d’Orléans then had on his payroll many of those who were to be leading actors in the revolutionary period, including Mirabeau, Danton, and Brissot, future luminary of the Girondins. It was Laclos, however, who is thought to have composed the famous Instructions, an influential and much imitated document sent out by the Duc d’Orléans to his bailiwicks in the period leading up to the Estates-General of 1789. This document demanded guarantees of personal liberty and freedom of expression, and even advocated divorce.

Rightly or wrongly, Laclos was believed to be responsible for distributing “Orléans gold” to win popularity for his master. Consequently, he was accused of suborning not only the rioters at the Réveillon wallpaper factory in April 1789 but also the working women of Paris who marched to Versailles in October of that year, an upheaval which resulted in the humiliating forced return of Louis XVI and his family to the capital. Much to Mirabeau's disgust, that weak reed the Duc d’Orléans failed to seize the opportunity to become Regent, and found himself dispatched on a “diplomatic mission” (virtual exile) to the Court of St. James, where we first met Laclos. It was Laclos who penned the correspondence of the Duc d’Orléans with the French Court, including that prince's long letter of self-justification requesting permission to return to Paris (a letter scorned by Félicité de Genlis, who was convinced that she could have done better).

Once back in Paris, the Duc d’Orléans and his secretary became active in the Jacobin Club. Laclos took part in debates as well as busying himself with the creation, editing, and publication of its journal. The flight of Louis XVI and his family, their recapture at Varennes, renewed the question of the King's abdication, and once more opened the path to the Regency of the Duc d’Orléans. Again he declined to seize the opportunity. Laclos, apparently unable to abandon the hopes he had pinned to this wavering star, wanted to make his master Regent in spite of himself. He keenly favored a national petition in which everyone, “all good citizens”—a category that significantly included women—would be able to express their opinion. Privily, to favor the Orléans cause, Laclos even made an alteration to Brissot's text of the petition, which led Brissot to say that all unknowingly he had been party to yet another liaison dangereuse. Laclos was foiled—by his old enemy, Félicité de Genlis. He retired from politics and returned to the army. The Duc d’Orléans went on as Philippe Egalité to vote for the death of the king and to die like his cousin by the guillotine.

During the Terror, Laclos was imprisoned on three occasions but, possibly owing to some powerful protector, he was eventually released. Laclos was not a republican like Brissot: he was a monarchist who had wanted a change of dynasty to bring about “a regenerative revolution.” He was among the few prominent revolutionaries to have the good fortune to survive the Terror. He could not, though, escape the odium that attached to all those who had served Philippe Egalité.

Laclos said once that he wanted a monarchy “so as not to have to decide one day, perhaps very soon, between Caesar and Pompey.” Soon enough, after the coup d’état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799, he would be enjoying the favor of Napoleon Bonaparte, a fellow artillery officer, some twenty-eight years his junior. As General Laclos, his experiments with the bullet were now welcomed. Promoted to commander of the artillery reserve, he served under Marmont during Bonaparte's Italian campaign. Stendhal (who said that as a boy in Grenoble he had been given sweetmeats by the original of Mme de Merteuil) later claimed to have met the elderly General Laclos in Milan in a box at La Scala in 1800, and to have courted him as the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses. On hearing that Stendhal (then, as Henri Beyle, a sublieutenant of dragoons aged seventeen) was a native of Grenoble, Laclos showed that he was moved. It seems less likely, however, that on another occasion in Naples, Laclos gave him a list of “great lords of 1778” with notes on morality. Laclos fell gravely ill and died in Taranto in 1803. No trace remains of his tomb, which was destroyed at the Bourbon Restoration in 1815.

Such was the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses, or Letters collected in a certain Society, and published for the instruction of others, to give the book its full title of 1782. The enigmatic epigraph, taken from the Preface to Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, ran: “I have seen the manners of my day, and I have published these letters.” The so-called “Publisher's Foreword” observed with biting sarcasm: “Indeed, several of the characters he [the Author] places upon the stage, are so immoral that it is impossible to imagine that they could have lived in our age; in this age of philosophy where the universal spread of enlightenment has, as everyone knows, made all men so virtuous and all women so modest and retiring.” The “Editor's Preface” laid the claim to a moral intent, as was then de rigueur. The ending of the novel, with the exemplary death of Valmont in a duel (after the style of Richardson's Lovelace), and the social and financial ruin of Mme de Merteuil and her disfigurement by smallpox, are clearly intended to convey the salutary message that the evil-doers have been punished. Yet eighteenth-century critics, to be followed by their heirs, could not help noticing that the depiction of the seducers and their wiles is adorned with every attraction, including charm, intelligence, and wit.

Laclos would not be the only writer to intend to write one kind of book and to appear to produce another. If taken as the portrayal of the manners of a certain privileged class in general, the book could be seen as “one of the revolutionary flood waters which poured into the ocean that submerged the Court,” wrote Tilly, long after the event. (In this sense Christopher Hampton would not be far off the mark in suggesting that Mme de Merteuil was going to be punished not by smallpox but by the guillotine). There were those who thought that what they called “the moral degradation of the aristocracy” was a major cause of the Revolution. Doubtless, the contempt that the sexual license of the privileged engendered, especially as rudely targeted in satirical underground scandal sheets, contributed to undermine respect for the society and institutions of the ancien régime.

Laclos himself was to perceive that this total absorption in sexual pleasure was harmful to society and to the body politic. In a memoir on foreign policy addressed to Committee of Public Safety in 1795, he listed among the causes of the Revolution not only financial mismanagement but also something from which he himself had suffered, “the scandalous abuse of favor and intrigue which allowed only incapable persons or those of ill repute to attain position,” together with “a profound immorality which the Court no longer even took the trouble to conceal.” There is no doubt about the existence of debauched eighteenth-century rulers and monarchs, like the Regent Philippe III d’Orléans (great-grandfather of Philippe Egalité) or Louis XV, and libertine aristocrats of both sexes, from Mme de Tencin to the Maréchal de Richelieu. The Marquis de Sade himself (born 1740), so astonishingly and consistently rehabilitated by writers in our own day, was a close contemporary of Laclos: Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’Ecole du Libertinage was written in 1785, three years after Les Liaisons dangereuses appeared. Baron Grimm had declared in 1782 in his Correspondance littéraire, addressed to subscribers among the crowned heads of Europe, that people mentioned more than one society that could have given Laclos the idea for his seductive monsters.

The ambiguity inseparable from Les Liaisons dangereuses, one aspect of its perennial fascination, is linked to the legend of Don Juan from which the novel can scarcely be disassociated. Laclos mentioned Molière's Tartuffe when discussing the hypocrisy of his characters with fellow novelist Mme Riccoboni, but it was above all another of Molière's hypocrites, his Don Juan, that Laclos could not have overlooked. Valmont, after Molière's libertine anti-hero, places noble birth above virtue and piety; he also sees his pursuit of women in terms of military heroism, gloire, and conquest; he, too, makes use of religion in his desire to overcome the scruples of the devout Mme de Tourvel.

The Don Juan legend, from Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla to Mozart's Don Giovanni, can scarcely be separated from religion and repentance; it moves from the seducer who constantly postpones the day of reckoning to the Don who defies the repeated warning to repent: “Pentiti, scellerato!”—both of whom are swept down to hell. Valmont is not a Satanist, as Baudelaire suggested, because that would imply belief in Satan, and he has no belief at all. Rather Valmont appears as an overreacher, a blasphemer who needs a divinity to defy. He does not want Mme de Tourvel to abandon religion; on the contrary, he cruelly wants her to suffer all the more through her faith and her torments of conscience. He cries: “I shall have this woman; … I shall dare to ravish her from the very God she worships.” And he adds that in the moment of success, “I shall really be the God she will have preferred.” The frisson that such a horrid boast provokes has less to do with faith than with something deeply primitive and contrary to reason and order. There needs no Statue come from beyond the grave to punish such hubris. We are in the world of human beings abandoned to themselves and their own instincts, their own destructive and self-destructive urges—the world we know.

Yet as if the masculine Don Juan were not enough, Laclos presents us with a singular feminine version of Don Juan (“a real female Lovelace,” according to Grimm) in Mme de Merteuil. Like Valmont, her former lover and her co-conspirator, she too cares nothing for religion, and she lives only for power and sexual gratification in numerous amours. However, as a woman she is obliged to hide behind a mask of social respectability. Whereas Valmont is received in high society despite his reputation as a seducer, she would not be received there if her mask of virtue were to slip for a moment. In the famous Letter 81, Mme de Merteuil gives an account of her upbringing, her loveless marriage, her realization that only by ruse, by secretly pursuing cold policy, could she achieve her aims. “Not yet fifteen, I already had all the talents to which the majority of our politicians owe their reputation,” she owns. It is this startling observation that makes us realize to the full the deviation of her gifts.

All her fine skills of study and intellect are now devoted to punishing her faithless lover, the Comte de Gercourt, by having him (so to speak) made a cuckold before his marriage to young Cécile Volanges. Similarly, Valmont, with his great name, wealth, position, and all the brilliant attractions of youth and wit, can believe that his conquest of women is equal to the heroic exploits of famous military commanders. The scene of the perverse and pernicious activity of Valmont and Mme de Merteuil seems far too small for them. As Baudelaire remarked, their “strategy is devoted to winning a very frivolous prize.” With so many gifts and so much energy they should surely be able to do something more significant. Instead, they occupy their time in intrigue, in manipulating other people in order to “fill the emptiness of their hearts, the futility of their existence,” as Grimm expressed it. It is here, perhaps, that we may sense the gist of the novelist's social, moral, and political criticism.

Proud, cold, vengeful, Mme de Merteuil is fully conscious of her superiority over Valmont—indeed, over all men and women. Gradually, we are drawn to see how she has made him her instrument, although he is far too vain to realize this. She quickly perceives that he has really fallen in love with Mme de Tourvel without knowing it. In his rapture he can tell Mme de Merteuil, his former lover, that he has never experienced such bliss; to her, this avowal cannot but appear as an outrage to herself. She plays on his vanity to have him send the cruel letter of dismissal that will destroy the life of his devoted victim. In the warfare that follows, both Valmont and Mme de Merteuil are also destroyed. Yet there remains a vital distinction. We are told by a witness that in the moment of his death Valmont revealed himself to be “truly great,” as he sought reconciliation with his opponent, young Danceny, whom he had wronged. As for M. de Prévan, the vicious rake whom Mme de Merteuil had exposed to ridicule and obloquy, he is restored to favor in society. In contrast, Mme de Merteuil herself is reduced to public disgrace and ostracism.

Laclos has Mme de Merteuil say to Valmont that “I was born to avenge my sex and to master yours,” through means original to herself. Oddly enough, Laclos—with Condorcet—was a feminist. His three writings on the education of women (1783 and after), a question which had long been a theme for impassioned discussion, adapt the ideas of Rousseau. According to Laclos, all women were free in a state of nature but in society they are now in chains. For Laclos, where there is slavery—and, he insists, women are “slaves” in society—there can be no education. Society reduces women to exercise seduction and guile since they lack the physical force to overcome men. In the perennial sex war that rages, women can rarely win, and when they lose, their enslavement only becomes more bitter.

These acute views illuminate retrospectively not only the depiction of Mme de Tourvel and Cécile Volanges as pawns in the sex game but also the treatment of the conduct and destiny of Mme de Merteuil as scourge and avenger. Laclos began his reflections on perfecting women's education with a paradox: there is no way to perfect the education of women in the present state of affairs. The supposed education hitherto given to women does not merit the name. Indeed, the very laws and manners are opposed to providing them with a better education, in his opinion.

After his grim analysis of existing conditions, Laclos went on to propose a surprising solution: he advised women not to wait for men, tyrants and “authors of your ills,” to come to their rescue, but to realize that the only way out of slavery was through “a great revolution.” And he added: “Is this revolution possible? It is for you alone to say so since it depends on your courage.” Laclos puts the ball in women's court—perhaps the easiest thing for him to do in the circumstances, in these pre-Revolution writings that remained unfinished and were never published in his lifetime. A strong hint of his feminist stance, however, does percolate through the portrayal of Mme de Merteuil to startle the modern reader or spectator.

Laclos, then, is at once traditional in his depiction of dangerous female power and highly original in his challenge to women themselves to seek to right the wrongs that he feels are done to them. A number of women would attempt to do so during the French Revolution—in vain. His attitude may be seen as optimistic and utopian in its urge to change society (“a great revolution”) and pessimistic in its analysis, thus remaining in accord with eighteenth-century ambivalence. Mme de Rosemonde, Valmont's aunt and a compassionate friend to Mme de Touvel, maintains that the sexes are never truly at one: above all, the perfect happiness in love that women dream about is an illusion, a trick of the imagination, a “deceptive hope.” It is with these dour notions that Mme de Rosemonde tries to console her friend—Job's comforter indeed. Yet this disillusion harmonizes with the author's profound pessimism.

The novel as a whole leaves the impression that his decent characters, or those who are trying to be decent, are blind fools. Mme de Volanges is deceived by Mme de Merteuil's mask of virtue; she fails to keep a keen maternal eye on her young daughter, Cécile, who is all too easily corrupted and debauched by Valmont. As for Mme de Tourvel, she is tricked by her pride into believing that she has wrought Valmont's conversion, and worn down by his passionate pursuit. Brutally cast aside, Mme de Tourvel withdraws to the convent in shame and agony, and she virtually wills her own death. In this respect she resembles Richardson's Clarissa, but without the odor of sanctity. In the world of Laclos, the decent are defeated, the innocent maimed. As a good husband and father, Laclos fully intended to write a second novel to embody the notion that “there is no happiness outside the family”: he spent many years thinking about it, but he could not do it.

This is a world where those with the means and urge to do so can freely enjoy manipulating and destroying others. The sheer intelligence of Valmont and Mme de Merteuil, and their insight into the minds and hearts, the weaknesses of their victims, are nothing less than stunning. One might at first be inclined to speak of motiveless evil on the lines of Iago, were it not that these supreme egoists do have the motive of selfish pleasure and the superior satisfaction of exercising deceit and power. Moreover, there is often a kind of black humor in their deleterious activity that recalls the tone of Richard III rather than of Iago. The supreme example of this is the brilliant letter of double entendre, addressed to Mme de Tourvel, that Valmont pens in bed with a courtesan while using her back as a desk. There is here a blending of cynicism and wit to which one responds with a certain revulsion, astonishment at the skill with the words—and, it must be owned, rather ashamed amusement at the black comedy.

In his telling 1939 essay on Laclos, André Malraux said that the book presented more than the application of the will to sexual ends: rather it revealed what he called “the eroticization of the will,” the transformation of something without an explicit sexual meaning into the motive for erotic pleasure, the intermingling of will and sexuality until they formed a single realm. All that separates the novel from the mores of today is the presence of social constraints that were ineluctable in the eighteenth century and that added to the savor of the dangerous game.

In the novel everything has moved into the sphere of sexuality and power. The word “heart” is employed to mean sexual pleasure. Only Mme de Tourvel sacrifices herself for love and finds her self-sacrifice mocked. Significantly, she is the one major character that Laclos had totally invented, if the avowals to Tilly are to be believed. Here are careless fools, blind instruments, along with clever knaves who might be better employed—a privileged society that does not realize it is on the brink of ruin. With its ruthless probing of the interplay of egoism, sexual gratification, domination, and power politics, the theme of Les Liaisons dangereuses chimes with one of the most all-embracing and so far apparently ineradicable preoccupations of present-day culture, as expressed through many of its leading and lesser pundits and its artistic products. Even the undercurrent of danger and threat, adumbrated by Laclos, is not entirely missing.