SOURCE: “Resistance and Retreat: A Laclosian Primer for Women,” The University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3, Spring, 1989, pp. 391-408.

[In the following essay, Diaconoff compares Laclos's essays with Les Liaisons dangereuses, arguing that his views on feminism lacked vision and did not call for fundamental change.]

In the past ten or fifteen years the assessment of Choderlos de Laclos's treatment of women has undergone significant revision. For if during decades he was celebrated as the first feminist writer and continues to be so called by some critics, male especially,¹ in recent years an increasing number of others have asserted new judgments. Various critics now suggest that, far from being feminist, Laclos's work in toto reveals a misogynist mentality (arising out of the imaginaire viril,² a sort of ambivalence towards women best defined as ‘reductive misogyny,)’³ the kind of writing that poses as femino-centric but whose ideological subscript is really that of female vulnerability and the re-establishment and ratification of the male order.⁴

The lack of agreement among critics indicates not only changing currents in criticism and differing ideological stands, but also, and most important, the recognition that Laclos delivers to women a mixed message of resistance and retreat. Author of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), arguably the century's finest novel and often considered the first genuinely feminist novel in French literature, Laclos followed that succès de scandale with a foray into non-fiction when in 1783 he took up the competition essay question proposed by the Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne, ‘Quels seraient les meilleurs moyens de perfectionner l’éducation des femmes?’ The question is characteristic of the intellectual debate sponsored by various regional académies in France during the century of Enlightenment, and also illustrates the typical formulation of the ‘woman question’ in the eighteenth century—that is, almost strictly in terms of education.⁵ Indeed, by 1783 hundreds of essays had already been devoted to the issue, and the chances of the competition's eliciting much originality were fairly slight. Laclos's approach was, however, striking because from the beginning he boldly asserted that it was not a different education that would improve conditions for women, but a different society. He caught his reader's attention by declaring, in the first pages of an essay on improving women's education, that in fact it could not be improved. In the three essays he eventually produced on the topic, he would show why this was so and how women could accommodate themselves to this knowledge, but he would never return to argue the case for the radical overthrow of society, something he had seemed to promise to women in that tantalizing phrase on the third page: ‘Apprenez qu’on ne sort de l’esclavage que par une grande révolution.’

Disappointing as this must be for us today, it is, nonetheless, wholly consistent with who Laclos was and particularly who he was in March 1783, when he decided to try his hand at essay-writing. Indeed, in his biography of Laclos, Georges Poisson offers a chronology of the essays' genesis that, if correct, is highly suggestive for the correlation between events in Laclos's life and the evolution of his notions about women. Following the publication of his novel in early April 1782, Laclos, a career military man stationed at La Rochelle, made the acquaintance of Marie-Solange Duperre, a young woman half his age with whose family he was billeted. It was the next March (1783) that he began writing the first of the three essays to which posterity has given the collective title ‘De l’Education des femmes,’ the one which gives greatest import to the necessity of freedom. However, he wrote only three pages before concluding that the subject required greater amplitude, and it was not until later that summer, at age forty-one and for the first time in his life in love, that he would make a second attempt to deal with the subject. His approach was now to consider the development of women's sensual, social, and moral dimensions and to seek to protect rather than to free them. This development, which is expressed implicitly in the second essay, is understandable, Poisson suggests, because his young mistress was pregnant with his child, and the feelings he had towards her were naturally extended to all women. (On 1 May 1784 their son was born, and the parents were married two years later almost to the day.) As for the third essay, the most conformist and the least original, some critics suggest that it probably was completed soon after the second, and others believe that it may have been written much later than the other two, perhaps in the period 1795-9, or even in 1802, largely after Revolutionary events and when Laclos was a happily married man.⁶

Today what makes Laclos's essays on the question of women's education worthy of sustained examination is, first, that while they do not contain much of interest about pedagogy, they have a great deal to say about women's condition in the eighteenth century; and, second, that if they lack the elegant ironies of his novel, they reveal in almost exemplary fashion the paradoxes of a type of Enlightenment thinking, born in passionate commitment to liberty and justice and ending in the bankrupt arguments of reformism. Nowhere is this clearer than in Enlightenment discourse on women with its characteristic and continual movement between promise and retraction, advocacy and containment. The paradox is repeatedly illustrated in these essays, in which Laclos's thinking about women can be characterized as feministic but not feminist. Thus, though he will bear accurate testimony to woman's condition and deplore her lack of freedom in the social contract with its patriarchal assumptions, he will not genuinely seek to free or empower her. Though he will lament the systematic underdevelopment and underuse of her faculties and will indict men for keeping her dependent, irresponsible, and unfree, he will not propose an educational program of substantial and thoroughgoing innovation that could lead to real change for her. And though he believes that social conditioning and not physical predisposition constitutes the real problem for women, he will not, because of conservatism or perhaps male pessimism, take a radical stand for the programmatic advancement of women, or even in Les Liaisons dangereuses posit a fictional world without sexual privilege or exploitation. Indeed, though he infuses his novel with the controlling consciousness of a woman, a character who dominates men and is superior to them in the execution of a libertine philosophy, he does not permit her to vanquish definitively any of her rivals, either male or female. Rather, he sets up such a system of social and psychological checks and balances that in the end the same result is obtained in the novel as in the essays: that is, a re-enactment of the status quo. Hence he undermines what he argues for, revealing in so doing the impotence of reformism and a lack of belief in real change. The history of the women's movement is littered with broken promises and disillusionment, and Laclos's essays demonstrate that this is not always because of the ill will or misogyny of men, but because of a lack of vision and of the daring to contemplate a truly new society.

Because his position, like that of many of his countrymen on the question of women's role in society, remains resolutely wedded to a notion of equality based on complementarity (the sexes should complete one another) rather than sameness (the sexes should have the right to the same privileges and responsibilities), and despite his arguments in favour of justice and liberty for all, he repeatedly shows in the elaboration of his thoughts on woman a reversionary predilection to re-enslave her. Indeed, in ‘De l’Education’ Laclos moves backwards in his commitment to woman, making in the first essay the strongest case for her, but weakening it in the second when he shows her as the victim of a tripartite machine—nature, sex, and society—and finally in the third backing himself into a corner, implicitly pleading not so much for equality and empowerment of woman as for accommodation to the status quo.

I propose to study this phenomenon by reading each of the three essays under a separate heading—freedom, sexuality, and education, respectively—in order to show that the movement in each, after some initial expansiveness, becomes narrow and restrictive, ‘naturalizing’ woman's condition and reconciling and rationalizing inequalities, not because Laclos is a closet misogynist but because he is deeply sceptical about freedom, sexuality, education, and the viability of real change. By narrowing his vision, by reducing the scope and space of his inquiry and proposals in these essays, he becomes caught in a backward and downward spiral of thinking and writing. In this vortex of negative and restrictive rhetoric he is led repeatedly to counsel resistance and then retreat. This mechanism of feministic thinking within the essays bears study, for it is this kind of analysis, widespread in the age of freedom, that, ironically, perpetuates the very paradigm of slavery it intended to destroy.

FREEDOM AND REVOLUTION: A CONSERVATIVE ESTIMATE

If we cannot exactly reconstruct Laclos's intentions in 1783 when he turned to address the question set forth by the Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne on the best ways to improve women's education, we can at least uncover his mode of thinking through examining his treatment of the subject—the ambiguities and contradictions, in particular. The essays demonstrate how an argument starting in paradox and a pessimistic appraisal of mankind's potential will necessarily and futilely circle back upon itself. Examination of the essays contradicts the notion that Laclos is an outspoken feminist who preaches revolution.

In this first essay his primary concern is to reveal to woman herself that the essence of the problem is her lack of freedom, as established by the social contract, to which she has merely acceded and not consented.⁷ Addressing himself to women, he says:

Venez apprendre comment, nées compagnes de l’homme, vous êtes devenues son esclave; comment, tombées dans cet état abject, vous êtes parvenues à vous y plaire, à le regarder comme votre état naturel; comment enfin, dégradées de plus en plus par votre longue habitude de l’esclavage, vous en avez préféré les vices avilissants, mais commodes, aux vertus plus pénibles d’un être libre et respectable. (404)

For it is that lack of freedom, Laclos argues, that deprives a woman, first of her morality, and secondly of her capacity to be educated, a judgment which leads him to declare that ‘On ne peut sortir de ce principe général que sans liberté point de moralité et sans moralité point d’éducation’ (405). His initial approach, then, is, as Madelyn Gutwirth has said, to deconstruct the Académie's proposition and to argue, even from the first pages, that there is no hope of improving either women's education or their condition—until or unless there is a revolution, whose feasibility he immediately casts into doubt by asking his female reader:

Cette révolution est-elle possible? C’est à vous seules à le dire puisqu’elle dépend de votre courage. Est-elle vraisemblable? Je me tais sur cette question; mais jusqu’à ce qu’elle soit arrivée, et tant que les hommes règleront votre sort, je serai autorisé à dire, et il me sera facile de prouver qu’il n’est aucun moyen de perfectionner l’éducation des femmes. (405)

The problem in improving women's lot is, as he sees it, men, for as arbiters of women's fate they will not or cannot accept women's accession to full and equal rights. Speaking to his female readership, he reminds them:

Ne vous laissez plus abuser par de trompeuses promesses, n’attendez point les secours des hommes auteurs de vos maux: ils n’ont ni la volonté, ni la puissance de les finir, et comment pourroient-ils vouloir former des femmes devant lesquelles ils seraient forcés de rougir? (405)

It is for this very reason that he remains so ambivalent about not only the probability but also the advisability of women's being better educated. Indeed, one of the questions he is to set for himself in this essay is whether

dans l’état actuel de la société une femme telle qu’on peut la concevoir formée par une bonne éducation ne serait pas très malheureuse en se tenant à sa place et très dangereuse si elle tentait d’en sortir. (404)

The answer, as it turns out, will be in the affirmative to both questions, specifically because Laclos, the pragmatic military man, is entrenched in what is—‘l’état actuel de la société’—rather than drawn to working on the actualization of what he might be able to visualize. However, it is because of his bifurcated view of the real and the ideal that his argument and logic become murky, compromised, contradictory. For instance, the notion of freedom that might be achieved if she could break the chains of her slavery, but rather merely the relative freedom that he invokes repeatedly is sometimes used in its most complete sense, as relating to the moral, social, and political, and sometimes in only a partial sense; at times Laclos appears to be talking about all women and at other times only about some; he will describe women as having no choice and yet at other times implore them to act and take the initiative. Torn between what is and what he thinks ought to be, he finds that the only solution is to blur distinctions and to establish two tiers, freedom and slavery, the public and the private. By doing so, he can suggest that women are enslaved in a public sector controlled by an immutable social contract, but capable, if removed from that arena, of creating a kind of internal freedom for themselves in the private sphere—and hence of becoming educable.

The freedom he holds out for woman the slave, however, is not the absolute freedom that could be had by loosening the chains through awareness of the possibility of internal freedom. For Laclos, the slave does have a measure of freedom and can, within her slavery, profit from it. Hence he says, ‘On ne niera pas … que [la liberté] soit une des facultés de la femme et [cela] implique que la liberté puisse se développer dans l’esclavage’ (405). To be sure, that freedom will have no effect except on the self, because it cannot be directed ‘vers l’utilité sociale puisque la liberté d’un esclave serait une atteinte portée au pacte social fondé sur l’esclavagé (my italics).

What seems obvious, then, is that by emphasizing the existence of an inner realm which can be in opposition to outer reality, Laclos is in effect accommodating himself to the immutability of woman's inequality and oppression in the public sphere and consigning her hopes for improvement and justice to the exclusively personal realm. Though ostensibly this first essay was to sketch out why woman's education could not be improved as long as she was unfree and hence immoral, Laclos is also constricted by his own feelings about the unchangeability of the social contract. But he seems to want to suggest that if women are enlightened as to the real and unadulterated nature of their condition, they will be able within their fetters and within the private sphere to create a kind of freedom through awareness. In view of this, he will encourage women to envision freedom as that which they can create for themselves by disposing of the slavelike mentality which prevents them from valuing what is ‘in their own real best interests.’ Clearly, what he is asking is that women create their own internal, moral freedom through an effort of will, and that they accept the social contract and its injustices not because women are an inferior gender but because, he fears, the social contract which binds society cannot be changed: the only possible revolution is small and personal. To modern eyes, his advice suspiciously suggests a revolution in the sense of revolving backward rather than going forward. Hence, he counsels that women seek to free themselves from a state of moral degradation and moral servitude while remaining unfree in a social or civil sense.⁸

Though he challenges women, as would Simone be Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe, to reseize control of their destiny, to recognize the part they have played in their own slavery (using female sexuality as instrumentality, preferring easy vice to difficult virtue, defining freedom as licence or luxury), these challenges are no more than rhetoric, for the so-called revolution he evokes as necessary for change is, in the final analysis, merely that which each individual herself can achieve internally. The freedom which Laclos ultimately seems to grant woman is what the prisoner invents for herself, what woman discovers within her servitude. It is what Montesquieu's Roxane found within the confines of the seraglio and to which she testifies when she tells Usbek, ‘J’ai pu vivre dans la servitude, mais j’ai toujours été libré (Les Lettres persanes, letter CLXI). For Laclos, this may not be an ideal solution, but, given his pessimism about real change and his discipline as a defence strategist, it is reasonable to speculate that he may have considered it to be the wisest if not most just course for women.⁹

Taken in its brief, three-page entirety, then, this first essay, while radical in its recognition of the magnitude of the tyranny perpetrated against women, is also inherently contradictory and conservative, a fact made particularly clear in the last paragraph, which functions primarily to imprison woman in a web of negatives. Despite some suggestive but misleading language, this first essay is not at all the feminist—let alone militantly feminist—call to arms that many have sought to make it.¹⁰ Though it ostensibly commits itself to helping women achieve the fullest social and civil rights possible and although it is imbued with sympathy for women, it will ultimately and ironically counsel only passive resistance and moral renewal because Laclos does not believe in or is too apprehensive about the possibility of real revolution. It is his inability to return woman to any but a slightly different status quo which causes him during the course of his deliberations on women twice to suspend his writing and twice to make a new attempt in yet another essay to create a different reality and a new and improved future for women.

FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

The second essay, a forty-two-page account of Laclos's interpretation of the ‘passage’ of woman from nature to society, is in many ways pedestrian, but within its seemingly naïve and simplistic discourse is another very important and exceedingly interesting discussion of female sexuality. Unlike Diderot in ‘Sur les Femmes' (1772), Laclos does not establish a pathology of femininity or consider, as did his compatriot, the phases of a woman's life starting from puberty and going through menopause as one continuous cycle of illness. Though he does, indeed, idealize the natural woman's sexuality, he does so primarily in order to contrast natural sexuality—sex in nature—with the artificiality and calculation that have invaded the expression and exploitation of woman's sexuality in society. He does not believe that female libido or passion is harmful in itself, but rather that sex has become an instrument that ultimately debases and distances the female from what ought to be the real core of her happiness: that is, her virtue. In consonance, then, with the theme that is being established of discovery and withdrawal, Laclos in this second essay recognizes and celebrates female sexuality, but concludes simultaneously that while it is pleasure in Nature, it is danger in Society, and so must be repressed and redirected, in order to ensure, if not woman's freedom, then her happiness—defined, of course, by him.

What is especially interesting and what, indeed, gives the essay a certain modernity or progressive spirit is the extent to which Laclos shows that he understands sexual difference as a social construction, and culture or society as having had an inimical effect on the relations between the sexes. After a long exposé encompassing several chapters, Laclos turns to summing up, and in a section entitled ‘Des Premiers Effets de la société’ he states clearly his belief that ‘la nature ne crée que des êtres libres; la société ne fait que des tyrans et des esclaves’ (453). Furthermore, he advances the idea that women, ‘manquant de forces ne purent défendre et conserver leur existence civile,’ with the result that ‘compagnes de nom, elles devinrent bientôt esclaves de fait.’ In his interpretation, then, women's lot would be little more than oppression and scorn, if it were not that

dans l’état de guerre perpétuelle qui subsiste entre elles et les hommes, on les a vues, à l’aide des caresses qu’elles ont su se créer, combattre sans cesse, vaincre quelquefois, et souvent, plus adroites, tirer avantage des forces même dirigées contre elles … (436)

In what amounts to a rather conventional reading of the issue, then, Laclos considers that female sexuality has become a tool used by women to redress the unequal balance of power between the sexes in this, a man's world, ruled by a social contract which has posited the fundamental hostility underlying sexual relations and which was his invention and not hers. For it was the social contract that condemned the sexes to live in a state of ongoing war just as it condemned women to the role of ‘esclaves malheureuses,’ whose destiny, said Laclos, was scarcely ‘meilleur que celui des noirs de nos colonies’ (434). Given this situation, the single hope for women was that since the contract had posited only female vulnerability and not female inadequacy, women could seek restitution by substituting ‘l’adresse à la force’: they could make men, on whom they were dependent economically and in terms of physical strength, depend on them for physical pleasure:

Elles sentirent enfin que, puisqu’elles étaient plus faibles, leur unique ressource état de séduire; elles connurent que si elles étaient dépendantes de ces hommes par la force, ils pouvaient le devenir à elles par le plaisir. (435)

Woman, then, according to Laclos, learned to appeal to and manipulate man's imagination (‘facile à séduire’), beguiling him into concentrating on the promise of unknown pleasure, rather than the pleasure itself. For, he argues, women (like modern sexologists who emphasize the importance of the imagination and mental activity in enhancing the sexual experience) knew that if the pleasure was essentially always the same, the promise of it could be made to be infinitely different and the key to their manipulation of men. Madame de Merteuil's use of this psychological mechanism is made amply clear in letter x of Les Liaisons dangereuses, in which she describes for Valmont how, in order to inflame the Chevalier's passions, she had, with panache and mystification, staged an erotic encounter with him at her petite maison. And how, once he arrived, she adopted a variety of attitudes, ‘tour à tour enfant et raisonnable, folâtre et sensible, quelquefois même libertine,’ and treated him as ‘un Sultan au milieu de son Sérail, dont j’étais tour à tour les Favorites différentes.’ Mad with pleasure, he paid her repeated hommage which, she boasts, was received by ‘la même femme,’ who was, however, also always ‘une Maîtresse nouvelle’ (31). Hence, she schemed, beguiled, and conquered. And she now sought, through her narration and its word picture of erotic promise and pleasure, to reduplicate both the scene and her power over the man by arousing in Valmont an overwhelming desire for her.

In Laclos's interpretation, then, woman's power arises directly out of her sexuality and is totally dependent upon her ability to create in man a continually new desire for her. But he also sees that her sexuality can be a source of danger for her, because it can entrap even while it gratifies her physically. Neither in the novel nor in the essays does Laclos deny women's capacity for sexual pleasure. In fact, he celebrates her latent erotic power and sensuality and shows her not as a passive partner, not a victim, forced to submit to the male's ‘brute needs,’ but often an active and enjoying participant in sex. But he still feels that it is equally possible that her sexuality will enslave her if she falls into promiscuity or permits love to become the very pivot of her oppression, as does, for instance, Madame de Tourvel. Or, on the other hand, if she chooses to reject the notion that she is merely chattel, with no control over her own destiny, and attempts to shake the chain and create for herself some type of freedom, she may be involved in an ultimately destructive form of self-deception. Such is the case with Madame de Merteuil, who wanted to throw out the entire subtext with regard to gender ideology, but ends up trapping herself in a behaviour—libertinage—of limited value, patterned as it is on that of the ‘enemy’ and imitating his model rather than being a creation of her own principles, as she alleges. We might judge that what she does not see is that her acceptance of eroticism or libertinage as the only means to power does little more than re-establish the male prerogative she is ostensibly attacking, by once again limiting the domain of female action to a total dependence on male pleasure. Of course, it is largely her sense of outrage that women must play the game as set forth by men that constitutes the basis of her fury against Valmont and leads to the exposition in letter LXXXI of what she erroneously believes is her own unique philosophy.

One might read in the destiny of Madame de Merteuil an indictment of the feminist demand to be treated the same way and to have the same rights and privileges as men. For we might well conclude that her experience demonstrates that this stance of ‘sameness’ is tantamount to arguing for what Elizabeth Meese has called ‘an unending regression within an oppressive and phallocentric economy.’¹¹ Sadly, it appears, Madame de Merteuil's attack is on the exclusivity of male privilege, not on the nature or quality of the privilege itself, so that while she adopts the feminist posture of defiance and challenges the phallocentric economy, all she does is destroy some individual predators, not the system itself, which protects the tyrant and oppresses women.

As he draws towards the end of this essay, Laclos shows that he wishes both to protect women from the predators/tyrants (men who would turn against women ‘ces armes qu’elles avaient forgées pour … les combattre’ and who would make their slavery yet worse [435]), and from her own misuse of her sexuality. He accuses women, for instance, of contributing to their own enslavement by devising notions of beauty that do little more than accentuate both their dependency on men and men's definition of them as primarily sexual and sensual beings. He claims that it is women who have fabricated what today we would call an essentially self-defeating notion of beauty, for they have declared that ‘la beauté n’est … que l’apparence la plus favorable à la jouissance, la manière d’être qui fait espérer la jouissance la plus délicieuse’ (437). Thus, he reveals, they define their central concern as sexual in nature and reduce themselves to creatures who compete with one another to serve men better. For the ‘jouissance’ referred to is man's, which means that even while women are attempting to assert themselves, they do so by embracing rules set forth by men and by seeking to please men.

In a final chapter on ‘De la Parure’ he adopts a new tone and takes a prescriptive approach, as though he were writing a conduct book for women, counselling what could be called a virtuous ‘economy of voluptuousness,’ offering advice on how to accommodate oneself to the unchangeable social contract and how to find some modicum of happiness within it. He admonishes women to be healthy, to avoid excess in everything, whether it be alcohol, sun, or exercise; he tells them to moderate their emotions, not to be evil-tempered, and to avoid envy and ambition; he counsels cleanliness (including, even, a daily bath), and gives beauty hints on cleansers and perfumes. Warning women away from artificial stimulants, he says ‘Vous êtes jeunes et belles: qu’avez-vous besoin de liqueurs fortes? C’est d’amour qu’il faut vous enivrer.’ What more conventional advice to women could he give? And what, indeed, has happened to any notion of revolution and to equality and female rights?

Clearly, they have receded far back in his mind, as he now contemplates female sexuality and accepts both the status quo and the cultural fabrication of woman. But if she cannot be made free, he would like at least to ensure some happiness for her in her reduced space, and in accordance with his basically bourgeois instincts he decides that only in marriage can she be protected from society and have much chance for happiness. Obviously he is compromising, for earlier he had portrayed marriage too as an institution of confinement when, in lauding the intensely erotic nature of natural woman's sexual encounters, he had asked the married woman:

En est-il une, parmi vous, qui ait joui constamment sans crainte, sans jalousie, sans remords, ou sans l’ennui pénible du devoir ou de l’uniformité? … ayez le courage de scruter vos coeurs et jugez par vous-mêmes. (417-18)

Now, however, because of the dangers that he concludes society holds for her, he encourages her to seek happiness and protection in marriage. Consequently we must judge that Laclos has treated the question of woman's sexuality as he did her freedom—finding it desirable, justifiable, positive, but also dangerous to her in the imperfect society in which she lives. As he has advanced in his deliberations and become more and more sensitive to female vulnerability, he has opted increasingly to see danger in the social contract and to want to defend woman from it, at the same time, however, limiting her growth—clearly a case of what Pierre Darnon has called paternalistic feminism.¹² Again, as in the first essay, Laclos has taken stock of the situation and has tightened the yoke, despite his original idea of loosening it, because he has entrapped himself, as much as woman, in a rhetoric of reflection rather than in one of visionary promise.

EDUCATION, THE FINAL DISILLUSION

Having now so curbed or recurbed woman, as he reinvented her natural history and traced her unfortunate passage into the state of society, Laclos will attempt at last in the third and final essay of not quite nine pages to focus on the specific details—subject matter, books, instructors—of the education he proposes for women. However, an examination of its contents, objectives, and what would have to be called a very modest, limited, and unoriginal program leads the reader to conclude not only that, when he was writing this essay, Laclos was in the rearguard when it came to progressive thinking about woman's education but also—surprisingly in an essay on this subject in the eighteenth century—that he appears deeply doubtful about the power of education to generate significant change. To understand this position one must recall that by the third essay Laclos has slipped into complicity with the status quo and its ideology, having ‘naturalized’ the social reality of women's condition, with the effect of making it seem, if not as value-free, at least as unchangeable as Nature itself.

Women's education, Laclos believes, must necessarily be a reflection of their role in society, and indeed for their own happiness, he judges, it should be consistent with that role. This position, which seems to arise less from an appreciation of any heritage or tradition than from a desire not to take risks, to respect certain prejudices, if to do so is less harmful than to revolt against them, is very much like the claustrophobic though pragmatic conservatism of a Montaigne or a Pascal, in that it has little to do with justice, but possibly a great deal to do with social order and with personal happiness. Dismissing or forgetting the importance that he had once attributed to freedom in improving women's conditions, Laclos now gives the appearance of arguing that happiness is a more appropriate goal for women because they should seek to create the most perfect relationship possible between the self and the ideas of virtue, modesty, and morality. It can be argued that these are qualities that in the eighteenth century were in direct opposition to the reigning code of sociability. In other words, what Laclos is pressing for is the rejection of this code, which has always kept woman enslaved, and the adoption of another standard of personal and moral fortification whose ostensible purpose will be greater happiness than she has henceforth enjoyed. On the final page of the essay he says:

Si la jeune personne qui nous occupe en ce moment a le courage de se livrer au travail que nous lui proposons, nous croyons pouvoir l’assurer qu’elle sera non seulement plus instruite, mais aussi plus heureuse que la plupart des autres femmes. (458)

Thus, Laclos advocates an education that would help woman cope with her individual life rather than encourage her to see herself as part of a collective whose aspirations have been held in check. Significantly, he also tells her, in the second most memorable sentence of the work, that whatever knowledge she obtains should remain largely private: ‘Nous espérons,’ he says, on the last page, ‘qu’elle y gagnera un assez bon esprit pour ne jamais montrer ses connaissances qu’à des amis les plus intimes et, pour ainsi dire, comme confidences’ (458). Any education will hence be strictly for private and domestic consumption; it will not be the means of changing one's public lot.

Laclos begins this essay by asserting that ‘la lecture est réellement une seconde éducation qui supplée à l’insuffisance de la première.’ Though he believes that experience is the greatest teacher, he realizes that it may come too late and be too fraught with risk to provide real aid, and so he counsels women to turn to books as they cultivate their reason, hearts, and minds. One should read books, he believes, primarily to gain knowledge about the self and others, and secondarily to learn about the world through study of the sciences. Laclos advises reading moralists (to learn ‘ce qui doit être’), historians (who teach ‘ce qui est’), and ‘littérateurs,’ including poets, orators, historians, and bellettrists, though he gives some conventional warnings concerning the potential danger of novels. The objective of this proposed reading of moralists will be to develop in ‘un sujet bien né’ a love of virtue, an appreciation for ‘le beau, le juste et l’honnête,’ and the development of an attitude of compassion and tolerance for others but severity towards the self, along with stoical courage or resignation in the face of pain; it will also teach ‘ce qu’ on doit à soi-même et ce qu’on doit aux autres’ (450).

He provides a few specific suggestions, giving customary accolades to Greek and Roman writers and the value of reading about ‘les principes des grandes et belles actions’; he tells women that they should learn something about the history of the various European nations, but that their sex frees them from having to know the details; he disparages the usefulness both of the contemporary morality of ‘nos philosophes’ who ‘n’ont rien ajouté à la morale des anciens’ and of preachers who have not improved upon the Bible. He counsels the aid of a good guide in the choice of novels (‘Presque tout dépend … en ce genre, ou de l’addresse du guide, ou du bon esprit de la personne qui lit’); he proposes that the female student learn Latin, largely because it is a language whose knowledge is for oneself rather than to show off to others, but he accepts that if she finds it too difficult, she should learn either Italian or English; he advises some knowledge of astronomy, physics, chemistry, natural history, and botany; he shows that he values both oral and written expression, and believes that one must develop adequately those skills for successful personal relations. Finally, he says, taking a cue from Montaigne (and many others):

Ce n’est pas ce qu’on mange qui nourrit, mais seulement ce qu’on digère. Il ne suffit donc pas de lire beaucoup, ni même de lire avec méthode, il faut encore lire avec fruit, de manière à retenir et à s’approprier en quelque sorte, ce qu’on a lu. (457)

It is not unreasonable to conclude from the extreme moderation and lack of verve in this section that, as Laclos reaches the end of his meditations on women, he is not really convinced that education is, in the final analysis, the central issue in the problem of woman's condition. After all, it is not because Cécile has not read enough that she is corrupted by Valmont, or because Madame de Tourvel is undereducated that she is led to become an adultress. And for Madame de Merteuil, who reads Crébillon and Rousseau and La Fontaine ‘pour recorder les différents tons que je voulais prendre’ (letter x), education is merely a means to an end—her own angry one. Indeed, she seems to pride herself on her classical education, but even more on the uses to which she has put it in the development of her philosophy of personal advancement. As she explains to Valmont:

Je … fortifiai [mes observations sur la société] par le secours de la lecture: mais ne croyez pas qu’elle fût toute du genre que vous la supposez. J’étudiai nos moeurs dans les Romans; nos opinions dans les Philosophes; je cherchai même dans les Moralistes les plus sévères ce qu’ils exigeaient de nous, et je m’assurai ainsi de ce qu’on pouvait faire, de ce qu’on devait penser et de ce qu’il fallait paraître. (Letter LXXXI)

Hence, in the society such as it is established (the one Laclos does not believe can be changed), her education has served only her selfish ends. In the war with men, it has permitted her at times to best them at their own games, but in the final analysis it wins her no permanent gains.

Indeed, Laclos does not seem to believe that education can change much at all, either for the individual woman (who must hide her knowledge, so as to preserve her modesty) or for society as a whole. Nowhere does he assert that education is the necessary first step in bringing about positive change in the relations between the sexes, nor does he even take up again the idea, presented in the first essay, of the positive role of education with regard to ‘l’utilité sociale.’ The idealistic though empty rhetoric of the first pages is not repeated here; rather Laclos retreats to the language of accommodation and constraint, which is mirrored in the reduced educational objectives he sets forth for women. Education is not presented as capable of opening an improved civil existence for women; it does not seriously address the issues of justice and equality; and there can never be one standard of education for all women. In fact, Laclos is not even talking about women as a group, for the optic has been significantly narrowed since the first essay, which he addressed to all women, and the second, in which he described the passage of most into chattels. Now he is concerned only with the few or privileged ones, those who have an obligation to become ‘properly’ educated.

It is no surprise, then, to learn that he, unlike Condorcet, is no proponent of the same education presented in the same way for all individuals. What books are chosen by the student's guide becomes a matter that depends, he says, on age, sex, condition, intelligence, and taste for a subject. Several times he specifically mentions that he has in mind the ‘sujet bien né,’ ‘une personne qui a de l’esprit et de la figure, et que son rang et sa fortune mettent dans le cas de vivre dans la compagnie la plus distinguée et même d’y avoir de l’influence’ (450). To so limit his audience of pupils is to suggest not only an élitist attitude, but perhaps also some deep-seated doubt about both the appeal and efficacy of mass education—disturbingly anti-democratic ideas in an essay which ostensibly deals with equality. Reading this essay, we are aware that while its spirit is that of egalitarianism, there are few specific points made that would support the implementation of equality. There is no egalitarian argument made here for giving women the same education as men or giving it for the same reasons. Nor does Laclos take the argument for women's education and against women's oppression very far: he is not advancing the idea that all women have a right to education; he is not proposing the establishment of schools for women, subsidized by the state and committed to teaching a specific curriculum; he is not even asserting that women should be educated so as to provide the state with more responsible citizens and properly brought up children—an argument many female feminists advanced in support of their demands for better education.¹³ He seems to believe that the best education is that which the woman will receive at home in the company of a tutor who will guide her into making correct and moral applications of her reading. The education he is advancing is ‘safe,’ useful, and appropriate, offering the right moral lessons. The philosophy Laclos embraces is one that limits choice. It suggests a view of humanity—not just of women, perhaps—that is excessively reserved if not deeply pessimistic and certainly at great variance with his reputation as a liberator or feminist.

But Laclos's paternalism in wishing to protect women from having to live in the maelstrom of society's conflicts may exist, not because of any hidden disdain for females on his part, but rather because of deep conservatism and weighty reservations about humankind and society. For the social scene both referred to in the essays and painted in Les Liaisons dangereuses is one rife with rivalries and ambitions, competitions and clashes from which a participant rarely emerges the victor and never with virtue intact; and Laclos, with chivalrous concern, seems to wish to protect women from such harsh realities. Moreover, in view of his implied pessimism about humanity, it is difficult to accuse him of misogyny or of having broken faith with women by failing to present a program of education that will prepare them for new roles of social power. The object of ‘De l’Education des femmes’ is not in the end to offer strategies for subverting the social contract; the most Laclos may have had in mind was to serve up some defensive strategies to be used by women in a politics of moral fortification. In other words, we misread him when we wish to read him as an early committed feminist.

Close study of the essays leads us to conclude that Laclos has systematically, if without malice, reduced woman's space in the course of these three essays. While granting her freedom from past enslavement, he has not granted her the freedom to develop to the fullest extent her own abilities and humanity. Ultimately, his position is that of a reformist, though one who recognizes the falseness of reformism, its broken promises and tarnished ideals. Hence the double view and contradictory message of this work: that is, of resistance and retreat. In ‘De l’Education des femmes’ we have a text which pulls against itself, which is ambivalent in its relation to women, representing both an attack on the sexual politics of the social contract and a redemonstration through example of those same politics. Laclos's relationship to feminism, like his relationship to the pedagogical act, is ambivalent: while expressing belief in women's rights and in education, he undermines those beliefs by casting doubts, drawing such narrow limits that in the end both his target and his commitment appear uncertain and begin to recede from view. Curiously, then, the essay begun in paradox also ends in paradox—hardly a clear pedagogical device—and, while condemning the lesson of futility taught to women in the constrictive social contract, Laclos is caught up in his own constrictive tendencies and comes close to propagating the very lessons he has sought to discredit. Ultimately, the primer he offers women is not only disappointing but also destructive and debilitating, for it re-enacts the very paradigm of slavery it set out to destroy.

Notes

1. For instance, Georges Poisson, in a 1985 biography of Laclos (the first since Emile Dard's 1936 version and based on new archival materials Poisson uncovered), calls him ‘le premier écrivain féministe de notre littérature,’ saying Les Liaisons dangereuses represents a ‘roman féministe, et même d’un féminisme agressif.’ Choderlos de Laclos ou l’obstination (Paris: Grasset 1985), 131.

2. Jean-Marie Goulemot speaks of a misogynist mentality underlying Les Liaisons dangereuses which he sees as defining the basic ethic of social and sexual interactions in the novel. ‘Le lecteur-voyeur et la mise en scène de l’imaginaire viril,’ Laclos et le libertinage, 1782-1982 (Paris: Presses Universitaires 1983), 163-75.

3. Using Madame Riccoboni's correspondence with Laclos, in which she protests against the image of womanhood presented in his novel, Madelyn Gutwirth writes that Laclos's sympathy for females, even in Les Liaisons dangereuses, is mottled with ambivalence and that the final effect of the novel is belittling to women. Gutwirth asserts that the emotional Tendenz, if not the intent, of Laclos's novel is to lament women's sexual fate, but to put her ‘back in her proper sphere.’ ‘Laclos and Le Sexe: The Rack of Ambivalence,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (189), 247-96.

4. In The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press 1980), Nancy K. Miller deals with female characters created by male writers whom she accuses of inscribing female destiny exclusively as sexual vulnerability. In what she calls the heroine's text, written by men, the rule of the female experience is the drama of a single misstep. In her reading of male writing, all female characters—Madame de Merteuil no less than Madame de Tourvel—will go from ‘all’ in this world to ‘nothing,’ sacrificed to a masculine idea and ideal. Miller's final assessment is that the commonplaces of culture do not provide women with any plots other than those that arise from the erotic or the familial. Taking an opposite stand is Geoffrey Wagner, who wishes to show that imagination can rise above sex and that the male writer can bear true testimony to the feminine experience. In support of this view he asks if one has to have murdered to be able to imagine what the experience might be like. Five for Freedom: A Study of Feminism in Fiction (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press 1973).

5. For a recent history of the education of females in the eighteenth century see Martine Sonnet, L’Education des filles au temps des Lumières (Paris: Editions du CERF 1987).

6. Laurent Versini, Laclos et la tradition: Essai sur les sources et la technique des ‘Liaisons dangereuses’ (Paris: Klincksieck 1968), 202.

7. He says this specifically in an important chapter, ‘Des Premier Effets de la société,’ in the second essay, when he observes, ‘on est tenté de croire qu’elles n’ont que cédé, et non pas consenti au contrat social, qu’elles ont été primitivement subjuguées, et que l’homme a sur elles un droit de conquête dont il use rigoureusement’ (434). All references to Laclos's writings are from Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard 1951).

8. Paul Hoffmann has described the type of revolt found in the eighteenth-century novel as a sort of moral and ‘spiritual feminism,’ in which there is a filiation between feminism and stoicism, and woman becomes ‘l’unique témoin de sa propre excellence’ (‘Sur le thème de la révolte dans quelques romans du XVIIIe siècle français,’ Romanische Forschungen, 99 [1987], 19-34). It would appear that this is the character of Laclosian feminism as well.

9. Since Laclos's military career was as a defence strategist, it is natural that critics should seek to uncover the presence of such a dimension in his other writing. Joan De Jean, for instance, deals with what has been called ‘fortress logic’ as it is manifested in both the novel and the essays, and suggests that Laclos believed military strategy could be reduced to defensive strategy (Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984], 201). There is, moreover, she feels, a defensive strategy that permeates Laclos's thinking and that posits an essential collusion between pedagogy and defensiveness. I would like to suggest that this is particularly true and appropriate with regard to his thinking about women, to whom the lessons of ‘De l’Education’ are destined.

10. For instance, in a recent book, Sex and the Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge University Press 1984), Rita Goldberg describes the essays as ‘a passionate treatise … urging women to take up the struggle for their own equality and freedom’ (5). This is a conclusion, I submit, that can be reached only if one takes Laclos's line about revolution out of context and does not consider the extent to which his thinking remains fundamentally ambivalent.

11. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1986), 17. Meese recognizes as valid the argument of those who believe that equality is situated in sameness, but also observes that newer critical approaches have caused many feminists to rethink the question of sameness and difference, realizing that valuing difference has the additional benefit of bringing the feminist critic closer to the mainstream of critical debate. While eschewing such a politically opportunistic stance herself, Meese argues for a new politics of positive deconstruction and reconstruction of women, one which emphasizes meaning, difference, and identity, and the valuation of a standard other than that of phallocentrism. Laclos's failure to establish another standard and his acceptance of what is (that is, the phallocentric economy) would disqualify him as a feminist in Meese's eyes.

12. Mythologie de la femme dans l’ancienne France (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1983). See especially the chapter ‘Les Mythes dépoussièrés des Lumières,’ 148-73. Darnon judges harshly Laclos's essays, about which he says, ‘l’ennui se substitue au génie … et l’opposition manichéenne entre la “femme sociale” qui porte le germe de la perversion, et la “femme naturelle,” qui inspire à l’auteur une succession d’envolées apologétiques, n’emporte guère les convictions' (157).

13. The Journal des dames, for instance, published in June 1774 a speech given to the Académie de Dijon the preceding summer, entitled ‘L’Admission de quelques femmes lettrées dans les Académies, proposée comme un moyen d’étendre et de rendre plus utiles les Influences de l’Esprit philosophique,’ in which a Monsieur Saizi of the Académie des Sciences de Dijon underscored the advantages that would accrue to society by improving women's education: ‘L’étude, en élevant leur esprit aux vues de la Philosophie règlera leurs affections, les éclairera sur leurs devoirs de mères & de citoyennes [my italics], leur fera connoître l’importance & les suites effrayantes de leur négligence à les remplir.’ Mention even is made of revolution: ‘Qui pourroit douter que l’admission de quelques femmes lettrées dans les Académies ne soit un moyen de hâter cette révolution qui sera le plus beau des trophées de la Philosophie?’