Libertine Enlightenment

Libertine Enlightenment

Also by Peter Cryle LA CRISE DU PLAISIR, 1740 1830 GEOMETRY IN THE BOUDOIR: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative THE TELLING OF THE ACT: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Libertine Enlightenment Sex Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century Edited by Peter Cryle Director, Centre for the History of European Discourses University of Queensland and Lisa O Connell School of English, Media Studies and Art History University of Queensland

Editorial matter, selection, Peter Cryle and Lisa O Connell 2003 Chapter 2 Éditions Denoël 2003; all remaining material Palgrave Macmillan Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4039-1763-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51350-5 DOI 10.1057/9780230522817 ISBN 978-0-230-52281-7 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Libertine enlightenment: sex, liberty, and licence in the eighteenth-century / edited by Peter Cryle and Lisa O Connell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Europe Moral conditions History 18th century. 2. Sex customs Europe History 18th century. 3. Libertinism Europe History 18th century. 4. Dissenters Europe History 18th century. 5. Europe Intellectual life History 18th century. 6. Libertinism in literature. I. Title: Sex, liberty, and licence in the eighteenth-century. II. Cryle, P.M. (Peter Maxwell), 1946 III. O Connell, Lisa, 1965 HN380.Z9M65 2003 306. 094 09033 dc21 2003053608 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors vii viii ix Sex, Liberty and Licence in the Eighteenth Century 1 Part I Disquieting Theories 1 Taking Liberties: Sterne, Wilkes and Warburton 15 Simon During 2 Casanova: Inscriptions of Forgetting 34 Chantal Thomas 3 Codified Indulgence: The Niceties of Libertine Ethics 48 in Casanova and His Contemporaries Peter Cryle 4 Kant, Sade and the Libertine Enlightenment 61 Alan Corkhill 5 Philosophical Liberty, Sexual Licence: The Ambiguity 75 of Voltaire s Libertinage Serge Rivière Part II Improper Women 6 The Female Rake: Gender, Libertinism and Enlightenment 93 Kathleen Wilson 7 The Making of a Libertine Queen: Jeanne de La Motte 112 and Marie-Antoinette Iain McCalman 8 Secrecy and Enlightenment: Delarivier Manley s New Atalantis 145 Nicola Parsons 9 Authorship and Libertine Celebrity: Harriette Wilson s 161 Regency Memoirs Lisa O Connell v

vi Contents Part III Spurious Practices 10 Libertines and Radicals in the 1790s: The Strange Case 183 of Charles Pigott I Jonathan Mee 11 James Graham as Spiritual Libertine 204 Peter Otto 12 The Mysteries of Imposture: Count Cagliostro s 221 Literary Legacy in German Romanticism Christa Knellwolf 13 Children of the Midnight Mass 236 Patrick Wald Lasowski Index 248

List of Figures Jacket William Hogarth, John Wilkes, Esq., 1763 (reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London). Figure 1 William Hogarth, John Wilkes, Esq., 1763 19 (reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London). Figure 2 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Laurence Sterne, 1760 20 (reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London). Figure 3 Jeanne St Remy de Valois de La Motte from 117 D. Lysons, Historical Account of the Environs of London, 1795 1811 Vol. III (opp. p. 306) (reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California). Figure 4 Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sarah Jennings, Dutchess of 151 Marlborough, 1705 (reproduced by permission of The National Trust). Figure 5 H. H. [Heath], La Coterie Debouché, 1825 176 (reproduced by permission of the British Museum). Figure 6 Soulagement en prison; or Comfort in prison, 196 1793 (reproduced by permission of the British Museum). Figure 7 Count Cagliostro from W.R.H. Trowbridge, 223 Cagliostro: The Splendour and Misery of a Master of Magic, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1910, frontispiece (courtesy of Iain McCalman). vii

Acknowledgements This book has its origins in a conference held at the University of Queensland in 2001. Financial support for that event was provided by the University s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, under the leadership of Graeme Turner. Administrative support of a sustained and continually inventive kind was provided by Andrea Mitchell, with the aid of Diana Jones and Marguerite Nolan. Contributions to funding were also made by the Humanities Research Centre (Australian National University) and by the French Ministry of Culture. Michelle Poole, of the University of Queensland, assisted us with the cover image. Matthew Bailey, of the National Portrait Gallery, Jean-Robert Durbin of the Huntington Library, Elisabeth Stacey, of the National Trust Photographic Library, Nicki Athanassi of Editions Denoël and Ivor Kerslake and Jenny Ramkalawon, both of the British Museum, kindly facilitated the business of obtaining illustrations and translations. Finally, the preparation of what we still fondly call the manuscript owes a lot to our research assistants: Catriona Mills, Phoebe Ling and the wonderful Amanda Lynch. viii

Notes on the Contributors Alan Corkhill is a senior lecturer in German Studies in the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He is Australasian editor of the German literary periodical Seminar and serves on the editorial panel of AUMLA. He is the sole author of four books, the most recent of which interrogates happiness discourses in the German novel from 1766 to 1809 (Röhrig Universitätsverlag, Saarbrücken, 2003). Peter Cryle is the director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He works on the history of erotic narrative in French. His publications include Geometry in the Boudoir (Cornell University Press, 1994); The Telling of the Act (University of Delaware Press, 2001); and La Crise du plaisir (Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003). Simon During teaches in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Harvard University Press, 2002); Foucault and Literature (Routledge, 1992); and Patrick White (Oxford University Press, 1996); and editor of The Cultural Studies Reader (1995, 2000). Christa Knellwolf is based at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is the author of A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (Manchester University Press, 1998); an editor of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 9 (2001), and editor of two journal issues drawn from the XIth David Nichol Smith Conference on the Exotic in the Eighteenth Century: a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (2002) and of Signatures 5 (2002/3). Iain McCalman is Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a specialist in eigtheenth-century British and European history and has a particular interest in the history of popular culture and low life. His recent publications include the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999) and the jointly edited Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2001). His forthcoming works include The Last ix

x Notes on the Contributors Alchemist: The Seven Extraordinary Lives of Count Cagliostro, Eighteenth- Century Enchanter (HarperCollins, Random House). He is editor of Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, (Oxford University Press, 2003); and general editor of The Enlightenment World (Routledge, 2003). Jonathan Mee is Margaret Candfield Fellow in English at University College, Oxford. His publications include Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Clarendon, 1992). He was one of the editors of the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999). He has published essays on many aspects of the Romantic period and also writes on contemporary Indian writing in English. Lisa O Connell is a lecturer in eighteenth-century British literature and culture in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She has published articles on the links between marriage practices and the theatre, recreational tourism, the novel and popular ethnography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter Otto teaches courses on Romanticism, Gothic Fiction and Romanticism and Modernity in the English Department at the University of Melbourne. His current research project, The Romantic Imagination and its Doubles, focuses on three social movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Romanticism, Mesmerism and Millenarianism. He has co-edited two collections of articles on Romanticism, and authored two books on William Blake: Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction (Oxford University Press, 1991) and Blake s Critique of Transcendence (Oxford University Press, 2000). Gothic Fictions: A Microfilm Collection of Primary Texts, which he edited with Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Alison Milbank, and an accompanying monograph, are forthcoming from Adam Matthews Publications. Nicola Parsons is completing her doctorate with the Department of English with Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis, (En)Gendering the Public Sphere: Literature, Scandal and the Construction of Political Discourse, examines early eighteenth-century texts that employ tropes of secrecy and disclosure and utilize strategies of gossip as a means of engaging with political issues. Marc Serge Rivière has been Professor of French in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland

Notes on the Contributors xi since 1996. He has published extensively on Voltaire and the eighteenth century and is one of the editors of Voltaire s Historical Works for the Complete Works of Voltaire (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation). His other research has focused on utopian literature of the seventeenth century and French travellers to the Pacific and Australia. Two of his fourteen books are: The Governor s Noble Guest: Hyacinthe de Bougainville s Account of Port Jackson, 1825 (Melbourne, 1999) and The Library of an Enlightened Princess (Berlin Verlag, 2002). Chantal Thomas taught in the United States for several years. She is now Directrice de Recherche at the Conseil National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Lyons. She is the author of Sade, l oeil de la lettre (Payot, 1978); Casanova, un voyage libertin (Denoël, 1985); Don Juan ou Pavlov (Seuil, 1987); La Reine scélérate, Marie-Antoinette dans les pamphlets (Seuil, 1989) (translated as The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, Zone Books, 1999); Thomas Bernhard (Seuil, 1990); Comment supporter sa liberté (Payot, 1998) (translated as Coping with Freedom, Algora, 2002). In addition, she has published a collection of short stories, La Vie réelle des petites filles (Gallimard, 1995) and a novel, Les Adieux à la Reine (Seuil, 2002), which was awarded the Prix Fémina. Patrick Wald Lasowski holds a chair in literature at the Université de Paris 8 (Vincennes-Saint-Denis). He is the author of seven books, including a number of essays on libertinage and galanterie. The most recent of these is Le Traité des mouches secrètes (Gallimard, 2003). He is also the editor of many critical editions, including a collection of eighteenth-century libertine novels in Les Editions de la Pléiade. Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Her books include The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism, 1715 1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), which won prizes from the Royal Historical Society, and the North American Conference on British Studies, and The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge, 2002). She has also edited a collection of essays, The New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity, 1660 1836 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).