D'ASCENZO Federica

Laclos embodied all forms of eighteenth-century sociability. He was a Freemason and regular visitor to the clubs and salons of the revolutionary period. Finding his military career unrewarding, he became politically active alongside Philippe d’Orléans and participated in the debates of his time through his writing. His epistolary Les liaisons dangereuses, which was based on Richardson’s Clarissa, was his ‘unique book’. More radical than its English model, it called into question a whole sociability that had descended into libertinism. The work simultaneously marked the pinnacle and dissolution of the epistolary novel, the symbol of sociable exchange.