Professeure en littérature française
Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara
Research expertise
Littérature française des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles
Contributions
People
Pierre-Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos
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.