D'ASCENZO Federica

Profitant du phénomène éditorial que sont les secrétaires, liée aussi bien à la société de la conversation, dont la lettre est un prolongement et un succédané, qu’à la vogue des correspondances célèbres qui consacrent la lettre comme ‘petit genre’, la littérature épistolaire foisonne au XVIIIe siècle. Le roman par lettres, expression directe de la sociabilité de l’époque et d’une société dont il est le miroir, porte en lui l’esprit et l’évolution d’un siècle protéiforme qui construit les bases de la modernité à venir.

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.