LACLOS, PIERRE-AMBRISE-FRANÇOIS CHODERLOS de. – French writer, born in Amiens on 18 October 1741, died in Taranto on 5 September 1803. He owes his fame to the epistolary novel Les liaisons dangereuses, published (anonymously) in Paris in 1782: a grim intrigue dominated not so much by passions as by the perverse intelligence of the protagonists, which, adopting the forms of libertine novels, with bitter lucidity and uninhibited realism (hence the reference to “Machiavellianism”), reproduces the psychological penetration of the major writers of the seventeenth century.
L. drew the epigraph of the Liaisons from their immediate predecessor and (to a certain extent) model, Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse: “I have observed the morals of my time, and I have published these letters.” Certainly, his work reflects the unconditional exaltation of the spontaneity of impulse carried out by the master of eighteenth-century sensibility; yet it is far more remote from the Christian sense of sin, indeed foreign to every moral principle, in the pitiless and deadly game in which the characters become entangled. For this reason, it marks the sharpest break with Christianity, which is nevertheless always present in the great French literature of psychological introspection, from Racine to Rousseau, and inaugurates the most desperate analyses of the human heart undertaken by nineteenth-century literature.
The scandal caused by the Liaisons did not benefit L.’s career, as he had been an artillery captain since 1780: in 1788 he resigned. He entered the service of Philippe d’Orléans, cooperating in his intrigues during the first years of the French Revolution and attaining the rank of colonel in 1792. Imprisoned twice in 1793, after 9 Thermidor he returned to service as secretary-general of the administration of mortgages and then as an artillery general in the Army of the Rhine and in the Neapolitan army. He also authored occasional poems, writings on military subjects, and various memoirs on the events of his time.