LACLOS, PIERRE-AMBROISE-FRANÇOIS CHODERLOS DE. - French writer, b. at Amiens on 18 Oct. 1741, d. at Taranto on 5 Sept. 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 the passions as by the perverse intelligence of the protagonists, and which takes up again, in the forms of libertine novels, with bitter lucidity and unscrupulous realism (hence there has been talk of "Machiavellianism"), the power of psychological penetration of the greatest writers of the 17th century.
L. took the epigraph of the Liaisons from their immediate predecessor and (up to a point) model, Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloïse: "I have observed the morals of my time, and I have published these letters." And certainly his work bears the mark of the unconditional exaltation of the spontaneity of impulse carried out by the master of eighteenth-century sensibility: but it is far otherwise distant from the Christian sense of sin, indeed alien to every moral principle, in the pitiless and deadly game in which the characters come to be entangled. For this reason it marks the sharpest break with Christianity, which is nonetheless always present in the great French literature of psychological introspection, from Racine to Rousseau, and it inaugurates the most desperate analyses of the human heart conducted by nineteenth-century literature.
The scandal raised by the Liaisons did not benefit the career of L., a captain of artillery from 1780: in 1788 he resigned. He went over to the following of Philippe d'Orléans, cooperating in his intrigues in the early years of the French Revolution and obtaining in 1792 the rank of colonel. Imprisoned twice in 1793, after 9 Thermidor he returned to service as secretary-general of the administration of mortgages and then as general of artillery in the Army of the Rhine and in the Neapolitan army. He was also the author of occasional poems, of writings on military subjects, and of various memoirs on the events of his time.