LACLOS, PIERRE-AMBROISE-FRANÇOIS CHODER, Chevalier de. — French writer, born in Amiens on 18 March 1741, died at Taranto on 5 September 1803. He owes his fame to the epistolary novel *Les Liaisons dangereuses*, published (anonymously) in Paris in 1782; a dark intrigue dominated not so much by passion as by the perverse intelligence of the protagonists, and which, in the forms of libertine novels, with bitter lucidity and unscrupulous realism (hence the talk of "Machiavellism"), reprises the psychological penetration of the major writers of the 17th century.
L. took the epigraph of *Les Liaisons* from its immediate predecessor and (up to a point) model, Rousseau’s *La nouvelle Héloïse*: “I have observed the customs of my time, and 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 18th-century sensibility; but it is far removed from the Christian sense of sin, indeed alien to any moral principle, in the merciless and deadly game in which the characters become entangled. For this reason, it marks the sharpest break with Christianity, which is nonetheless ever-present in the great French literature of psychological introspection, from Racine to Rousseau, and inaugurates the most desperate analyses of the human heart conducted by 19th-century literature.
The scandal aroused by *Les Liaisons* did not benefit L.’s career, who from 1780 had been a captain of artillery; in 1788 he resigned. He then attached himself to Philippe d’Orléans, participating in his intrigues in the early years of the French Revolution and obtaining the rank of colonel in 1792. Imprisoned twice in 1793, after 9 Thermidor he re-entered service as secretary-general of the mortgage administration, and later as artillery general in the Rhine army and in the Neapolitan forces. He was also the author of occasional poems, writings on military subjects, and various memoirs on the events of his time.