LIBERTINI. — The word l., with the passage of time, has taken on various meanings. Calvin defined as l. the supporters of pantheistic theories who lived in France at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation: this libertine group originated in Lille around 1525 through the work of the tailor Quentin and subsequently of the priest Antonio Pocques, and then spread to Paris; for them there is only one spirit, and God himself, animating human beings, is formally united with their body and is the agent of both good and evil; in 1547 a cordelier of Rouen maintained that man lives in a kind of peace even after committing evil, because that is the will of God, thus proclaiming pre-Quietist theories. Alongside these religious l. there lived l. of a typically political stamp, who acted in Geneva against Calvin’s theocratic government (they were definitively destroyed by Calvin in 1555).
In the seventeenth century, the concept of l. acquired the meaning of freethinkers (v.). In the eighteenth century, l. also designated deists or supporters of religious toleration, and subsequently those who would even today be called l., that is, epicureans in their manner of living (a concept that was, moreover, also present in the seventeenth century). In the eighteenth century, an alliance should be noted between the l. and the honnête homme (the bourgeois) in the defense that both, on an economic level and against evangelical morality, made of every loan at interest.
Libertinism is not merely a way of acting; it also consists in drawing inspiration from a theory—the theory of unbelief and of the desire to free oneself from fear of eternal punishment. In the study of the modern world, the influence of seventeenth-century libertinism is fundamental: all the rationalistic secularism of the eighteenth century and the positivistic secularism of the nineteenth century derive from II.