LIBERTINES. - The word L., with the passage of time, has become charged with various meanings. Calvin called Libertines the supporters of pantheistic theories who lived in France at the beginning of the Protestant Revolution: this libertine group began in Lille, around 1525, through the tailor Quentin and then the priest Antonio Pocques, and then spread to Paris; for these there exists only one spirit, and God himself, the animator of men, is formally united to 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 having committed evil, because that is the will of God, thus announcing pre-Quietist theories. Alongside these religious Libertines there lived Libertines of a typically political stamp, who worked in Geneva against Calvin's theocratic government (they were definitively destroyed by Calvin in 1555).
With the 17th century the concept of Libertine takes on the meaning of free thinkers (v.). In the 18th century the term Libertines also designates Deists or the supporters of religious toleration, and then those who would even today be called Libertines, that is, the Epicureans of life (a concept which is, moreover, also present in the 17th century). In the 18th century an alliance should be noted between the Libertine and the honnête homme (the bourgeois) in the defense that both make, on an economic plane, against evangelical morality, of every loan at interest.
Libertinism is not only a way of acting, but is also an inspiration to a theory, the theory of unbelief and of the will to free oneself from the fear of eternal punishment. In the study of the modern world the influence of 17th-century libertinism is fundamental: all the rationalistic laicism of the 18th century and the positivistic laicism of the 19th century come from there.
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Massimo Petecchi