This research examines the themes of social, sexual, religious, and political freedom in Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The research will set forth the cultural context in which the novel first appeared and link that context to the shape of the pattern of ideas about freedom and the means by which they are articulated in the text.
The fact that Les Liaisons Dangereuses was published in 1782, seven years before the French Revolution and in the waning years of the American Revolution, and in the midst of the philosophical flowering of the Enlightenment, seems significant for themes of freedom that come out in the text. Relativism, indeterminism, and skepticism mark the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and it is important to recognize that they occur so dramatically because they represented a challenge to the cultural residue of absolutist monarchy and moral authoritarianism backed up by the rigidity of Church doctrine. To be sure, France was to represent a last bastion of absolute monarchy; however, the momentum was on the side of increasing personal agency and enlarging the scope of human behavior. What Wilson refers to as the "new sociology and the new social science--if they can be dignified at this early period with such positive names . . . depended upon a view of man and society that of course differed from the traditional and authoritarian one" (Wilson 202). The subtext of the statement that opens Rousseau's On the Social Contract--"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (Rousseau 85)--is opposition to the tyranny of absolute givens. Mankind, on this view, is better understood as a self-creation than as a vehicle of salvation or damnation. The epistolary structure of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a series of self-presentations and self-creations that very much ignore soteriological consequences. The culture has moved beyond the concerns of faith.
The thematic content of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is sex, or more e...