This research examines the motivations driving the characters of Mme. Tourvel and Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos. The plan of the research will be to set Tourvel's emotive force in the context of the novel as a whole and then to discuss, with reference to selected letters attributed to Tourvel in this epistolary novel, how Tourvel's thoughts, feelings, and desires manifest the social dynamics of the privileged classes of pre-Revolutionary 18th-century France.
It is impossible to appreciate the motives of characters in Les Liaisons Dangereuses without a sense of the social and cultural context in which the novel is embedded. A major feature of that context is social stratification. Valmont's status as an aristocrat is to be contrasted to Tourvel's status as a bourgeoise matron. Despite the nascent sophistication of the bourgeoisie, there is a divide between bourgeois and aristocrat that inevitably privileges the latter. Tourvel embodies the vulnerability of the former.
The broader context of late 18th-century France must also be taken into account. As of 1782, when Liaisons Dangereuses was published, the Enlightenment was at its height, displacing the gap in philosophical discourse left by the devolution of theological disputation land Europe's religious wars and sharply interrogating established social and moral structures. It would be an overstatement to say that Liaisons Dangereuses anticipated the French Revolution or that it incorporated Enlightenment philosophy, but it does reflect the fact that moving beyond the concerns of faith had by no means settled moral, ethical, social, or material experience. Laclos seems to have been completely aware of the social instability wrought by the interpenetration of bourgeois and aristocrat. In #5, for example, Merteuil playfully scolds Valmont for even considering a seduction of Tourvel:
You, have that judge's wife? You, Vicomte de Valmont in person? . . . Don't you fe...