Description
Book SynopsisIn a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies.
Libertinage was a polysemous term in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, generally translated as “debauchery” or “licentiousness” in English. Davis assesses the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage in the French Atlantic, based on hundreds of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings.
The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impos
Trade Review“A documented and strikingly original investigation of the shifting category of libertines which, far from being exclusively associated with nonstandard or abusive sexual practices, has for several centuries also been associated with the stigmatization of personal, individualist relationships to the law.”—Anne Verjus, director of research at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France
“A lively, ambitious, and provocative book. Bad Subjects raises a host of important questions through a wide geographic and long chronological exploration of libertinism as a plastic concept appropriated in many regions. In centering sexuality as a key subject for imperial politics writ large and small, Davis offers an innovative addition to our understanding of the first French empire.”—Julie Hardwick, author of
Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660–1789
