The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel by Pierre Saint-Amand, Jennifer Curtiss Gage

Saint-Amand, Pierre. The Libertine’s Progress: Seduction in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel. Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Hanover and London: Brown University Press, 1994. Pp. 166.

This short, provocative, and clearly written book succeeds in putting the sinister back into seduction by delving beyond the gallantry and honor of eighteenth-century libertinism to uncover what Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction does not adequately apprehend: seduction’s diabolical “archaic core”(3). Through informal readings of Mrivaux, Prévost, Diderot, Crébillon, Laclos, Sade, and Goethe, Saint-Amand shows how the coquette is the “modern reconstruction of the sorceress”(5) — a Medusa, Siren, Delilah or Venus, and how the seducer is the Devil himself but with “a modern face and worldly tastes” (5). This is the superstitious or dark side of the Enlightenment, the side still consumed by fears of possession and damnation. By illuminating it as he does, Saint-Amand provides a fresh and sometimes frightening perspective on eighteenth-century amorous relations.