Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme (or Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne) (1734-1806). Author of novels, short stories, diary-documentaries, philosophical treatises and Utopian legislative tracts, and a major 16-volume autobiography, Monsieur Nicolas, ou le Cœur humain dévoilé (1794-7). Historiographer of the Parisian streets and their public during the Revolution (Les Nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur nocturne, 1788-94) and obsessive chronicler of his own private sexual fantasies, Restif is a writer unique and innovatory in his perspectives and style. He cuts across all the categories of the classical canon and closes the gap between the psychological novel of the 18th c. and the social realism of the 19th.
The historian Le Roy Ladurie has tellingly characterized Restif as the type of the many young men of well-to-do peasant families who came to Paris in the pre-Revolutionary period to seek their fortune (see Monsieur Nicolas, and the novels Le Paysan perverti, 1775, La Paysanne pervertie, 1784). Their experiences at the bottom of the urban pyramid (in Restif's case, as a printing-shop apprentice) stirred in them a revolutionary fervour that coexisted with a nostalgic longing for the security of the patriarchal hierarchy back home. This group, eager for reform but afraid of changes that might threaten their own precarious status, constitutes a major section of the new middle ground in which revolutionary politics, codified by Napoleon in 1804, eventually stabilized.
Much of Restif's writing focuses on the organization of sexuality and the family which he (like the Napoleonic Code) sees as fundamental to the proper organization of the state. The classification and regimentation of women in their social and sexual functions—daughter, spinster, wife, mother, whore—are the subject-matter of the observations and anecdotes and the vivid and vigorous dialogue in Les Contemporaines (1780-6), Les Françaises (1786), and Le Palais-Royal (1790). These put flesh on the bones of the legislative proposals in Le Pornographe (1769), which advocates state-run brothels to cement social stability, or in Le Thesmographe (1789), which sketches new laws on property, marriage, and divorce. Marriage as a bar to sexual freedom is the theme of the novels La Femme infidèle (1786), based on Restif's own unhappy marriage, and Ingénue Saxancour (written 1786, published 1789), a graphic fictionalization of his daughter's struggles to leave a violent and vicious husband. The latter is an interesting text to read in conjunction with the incestfantasies of Restif's pornographic L'Anti-Justine, ou les Délices de l'amour (1798), which he presents as a more acceptable version of Sade's text.
— Jennifer Birkett
Bibliography
- M. Poster, The Utopian Thought of Restif de la Bretonne (1971)
