| My dissertation examines the relationship between utopian and libertine novels in the eighteenth-century through an analysis of Therese philosophe by the Marquis Boyer d'Argens, Candide by Voltaire, and Aline et Valcour by the Marquis de Sade. Although utopian and libertine novels may seem antithetical at first glance, given the fact that the former is concerned with the construction of a morally ideal society and the latter idealizes moral transgression, both genres appear curiously similar insofar as they pursue the same ends and pose the same question: how can individual liberty and happiness be maintained within a given sociopolitical paradigm? Indeed, wary of the concept of the ideal society and its unnecessary constraining of the liberty of the individual, Boyer d'Argens, Voltaire, and Sade instead seek refuge in the literary construct of idealized micro-societies.;Yet, although they thus reject one form of utopia, they nevertheless propose another in its place, the very realizability of which they paradoxically place in doubt. Indeed, the micro-societies these authors proposed all manifest the same crippling sterility, for whether through contraception, repression of sexual desire, or symbolic death, each author abnegated the possibility of reproduction and thus doomed the society to extinction. Yet, although these authors failed in their attempts to reconcile the liberty and happiness of the individual with the exigencies of society, their failure was fraught, for by questioning the moral and philosophical basis of the religious and political institutions of the ancien regime, these authors did much to facilitated the latter's destruction. Indeed, these novels constituted a necessary prelude to the French Revolution, for although the ideas underlying the utopian literary constructs discussed in my dissertation were first espoused in the seventeenth century as demonstrated by authors such as Jonathan Israel and Paul Hazard, the proselytizing of the masses occurred only as a result of their figuration and popularization in eighteenth-century utopian and libertine novels. |
