Should we abandon the term “libertinism”? Scholarly usage varies so widely that we begin to doubt whether there ever was a single libertine movement or attitude; anachronism, imprecision, and ambiguity further erode our confidence in the term. Nevertheless, because the concept of libertinism is clearly central to a discussion of illicit sexuality in the eighteenth century, we ought to sharpen our sense of what is involved in using it. This essay will explore some of the semantic inconsistencies of both modern and eighteenth-century usage, and then gather materials for the larger question: how can we construct a history of libertinism?

Apart from denoting some combination of irreligion and sexual rampancy, libertinism appears to be a nebulous concept defined by the interests of the individual scholar. The major French and Italian historians of libertinism confine themselves to the first half of the seventeenth century, placing les derniers libertins in the reign of Louis XIV; and their focus is on the defiance of organized religion rather than on illicit sexuality. French dix-huitièmistes, in contrast, normally apply “libertinisme” and “libertinage” to the erotic fiction of the Régence and to the sexual activities of literary characters, notably in Laclos and Sade. The most thorough German study of libertinism confines itself to France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and accords only a small role to literary texts, whereas English scholarship tends to apply the term to literature, frequently narrowing the period to the later seventeenth century.