The configuration of love and desire taking place during the early modern period is distancing itself from the dominance of Christian ideas. New literary constructions of a libertine and far more indulgent view of human life are beginning to refute the hegemonic hostility to the passions and the preoccupation of restraint. The paradigm of man as the image of God gives way to a ‘mixtion humaine’ as Michel de Montaigne called it. This idea of the subject as composed by contradictory forces stands out as a crucial step in the history of subjectivity, and the Renaissance philosopher is in many senses the most important precursor to the French moralists and freethinkers during the seventeenth century in their attempts to come to terms with human passions. Refuting every system, preferring to transgress the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and theology, these writers excelled in minor genres such as sentences, maxims, and correspondences. By means of examples taken from Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), Charles de Saint-Evremond (1610-1703), and Ninon de Lenclos (1620-1705), I want to discuss some aspects of their polyvalent ideas about love and desire. The aim is to demonstrate how they articulated their discursive practice at the intersection of Augustinian, rational, and libertine configurations of love and desire, and the implications for the boundaries of gender and sexual identity as well as for the conception of the human subject.

What is a moralist?

To better understand what is at stake in the discussions of love and desire among the three seventeenth-century writers taken into consideration here, it could be illuminating to say something about the very term moraliste, which should not be too promptly equated with the modern signification of a person who promotes morality. Drawing on the etymology, from the Latin origin, moralitas, ‘manner, character, proper behaviour’, one could say that an early modern moralist does not prescribe, but describes and examines the manners and cultural codes of the society, or more exactly, the hidden driving forces of these codes and regulations of manners and proper behaviour. As John M. Conley points out, with a vocabulary that echoes the moralists’ own metaphorical use of anatomy, ‘the moraliste dissected the movements of the human heart: the pretension of virtue, the empire of the will, the contradictory desires’.