THE LAST LIBERTINES

Wide-ranging history of a doomed generation of French aristocrats whose world would come to an end with the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

Craveri, an Italian professor of French literature, opens with Saint-Beuve’s famous observation, “It is always a beautiful thing to be twenty years old.” So it is, she allows, but especially for the young generation that came up around the time of the reign of Louis XVI. Some brilliant and some merely rich idlers, the seven historical figures she portrays as representative of their class had not just wealth and nobility at their command; they also took note, to varying degrees, of the Enlightenment ideals that were springing up around them. Four of her subjects were counts, two dukes, one a mere “chevalier,” but all understood, by Craveri’s account, that the meritocratic ideal of thinkers like Diderot mattered less than the accident of their birth. Some of the author’s characters hitched their fortunes to the star that was Marie Antoinette, the “ravishing, frivolous queen.” But then, the nobility as a whole tended toward the frivolous, given to intensely public displays of consumption, campaigns of gaining royal favor, court intrigues, and the usual affairs, all expressions of what the author calls “classical libertinism.” (She adds that the habit of the extramarital affair “played the role of corrective for a matrimonial institution indifferent to the wishes of its contracting parties.”) Craveri’s narrative is long, winding, and leisurely, as the author takes her time getting to the French Revolution and the arrival of the guillotine, which took some—but not all—of the aristocrats off the stage. Indeed, there’s a hint of Balzac to the prose, which has some nice moments, as when she writes of one social climber, “Julie was too proud to submit to the logic of caste that relegated her to the margins of society.”

For fans of Laclos and De Staël, an overstuffed portrait of a long-gone era.