Libertines

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Since it seems that so few people really know much about even the defenition of a Libertine nowadays, I shall post a tread enlightening people on the subject, haveing a few of the most famous libertines, books, litrature, and so on. Enjoy.  

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Libertine

Libertine has come to mean one devoided of any restraints, especially one who ignores or even spurn religious norms, accepted morals, and forms of behavior sanctioned by the larger society.

The philosophy gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century, especially in France and Britain.
Notable among these were John Wilmot and Marquis de Sade.

'Libertine' is today defined as "a dissolute person; usualy a person whom is moraly unrestrained."  

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Marquis de Sade

Movie: Quills

The most infamous writer in the history of French literature, who occasionally has been hailed as "the freest spirit who has ever existed." Marquis de Sade published erotic writings, that gave rise to the term sadism - enjoyment of cruelty, which first made it into a dictionary in 1834. His works have been seen as exploration of sexual and political freedom. In his 'Idées sur les romans' (1800) de Sade writes that the essence of novelistic representation lies in the writer's incestuous relationship with nature. To be true to this relationship is to eschew all limitations, and exceed the bounds of convention and knowledge.

"But if there seems little reason for literary people to concern themselves with Sade, he has found a new lease of life among philosophers and anthropologists. Bored and uneasy with our little lives we resort to the greater amplitude of symbols. Bardot, Byron, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle." (D.J. Enright in 'The Marquis and the Madame', in Conspirators and Poets, 1966)

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was born in Paris into an aristocratic family. He was the only surviving child of Jean-Baptiste de Sade and his wife Marie-Eléonore de Maillé, a distant cousin of the Prince de Conde. His family had been ennobled in the 12th century and remained a major power-broker in the southern region of Provence. "Connected, through my mother, to all the greatest powers in the kingdom and, through my father, the most distinguished families of the provenance of Languedoc; born in Paris in the bosom of luxury and plenty, I believed, from the very first moment I could reason, that nature and fortune had collaborated to lavish me with their gifts; I believed it because people were foolish enough to tell me so, and this ridiculous prejudice made me haughty, despotic, and choleric..." (from Aline et Valcour, 1795)

Aged four, de Sade was sent to Avignon into the care of his uncle, Abbe de Sade, whose sexual life was notoriously irregular. After this period de Sade attended the Jesuit college of Louis Le Grand. From the age of 14 to 26 de Sade was in active military service, and participated in the Seven Years War. He married in 1763 Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the daughter of a high-ranking bourgeois family, but also began an affair with an actress and invited prostitutes to his house.

In 1768 de Sade held a prostitute called Rose Keller captive and abused her. The chief of the Paris vice squad warned brothels of de Sade - he was considered a mortal threat to prostitutes. In the following years de Sade was found guilty of all kinds of sexual crimes, and he managed to anger Mme. de Montreuil, his mother-in-law by seducting her younger daughter, Anne-Prospre, when she was visiting his medieval fortress at La Coste in Provence. The unabated de Sade had again an orgy, but probably he never killed anyone, except in the war.

At Aix in 1772 de Sade received the penalty of death for an unnatural crime and poisoning, but escaped to Italy with his valet Latour. After arrest he was excluded from Paris and sent to his wife's family home in Normandy. At La Coste de Sade continued to arrange orgies from 1773 to 1777 - he had hired a harem of young girls as sexual slaves. After continuous scandals and charges de Sade was arrested and sent to round tour of 27 years in prisons, which started in the dungeon of Vincennes on February 13, 1777. Probably his imprisonment had been arranged by Mme. de Montreuil, whom he remembered in his writings: "Oh, powers from Hell, grant me Nero's wish, that all women have but one head and that this head belong to the shrew who tyrannizes me; then grant me the pleasure of chopping it off!" At Vicennes he was sometimes fed through the bars of his cage, but he also wanted to keep up some standards and wrote in a letter: "Send me a little prune-colored redingote, with suede vest and trousers, something fresh and light but most specifically not made out of linen; as for the other costume, make it Paris Mud in hue with a few silver trimmings, but definitely not silver braid." To overcome boredom he started to write sexually graphic novels and plays.

After escape de Sade was transferred in 1784 to Bastille in Paris, where he had a large room, sixteen feet in diameter. In the new surroundings the hard-working prisoner wrote LES 120 JOURNÉES DE SODOME, an underground classic over a hundred years. He was released from insane asylum at Charenton on April 2, 1790. Renée-Pélagie obtained a divorce. Next year, at the age of 51, de Sade published JUSTINE (1791). In the sequel, JULIETTE (1797), the heroine was Justine's sister, who enjoys the delights of evil: "How delicious are these implements of torture, of the crime that we love." de Sade boldly addressed a copy of the novel to Napoleon in 1803. Napoleon refused to set de Sade free. Juliette, which consisted of six volumes, was the second part of the monumental LA NOUVELLE JUSTINE (1797), nearly four thousand pages long Gospel of Evil, which manifested that vice - or the pleasures of imagination - cannot be punished by imprisonment. - See also Voltaire's Candide (1759), Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Comte de Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1869).

Justine, de Sade's most famous work, depicts graphically sexual encounters of a poor young girl. de Sade wrote an early version of the novel in the Bastille and completed it in 1791 while free. In de Sade's philosophy God is evil and the misfortunes suffered by Justine are a result from denying this truth. de Sade himself declared Justine a work "capable of corrupting the devil" and denied his authorship. According to D.J. Enright, de Sade's philosophy was very simple: "if you enjoy wickedness, it shows that Nature intended you to be wicked, and it would be wicked not to be." Some 19th-century writers were inspired by de Sade's belief that people should act on their instincts. "Irrités de ce premier crime, les monstres ne s'en tinrent pas là; ils l'étendirent ensuite nue, à plat ventre sur une grande table, ils allumèrent des cierges, ils placèrent l'image de notre sauveur à sa tête et osèrent consommer sur les reins de cette malheureuse le plus redoutable de nos mystères." (from Les Infortunes de la Vertu, 1787)

Somehow de Sade survived through the years of the French Revolution, although many other aristocrats were executed and his name was in 1794 on a list of prisoners to be brought to trial. To secure his freedom and property he wrote an eulogy of Marat, and got elected secretary of his district in Paris. In 1801 he was again arrested and sent to Charenton, where he began to work a 10-volume novel, Crimes of Passion. During this period he also wrote and staged plays in the asylum, although Minister of the Interior issued the order, that the "greatest care [must] be taken to prevent any use by him [Sade] of pencils, pens, ink, or paper." His last days de Sade spent under the control of an ex-abbé. After his death on December 2, 1814, his elder son burned his last and other manuscripts. de Sade's grave was later desecrated when his skull was taken for pseudo-scientific measurements.

Although de Sade wrote many plays, they have remained largely unpublished and unproduced. However, the Marquis has securured his literary immortality. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed that the writing of de Sade would dominate the 20th-century. de Sade's work has prompted pornographic literature, academic studies, and films, including Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and Philip Kaufman's Quills (2000), starring Kate Winslet, Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, and Michael Caine. The film was based Doug Wright's play from 1995.  

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John Wilmot

Movie: The Libertine

JOHN WILMOT, 2ND EARL OF ROCHESTER,
English poet and wit, was the son of Henry Wilmot, 1st Earl (c.1612-165 cool . Having fought against the Scots at Newburn and been imprisoned and expelled from the House of Commons for plotting in the interests of the King in 1641, Henry Wilmot served Charles I well during the Civil War, being responsible for the defeats of Sir William Waller at Roundway Down in July 1643 and at Cropredy Bridge in June 1644. In 1643 he was created Baron Wilmot of Adderbury. Wilmot was on bad terms with some of the king's friends and advisers, including Prince Rupert, and in 1644 he is reported to have said that Charles was afraid of peace and to have advised his supercession by his son, the Prince of Wales. Consequently he was deprived of his command, and after a short imprisonment was allowed to cross over to France. He was greatly trusted by King Charles II, whose defeat at Worcester and subsequent wanderings he shared, and during this king's exile he was one of his principal advisers, being created by him earl of Rochester in 1652. In the interests of Charles he visited the emperor Ferdinand III, the Duke of Lorraine, and the elector of Brandenburg, and in March 1655 he was in England, where he led a feeble attempt at a rising on Marston Moor, near York; on its failure he fled the country.

Born at Ditchley in Oxfordshire on the 10th of April 1647, John Wilmot, who succeeded his father as 2nd earl in 1658, was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, and in 1661, although he was only fourteen years of age, received the degree of M.A. On leaving Oxford he travelled in France and Italy with a tutor who encouraged his love of literature, and moreover advocated principles of temperance which, however, bore little fruit. He returned in 1664, and at once made his way to Charles II's court, where his youth, good looks and wit assured him of a welcome. In 1665 he joined the fleet serving against the Dutch as a volunteer, and in the following year distinguished himself by carrying a message in an open boat under fire. This reputation for courage was afterwards lost in private quarrels in which he seems to have shirked danger. He became gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles II, and was the confidant of his various exploits. According to Anthony Hamilton, banishment from court for lampooning the king or his mistresses was with Rochester an almost annual occurrence, but his disgrace was never of long duration. Charles seems to have found his company too congenial to be long dispensed with, and Pepys says that all serious men were disgusted by the complaisance with which he passed over Rochester's insolence (Diary, 57th Feb. 1669). In order to restore his rapidly vanishing fortune he became a suitor to Elizabeth Malet. In spite of the king's support of Rochester's suit, Miss Malet refused to marry the earl, who thereupon had her seized (1665) from her uncle's coach. Rochester was pursued, and Charles, who was very angry, sent him to the Tower. Miss Malet, however, married him in 1667.

Not content with making or unmaking the reputation of the maids of honour and the courtiers by his squibs and songs, Rochester aspired to be a patron of poetry and an arbiter of taste, but he was vain and capricious, tolerating no rivals in his capacity of patron. Dryden dedicated to him his Marriage-ala-Mode (1672) in a preface full of effusive flattery, at the close of which, however, occurs a passage that may be taken to indicate that he already had misgivings. "Your lordship has but another step to make," he says, "and from the patron of wit, you may become its tyrant; and oppress our little reputations with more ease than you now protect them." Dryden had another patron in Lord Mulgrave (afterwards duke of Buckingham and Normandy), to whom he dedicated (1675) Aurengzebe. Mulgrave had engaged in a duel with Rochester, who had refused to fight at the last minute on the ground of ill-health. Mulgrave allowed this story to spread, and Rochester, who apparently thought him too dangerous an opponent, revenged himself on Dryden as Mulgrave's protégé by setting up as his rivals, first Elkanah Settle, and then John Crowne. By his influence Settle's Emperor of Morocco was played at Whitehall, and Crowne was employed, in direct infringement of Dryden's province as laureate, to write a masque for the court. Both these poets were discarded in turn for Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway. In 1679 Mulgrave began to circulate his Essay on Satire in which Rochester was singled out for severe criticism.

Rochester chose to pretend that this was Dryden's work, not Mulgrave's, and by his orders a band of roughs set on the poet in Rose Alley, Covent Garden, and beat him. He obviously felt no shame for this infamous attack, for in his "Imitation of the First Satire of Juvenal" he says, "Who'd be a wit in Dryden's cudgelled skin?" His health was already undermined, and in the spring of 1680 he retired to High Lodge, Woodstock Park. He began to show signs of a more serious temper, and at his own request was visited (July 10th to July 24th) by Bishop Burnet, who attested the sincerity of his repentance. He died, however, two days after the bishop left him. When his son Charles, the 3rd earl, died on the 12th of November 1681, his titles became extinct. As a poet Rochester was a follower of Abraham Cowley and of Boileau, to both of whom he was considerably indebted. His love lyrics are often happy, but his real vigour and ability is best shown in his critical poems and satires. The political satires are notable for their fierce exposure of Charles II's weakness, his ingratitude, and the slavery in which he was held by his mistresses. They show that Rochester had it in him to be a very different man from the criticizing courtier and the "very profane wit" who figures in contemporary memoirs.  

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Movie Sugestions

Quills -A movie of Marquis de Sade.
The Libertine -The life of John Wilmot.
Caligula -Roman orgies.
A Dirty Shame -Sexoholics takeing over the world.
Ai no Kusabi -Anime. A city without morals.
Rocky Horror Picture Show -Sexy horror musical.

 

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Book Sugestions

Philosophy in the Bedroom by Marquis de Sade
Justine by Marquis de Sade
120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade
She Done Him Wrong by Mae west
Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practises by Brenda Love
The Satanic Witch by Anton Szandor LaVey
The Vampire Lestat by Ann Rice

Manga Sugestions

Count Kain by Kaori Yuki
The Kain Saga by Kaori Yuki
Angel Sanctuary by Kaori Yuki
Boys Next Door by Kaori Yuki
Doll by Aoike Yasuko
From Eroica With Love Mitsukazu Mihara