Volume 2, Number 12 · July 30, 1964
Eighteenth-Century Paris
By John Weightman
Les Nuits de Paris
by Restif de la Bretonne, with an Introduction by Jacques Barzun, translated by Linda Asher, by Eileen Fertig
Random House, 375 pp., $5.95
'Restif de la Bretonne, probably best known as a prolific pornographer…,' says the notice on the cover of this book. If the remark is intended to mean that Restif was, in fact, a prolific pornographer, then for once a blurb is less than fair. Prolific Restif undoubtedly was. He published his first book in 1767, when he was thirty-three, and it is said that his total score, by the time he died in 1806, was 240 volumes. The figure sounds incredible, but he was a printer by trade and, during the second part of his life, seems to have concentrated on printing and publishing his own works—sometimes even composing them directly into print, without going through the process of writing them down before-hand. Of these 240 volumes only a proportion are available in the British Museum and the London Library, but they appear to be sufficiently representative to allow one to rebut the charge that Restif was first and foremost a pornographer. He was something of a mild sex maniac—a foot-fetishist with an incest fixation—which is quite a different matter. He himself claims in the original, uncut version of Les Nuits de Paris that he never wrote a line 'for any other motive than the public good.' Although this assertion is partly eighteenth-century commonplace, his reforming zeal is only too obvious, since he wrote projects for the reorganization of practically everything, from prostitution to spelling. It is true that in all his works the lay sermons alternate with what the French call 'livelier scenes,' but I doubt whether any of these were written deliberately and with mercenary intent. Restif shows all the signs of being a genuinely obsessed writer; his sexiness is no more intentional than Boswell's and, as far as I know, it has never been suggested that Boswell's Journals are pornographic.
Review, 1900 words
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