Dangerous Liaisons - Stratford Festival

eader’s response, asserts the impossibility that
people of such evil mores could have lived in the
philosophical enlightenment of the current age,
which, as everyone knows, has made all men
honest and all women modest and reserved. This
Swiftian irony, implying that licentiousness and
deceit are, in fact, perennials, flavours a work
destined for controversy. Hampton’s play sets the
action in an autumn and winter in the 1780s. The
direct encounters of characters on stage, in place
of descriptions of actions in letters, intensifies its
here-and-now immediacy.
Happily for Laclos, whose career as an artillery
officer and fortification expert was making no
progress and whose literary work was judged
mediocre, or worse (his comic opera Ernestine, at
whose opening the ill-fated queen Marie Antoinette
was present, was booed off the stage at its sole
performance), his novel was pronounced in the
literary press a “dazzling success.” But other
voices condemned it. One contemporary, although
admiring the artistry, judged it as “very black,
a veritable pack of horrors and infamy.” Simply
reading the novel was, according to several critics,
dangerous for young people. A strikingly contrary
view was expressed by the Bishop of Pavia, who
told Laclos that “the work is very moral and very
good to give to others to read, especially young
women.”
Laclos’s military superiors took an unenthusiastic
view of their comrade’s work. He was recalled to
boring, routine duty. Yet it was probably not only
moral outrage that animated Laclos’s commanders.
More offensive was his pamphlet criticizing the
French military hero and master of fortification,
Vauban. Likewise, during the Revolution, when
Laclos put his literary talents at the service of
a losing faction (that of the Duc D’Orleans) and
was imprisoned on orders from Robespierre and
threatened with the guillotine, his novel was of no
special account. If it was, as some have thought, a
satirical attack on the ancien régime, that conferred
no benefit. His eventual promotion to the rank of
general in Napoleon’s Revolutionary Army probably
resulted from his professional expertise (he
invented a new form of shell used by the navy) and
lengthy service rather than political zeal, although
he wrote an essay justifying continual war on
France’s enemies.
Attempts to understand Laclos and his one
literary masterpiece – especially his relationship to
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