Les Liaisons dangereuses Reading Order

Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is the most brilliant and most scandalous French novel of the 18th century — the epistolary account of a calculated seduction campaign waged by the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil against two innocents (the convent-educated Cécile de Volanges and the virtuous Présidente de Tourvel), which ends in universal destruction. The novel is famous for its coldness: where Rousseau's Julie makes virtue passionate and Prévost's Manon makes destruction sympathetic, Laclos presents seduction as warfare and treats the emotional devastation of the victims as a competition. The genius of the epistolary form in Laclos's hands is that the reader sees the seduction from the inside — the letters between Valmont and Merteuil that plan and record the campaign — while also seeing its effects through the letters of the victims, who cannot know what the reader knows. This structural irony is the formal equivalent of the libertine perspective: the reader is made complicit in the very manipulation they are watching. The novel provoked immediate scandal (Napoleon kept a copy and said it was the book he most feared falling into women's hands), inspired Dangerous Liaisons (1988 film, Glenn Close and John Malkovich), Cruel Intentions (1999), and dozens of other adaptations.