Libertinage et feminisme dans les lettres du colonel talbert de francoise-albine puzin de la martiniere benoist

In 1767, Mme Benoist published an epistolary libertine novel entitled Lettres du
Colonel Talbert. Although she has received little critical attention to date, she was a
prolific author who appeared with great regularity at minor literary salons. Her presence
at these salons is well-established in personal memoirs and correspondences, and actively
remarked upon by other authors—men and women—of the period, including Mme
Roland and Choderlos de Laclos. Mme Benoist’s preferred genre was the novel with its
explicit blend of high and low literary cultures, its melding of the philosophical and the
sentimental, its pursuit of formal innovation, and its deliberate marketing in multiple
formats and for multiple audiences, including publication through the mainstream book
market, and serial publication in revues and journals with a large female readership, such
as the Journal des Dames. This study focuses on Lettres du Colonel Talbert (1767) as
both a paradigmatic and privileged text inside Mme Benoist’s larger corpus, and one
which explicitly engages many of the most pressing moral and philosophical debates of the period, including the legal status of women. To do so, Mme Benoist appropriates the
libertine novel as specific novelistic subtype. In Les Lettres du Colonel Talbert, Mme
Benoist parodies the libertine novel and in doing so, converts the libertine textual
economy to one in which well-established narrative codes of femininity and masculinity
are inverted. Although her depiction of the heroine, Hélène—an exceptional and
courageous young woman who resists the predatory advances of a man through sheer
strength of moral character—is not in itself unusual, Mme Benoist’s choice to frame her
heroine’s moral struggle in a narrative epistolary exchange between two diametrically
opposed male “types” in enlightenment thought—the libertine and the honnête homme—
Mme Benoist effectively subverts masculine textual dynamics at the level of plot and
character. More importantly, she also subverts the libertine novel’s traditional
identification with masculine authorship.