Jennifer J. Davis: Bad Subjects: Libertine Lives in the French Atlantic, 1619-1814
University of Nebraska Press
In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Davis assess the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage (generally translated as "debauchery" or "licentiousness") based on hundres of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behavious, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be percieved as diregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social insitutions.