Erotika Biblion
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Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau (March 9, 1749 – April 2, 1791) was a France writer, popular orator and statesman. During the French Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a constitutional monarchy built on the model of Great Britain. He unsuccessfully conducted secret negotiations with the French monarchy in an effort to reconcile it with the Revolution.
List of works
- Ma conversion ou Le libertin de qualité
- Erotika Biblion, essai publié en 1783
Le chien après les moines<ref>Cette violente charge anti-cléricale a été attribuée sans preuve à Mirabeau car elle est bien dans le style et la veine du « Flambeau de Provence ». L'auteur y fustige le despotisme et l'hypocrisie monacales, réclame l'abolition des vœux monastiques et la dissolution de tous les ordres religieux.</ref>, poème satyrique publié en 1782
Hic et Hec ou L'élève des RR. PP. jésuites d'Avignon, roman publié en 1798
Le degré des âges du plaisir<ref>L'attribution de ce roman à Mirabeau est probable mais pas assurée.</ref>, sous-titré Jouissances voluptueuses de deux personnes de sexe différent aux différentes époques de la vie, roman publié en 1798
Lettres à Sophie, recueil de correspondance publié en 1792<ref>Cette correspondance fut d'abord publiée sous le titre « Lettres originales de Mirabeau écrites au donjon de Vincennes pendant les années 1777, 78, 79 et 80 ».</ref>
Mirabeau, who was already facing financial trouble and increasing debt, could not keep up with the expensive lifestyle his wife was used to and their extravagances forced his father to send him into semi-exile in the country, where he wrote his earliest extant work, the Essai sur le despotisme. The couple had a son who died early, mostly due to the poor living conditions they experienced during that time.
His violent disposition led him to quarrel with a country gentleman who had insulted his sister, and his exile was changed by lettre de cachet into imprisonment in the Château d'If in 1774. In 1775 he was transferred to the castle of Joux, where he was not closely confined, having full leave to enter the town of Pontarlier. In a house of a friend he met Marie Thérèse de Monnier, his "Sophie", and the two fell in love. He escaped to Switzerland, where Sophie joined him; they then went to the United Provinces, where he lived by hack work for the booksellers; meanwhile Mirabeau had been condemned to death at Pontarlier for seduction and abduction, and in May 1777 he was seized by the French police, and imprisoned by a lettre de cachet in the castle of Vincennes.
The early part of his confinement is marked by the indecent letters to Sophie (first published in 1793), and the obscene Erotica biblion and Ma conversion. In Vincennes, he met the Marquis de Sade, who was also writing erotic works; however the two disliked each other intensely. Later during his confinement, he wrote Des Lettres de Cachet et des prisons d'état, published after his liberation (1782). It exhibits an accurate knowledge of French constitutional history skillfully applied in an attempt to show that the system of lettres de cachet was not only philosophically unjust but also constitutionally illegal. It shows, though in a rather diffuse and declamatory form, the application of wide historical knowledge, keen philosophical perception, and genuine eloquence to a practical purpose which was the great characteristic of Mirabeau, both as a political thinker and as a statesman.
