#000579
Monsieur Nicolas
Restif de la Bretonne
Restif de la Bretonne's sprawling autobiography, published in sixteen volumes between 1794 and 1797 under the full title *Monsieur Nicolas, ou le cœur humain dévoilé* — "the human heart laid bare." Begun when the author was sixty, it recounts his life across ten "epochs," from a peasant boyhood in Burgundy through decades in Revolutionary Paris, dwelling with unusual candor on his innumerable love affairs, real and imagined. As social history it is priceless, a ground-level panorama of eighteenth-century French life; as confession it anticipates the modern memoir's appetite for self-exposure. English readers usually meet it through Robert Baldick's abridged translation, since the complete work runs to thousands of pages. Frank, digressive, and self-obsessed, it is one of the strangest and most revealing documents the age produced.
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The author
Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806) was a printer who set much of his own prodigious output — novels, utopias, and reportage on Parisian street life. Two curiosities cling to his name: he is often credited with popularizing the word pornographe, and the term "retifism," for shoe and foot fetishism, was coined in his honor, since footwear recurs as an object of desire throughout his fiction; Havelock Ellis cited him as the first well-documented such case.
The book
Monsieur Nicolas (1794–1797) is his sixteen-volume confessional autobiography, organized into ten "epochs" spanning roughly 1734 to 1784. Alongside a vivid record of Enlightenment-era France, it details his erotic life at length — including frank, sometimes disturbing claims about sexual feeling in early childhood — which is central to how the book is read today.
How it reads
By turns fascinating and self-indulgent. Historians prize its granular social detail; readers should be prepared for its unfiltered and, by modern standards, troubling sexual candor. Most English editions are heavily abridged.
For more context
Robert Baldick's translation and the standard biographies frame Restif's peculiar place in French letters.
Sources - Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne — Wikipedia - Monsieur Nicolas — French Wikipedia - Monsieur Nicolas, 1796 edition — Internet Archive
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Restif de la Bretonne
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Colorado
Places