The Pornographer

The Pornographer (Le Pornographe), written by Restif de la Bretonne and published in 1770 originally, is a novel, in epistolary format, that includes a serious proposal of rules for prostitution, at a state level, to address the problem of syphilis ravaging Europe at the time, as well as a counteractive to the degradation of public morality.

To say that French author Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806) was ahead of his time is, for anyone who knows his work, - and they are few - so platitudinous itʼs not funny. The man had an uncanny ability to synthesize history as far back as ancient Greece, and that of his own pre-Napoleonic era, and to project it onto our present, his future, as easily as a man casting a shadow on the ground at 3 pm. His ideas on the inequality of the classes, for instance, as a main cause of modern prostitution are both simple and brilliant. His strong words against the poor treatment of Native Americans immediately after the discovery of the New World, from which event syphilis was imported into Europe, is painfully relevant. His support of the working class (the "third estate") and womenʼs rights over that of nobility, Church, and males anticipated ideas later encoded in the laws of Western societies, and the struggles today to keep said laws "honest." Would it surprise any one of his readers that he probably coined the term "Pornographer," over two hundred twenty-five years before the popularization of the Internet? With an eerily hyper-modern, politically correct, opinion on many things - he would have fit in most perfectly in this third decade of the twenty-first century, making many of us modern folk appear old-fashioned and dull - as perhaps no other 18th-century man of letters of France, or of any European country for that matter, could.