The Libertine's Bluff: Cards and Culture in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

If any one period stands as the heyday of gambling in France, it is the three-quarters of a century separating the death of Louis XIV from the storming of the Bastille and the coming of the Revolution. The years between 1715 and 1789, beginning with the Regency of Philippe d'Orléans and continuing through the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, represent an interlude, a proliferation of brave new ideas that involved a systematic rethinking of the notions of worldly happiness and individual freedom, coupled with what was nothing less than a national obsession with chance and gambling in all its forms. As such, this period was distinctly different from both the austere religiosity marking the last years of Louis XIV and the progressively more belligerent civic moralism of the Revolution and its bloody aftermath. As a way of better understanding the distinctive tenor of those times, I will examine the startling homology between two aspects of that culture which are rarely brought together: the period's signature rethinking of relations between the sexes known as libertinage and the widespread practice of gambling as a favored form of aristocratic sociability. Bringing gambling and libertinage together, looking at each from the perspective of the other, will allow us to understand two things better: how the ancien régime's fascination with gambling became the hallmark of a new form of conviviality redefining the interplay of individual and group; and how, thanks to a conspicuous shift in the metaphorics of gambling, that social practice became, by the late 1760s, the elected scapegoat of an emerging bourgeois ideology preaching the sanctity of money. Understanding the role of gambling within culture necessarily involves, as [End Page 505] Robert Mauzi has put it, a reflection "situated at the intersection of individual and social morality." 1