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Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, born Nicolas-Edme RétiforNicolas-Edme Restif (French:[ʁetif]; 23 October 1734 – 3 February 1806), also known as Rétif, was a French novelist. The term retifism for shoe fetishism was named after him (an early novel, entitled Fanchette's Foot, follows a beautiful heroine and her pretty little foot, which, with her pretty face, gets her and her shoe/s into lots of trouble). He was also reputed to have coined the term "pornographer" in the same-named book, The Pornographer.
Born the son of a farmer at Sacy (in present-day Yonne), Rétif was educated by the JansenistsatBicêtre, and on the expulsion of the Jansenists was received by one of his brothers, who was a curé. Owing to a scandal in which he was involved, he was apprenticed to a printer at Auxerre, and, having served his time, went to Paris. Here he worked as a journeyman printer, and in 1760 he married Anne or Agnès Lebègue, a relation of his former master at Auxerre. Soon he embraced Protestantism.[1]
It was not until five or six years after his marriage that Rétif appeared as an author, and from that time to his death he produced a bewildering multitude of books, amounting to something like two hundred volumes, many of them printed with his own hand, on almost every conceivable subject. Rétif suffered at one time or another the extremes of poverty. He drew on the episodes of his own life for his books, which, "in spite of their faded sentiment, contain truthful pictures of French society on the eve of the Revolution".[2] He has been described as both a social realist and a sexual fantasist in his writings.
The original editions of these, and indeed of all his books, have long been bibliographical curiosities owing to their rarity, the beautiful and curious illustrations which many of them contain, and the quaint typographic system in which most are composed on.
The fall of the assignats during the Revolution forced him to make his living by writing, profiting on the new freedom of the press. In 1795 he received a gratuity of 2000 francs from the Thermidor Convention.
In spite of his declarations for the new power, his aristocratic acquaintances and his reputation made him fall in disgrace. Just before his death, Napoleon gave him a place in the ministry of police; he died at Paris before taking up the position.
Restif de la Bretonne undoubtedly holds a remarkable place in French literature. He was inordinately vain, of extremely relaxed morals, and perhaps not entirely sane. His books were written with haste, and their licence of subject and language renders them quite unfit for general perusal.
In his analysis of the satirical poem "Ode to Buggers," David M. Halperin suggested that Rétif's writing may have drawn from internal conflicts surrounding his sexuality. There is much scholarly debate over the veracity of this conclusion.
Rétif was a "pornographer" in the modern sense of the word, being a writer of graphic depictions of sex. However, he was also a "pornographer" in the Ancient Greek sense of the word, as he wrote about the day-to-day life of prostitutes, and concerned himself with their well-being. It was the latter definition which he accepted as the rightful use of the word.[3]
Frontispiece from La Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, 1781
The most noteworthy of his works are:
Le Pied de Fanchette, a novel (1769), the story of a pretty French orphan girl who is hounded by shoe-fetishists.
Le Pornographe (1769), a plan for regulating prostitution which is said to have been actually carried out by the Emperor Joseph II, while not a few detached hints have been adopted by continental nations
Le Paysan perverti (1775), an erotic novel with a moral purpose, which is a big hit, causing him to follow it with "La Paysanne Pervertie" (1784).[4]
The extraordinary autobiography of Monsieur Nicolas (16 vols., 1794–1797), in which at the age of sixty he has set down his remembrances, his notions on ethical and social points, his hatreds, and above all his numerous loves, both real and fancied. In it, Rétif relates the beginnings of his sexual awakenings between 1738 and 1744, when he remembers experiencing the most pleasurable of sexual stimulations in very early childhood (see text for details). However, the last two volumes are practically a separate and much less interesting work in the opinion of the redactors of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
^Kendrick, Walter (1987). The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (First ed.). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 19–20. ISBN0-520-20729-7.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Restif, Nicolas Edme". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 23 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 200.
