Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (born Oct. 18, 1741, Amiens, France—died Nov. 5, 1803, Taranto, Parthenopean Republic [now in Italy]) was a French soldier and writer, author of the classic Les Liaisons dangereuses, one of the earliest examples of the psychological novel.

Laclos chose a career in the army but soon left it to become a writer. His first novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), caused an immediate sensation. Written in epistolary form, the story deals with the seducer Valmont and his accomplice, Mme de Merteuil, who take unscrupulous delight in their victims’ misery. Laclos’ second novel, De l’éducation des femmes (1785; “On the Education of Women”), is of little importance except for the light it throws on the psychology of the earlier novel. His Lettre à MM. de l’Académie Française sur l’éloge de M. le Maréchal de Vauban (1786) mocked the French army and its hopelessly outdated methods of defense and, as a result, lost him his army commission. He then entered politics, working for a while as secretary to the duc d’Orléans. He again joined the army in 1792, however, and ultimately rose to the rank of general under Napoleon, serving in the Rhine and Italian campaigns.