SOURCE: “The Anonymous Public in Les Liaisons dangereuses,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 18, 1988, pp. 479-87.

In the essay below, Rosa claims that Laclos raises questions about his intended moral objective in writing Les Liaisons dangereuses in order to more fully engage the reader.

Throughout the eighteenth century in France, novelists insisted that their works were morally useful. In countless préfaces, avertissements, and avis au lecteur, they reiterated their aims of pleasing and moving readers in order to instruct and improve them in an agreeable way. Though adherence to this view of the novel may have been for many novelists only nominal—a defensive maneuver designed to placate right-thinking critics and gain a modicum of respectability for a genre considered disreputable—its repeated expression nevertheless reflects the accepted view of literary production in a society which increasingly valued art for its usefulness, and in which literary works were...