Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, a French official and army general, was born on October 18, 1741 in Amiens, France and died in Taranto, Italy on September 5, 1803. He is most famously remembered for his epistolary novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), a classic celebrated for its exploration of seduction, revenge, and human malice, although the author meant it primarily to reflect, through its principal characters, the reprehensible state of eighteenth-century French female education and its moral consequences. It is also a morality tale about the corrupt, squalid nobility of the Ancien Régime.

The story has been adapted as a film several times—notably in 1988 as Dangerous Liaisons, directed by Stephen Frears, and in 1989 as Valmont, directed by Miloš Forman with screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière.

Laclos died in the former convent of Saint Francis in Taranto, but following the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte the locals destroyed his burial tomb and it is believed that his bones were tossed into the sea.

Bibliography

• Ernestine, (1776)
• Les Liaisons dangereuses, (1782)

1741 births | 1803 deaths | First French Empire | French novelists

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