Cuban Theater Digital Archive

Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos was born in Amiens on 18 October 1741. His father was a government official who was ennobled but without a title. In January 1760 Laclos became a pupil of the Royal Corps of Artillery and two years later, as a second lieutenant, was posted to the port of La Rochelle. With the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, Laclos was transferred to north-eastern France. It was while stationed there that he published his first literary piece, a poem in a periodical in 1767. In 1769 he moved to Grenoble where he stayed until being garrisoned in Besançon in 1775. During this period he was promoted and published other minor verse. In December 1776 he became a freemason. The following year saw the sole performance in Paris of his comic opera, Ernestine, adapted from the tale of the same name by the successful novelist, Mme Riccoboni. It is possible that Laclos began writing his most famous work, Les Liaisons dangereuses [Dangerous Connections], in 1778. He was certainly engaged on the drafting of the novel while working on the fortifications of the island of Aix (off the west coast of France) in 1779. To aid the composition of his novel, he was on leave in Paris in 1780 and 1781 where he began moves to have his work published. The first edition of the novel appeared in 2000 copies between 7 and 10 April 1782, with a contract for a second printing with an identical number of copies signed on 21 April. At the end of the year, or the very start of the next, Laclos began a relationship with the woman who was to become his wife, Marie-Soulange Duperré. She was the eldest of twenty-two children and had been born in La Rochelle in 1759. The same year he commenced writing, but did not complete, a discourse on the best method of educating women (this and other essays on the same topic were not published before the twentieth century). There followed various minor works, some friction with authority, and finally marriage in 1786. In 1788 he entered the service of the Duke of Orléans and accompanied his employer to London in 1790. He engaged in revolutionary activity, using the power of his pen. He resigned from the army in 1791. In the thick of political in-fighting, he was arrested and then released in the spring of 1793, only to be incarcerated again in November. He expected to be guillotined, but was set free in December 1794. After miscellaneous activities in the succeeding years, Laclos was appointed an artillery general in 1800, and fulfilled various military functions before dying on 5 September 1803 in Italy.