Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Restif, also known as Rétif or Restif de la Bretonne, was a French novelist. The term retifism for shoe fetishism was named after him.
Biography
Born the son of a farmer at Sacy, Rétif was educated by the Jansenists at Bicêtre, 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. 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 societyon the eve of the Revolution". 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. 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.
Assessment
According to 1911 Britannica, He and the Marquis de Sade maintained a mutual hate, while he was appreciated by Benjamin Constant and Friedrich von Schiller and appeared at the table of Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, whom he met in 1782. Jean François de La Harpe nicknamed him "the Voltaire of the chambermaids". He was rediscovered by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. He is also noted for his advocacy of communism, indeed the term first made its modern appearance in his book review of Joseph-Alexandre-Victor Hupay de Fuveau who described himself as "communist" with his Project for a Philosophical Community. The author Mario Vargas Llosa has a chapter on Rétif in his novel The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. The French novelist Catherine Rihoit made Restif de la Bretonne a major character in her 1982 novel La Nuit de Varenne. It was made into a film in the same year, a French-Italian production called either La Nuit de Varennes or Il mondo nuovo''. Jean-Louis Barrault played Restif. The film also had Marcello Mastroianni as Casanova and Harvey Keitel as Thomas Paine. 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.
Works
The most noteworthy of his works are:
Le Pied de Fanchette, a novel
Le Pornographe, 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, an erotic novel with a moral purpose, which is a big hit, causing him to follow it with "La Paysanne Pervertie".
La Vie de mon père
La Découverte Australe par un Homme-Volant, a work of proto-science-fiction notorious for its prophetic inventions.
Anti-Justine, an answer to the earlier editions of the Marquis de Sade's Justine.
The extraordinary autobiography of Monsieur Nicolas, 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. 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.
