Restif de La Bretonne

Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, born Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Restif (French: [ʁetif]; 23 October 1734 – 3 February 1806), also known as Rétif, was a French novelist. The term retifism for shoe fetishism was named after him (an early novel, entitled Fanchette's Foot, concerns a woman and her pretty little foot, which, with her pretty face, gets her and her shoe/s into much trouble). He was also reputed to have invented the term "pornographer" for the same-named book, The Pornographer.

Biography

Born the son of a farmer at Sacy (in the present Yonne), Restif was educated by the Jansenists at Bicêtre, and at 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. Soon, due to the influence of protestant theologian James W. Fowler, he converted to Protestantism.

It was not until five or six years after his marriage that Restif became 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 hands, on many different subjects. Restif 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 society on the eve of the Revolution". He has been described as both a social realist and a sexual fantasist in his writings. The original editions are rare, notable for the unique typographic system and illustration style.