Nicolas-Edme Rétif (23 October 1734, Sacy, Yonne, Kingdom of France – 3 February 1806, Paris), more widely recognized as Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, was a notable and controversial French novelist celebrated for his prolific and often explicit writings, which earned him the distinction of coining the term "pornographer" in 1769. His candid and sometimes obscene portrayals of sexuality led to a complex legacy, with the Encyclopaedia Britannica characterizing him in 1911 as "inordinately vain, of extremely relaxed morals, and perhaps not entirely sane," while acknowledging his significant role in French literature. Throughout his career, Restif adopted numerous pseudonyms, including "Monsieur Nicolas," le Hibou ("the Owl"), M. Dulis, and M. Saxancour.
Rétif was born into the family of a village farmer and experienced a tumultuous upbringing marked by conflicts and rebellious behavior. His childhood was fraught with disciplinary issues, leading to multiple expulsions from schools and eventual separation from relatives unable to manage his defiant nature. He began his career by apprenticing with typemakers in Auxerre and Dijon before relocating to Paris around 1761, where he worked as a journeyman for various printing establishments. This new profession allowed him to connect with prominent novelists such as Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799), Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814), and Grimod de La Reynière (1758–1837), ultimately inspiring him to embark on his own writing journey. A graphomaniac, Restif produced an extensive array of works across genres, from provocative novels like Le Paysan perverti (1775) to comprehensive historiographies of the French Revolution, notably Les Nuits de Paris (1788-94), which spans over 4,000 pages across eight volumes. He was also deeply engaged with utopian concepts and societal reform, advocating for communism and reviewing Victor d'Hupay's Projet de communauté philosophe ("Project for a Philosophical Community") in 1785, an early text that utilized the term "communist." His influential non-fiction work, Monsieur Nicolas, is an eight-volume autobiography penned between 1794 and 1797, offering rich insights into his troubled psyche, as well as detailed portrayals of 18th-century rural life and the daily practices of French printers and typographers.
Restif de la Bretonne is recognized as one of the pioneers of pornography, producing explicit sexual content in several of his works. However, he approached the role of the pornographer from a philosophical standpoint, viewing himself as a "guardian" of prostitutes, concerned with their welfare. His foundational 1769 work, Le Pornographe, served as a socio-philosophical treatise proposing a comprehensive approach to the regulation of sex workers. Some historians have suggested that his ideas influenced the policies of figures such as Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790) and other European leaders. Among his early novels, Le Pied de Fanchette ("Fanchette's Foot") (1769) tells the story of an orphan girl pursued by fetishists fixated on her feet, leading to the coining of the clinical term for "shoe fetishism," retifism, after him. Notably, Restif had a contentious rivalry with the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), marked by mutual disdain. In 1798, he published the novel Anti-Justine, which critiques Sade's Justine, ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu, released seven years earlier.
Additionally, Restif experimented with proto-science fiction, exemplified by La Découverte Australe par un Homme-Volant (1781), where he introduced progressive concepts such as the continuous evolution of species, animal rights, and early feminist ideas. His later work, Les Posthumes (1802), is considered one of the earliest entries in the space opera genre and explores the notion of "exolinguistics," or the creation of alien languages within literature.
