Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon

Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (Paris, 1707–1777) was a French novelist of the eighteenth century. To tell him apart from his father, the famous writer of tragedies Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, he is usually called Crébillon the Gay. He matters because he shaped the libertine and satirical novel of the French Enlightenment, a genre in which social criticism hides behind erotic stories or exotic fables.

He was educated by Jesuits at the elite Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. In his youth he wrote light pieces, including plays for the Italian Theatre in the capital, and in 1730 he published the short tale Le Sylphe. For almost a decade he took part in the dinners of the Caveau, named after the tavern where they took place, with writers such as Alexis Piron, Charles Collé and Charles Duclos.

His first major controversy came with Tanzaï et Néadarné (1734), presented as a Japanese tale but containing thinly veiled attacks on the papal bull Unigenitus and on churchmen. It cost him a brief stay in the prison at Vincennes. In 1742 he published Le Sopha, an erotic political satire that forced him to leave Paris for several months. His novel Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit appeared between 1736 and 1738 and was never finished.

Around 1744 he began a relationship with Lady Henrietta Maria Stafford, daughter of a Jacobite chamberlain, and they married in 1748. After the death of their son and then of his wife in 1755, he faced financial hardship, until in 1759 he secured a steady post as royal censor, as his father had been. His last two epistolary novels appeared in 1768 and 1772.

Today he is read mainly as a representative of the eighteenth-century libertine novel and as the author of light tales that look at morals and court society with irony.