Chronicler of the Street

1734 Restif de la Bretonne (Nicolas-Edme Rétif or Nicolas-Edme Réstif, called de la Bretonne for his father’s farm in Burgundy; d. February 2, 1806), prolific French novelist, early communist theorist, known as 'the Chronicler of the Street' (also 'the Rousseau of the Gutter' and 'the Voltaire of the Chambermaids') during the French Revolution, and some say inventor of the term 'communism'.

More than 250 of his novels were published (many printed by himself), mostly based on incidents in his own life. It must have been some life.

Bretonne helped inaugurate the ‘personal novel’, a genre that rose to prominence in the 19th Century. Much of Restif’s work was libertine and long excluded by the arbiters of literary taste as cynical, vulgar, and tasteless. The term 'retifism' ('shoe fetishism') was named after him ...

Tagged: biography, france, literature, sex, communism, pornography