ABSTRACT. Producing Humanity: Sensibility and Human Epistemology in Two Eighteenth-Century French Novels. The eighteenth century is not only the Age of Reason but also a great age of feeling, in which sensations, emotions, feelings and affects redefine both the relationship between the human and the natural environment and the relationship between the self and the social, or the self and itself. If the “sensitive soul” shapes a new moral ideal, it also points out the importance of a human faculty which does not oppose reason, but complements it. In this paper I wish to explore the questions posed by the “rise of feeling” in the eighteenth-century French novel and the way in which it impacts upon a general understanding of the “human machine” and human nature. In this respect, I intend to propose a re-reading of two famous novels of the time, i.e. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses. Based upon recent research on the history of sensibility and emotions, our study examines the way in which sensibility promotes new fictional forms and norms of emotional behavior intended to open a debate on human nature. The conclusion that I will draw is that the French novelists of the time, even those who seemed less “sentimental” (such as Montesquieu) or less “philosophical” (such as Prévost or Laclos), did not ignore the then contemporary philosophical debates on sensibility and human nature, but tackled them from a more experimental angle by imagining fictional characters whose disturbed sensibility served to question the limits between the human, the non-human and the inhuman.

Keywords: sensibility, senses, feelings, human nature, Enlightenment, Montesquieu, Laclos.