The Count Ory woos women with tricks. He will do anything to win over the beautiful Adèle, even if it means he has to dress up as a nun. Like Don Giovanni he follows the lust before the law. The tricksters are the opera world's most notorious womanizers and both are libertines.
Libertinism is the conviction that one must cast off the moral restrictions if one is to be free. A truly independent individual cannot be restricted by rules that he himself does not want to follow. For the libertine the conventions of society are therefore just obstacles on the road.
Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was one of the most prominent libertines. The word "sadism" comes from his name. de Sade blended philosophical ideas with violent pornography in his writings, and blasphemed the Catholic Church. He advocated a minimum of social order and a maximum of individual freedom.
The word "libertine" can be traced back to the Latin words of a free man. A slave set free from legal servitude, a manumitted slave, was called "libertinus" in the Roman Empire. A free born man on the other hand was known as an "ingenuus". The shameless and morally reprehensible associated with the libertine, is not as brazen and reprehensible when you consider that the "libertinus" is forced to free himself. He is not free from the beginning, but rather caught in a society which is holding him back.
In the 1500s, "libertine" was used as a derogatory term for religious freethinkers. The Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) used the word in a pamphlet to attack his political opponents that equated God with Nature. They rejected property rights and wanted a society where all goods are shared.
Italian libertines like Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) regarded religion as a product of man. Despite threats of torture and death they contested the Pope and the Roman church's absolute authority. Campanella was condemned as a heretic, tortured and imprisoned. Bruno was burned at the stake. Today he is known as a martyr of science.
Lucilio Vanini (1585-1619), another Italian libertine, opposed the belief in the immortality of the soul and equated man with animals. Vanini had his tongue cut out on the orders of the pope as punishment for his heresy, and he was strangled and burnt to ashes. Like the much later Darwin, Vanini had the audacity to suggest that humans descend from the monkey.
Man's animalistic side became increasingly important for libertines after Vanini. Towards the 1700s they were increasingly criticized for being devoid of sexual restraints. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798), whose name became synonymous with libertinism, writes in his autobiography: "I was all my life the victim of my senses". Casanova is well known for his sexual excesses around Europe and his many scams and masquerades. Casanova made a living by cheating people out of money, which he then squandered on gambling and women. (By his own admission, he had sex with over a hundred women, including a nun.)
Count Ory is an example of the latter kind of libertine. The Count opposes traditional religion and conventional morality, like Bruno and Vanini. But it is difficult to see him as a martyr for free thought. Con artists like Ory rather sets libertinism in a bad light.
Despite this, one should not be too quick to condemn The Count Ory as a deceiver through and through. At least the libertines of the 1700s and 1800s, where one finds the most prominent characters, were true to themselves. They did not deny that they also had "low" instincts and desires. They did not repress their Dionysian side. None of this can serve to excuse the transgressions of Casanova and Marquis de Sade against other people, but there is something admirable in daring to see the whole person - even the dark sides. It is not enough to simply resist evil. One must first and foremost be able to discern evil, both within and without.
From the perspective of the libertines it is society itself that is reprehensible, since it keeps people from exploring their "low" instincts. It was not libertines but the whole of society that sneered at pornography, sadomasochism and deviant sexualities in the 1700s. And the sneering prevails. LGBT people are discriminated in Russia. Sadomasochism is still illegal and characterized as a disease in many parts of the world. When it comes to accepting our animal side and especially our sexuality, there is still much to learn from libertines such as Vanini, Casanova and Ory.
