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Charles-Michel,
Marquis de Villette (December 4, 1736 – July 7, 1793) was a French writer.
Villette was the most famous sodomite in eighteenth-century France. A wealthy
nobleman, born in Paris, Villette earned a law degree, but instead of
practising his profession preferred to serve in the French army during the
Seven Years War (1756–1763), before beginning a literary career with the
support of Voltaire, who was his
mother's friend. (Indeed, Villette liked to hint that he was Voltaire's
illegitimate son.) He was rich, handsome (though very short) and witty, but
contemporaries gossiped about his private life and mocked him in print as an
aristocratic wastrel, coward and sodomite.
In 1765, Voltaire invited the Marquis to his estate at Ferney. Although Voltaire joked quite freely about the Marquis' illegal attractions to men, he convinced the Marquis to marry Reine Philiberte de Varicourt in 1777. The marriage was unhappy, and his wife was subsequently adopted by Voltaire's niece, Marie Louise Mignot. Both Charles and Philiberte remained devoted to Voltaire, however, and it was at their home in Paris that Voltaire died in 1778. Villette kept Voltaire's heart in an urn.
Satirical pamphlets published at the start of the French Revolution
portrayed Villette as spokesman for the country's sodomites and an advocate of
sexual liberty. For example, The Children of Sodom before the National
Assembly (1790), supposedly signed by 'Charles, Marquis de Villette, High
Commander of the Order', and purportedly the text of a meeting of an
association of sodomites, announced that sodomy 'will henceforth become a
science studied and taught in all classes of society'. Similarly, in Les
Petits Bougres au Manege (1790), 'M. de V—, authorised Procurer of the
Sodomitical Society', declared that `my cock and balls belong to me, and so
... whether I put them in a cunt or an arsehole is of no business to anyone
else'.
Villette supported the French Revolution from the beginning. He wrote for
the Chronique de Paris from April 1789 to August 1792, when the department of
the Oise elected him deputy to the National Convention. He adopted a moderate
political position in the assembly, voting against the death penalty at the
trial of Louis XVI. He died of natural causes.
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