Writing Utopias- from Plato to Thomas More to Pierre Louys

Frontispiece to the 1926 translation of King Pausole, by Clara Tice (Note the motto- suitable for Aleister Crowley!)

Humans have imagined ideal worlds, ever since the time of the Greeks. Plato explored these ideas first in Republic, and then in Timaeus and Critias, when his perfect stated was located on the island of Atlantis. Distant islands are always good sites to choose, because it explains their mystery and their isolation from contamination or conquest by civilisation as we know it.

In 1516 Sir Thomas More composed Utopia, a description of an ideal island that is, in fact, a kind of communist dictatorship: everyone is provided for, as long as they comply with very rigid standards of conduct. For our purposes, and to contrast with Pierre Louys later, I’ll merely note the Utopian rules on dress: they all wear very simple leather overalls for work and a plain cloak for travel- cheap, practical and simple. As for relationships, the Utopians are strictly monogamous, but their very liberal custom is that, preparatory to marriage, potential partners are presented to each other naked, to ensure that each is entirely happy with the other before they make their binding commitment. 

After Sir Thomas More, many more Utopias were described. For instance, further ideal worlds were imagined in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1600), Johan Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and, later, in Gulliver’s Travels, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and William Morris’ News from Nowhere. These nations were, as often, vehicles for satirising our own less than perfect worlds as they were blueprints for a better society.

The first novel by Pierre Louys, Les Chansons de Bilitis (The Songs of Bilitis, 1894) was in some limited degree a utopian story: he imagined an ideal classical Greek world in which same sex marriage was possible and people’s sexuality was of very little concern. He pursued this idea in Les Aventures du roi Pausole in 1900, in which he imagined a contemporary kingdom of Trypheme, somewhere towards the south of France. It was a pagan land, ruled benignly by King Pausole, although he imposed various odd ideas on the population. Young people went around naked most of the time; the king had a harem and imposed no restrictions on other people taking multiple spouses; sexuality once again was unrestricted and could be expressed by individuals however they wished. I think it’s fair to observe that the want of clothes in Trypheme- youths only tend to wear a hat or scarf on their heads and clogs on their feet in its mild climate- is probably more to do with the king (and others) being able to ogle young bodies than it is to do with any notions of equality or simplicity as might have been found in Sir Thomas More’s work. 

Nonetheless, when- in about 1911-1913- Louys composed L’Île aux dames, a description of an island Utopia, he took the ideas barely sketched in Bilitis and Pausole much further.

L’Île aux dames concerns the experiences of Fernande, a French woman, who finds herself deposited on the island after a ballooning accident. This means of arrival in the strange land is something Louys stole from Jules Verne, for that writer had used it previously in his novel of 1875 to take his characters to the Mysterious Island. In addition, he may well have been inspired to devise a utopia by the Marquis de Sade, whose Aline et Valcour (1795) explored a South Pacific island paradise called as Tamoé which is led by the philosopher-king Zamé and happiness and prosperity flourish amidst benevolent anarchy. 

Louys’ novel is fragmented and unfinished and was only published in 1988, long after the author’s death in 1925. The text presents itself in part as a historical and tourist guide to this imaginary territory, the ‘Isle of Women,’ which is located off the coast of Cape Verde. Since its discovery in 1623, the island has been totally dedicated to, and governed by, female sexuality; so, for example, the constitution prohibits “on pain of death, the kidnapping or rape of a woman or girl”. At the time of Fernande’s visit, the island is ruled by a 33-year-old queen and her “harem of lovers and mistresses.” Women are entitled to express and enjoy their sexuality entirely freely and (perhaps predictably for Louys) a large proportion of the female population prefer same-sex relationships. This is something for which the island’s economy caters lavishly, with lesbian brothels and cabarets, intimate hair dressers and sex toy makers. In fact, sex appears to be the sole foundation of the economy. Again, Louys being Louys, the queen was introduced to lesbian sex by her eldest daughter and all the royal princesses engage in regular orgies with their ladies in waiting.

In the book, Louys sets out the history, geography (with even a map of the triangular island), legislation, customs, fashions, literature, industries and entertainments of the island. It is a community of pleasures: people seem to have sex whenever and wherever they like- and with whomsoever they like. The text then follows the adventures of Fernande, as she is befriended by a local family, adapts (quickly) to local customs and discovers her own same-sex attraction.

As with his parody of etiquette manuals, the Handbook of Good Manners for Young Girls, Louys set out to challenge and subverted the prevailing social standards of the Catholic French bourgeoisie. The book is both an attack on the restrictions and hypocrisy of contemporary French society as it is postulation of an alternative. In fact, the Île aux dames is not much of a practical alternative to anything- as it stands- as beyond their complete sexual liberation, the population don’t seem to have achieved very much. It’s not a perfect society, certainly, in that individuals can starve and may have to offer sexual services to be able to eat- which even happens to Fernande towards the end of the book as we have it. She gains a prestigious place at court, but then falls out with the queen and is reduced to selling herself on the street.

Louys may have planned more and might have resolved Fernande’s problems, at least, but he set aside the manuscript and never returned to it. As ever, too, we should be cautious about reading too much into some of what Louys wrote, as he was always inclined to parody and exaggeration. Nevertheless, in Île aux dames we have an intriguing glimpse of an alternative world, one that offers exhilaration and excitement that wouldn’t be found in More’s severely rational and materialist Utopia, but one that has its own (very different) gaps, faults and monotonies.

Louys invented no dystopias, as such, although it may have been possible that the downsides of L’Ile aux dames would have been revealed had he completed the text. The author did, nonetheless, compose some dystopian scenes rather than entire countries. The royal court of King Gonzalve in L’Histoire du Roi Gonzalve is highly arguably a depraved and malfunctioning environment, in which the king has created a situation that both facilitates his planned incest with his daughters and yet frustrates it in the most dysfunctional way. On an even smaller scale, the similar circumstances of the family in Trois filles et leur mere present to us a wholly depraved and unhealthy household. These are small scale examples of what an absence of normal restraints and principles might create.

Pierre Louys created imaginary worlds in which he could test out his social and moral ideas. These utopias might be lands faraway in the antique past, they might be distant islands or countries or they might be isolated communities in present-day France- Teresa’s self-contained household in Trois Filles or the boarding school of Toinon. In all cases, they were sealed off from our reality, allowing him to experiment. In this, Louys was not alone. Consider, for example, the gay artist Gaston Goor (1902-1977); he depicted boys and young men together but, given the time place and subject matter, he generally chose to relocate his fantasies to the classical world (where pederasty was an accepted institution), to boarding schools or to isolated islands. This, again, removed the controversial sexuality he portrayed to a safe distance and made it more acceptable.

For more on Louys, see my bibliography page.