the roué

• Posted by mgr on July 21st, 2008 filed in Dandy-Typen, KULTURELLES, Zeitdokumente
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definition: criminel supplicié sur la roue. Sous la régence, ce nom fut donné aux débauchés et aux libertins de la cour. Il ne falloit rien moins qu’une époque de licence effrénée pour désigner sans répugnance un séducteur sémillant, un petit-maître de la cour, sous la dénomination d’un supplicié. Cette étrange dénomination doit sa bizarre origine á la répartie d’un ivrogne. Traversant la place de Grève en 1719, il se crut insulté par les imprécations d’un supplicié condamné à expirer sur la roue. En entendant les lamentations du patient, le suppôt de Bacchus s’arrête et lui dit: Allons, mon ami, ce n’est pas le tout que d’être roué, il faut encore être honnête? Ce mot, retenu et rapporté, fit fortune, il passa sur le champ à la cour, et les jeunes seigneurs s’empressèrent de mériter et de porter le nom de roués.

Source: B. de Roquefort: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue françoise. Paris: 1829.

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definition: dissipated man, rake; originally from the French verb rouer (to break on the wheel; a means of torture); said to have been first applied in France around 1720 to dissolute the friends of the Duke of Orléans to suggest the punishment they deserved

source: Online Etymological Dictionary

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definition: an immoral or licentious man

source: Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition (1995)
definition: dissipated man, rake; originally from the French verb rouer (to break on the wheel; a means of torture); said to have been first applied in France around 1720 to dissolute the friends of the Duke of Orléans to suggest the punishment they deserved

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definition: The profligate Duke of Orléans, Regent of France, first used this word in its modern sense. It was his ambition to collect round him companions as worthless as himself, and he used facetiously to boast that there was not one of them who did not deserve to be broken on the wheel - that being the most ordinary punishment for malefactors at that time; hence these profligates went by the name of Orléans’ roués or wheels. The most notorious roués were the Duke of Richelieu, Broglie, Biron, and Brancas, together with Canillac and Nocé; in England the Duke of Rochester and Buckingham.
A notorious roué. A libertine.

source: E. Cobham Brewer. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)
definition: dissipated man, rake; originally from the French verb rouer (to break on the wheel; a means of torture); said to have been first applied in France around 1720 to dissolute the friends of the Duke of Orléans to suggest the punishment they deserved

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First associated with debauchery in the circle of the Duc d’Orléans, the roué designated “a man of the world who has neither virtues nor principles, but who gives his vices a seductive facade and who ennobles them only by dint of grace and wit” (388: VI, 34). Thus the dandies of La Comédie humaine compose, in Balzac’s view, “the world of the Parisian rakes” (19: IV, 377). Both Musset in Namouna and Baudelaire in his Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses saw the archetypal roués, Lovelace and Valmont, as the dandy incarnate.

Quelle: Domna C. Stanton: The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnete Homme and the Dandy in Seventeenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980: 55.

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