| Summary: | According to Pierre Charron’s reflections on the « preud’homie », the dissociation between the figure of the free thinker and the gender of the weaker sex prevailed as a founding principle of the libertine-inspired literature. For all that, do we have to believe that, in the heterodox culture of the 17th century, the masculinity of the free thinker came from a real genre distinction? Did libertine writers really support a virile image of the natural mind? Works such as L’Autre monde by Cyrano de Bergerac, the Aventures by Charles Dassoucy or La Terre australe connue by Gabriel de Foigny show us that sometimes the image of the free thinker can be linked to the erasure of the sex difference using hermaphrodite characters. At the same time, the libertine power of the gender notion is more apparent than real. At the end, it is only a simple hypothesis marked by the signs of the masculine domination, the same domination that it seems to criticize.
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