For over a century, the world read a censored, pirated version of Casanova's life.
In short: Giacomo Casanova is remembered as a legendary adventurer, yet his massive autobiography remained distorted for generations. While he wrote his life story in French, early editions were heavily altered, censored, or even invented by translators. It took until the 1960s for the authentic, unexpurgated manuscript to finally reach the public.
Casanova began drafting his memoirs in 1789 during a severe illness, eventually producing a 3,500-page manuscript spanning his life until 1774. Although he was Venetian, he wrote in French, the language of the educated elite. Before his death in 1798, he entrusted the work to his nephew, Carlo Angiolini. The manuscript then languished in private hands for decades, caught in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars, which made publishing the life of a bygone figure commercially unappealing.
The publication history is a saga of piracy and error. In 1821, the manuscript was sold to publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, who commissioned a German translation. Subsequent French editions were often translated back from this German text, leading to significant inaccuracies. One editor, Jean Laforgue, took extreme liberties, rewriting passages and censoring Casanova's religious and political views. For over 130 years, from 1838 to 1960, almost every version of the memoirs—including the standard English edition by Arthur Machen—relied on these flawed, bowdlerized sources.
The original manuscript survived the 1943 bombing of Leipzig, hidden in a bank by Brockhaus. It was eventually moved to Wiesbaden by American troops in 1945. A collaboration between Brockhaus and the French editor Plon finally produced the first authentic edition between 1960 and 1962. In 2010, the National Library of France acquired the original 3,700-page document for approximately €7 million, leading to a definitive, scholarly Pléiade edition published between 2013 and 2015. This modern version restores Casanova's original punctuation, Italianisms, and layout, finally allowing readers to encounter the adventurer's true voice rather than the distorted echoes of nineteenth-century censors.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Histoire de ma vie
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