Legacy
A common noun, a recovered manuscript, and a biography still being corrected.
The name in the language
“Casanova” — lowercased — has entered English, French, Italian, and other languages as a common noun for a libertine or practiced seducer. The dictionaries record it without reference to the man; the man would probably have approved.
The book’s second life
For 120 years readers knew a censored Casanova: the bowdlerized German (1822–28) and French (1826–37) editions, and Arthur Machen’s English version (1894). The 1960–62 Brockhaus–Plon edition — the first printed from the manuscript — restored the text, and the Pléiade editions (1958–60, ed. J. Rives Childs; 2015, ed. Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna) made it a scholarly object. The BnF’s 2010 acquisition of the manuscript (NAF 28604) and its digitization completed the recovery: the book Casanova wrote is finally the book the world can read.
Casanova in art and film
The escape and the legend have been filmed and staged repeatedly — from early silent pictures to Fellini’s Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976). This site takes no position on the adaptations except one: none of them is a source. The memoirs are the source.
What scholarship still debates
- Reliability. The archival turn in Casanova studies (checking the memoirs against state papers, parish registers, and correspondence) broadly vindicates his dates and places while discounting his private episodes. The work continues.
- The missing chapters. The absent fourth and fifth chapters of the twelfth volume — withdrawn by Casanova himself, the editors judged — remain the manuscript’s great silence.
- The grave. No authenticated burial site survives at Duchcov; the unmarked grave’s location is uncertain.
Source notes
- The publication history follows the publication history page; the Pléiade and BnF details are from those institutions’ published records.