¹⁴ See Réne Pintard’s still seminal study of French libertine thought, Le Libertinage érudit (Paris, 1943), 127–8. Richard W. F. Kroll takes issue with the view ‘that the political significance of neo-Epicureanism is primarily royalist and libertine’. See The Material Word (Baltimore, 1991), 18. Scholars continue, though, to stress the connection between Gassendi, neo-Epicureanism, and libertine ‘freethinking’.