Marquis de Sade

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The French writer of psychological and philosophical works Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade (1740-1814), was also a libertine, debaucher,pornographer, and sadist - a term derived from his name.

The Marquis de Sade has been traditionally viewed as the greatest incarnation of evil that ever lived. Recently, however, new interpretations of his life and writings have begun to appear. It is now generally agreed that despite his reputation, his works, which were ignored for over a century, must be considered as of the first rank. Sade has been termed the "most absolute writer who has ever lived."

Born on June 2, 1740, to Marie Elénore de Maille de Carman, lady-in-waiting to and relative of the Princess de Condé, and Jean Baptiste Joseph François, Comte de Sade, who traced his ancestry to the chaste Laura of Petrarch's poems, the Marquis de Sade may be the most typical and the most unusual representative of the other side of the Enlightenment, the side at which the philosophes railed.

Very little is known of Sade's life. He graduated from the Colle‧ge de Louis le Grand, was commissioned as a coronet in the French army, and later sold his commission. He was forced to marry the eldest daughter of a leading magisterial family, Renée Pélagie de Montreuil, who bore him three children. Because of his libertinage, which included the seduction of and elopement with his wife's sister, Anne Prospe‧re, he incurred the unending enmity of his mother-in-law, who eventually had him imprisoned in 1781. Sade had tasted imprisonment before for libertinage and indebtedness, and he spent half of his adult life in prisons and asylums. Only three public scandals can be proved against him, and none of these seems to merit the punishment meted out to him, reinforcing his claim that he was an unjust victim of his reputation and others' hatreds.

During the Revolution, Sade was released from prison, served as secretary and president of the Piques section of Paris, and represented it at least once before the National Convention, where he addressed a pamphlet calling for the abolition of capital punishment and the enfranchisement of women. His attitudes and actions gained the hatred of Maximilien de Robespierre, who had him imprisoned (1793). He was saved only by the death of the "Incorruptible." Released in 1794, Sade was arrested in 1801 for being the supposed author of a scandalous pamphlet against Napoleon. He spent the rest of his life at Charenton insane asylum, where he died on Dec. 8, 1814. His best-known books include Justine; ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) and its sequel, Histoire de Juliette; ou, Les Prospérités du vice (1797).

Thus the life of the Marquis de Sade. Who was he? Why did he acquire the unique reputation he possesses? There are no simple answers regarding the life of any man. For Sade, there is possibly no answer at all. Recent works on his life have justly sought answers in his literary works, and because of this most commentators tend to psychoanalyze him. Although many of these works have offered brilliant insights into the character of the man, none of them is definitive and most treat him out of context, as though his life and aberrations were apart from life. Most Sadean scholars tend to agree that his hostility to religion, to the established social and political order, and to the despotism of existing law was similar in many ways to that of the philosophes. Some writers believe that he carried the beliefs of the philosophes to the rational conclusions, which in the end negated the conclusions and opened for succeeding generations a moral abyss. Others focus on what is termed a philosophy of destruction found in Sade's writings. Sade's atheism is viewed as the first element in a dialectic which destroys divinity through sacrilege and blasphemy and raises to preeminence an indifferent and unfolding nature which destroys to create and creates to destroy. Nature itself is then destroyed by being constantly outraged because it takes on the same sovereign character as God. What emerges is the "Unique One," the man who rises above nature and arrogates to himself the creative and destructive capacities of nature in an extreme form, becoming solitary, alone, unique in the conscious awareness that he is the creative force and all others are but the material through which his energy is expressed.

Further Reading

Many of Sade's works are available in English. Biographies include Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (1934; rev. ed. 1953), and Gilbert Lély, The Marquis de Sade (trans. 1962). Recommended for literary background is Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (trans. 1933; 2d ed. 1956).

Additional Sources

Gorer, Geoffrey, The life and ideas of the Marquis de Sade, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978, 1963.

Hayman, Ronald, De Sade: a critical biography, New York: Crowell, 1978.

Lever, Maurice, Sade: a biography, San Diego: Harcourt Brace &Co., 1994.

Thomas, Donald, The Marquis de Sade, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1992.

Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, marquis de (1740-1814). For generations a forbidden author with a subversive attraction, the marquis de Sade has in recent decades acquired both literary and intellectual respectability and has become a classic. He is an essential point of reference for such 20th-c. writers as Barthes, Blanchot, and Georges Bataille.

Of ancient Provençal nobility in straitened circumstances, he married into money (1763) to find financial freedom and spent the next 30 years struggling in the webs spun between family and state. Under the ancien régime he was pursued by lettres de cachet from his wife's family, who were horrified by his scandalous conduct. He was arrested and imprisoned a number of times for assaults and attempted murders of prostitutes, and had been in prison for 12 years when the Revolution began. The decree of the Assemblée Constituante abolishing lettres de cachet (March 1790) led to his release in the following month. In June his wife took advantage of the new legislation to obtain a legal and financial separation.

His relations with the Revolution were no happier. He described himself in a letter to his agent, Gaufridy (December 1791), as neither aristocrat nor democrat, but possessed of a dislike of the Jacobins. An ‘Adresse au roi des Français’ (June 1791) on the royal family's return from Varennes shows him in favour of a reformed monarchy. His anti-aristocratic drama Le Comte Oxtiern, ou les Effets du libertinage, which received two showings in October 1791, was a failed attempt to exploit revolutionary sentiment for dramatic success. The brochure ‘Français, encore un effort si vous voulez etre républicains’, included in La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), is a plea for licence for the passions, not political reform. But as a prudent man, Sade obtained from his section (Place Vendôme) in July 1790 his carte de citoyen actif, and performed the appropriate duties. Arrested on 8 December 1793 because his name appeared in error on a list with others denounced for conspiracy, he missed the guillotine by a bureaucratic accident and was released after the fall of Robespierre in 1794. Sade and the new order were as ill-matched as Sade and the old. The publication of Justine in 1791 was met with cries of outrage, and Sade spent the rest of his career assiduously denying its authorship. He was nevertheless imprisoned in April 1801 (without trial, to avoid scandal) as part of the campaign for morality launched by Napoleon. He spent his last years confined to the mental asylum at Charenton, where he continued to write and organized plays performed by the inmates.

Sade was no politician. He remarks in La Nouvelle Justine (1800): ‘Il n'y a vraiment aucun bon particelui de l'opinion générale est toujours le seul qu'il faut adopter.’ The message of all his libertines is that, short of possessing absolute power, dissimulation is the sole key to freedom. Imagination, in his work, compensates for impotence. His writing reduces the whole universe to the manageable dimensions of the (imagined) human body, which becomes his theatre of power—or, more precisely, of desire for power denied.

A man of his time, he pushed to extremes the ideas of the philosophes, with the exception of their belief in historical progress and the perfectibility of human nature. He was a materialist and an atheist; the ideas presented in treatise form in his Dialogue entre un prêtre et un mourant (1782) reappear throughout his fictions. He took an equally keen interest in contemporary developments in imaginative fiction, acknowledging a special debt to Richardson and Prévost for their treatment of the passions. His own well-argued study of the Gothic novel, Idée sur les romans, appeared as the introduction to his collection of short stories, Les Crimes de l'amour (1800). His extensive and varied œuvre experiments with the range of contemporary genres, including prose narrative (short stories, historical novels, romans à tiroirs) and drama, as well as pamphlets and philosophical treatises.

Sade began writing novels in the Bastille. From the beginning, he applied the whole Gothic apparatus—coincidence, melodrama, terror, sentimentality, and brutality—as well as a rationalist mind-set, which works in cold and effective contrast to the chaotic material it contains. From the start, too, the concept of story-telling is foregrounded. The procedures of art, the mechanisms of control, are crucial to Sade's eroticism: not blind instinct, but constructed desire.

Les 120 Journées de Sodome, written in the Bastille in 1784-5, was first published in 1904. The definitive text was produced in 1931-5 by Maurice Heine, whose work facilitated the passage of Sade's writing from the literary underground to open availability to creative writers (the Surrealists, for example, were already provided with Apollinaire's 1909 anthology of Sade) and scholars in psychology, literary history, and literary criticism. (The appearance in 1990 of the first volume of the Pléiade edition of Sade's complete works marks, as its editors say, the final admission of Sade into the university.) The 120 Journées, which presents the most forbidden subjects in uncensored detail, has not lost its power to shock; it is like a parody of the operations of the well-run modern state: a careful categorization of crimes and perversions, carried out to a strict timetable and set of rules by a brilliantly caricatured group of contemporary authority figures—judges, financiers, churchmen. The institutions of the state thrive in the spaces of individual despotic desire: in the private depths of the family castle, the bodies of the family and the paid servants are the raw material on which tyranny practises.

Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu (1791; an expanded version of a text of 1787) is a less hair-raising version of the same theme of the pleasure and power of evil. In this first-person narrative, which inevitably—perhaps in deliberate parody—invites comparison with Voltaire's Candide, the naïve orphan, seeking only to live by an ethic of virtue and kindness, experiences a painful initiation into the logic of a Hobbesian universe. Subjected to a sequence of spectacular rapes and perverted cruelties at the hands of her fellow men and women, Justine, unlike Candide, is denied the chance of a happy ending by a well-aimed, morally indifferent bolt of lightning. In contrast, Justine's sister Juliette, a paradigm of evil, thrives and prospers (La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu, suivie de l'Histoire de Juliette, sa sœur ou les Prospérités du vice, 1797). Juliette, having served and survived her apprenticeship with the most wicked libertines in France, takes off on an early Cook's Tour, spreading death, disease, and immorality through all the antique sites and beauty spots of Western Europe, devastating the cultural inheritance.

Aline et Valcour, begun in the Bastille and finally published in 1795, had the merit, according to Sade, of predicting the Revolution, in the scattered references throughout the text to democratic principles and especially in its section on the Utopian kingdom of Zamé. In fact, the centre of the novel is the pleasure of incest: the baron de Blamont and his libertine friends engage in a complex seduction and exchange of daughters, closing the circle of desire.

[Jennifer Birkett]

Bibliography

• S. de Beauvoir, ‘Faut-il brûler Sade?’ (originally, Privilèges, 1955)
• G. Lély, Sade (1967)
• J.-J. Pauvert, Sade vivant (1989)

Sade, Donatien Alphonse, marquis de (1740-1814) French pornographer and madman. His nihilism as much as his obsession with the psychopathology of unbridled violent lust has given him a remarkable symbolic role in the thought of writers such as Foucault, the French theorist Gilles Deleuze (1925-95), and others concerned with sexual desire and its relationship to political power. See also wickedness.

Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François De (1740–1814), French writer. Belonging to one of France's most ancient noble families, the marquis de Sade attended Paris's rigorous Louis-le-Grand lycée as a youth and then a light cavalry academy that would steer him toward a military career. At the age of sixteen he was commissioned as a lieutenant and standard bearer in the Carabiniers, a prestigious military unit of armed officers, and he took part in the war against Prussia. By early 1759, when he was eighteen years old, Sade was nominated captain in the Burgundy cavalry. Early in his military career Sade had earned a reputation with his peers as a gambler and a ladies' man, and the young officer often lamented both his lack of motivation to do the things required to succeed and the absence of close, sincere friends in his life. When the Seven Years' War ended in 1763, Sade's family began marriage negotiations with the Montreuil family, petty nobility of the robe who were nevertheless extremely wealthy. Sade resisted his family's wishes that he marry, but when the woman with whom he was in love scorned him, Sade returned to Paris from Provence four days before his wedding in May 1763 and married Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, whom he did not meet until the day before the wedding.

Five months later, the marquis was imprisoned in the Vincennes dungeon for licentiousness and blasphemy. This first of his many incarcerations resulted from the violence he meted out to the young Jeanne Testard, whom he had paid to spend the night with him in small rented quarters in Paris which, like a number of aristocrats, the marquis kept for occasional trysts. During his encounter with Testard, the marquis first asked the young woman whether she believed in God, and then proceeded to desecrate a number of crucifixes and other religious objects. He asked the young woman to beat him with a red-hot whip and pressed her to choose the whip with which he would flagellate her. Testard made a deposition to the commissioner of police, Sade was arrested, and taken to Vincennes, an ancient fortress on the southeast edge of Paris. Sade remained there for less than a month, but would return to Vincennes or to the Bastille on numerous other occasions for similar acts of blasphemy and sexual violence. (He spent a total of about thirty years, including the years from 1801 to the end of his life, in prison.) Sade wrote most of the works for which he is best known while incarcerated. His first significant piece is the Dialog between a Priest and a Dying Man, probably composed in 1782 while he was imprisoned in Vincennes. The dialogue treats some standard eighteenth-century views on religion, philosophy, materialism, and reason, and the dying man concludes that it is the latter faculty, more than faith in God, that leads to human happiness. Shortly after Sade finished the short philosophical piece, authorities confiscated all the prisoner's books because they appeared to give him inappropriate ideas. In the remaining years of the decade Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom, The Misfortunes of Virtue, and Aline and Valcour, a semi-autobiographical novel. Other major works consist of a number of short stories and plays.

The marquis de Sade's novels combine a philosophical interest in materialism, an intense examination of the extent and limits of human reason, and an extremely vivid, often overwhelming, depiction of graphic sexual violence. All of the major novels revolve around the planning, narration, and carrying out of elaborate, often implausible acts of torture and mutilation, many of which involve religious motifs. Most often, a sophistic diatribe concerning, among other things, the absurdity of virtue in a class-based society accompanies the consummation of the violent acts. The libertines who inflict the violence in Sade's novels engage in a nonstop philosophical conundrum in which they attempt to locate the limits of language, power, bodily existence, and domination. Repeatedly attempting to physically and subjectively annihilate their victims, they rely all the more on those whom they would destroy for their own identities in their attempts to do, say, and be all. The dialectic Sade constructs throughout the better part of his fiction interrogates the possibility of unmediated access to such ostensibly natural phenomena as the body, pleasure, pain, and intersubjective violence.

Virtually all of Sade's works have been reviled and censored since their very first appearances, and even as late as 1956 the publishing firm Pauvert was fined for printing the complete works. Nevertheless, Sade has had considerable influence in artistic and philosophical circles. André Breton (1896–1966) and the surrealists, in particular, found in his work liberating ideas for thinking about reason and sexuality.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Sade, marquis de. The Complete Justine: Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings. Compiled and translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. New York, 1965.

——. The Crimes of Love. Translated and edited by Margaret Crosland. London, 1996.

——. Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond. Paris, 1926.

——. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. Translated and edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. New York, 1987.

Secondary Sources

Frappier-Mazur, Lucienne. Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Philadelphia, 1996.

Lély, Gilbert. The Marquis de Sade: A Biography. Translated by Alec Brown. New York, 1970.

Lever, Maurice. Sade: A Biography. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York, 1993.

—THOMAS DIPIERO

Quotes:

"If Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws. Now, once we observe that destruction is so useful to her that she absolutely cannot dispense with it from this moment onward the idea of annihilation which we attach to death ceases to be real what we call the end of the living animal is no longer a true finish, but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter. According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another."

"Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates."

"Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world."

"The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect."

"The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success."

"Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong: there you have Nature, there you have her intentions, there you have her scheme: a perpetual action and reaction, a host of vices, a host of virtues, in one word, a perfect equilibrium resulting from the equality of good and evil on earth."

See more famous quotes by Marquis De Sade

"De Sade" redirects here. For the 1969 film, see De Sade (film).

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Marquis de Sade
Portrait of the Marquis de Sade by Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (c. 1761), the only portrait that Sade actually sat for.
Born	2 June 1740(1740-06-02) Paris, France
Died	2 December 1814 (aged 74) Charenton, France
Occupation	Noble, writer, poet, critic, delegate to the National Convention
Influences Voltaire
Influenced Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Guillaume Apollinaire, Camille Paglia

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) (French pronunciation: [maʁki də sad]) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and writer. His works include novels, short stories, plays, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic novels, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting bizarre sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom (or at least licentiousness), unrestrained by morality, religion or law.

Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life; eleven years in Paris (10 of which were spent in the Bastille) a month in Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes, three years in Bicêtre, a year in Sainte-Pélagie, and 13 years in the Charenton asylum. Many of his works were written in prison. The term "sadism" (/ˈseɪdɪzm/) is derived from his name.

Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life and education 1.2 Title and heirs 1.3 Scandals and imprisonment 1.4 Return to freedom, delegate to the National Convention and imprisonment 1.5 Imprisonment for his writings and death 2 Appraisal and criticism 3 Cultural depictions 4 Bibliography 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Life

Early life and education

The castle above Lacoste, a residence of de Sade; currently the site of theater festivals.

The Marquis de Sade was born in the Condé palace, Paris, to Comte Jean-Baptiste François Joseph de Sade and Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, cousin and Lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Condé. He was educated by an uncle, the abbé de Sade. Later, he attended Jesuit lycée, then pursued a military career, becoming Colonel of a Dragoon regiment, and fighting in the Seven Years' War. In 1763, on returning from war, he courted a rich magistrate's daughter, but her father rejected his suit, and, instead, arranged a marriage to his elder daughter, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil; that marriage engendered two sons and a daughter.^[1] In 1766, he had a private theatre built in his castle at Lacoste in Provence. In January 1767, his father died.

Sade's father, Jean-Baptiste François Joseph de Sade.

Title and heirs

The Sade men alternated using the marquis and comte (count) titles. His grandfather, Gaspard François de Sade, was the first to use marquis;^[2] occasionally, he was the Marquis de Sade, but is documentarily identified as the Marquis de Mazan. The Sade family were Noblesse d'épée, claiming at the time the oldest, Frank-descended nobility, so, assuming a noble title without a King's grant, was customarily de rigueur. Alternating title usage indicates that titular hierarchy (below duc et pair) was notional; theoretically, the marquis title was granted to noblemen owning several countships, but its use by men of dubious lineage caused its disrepute. At Court, precedence was by seniority and royal favour, not title. There is father-and-son correspondence, wherein father addresses son as marquis.^{[dubious – discuss]}

Twentieth-century descendant, the Comte Xavier de Sade, was the first to defend the family name and be interested in the Marquis's controversial work. Until 1948, Comte Xavier had known little of his ancestor because the Marquis de Sade's works went unpublished and unread in France until the 1960s. Thus, when he found a trunk containing journals, letters, manuscripts, and legal documents, he granted access to biographer Gilbert Lêly; the works were published from 1948 to the 1960s. The Comte Xavier and his descendants own the copyrights and the family name, a peculiar legal manoeuvre because the Marquis de Sade died and his copyrights expired two centuries earlier.^{[citation needed]}

To avoid association with the Marquis de Sade, descendants have refused the Marquis title. Bibliographically, the Sade family have some original manuscripts, others are in universities and libraries, or were destroyed in the eighteenth century. Moreover, the Comte Xavier de Sade founded a winery, honouring the Marquis de Sade, vinting champagne and claret, introduced to market in the late 1980s. Before Comte Xavier, most descendants were against using any of the Marquis's names, yet he named a son Donatien.^{[citation needed]} in 2009 he was rediscovered.

Scandals and imprisonment

Portrait of the elder Sade

Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, a serious offense at that time. His behavior included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospère, who had come to live at the castle.

Beginning in 1763, Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about mistreatment by him and he was put under surveillance by the police who made detailed reports of his escapades. After several short imprisonments, which included a brief incarceration in the Château de Saumur (then a jail), he was exiled to his chateau at Lacoste in 1768.^[3]

One of Sade's first major scandals occurred on Easter Sunday in 1768, in which he procured the sexual services of a woman, Rose Keller^[4]  – whether she was a prostitute or not is widely disputed. He was accused of taking her to his chateau at Arcueil, imprisoning her there and sexually and physically abusing her. She escaped by climbing out of a second-floor window and running away. It was at this time that la Présidente, Sade's mother-in-law, obtained a lettre de cachet from the king, excluding Sade from the jurisdiction of the courts. The lettre de cachet (a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or access to the courts) would later prove disastrous for the marquis.

An episode in Marseille, in 1772, involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac Spanish fly and sodomy with his manservant Latour. That year the two men were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning. They fled to Italy, and Sade took his wife's sister with him.

Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans, in late 1772, but escaped four months later.

Sade later hid at Lacoste where he rejoined his wife who became an accomplice in his subsequent endeavors. He kept a group of young employees at Lacoste, most of whom complained about sexual mistreatment and quickly left his service. Sade was forced to flee to Italy once again. It was during this time he wrote Voyage d'Italie, which, along with his earlier travel writings, has never been translated into English. In 1776 he returned to Lacoste, again hired several servant girls, most of whom fled. In 1777 the father of one of those employees came to Lacoste, to claim her, and attempted to shoot the Marquis at point-blank range. Fortunately for Sade, the gun misfired.

Later that year, Sade was tricked into visiting his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had recently died, in Paris. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. He successfully appealed his death sentence in 1778 but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau who also wrote erotic works. Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other immensely.^[5]

In 1784 Vincennes was closed and Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789 he reportedly shouted out from his cell, to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!" causing something of a riot. Two days later he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. (The storming of the Bastille, marking the start of the French Revolution, occurred on 14 July.)

He had been working on his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom). To his despair he believed that the manuscript was lost during his transfer; but he continued to write.

He was released from Charenton in 1790 after the new Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon after.

Return to freedom, delegate to the National Convention and imprisonment

During Sade's time of freedom, beginning in 1790, he published several of his books anonymously. He met Marie-Constance Quesnet, a former actress, and mother of a six-year-old son, who had been abandoned by her husband. Constance and Sade would stay together for the rest of his life. Sade was by this time extremely obese.

He initially ingratiated himself with the new political situation after the revolution, supported the Republic,^[6] called himself "Citizen Sade" and managed to obtain several official positions despite his aristocratic background.

Due to the damage done to his estate in Lacoste which was sacked in 1789 by an angry mob, he moved to Paris. In 1790 he was elected to the National Convention where he represented the far left. He was a member of the Piques section, a section notorious for its radical views. He wrote several political pamphlets, in which he called for the implementation of direct vote. However there is much to suggest that he suffered abuse from his fellow revolutionaries due to his aristocratic background. Matters were not helped by the desertion of his son, a second lieutenant and the aide-de-camp to an important colonel the Marquis de Toulengeon, in May 1792. De Sade was forced to disavow his son's desertion in order to save his neck. Later that year his name was entered - whether by error or willful malice - on the list of émigrés of the Bouches-du-Rhône department.^[7]

Appalled by the Reign of Terror in 1793, he wrote an admiring eulogy for Jean-Paul Marat to secure his position. Then he resigned his posts, was accused of "moderatism" and imprisoned for over a year. This experience presumably confirmed his life-long detestation of state tyranny and especially of the death penalty. He was released in 1794, after the overthrow and execution of Maximilien Robespierre had effectively ended the Reign of Terror.

In 1796, now all but destitute, he had to sell his ruined castle in Lacoste. The ruins of the castle were acquired in the 1990s by fashion designer Pierre Cardin who now holds regular theater festivals there.

Imprisonment for his writings and death

The first page of Sade's Justine, one of the works for which he was imprisoned.

In 1801 Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine and Juliette. Sade was arrested at his publisher's office and imprisoned without trial; first in the Sainte-Pélagie prison and, following allegations that he had tried to seduce young fellow prisoners there, in the harsh fortress of Bicêtre.

After intervention by his family, he was declared insane in 1803 and transferred once more to the asylum at Charenton. His ex-wife and children had agreed to pay his pension there. Constance was allowed to live with him at Charenton. The benign director of the institution, Abbé de Coulmier, allowed and encouraged him to stage several of his plays, with the inmates as actors, to be viewed by the Parisian public. Coulmier's novel approaches to psychotherapy attracted much opposition. In 1809 new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprived him of pens and paper, though Coulmier succeeded in ameliorating this harsh treatment. In 1813, the government ordered Coulmier to suspend all theatrical performances.

Sade began an affair with 13-year-old Madeleine Leclerc, daughter of an employee at Charenton. This affair lasted some 4 years, until Sade's death in 1814. He had left instructions in his will forbidding that his body be opened upon any pretext whatsoever, and that it remain untouched for 48 hours in the chamber which he died, and then placed in a coffin and buried on his property located in Malmaison near Épernon. His skull was later removed from the grave for phrenological examination. His son had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burned, including the immense multi-volume work Les Journées de Florbelle.

Appraisal and criticism

Numerous writers and artists, especially those concerned with sexuality, have been both repelled and fascinated by Sade.

The contemporary rival pornographer Rétif de la Bretonne published an Anti-Justine in 1793.

Simone de Beauvoir (in her essay Must we burn Sade?, published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952) and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding modern existentialism by some 150 years. He has also been seen as a precursor of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis in his focus on sexuality as a motive force. The surrealists admired him as one of their forerunners, and Guillaume Apollinaire famously called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed".^[8]

Pierre Klossowski, in his 1947 book Sade Mon Prochain ("Sade My Neighbor"), analyzes Sade's philosophy as a precursor of nihilism, negating both Christian values and the materialism of the Enlightenment.

One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behavior of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment. Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1966 essay "Kant avec Sade" that de Sade's ethics was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.

In his 1988 Political Theory and Modernity, William E. Connolly analyzes Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom as an argument against earlier political philosophers, notably Rousseau and Hobbes, and their attempts to reconcile nature, reason and virtue as basis of ordered society.

In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye) in her essay, "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored.

By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern re-telling of Sade's Juliette.^[9]

Cultural depictions

Depiction of the Marquis de Sade by H. Biberstein in L'Œuvre du marquis de Sade, Guillaume Appolinaire (Edit.), Bibliothèque des Curieux, Paris, 1912

Main article: Marquis de Sade in popular culture

There have been many and varied references to the Marquis de Sade in popular culture, including fictional works and biographies. The namesake of the psychological and subcultural term sadism, his name is used variously to evoke sexual violence, licentiousness and freedom of speech.^[10] In modern culture his works are simultaneously viewed as masterful analyses of how power and economics work, and as erotica.^[11] Sade's sexually explicit works were a medium for the articulation of the corrupt and hypocritical values of the elite in his society, which caused him to become imprisoned. He thus became a symbol of the artist's struggle with the censor. Sade's use of pornographic devices to create provocative works that subvert the prevailing moral values of his time inspired many other artists in a variety of media. The cruelties depicted in his works gave rise to the concept of sadism. Sade's works have to this day been kept alive by artists and intellectuals because they espouse a philosophy of extreme individualism that became reality in the economic liberalism of the following centuries.^[12]

In the late twentieth century, there was a resurgence of interest in Sade; leading French intellectuals like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault published studies of the philosopher, and interest in Sade among scholars and artists continued.^[10] In the realm of visual arts, many surrealist artists had interest in the Marquis. Sade was celebrated in surrealist periodicals, and feted by figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard and Maurice Heine; Man Ray admired Sade because he and other surrealists viewed him as an ideal of freedom.^[12] The first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) announced that "Sade is surrealist in sadism", and extracts of the original draft of Justine were published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.^[13] In literature, Sade is referenced in several stories by science fiction writer Robert Bloch, while Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem wrote an essay analyzing the game theory arguments appearing in Sade's Justine.^[14] The writer Georges Bataille applied Sade's methods of writing about sexual transgression to shock and provoke readers.^[12]

Sade's life and works have been the subject of numerous fictional plays, films, pornographic or erotic drawings, etchings and more. These include Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade, a fantasia extrapolating from the fact that Sade directed plays performed by his fellow inmates at the Charenton asylum.^[15] Yukio Mishima, Barry Yzereef, and Doug Wright also wrote plays about Sade; Weiss's and Wright's plays have been made into films. His work is referenced on film at least as early as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's L'Age d'or (1930), the final segment of which provides a coda to Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, with the four debauched noblemen emerging from their mountain retreat. Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), updating Sade's novel to the brief Salo Republic; Benoît Jacquot's Sade and Philip Kaufman's Quills (from the play of the same name by Doug Wright) both hit cinemas in 2000. Quills, inspired by Sade's imprisonment and battles with the censorship in his society,^[12] portrays Sade as a literary freedom fighter who is a martyr to the cause of free expression.^[16]

Bibliography

For more details on this topic, see Bibliography of the Marquis de Sade.

See also

• BDSM
• Fetish fashion
• Foreplay
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
• Sexual fetishism
• Quills

References

1. ^ Love, Brenda (2002). The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. UK: Abacus. pp. p145. ISBN 0-349-11535-4. 
2. ^ Vie du Marquis de Sade by Gilbert Lêly, 1961
3. ^ Timeline of Sade's life by Neil Schaeffer. Retrieved 12 September 2006.
4. ^ Barthes, Roland (2004) [1971]. Life of Sade. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 
5. ^ Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti (1921). L'Œuvre du comte de Mirabeau. Paris, France: Bibliothèque des curieux. pp. p9. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k206962n.notice. 
6. ^ McLemee, Scott (2002), "Sade, Marquis de", glbtq.com, http://www.glbtq.com/literature/sade.html 
7. ^ "The Life and Times of the Marquis de Sade". Geocities.com. http://www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/7362/timeline.htm. Retrieved 23 October 2008. 
8. ^ Queenan, Joe (2004). Malcontents. Philadelphia: Running Press. pp. 519. ISBN 0762416971. 
9. ^ Andrea Dworkin has Died, from Susie Bright's Journal, 11 April 2005. Retrieved 23 November 2006
10. ^ ^{a b} Phillips, John, 2005, The Marquis De Sade: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0192804693.
11. ^ Guins, Raiford, and Cruz, Omayra Zaragoza, 2005, Popular Culture: A Reader, Sage Publications, ISBN 0761974725.
12. ^ ^{a b c d} MacNair, Brian, 2002, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire, Routledge, ISBN 0415237335.
13. ^ Bate, David, 2004, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent, I.B. Tauris, ISBN 1860643795.
14. ^ Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. (1986). "Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem". DePauw University. http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/lem40interview.htm. 
15. ^ Dancyger, Ken, 2002, The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, and Practice, Focal Press, ISBN 024080225X.
16. ^ Raengo, Alessandra, and Stam, Robert, 2005, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Blackwell, ISBN 0631230556.

Further reading

• Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. (1994) by Roger Shattuck (Provides a sound philosophical introduction to Sade and his writings.)
• Pour Sade. (2006) by Norbert Sclippa
• Marquis de Sade: his life and works. (1899) by Iwan Bloch
• Sade Mon Prochain. (1947) by Pierre Klossowski
• Lautréamont and Sade. (1949) by Maurice Blanchot
• The Marquis de Sade, a biography. (1961) by Gilbert Lély
• Philosopher of Evil: The Life and Works of the Marquis de Sade. (1962) by Walter Drummond
• The life and ideas of the Marquis de Sade. (1963) by Geoffrey Gorer
• Sade, Fourier, Loyola. (1971) by Roland Barthes
• De Sade: A Critical Biography. (1978) by Ronald Hayman
• The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. (1979) by Angela Carter
• The Marquis de Sade: the man, his works, and his critics: an annotated bibliography. (1986) by Colette Verger Michael
• Sade, his ethics and rhetoric. (1989) collection of essays, edited by Colette Verger Michael
• Marquis de Sade: A Biography. (1991) by Maurice Lever
• The philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. (1995) by Timo Airaksinen
• Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism. (1996) by Thomas Moore (spiritual writer)
• Sade contre l'Être suprême. (1996) by Philippe Sollers
• A Fall from Grace (1998) by Chris Barron
• Sade: A Biographical Essay (1998) by Laurence Louis Bongie
• An Erotic Beyond: Sade. (1998) by Octavio Paz
• The Marquis de Sade: a life. (1999) by Neil Schaeffer
• At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life. (1999) by Francine du Plessix Gray
• Sade: from materialism to pornography. (2002) by Caroline Warman
• Marquis de Sade: the genius of passion. (2003) by Ronald Hayman
• Marquis de Sade: A Very Short Introduction (2005) by John Phillips

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marquis de Sade

• Marquis de Sade at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Norbert Sclippa
• Œuvres du Marquis de Sade
• Marquis de Sade at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by Marquis de Sade at Project Gutenberg
• Biography at Trivia Library

v • d • e Marquis de Sade Bibliography: Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man • 120 Days of Sodom • Justine • Aline and Valcour • Philosophy in the Bedroom • Juliette • Histoire secrete d'Isabelle de Baviere, reine de France Miscellanea Marquis de Sade in popular culture

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Persondata
NAME	de Sade, Marquis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Novelist, philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	2 June 1740(1740-06-02)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris, France
DATE OF DEATH	2 December 1814
PLACE OF DEATH	Charenton-Saint-Maurice

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