Marquis de Sade

Life

Early life, education and marriage (1740–1763)

Sade was born on 2 June 1740, in the Hôtel de Condé, Paris, the only surviving child of Jean-Baptiste François Joseph, Comte de Sade, and Marie-Éléonore de Maillé de Carman. The Sade family was of the provincial nobility dating to the 13th century. Sade's mother was from a junior branch of the house of Bourbon-Condé and therefore Sade was related to the King of France by blood.

Sade's father was a captain of dragoons who was entrusted with diplomatic missions to the Russian Empire, Britain and the Elector of Cologne. His mother was lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Condé and, for his first four years, Sade lived in the Hôtel de Condé. The infant Sade was spoilt, haughty, and prone to violent rages. In 1744, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Avignon, probably because he had fought with his playmate, Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, who was four years his senior.

The following year, Sade was placed in the care of his paternal uncle, the Abbé de Sade, a priest and libertine who lived in the château de Saumane in the Vaucluse region. The Abbé d'Amblet was appointed as Sade's tutor and the young marquis grew to respect him greatly. Meanwhile, the Count de Sade had lost favor with the king and had been recalled from his post in Germany. His career was now in ruins and his wife eventually left him to live in a Carmelite convent in Paris.

In the autumn of 1750, ten-year-old Sade was sent to the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he was taught Latin, Greek and rhetoric, and also participated in the school's theatrical productions. Sade's father was now heavily in debt and could not afford to enroll his son as a residential student, so Sade probably lived in private accommodation with Amblet. Residential students were discouraged from mixing with external students, and this might have isolated Sade from his aristocratic peers. Biographers and historians are divided on whether or not Sade experienced caning (or other forms of corporal punishment), sexual abuse or sodomy while at school, and whether or not this influenced his sexual development.

Sade spent his summer holidays with Madame de Raimond, one of his father's former lovers, at the château de Longeville in the Champagne region. There, he met Madame de Saint-Germain, for whom he would hold a life-long affection. Both women became mother-figures for Sade.In 1754, Sade was sent to the Chevaux-légers military academy. After twenty months of training, on 14 December 1755, aged 15, Sade was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the King's Foot Guard. He soon went to battle at the onset of the Seven Years' War. After thirteen months as a sub-lieutenant, he was commissioned to the rank of cornet in the Brigade de Saint-André of the Comte de Provence's Carbine Regiment on 14 January 1757, and again promoted to the rank of captain in the Burgundian Cavalry on 21 April 1759. Despite this, Sade generally refused to ingratiate himself with his superiors, and "disdained making friends with his peers". He frequently infuriated his father with his gambling and womanizing.

Scandals and imprisonment (1763–1790)

Four months after his wedding, Sade was accused of blasphemy and incitement to sacrilege, which were capital offenses. He had rented a property in Paris which he used for sexual encounters. On 18 October 1763, Sade hired a prostitute named Jeanne Testard. Testard stated to the police that Sade had locked her in a bedroom before asking whether she believed in God. When she said that she did, Sade said there was no God and shouted obscenities concerning Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Sade then masturbated with a chalice and crucifix while shouting obscenities and blasphemies. He asked her to beat him with a cane and an iron scourge which had been heated by fire, but she refused. Sade then threatened her with pistols and a sword, telling her he would kill her if she did not trample on a crucifix and exclaim obscene blasphemies. She reluctantly complied. She spent the night with Sade, who read her irreligious poetry. He asked her for sodomy (another capital offense) but she refused. The following morning, Testard reported Sade to the authorities. On 29 October, following a police investigation, Sade was arrested on the personal orders of the king and jailed in Vincennes prison. Sade wrote several contrite letters to the authorities in which he expressed remorse and asked to see a priest. After Sade's father begged Louis XV for clemency, the king ordered Sade's release on 13 November.

On his release, Sade was exiled to the Montreuil estate at Échauffour, Normandy. In September 1764, the king revoked Sade's exile and the marquis returned to Paris where he took up a series of mistresses. In the summer of 1765 he took his then mistress, Mademoiselle Beauvoison, to his favourite castle at La Coste, Provence, where he passed her off as his wife, greatly offending Madame de Montreuil. The following year, he undertook renovations of La Coste, including building a theater for public performances.

In January 1767, Sade's father died. That summer, Sade went to La Coste where the local dignitaries and vassals formally swore homage to their new lord; a revival of a feudal custom which his father had avoided. On 27 August, his first son, Louis-Marie, was born.

On 3 April 1768, Easter Sunday, Sade approached a 36-year-old widow named Rose Keller who was begging at the Place des Victoires in Paris. Keller stated that Sade offered her employment as a housekeeper. He took her in his carriage to his country residence in Arcueil, where he locked her in a room and threatened to kill her if she did not undress. He then tied her down on a bed and whipped her with a cane or a cat-o'-nine-tails. She stated he also cut her with a penknife and poured hot wax on her wounds. He brandished a knife and threatened to kill her if she did not stop screaming. He later gave her food and locked her in an upstairs room. She managed to escape out a window and sought help. She went to the authorities that evening and lodged a complaint. The local magistrate began an investigation the following day and news of the affair reached Madame de Montreuil on 7 April. She immediately sent representatives to Arcueil who paid Keller to withdraw her complaint. On 8 April, the king issued a lettre de cachet (a royal warrant for arrest and detention without trial) and Sade was imprisoned at the Château de Saumur and later the Pierre-Encize prison. On 15 April, the criminal chamber of the parlement de Paris took up the case and soon issued an arrest warrant for Sade. On 3 June, the king issued a pardon for the marquis, probably on the petition of the Montreuil family. The parlement interrogated Sade on 10 June and he stated that Keller was a prostitute who willingly supplied her services. He denied tying her down, cutting her with a knife or burning her with hot wax and stated that Keller did not complain about the flagellation at the time. The parlement accepted the king's pardon and ordered Sade to pay 100 livres in alms for prisoners. Sade was returned to Pierre-Encize prison under the lettre de cachet. On 16 November, the king ordered his release on the condition that he stay at La Coste under supervision.

Freedom and imprisonment (1790–1801)

On Sade's release, his wife sought a legal separation and the marriage was dissolved in September 1790. In August, he met Marie-Constance Quesnet, a 33-year-old actress, and they began a relationship which was to last until his death. Sade now called himself "Louis Sade, man of letters" and tried to launch a career as a writer. His novel Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue was published anonymously in June 1791. In October, his play Oxtiern opened at the Théâtre Molière in Paris, but closed after only two performances following audience uproar.

Sade was increasingly involved in politics, at first supporting a constitutional monarchy. However, as republican sentiment grew in 1792, Sade found himself in political difficulty due to his noble ancestry, public support of the monarchy and the emigration of his two sons. In March, his play Le Suborneur premiered at the Théâtre Italien but only lasted one night when Jacobin activists disrupted the performance. He began publicly espousing more radical republican views and became more prominent in his local revolutionary section, the Section des Piques. Following the fall of the monarchy in September 1792, he was appointed the section's commissioner on health and charitable institutions, and in October 1793 he was chosen to deliver the funeral oration for the revolutionary martyrs Marat and Le Peletier. In November, his section delegated him to deliver a petition against religion to the National Convention. His speech probably alienated Robespierre and other members of the convention and its powerful Committee of Public Safety who were attempting to suppress atheism and attacks on religion. In December 1793, Sade was arrested and charged with "moderatism", associating with counter-revolutionaries, anti-republicanism and "feigned patriotism". He was listed for execution on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor) but was saved either by bribery or bureaucratic error. Robespierre and his supporters fell from power that day, ending the Reign of Terror and paving the way for Sade's release from prison in October.

On his release, Sade concentrated on literature and his personal affairs. He published a series of anonymous novels: Philosophy in the Bedroom and Aline and Valcour (1795), and the first volumes of The New Justine and Juliette (1797–99). Sade had huge debts, little income from his properties, and the Vaucluse department had incorrectly placed him on its list of émigrés, leaving him vulnerable to arrest and confiscation of property. In October 1796, he was forced to sell La Coste, but his former wife obtained most of the proceeds. In 1798, Sade unsuccessfully petitioned Paul Barras, a leader of the Directory regime, to have his name removed from the list of émigrés. Sade's émigré status was finally revoked in December 1799, by which time he had fallen deeper into poverty and had registered as indigent.

Final imprisonment and death (1801–1814)

The Napoleonic Consulate was cracking down on public immorality and, in March 1801, Sade was arrested at his publisher's office and detained in the Sainte-Pélagie Prison. The stocks of The New Justine and Juliette were seized and the police minister Joseph Fouché ordered Sade's detention without trial as he believed the pornography laws did not provide for sufficient punishment and any trial would only increase Sade's notoriety. Following Sade's attempts to seduce young prisoners at Sainte-Pélagie, he was declared insane with "libertine dementia" and transferred to the Bicêtre Asylum.

After intervention by his family, he was transferred once more to the Charenton Asylum, where his ex-wife and children agreed to pay his room and board. Marie-Constance, pretending to be his illegitimate daughter, was allowed to live with him there. The director of Charenton, Abbé de Coulmier, attempted to run the institution on humane principles with an emphasis on "moral treatment" in accordance with the nature of the mental illness. He allowed Sade to write, produce and perform in plays, and also encouraged balls, concerts, dinners and other entertainments. In 1805, Coulmier had a theater built on the premises with seating for about 200. The performances, which included professional actors and inmates, became fashionable, attracting many among the elite of Napoleonic society.

Sade was also allowed to write. In April 1807, he completed Les journées de Florbelle, a ten-volume libertine novel. The novel was seized after a police search of Sade's and Quesnet's rooms. Sade later completed three conventional novels at Charenton.

Coulmier's novel approach to psychotherapy and the privileges granted to Sade attracted much opposition in official circles. In 1810, new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprived him of pens and paper. Coulmier, however, gradually restored most of Sade's privileges.

In 1813, the government ordered Coulmier to suspend all theatrical performances, balls and concerts. By this time, Sade was in a sexual relationship with Madeleine Leclerc, the teenage daughter of an employee at Charenton. The relationship caused consternation for Quesnet and further allegations of immorality against Sade. In September 1814, the new director of Charenton asked the Bourbon restoration government to transfer Sade to another institution. Sade, however, was now seriously ill. He died on 2 December 1814 after an attack of "prostrating gangrenous fever".

Posthumous evaluation

Marshall writes that Sade's "known behaviour (which includes only the beating of a housemaid and an orgy with several prostitutes) departs greatly from the clinical picture of active sadism". Phillips states "there is no reason to believe that any of this behaviour involved compulsion". Dworkin, however, argues that the issue is whether one believes Sade or his female accusers and that admirers of Sade "attempt to justify, trivialize, or deny (even though records confirming the facts exist) every assault Sade ever committed against women and girls". Gray states that Sade engaged in "psychic terrorism" and that "Sade's brand of sadism was often more mental than corporeal". According to Bongie, Sade perpetrated "crimes of physical violence committed during sexual assaults on hapless prostitutes. Such assaults, aggravated by death threats and the element of recidivism, could easily get an offender into similar difficulties today".

Political, religious, and philosophical views

John Phillips argues that Sade's views cannot be easily determined due to the "difficulty of distinguishing a single authorial voice" from the multitude of characters in his fiction. Even in Sade's letters he was often playing a role which leads to "the ultimate impossibility of identifying the real Sade through his writing". The arguments his characters use to justify their more extreme behavior are often satire, parody and irony.

Geoffrey Gorer states that Sade was in opposition to contemporary thinkers for both his "complete and continual denial of the right to property" and for viewing the political conflict in late-18th-century France as being not between "the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another", but rather all of these "more or less united against the people". Thus, Gorer argued, "he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist".

Peter Marshall sees Sade as a precursor to anarchism in that he was libertarian in his desire to expand human freedom and contemplated a society without laws. Ultimately, however, Sade advocated a society with minimal laws.

Marshall writes that Sade was a proponent of free public brothels paid for by the state in order to reduce sex crimes and satisfy people's wishes to command and be obeyed. Dworkin, however, states that this proposal was for compulsory prostitution from childhood on, where women and girls could be raped by men. The proposal is from one of Sade's fictional characters, Le Chevalier, in the novel Philosophy in the Bedroom. Phillips argues that the views of Sade's characters cannot always be attributed to Sade. Gray suggests that Le Chevalier's speech should be read as subversive irony.

Maurice Lever, Laurence Louis Bongie and Francine du Plessix Gray present Sade as a political opportunist whose only consistent principles were libertinage, atheism, opposition to the death penalty and the defense of his own property and aristocratic privileges. Prior to the Revolution, Sade insisted on the observance of feudal customs. After the Revolution he supported the constitutional monarchy because that was the prevailing trend. Following the overthrow of the king, he publicly advocated republicanism only to protect himself from arrest as a supporter of the monarchy. Gray concludes, "relentlessly opportunistic in his public stances, the ci-devant marquis ... was an unswerving moderate horrified by political excess".

Critical reception

Contemporary critics were generally hostile to Sade's works. When his play Oxtiern premiered in 1791, the critic for the Moniteur stated, "there is interest and energy in the play, but the role of Oxtiern is a revolting atrocity". The anonymous Justine and Juliette were seen as obscene works. A review of Justine in the Journal Général de France stated that although Sade displayed "a rich and brilliant" imagination, "It is difficult to not often close the book out of disgust and indignation". There were rumours that Danton and Robespierre used Justine as an aid to masturbation and to inflame their lust for blood. Rétif de la Bretonne published an Anti-Justine in 1798. By 1800, numerous authors were attributing Justine to Sade. One reviewer called Sade's Crimes of Love "a detestable book written by a man suspected of having written a yet more horrible one".

The mostly hostile reception continued throughout the 19th century. The French historian Jules Michelet called Sade the "professor emeritus of crime". Although writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Byron and Poe expressed admiration for Sade's work, Swinburne found them unintentionally funny and Anatole France said, "their most dangerous ingredient is a fatal dose of boredom". In 1886, the sexologist Krafft-Ebing treated Sade's work as a compendium of sexual pathologies and gave the term sadism its clinical definition.

Interest in Sade increased in the 20th century. His biographer Laurence Louis Bongie writes, "Many different Sades have been invented over the years, and nearly always with passionate hostility towards opposing or even complementary definitions of the man". In 1909, Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed". André Breton called him "a surrealist in Sadism" committed to "total liberation, both social and moral". Others see him as a precursor to Nietzsche and Freud. Writing soon after World War II, Raymond Queneau argued that Sade's moral universe prefigured Nazism.

Simone de Beauvoir, in her essay "Must we burn Sade?" (published in 1951–52), argued that although Sade is a writer of the second rank and "unreadable", his value is making us rethink "the true nature of man's relationship to man".

After Sade's work became freely available in unexpurgated editions in France, the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s, critical interest in Sade accelerated. In 1971, Roland Barthes published an influential textual analysis, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, which largely resisted psychological, social and biographical interpretations of his work.

Cultural influence

Crocker sees Sade's intellectual influence in the 19th century as reflected in writers such as Stendhal, Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, and thinkers such as Stirner and Nietzsche. However, he states that Sade's greatest impact was on the 20th century. In 1963 Crocker wrote, "Sade speaks with the loudest voice to our time... for it is our age that has had to live the truths he revealed... It is in the twentieth century that the failure of rationalism, revealed in history and psychology, has plunged our arts and often our acts into the absurd of nihilism".

Sade has also entered Western culture as a case study in sexual pathology. Sexual sadism disorder, a mental condition named after Sade, has been defined as experiencing sexual arousal in response to extreme pain, suffering or humiliation done non-consensually to others (as described by Sade in his novels). Other terms have been used to describe the condition, which may overlap with other sexual preferences that also involve inflicting pain. It is distinct from situations where consenting individuals use mild or simulated pain or humiliation for sexual excitement.

After World War II, Sade attracted increasing interest from intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Camille Paglia and others as an early thinker on issues of sexuality, the body, transgression and nihilism.

A. D. Farr suggested that Sade's writing, particularly Philosophy in the Bedroom, influenced the subsequent medical and social acceptance of abortion in Western society. Dworkin, however, argues that Sade only extolled abortion as a form of murder which he sexualized. He more frequently advocated the murder of pregnant women. Phillips argues that the sexual liberation of the 1960s was the result of complex social factors and the availability of the contraceptive pill rather than the ideas of Sade.

Sade's writing has achieved commercial success since it became freely available in the 1960s. The American edition of Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom alone sold 350,000 copies from 1965 to 1990 and about 4,000 copies a year from 1990 to 1996. Shattuck sees the cultural rehabilitation of Sade after World War II as an "eerie, post-Nietzschean death wish". Noting that Sade has been elevated into the French literary canon and that serial killers Ian Brady and Ted Bundy read and admired Sade, he concludes that Sade's "profusely illustrated moral nihilism has entered our cultural bloodstream at the highest intellectual and lowest criminal levels".

Writing

Sade's writing includes novels, stories, plays, dialogues, travelogues, essays, letters, journals and political tracts. Many of his works have been lost or destroyed.

Libertine novels

Sade is best known for his libertine novels which combine graphic descriptions of sex and violence with long didactic passages in which his characters discuss the moral, religious, political and philosophical implications of their acts. The characters engage in a range of acts including blasphemy, sexual intercourse, incest, sodomy, flagellation, coprophilia, necrophilia and the rape, torture and murder of adults and children. The libertines argue that these acts accord with the laws of nature. Sade's major libertine novels are The 120 Days of Sodom (written 1785, first published 1899), Justine (two versions, published 1791 and 1797–99), Philosophy in the Bedroom (a novel in dialogue, published 1795) and Juliette (published 1797–99). The libertine novels include elements of pornography, Gothic fiction, moral and didactic tales, dark fairy tales in the manner of the brothers Grimm, and social, political and literary satire.

Other novels and tales

Sade's first substantial prose work was the Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, written in 1782 while he was in prison. The work is not pornographic but outlines some of his main themes including the non-existence of God or an afterlife, nature as semi-divine, materialism and determinism, the permanent flux of living matter, a relativist and pragmatic morality, and a defence of libertinism. In prison he drafted an epistolary novel, Aline and Valcour (published 1795), and the novella The Misfortunes of Virtue, which he later expanded into the two versions of Justine. He also wrote about fifty tales, of which eleven were published under his own name, in the collection The Crimes of Love in 1800. The tales were not pornographic but contained themes of incest, libertinage and disaster.

In 1812–13, while confined at the Charenton insane asylum, he wrote three conventional historical novels: Adelaide of Brunswick, Princess of Saxony; The Secret History of Isabelle of Bavaria; and The Marquise de Gange.

Plays

Sade had a life-long interest in theater and during his first extended incarceration he wrote about twenty plays. Oxtiern and Le Suborneur were professionally staged on his release and he organized several others to be staged semi-professionally when he was confined at the Charenton asylum. According to critic John Phillips, "the overwritten melodramas he composed for the theatre have not attracted much critical interest to date, and are unlikely to ever do so".

Essays and political tracts

Sade's "Reflections on the Novel" was published as a preface to the collection The Crimes of Love in 1800. Sade reviews the development of the novel from classical times to the 18th century and provides rules for aspiring novelists. Sade advised writers not to depart from what is possible; not to interrupt the plot with repetitious or tangential incidents; that the author should leave any necessary moralizing to his characters; and that the author should not write primarily for money. Phillips and Edmund Wilson have praised Sade's knowledge of the history of European fiction while noting that in his libertine novels he violated most of his own principles for writing good fiction.

Sade's avowed political writings include his "Address to the King" (1791), his pamphlet "Idea on the method for the sanctioning of laws" (1792) and his eulogy for the revolutionaries Marat and Le Peletier (1793). In his 1791 address, Sade advocated a constitutional monarchy. In the 1792 pamphlet, Sade argued that all laws passed by the legislature should be ratified by local assemblies of active citizens. In his 1793 eulogy, he praised Marat and Le Peletier as "sublime martyrs of liberty". Phillips, Gray and others have speculated on whether these writings express Sade's real political views or were parodies or exercises in political expediency to forestall his possible persecution as a former aristocrat.

Letters and journals

Over 200 of Sade's letters, mostly written to his wife from prison, have been published since his death. Sade's journals for 1807–8 and July–December 1814 also survive. Bongie has called his prison letters "his lasting literary achievement". Richard Seaver states that the prison letters "reveal more about this most enigmatic of men than any of his other work". Phillips warns that in his letters and journals Sade was often playing a role and creating a fictionalized version of himself.

Legacy

For many years, Sade's descendants regarded his life and work as a scandal to be suppressed. This did not change until the mid-20th century, when the Comte Xavier de Sade reclaimed the marquis title, long fallen into disuse, and took an interest in his ancestor's writings. He subsequently discovered a store of Sade's papers in the family château at Condé-en-Brie, and worked with scholars for decades to enable their publication. His youngest son, the Marquis Thibault de Sade, has continued the collaboration. The family have also claimed a trademark on the name. The family sold the Château de Condé in 1983. As well as the manuscripts they retain, others are held in universities and libraries. Many, however, were lost in the 18th and 19th centuries. A substantial number were destroyed after Sade's death at the instigation of his son, Donatien-Claude-Armand.

Sade's favorite castle at Lacoste was bought and partially restored by Pierre Cardin. Since the restoration it has been used as a site for theater and music festivals.

The Sade documents found in 1948 became the basis for Gilbert Lely's important biography of Sade published in two volumes in 1952 and 1957. Volumes of Sade's letters, journals and other personal documents have been published progressively from 1949. In 1966, the French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert published a 30-volume edition of his complete works. From 1990, Sade's works were published in the French Pléiade editions.

The 20th century serial killers Ian Brady and Ted Bundy read works by and about Sade as well as other violent pornography. There is scholarly debate over whether Sade and violent pornography in general influenced later crimes.