Marquis de Sade

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 2nd of July 1789, the Marquis de Sade stood at a window of the Bastille and shouted through a megaphone he had improvised himself. He told the people in the street below that the warders were murdering the prisoners. That evening he was moved to the Charenton insane asylum. Twelve days later a revolutionary crowd stormed the Bastille, and the personal belongings he had left behind in his sealed cell were looted.

  Sade was a French nobleman and writer who spent most of his adult life locked inside prisons and asylums. He was held there by kings, by revolutionaries and by an emperor's police, each of whom found him intolerable. His name survives as a word for taking pleasure in the suffering of others, a word drawn from the characters in his fiction rather than from any dictionary of his own day.

  Who was the man behind that word? What did he actually do to the women who accused him, and what did he only invent on paper? How did a nobleman related to the king end up cheering for a republic, and then nearly lose his head to it? And why do thinkers, novelists and critics still fight over whether he should be read at all?

  2243133

• 2. A Nobleman's Inheritance

  ›

  Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was born in the Hôtel de Condé in Paris on the 2nd of June 1740, the only child of his parents to survive. His father, Jean-Baptiste François Joseph, Comte de Sade, was a captain of dragoons who had been trusted with diplomatic missions to the Russian Empire, Britain and the Elector of Cologne. His mother, Marie-Éléonore de Maillé de Carman, served a princess and came from a junior branch of the house of Bourbon-Condé. That made the boy a blood relative of the King of France, and the family itself was provincial nobility reaching back to the 13th century.

  In 1744, the four-year-old was sent away to his grandmother in Avignon. The likely reason was a fight with his playmate Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, who was four years older. The infant Sade was described as spoilt, haughty and prone to violent rages. The following year he passed to the care of his uncle, the Abbé de Sade, a priest and libertine who lived at the château de Saumane. A tutor, the Abbé d'Amblet, was appointed, and the boy came to respect him deeply. Meanwhile the Count had lost the king's favor and been recalled from Germany, and his wife eventually left him for a Carmelite convent in Paris.

  In the autumn of 1750, ten-year-old Sade entered the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He studied Latin, Greek and rhetoric and took part in the school's theatrical productions. His father was too deep in debt to pay for boarding, so the boy probably lodged privately with Amblet, which may have cut him off from his aristocratic classmates. Biographers disagree about whether he suffered beatings or sexual abuse at the school, and whether any such thing shaped his later desires. His summers were spent at the château de Longeville in Champagne with Madame de Raimond, a former lover of his father. There he met Madame de Saint-Germain, for whom he kept a lifelong affection, and both women became mother figures.

  In 1754 he entered the Chevaux-légers military academy. After twenty months, on the 14th of December 1755, the fifteen-year-old was commissioned a sub-lieutenant in the King's Foot Guard, just as the Seven Years' War began. He became a cornet in January 1757 and a captain in the Burgundian Cavalry on the 21st of April 1759. He earned a name as a capable soldier, but also as a gambler and spendthrift who would not flatter his superiors and "disdained making friends with his peers". When the Treaty of Paris ended the war in February 1763, he was discharged.

  Back in Paris, his father was negotiating a marriage with the Montreuil family. They had only been ennobled in the 17th century, but they were rich and well connected at court and in legal circles. The Count wrote of his son: "As for me, what makes up my mind is that I will be rid of the boy, who has not one good quality and all the bad ones". Sade had just been rejected by a nobleman's daughter, Laure de Lauris, after two months of courtship. He swore he would "only marry for love" and skipped the court ceremony on the 1st of May 1763. He relented, the contract was signed on the 15th of May, and he married Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil two days later.

  At first he praised his devout, strictly Catholic bride to his uncle. Two years later he complained she was "too cold and too devout". Renée-Pélagie would bear him two sons and a daughter, and later, according to the source, become an accomplice in his alleged crimes with adolescents.

  2224311417

• 3. The Scandals

  ›

  On the 18th of October 1763, four months after the wedding, Sade hired a prostitute named Jeanne Testard at a Paris property he rented for his encounters. She told the police that he locked her in a room, asked whether she believed in God, and then poured out blasphemies against Jesus and the Virgin Mary. She said he threatened her with pistols and a sword until she trampled a crucifix. She reported him the next morning. Blasphemy and incitement to sacrilege were capital offenses, and on the 29th of October the king personally ordered his arrest. Sade wrote contrite letters from Vincennes prison and asked for a priest. After his father begged Louis XV for mercy, he was freed on the 13th of November, then briefly exiled to the Montreuil estate at Échauffour in Normandy.

  Easter Sunday, the 3rd of April 1768, brought a worse scandal. In the Place des Victoires, Sade approached Rose Keller, a 36-year-old widow who was begging, and offered her work as a housekeeper. He drove her to his house at Arcueil. She later stated that he locked her in, threatened to kill her, tied her to a bed and whipped her. She escaped through a window and filed a complaint that same evening. Madame de Montreuil, Sade's formidable mother-in-law, quickly sent agents who paid Keller to withdraw it. The king issued a lettre de cachet, a royal warrant for arrest and detention without trial. Sade was held at Saumur and Pierre-Encize, pardoned on the 3rd of June, and ordered to pay 100 livres in alms. His own account to the parlement was that Keller was a prostitute who had agreed to everything. He was released on the 16th of November on condition that he stay under supervision at La Coste in Provence.

  The summer of 1772 took him to Marseilles with his manservant Latour. On the 27th of June they staged an orgy with four prostitutes, and Sade handed out aniseed pastilles laced with Spanish fly. Two of the women, Marianne Laverne and Marguerite Coste, fell ill, Coste critically. She went to the police, and a warrant was issued for sodomy and poisoning. Sade hid while his wife bought off the complainants, but the court pressed on. On the 2nd of September it sentenced Sade and Latour to death in their absence, and they were burnt in effigy on the 12th.

  By then Sade had fled to Italy with Anne-Prospère, his wife's 19-year-old sister, who had visited La Coste the previous November. He had developed what was called "a fatal passion" for her. That affair made Madame de Montreuil his implacable enemy. Using her influence, she had him seized and locked in the Fortress of Miolans, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He escaped on the 30th of April 1773.

  In September 1774, the Sades hired seven new servants for La Coste, among them a male secretary and five girls of about fifteen. Over that winter, with his wife's quiet consent, Sade held orgies with the servants. In January 1775 the girls' families filed charges of kidnapping and seduction, and one girl who stayed at La Coste died of an illness a few months later. When a servant named Nanon Sablonnière quarreled with the Sades and fled to a convent, Madame de Montreuil falsely accused her of theft. A lettre de cachet followed, and Nanon sat in prison at Arles for over two years.

  In January 1777, the father of a young servant named Catherine Treillet came to La Coste to take his daughter home. He fired a pistol at Sade from point-blank range, and it misfired. He tried again and failed again, then filed his own complaint. Madame de Montreuil then wrote that Sade's mother was gravely ill. He and his wife rushed to Paris on the 8th of February, only to learn that she had been dead for three weeks. On the 13th of February he was arrested and taken to the Vincennes fortress.

  The courts in Provence soon agreed to hear his appeal. On the 30th of June 1778 they overturned the poisoning conviction. Meanwhile Madame de Montreuil sent an agent to Marseilles to bribe the prostitutes and other witnesses. On the 14th of July the court found him guilty only of "debauchery and immoderate libertinage", fined him lightly and banned him from Marseilles for three years. He was arrested again at once, escaped his guards on the road to Paris, and was recaptured in a raid on his château on the 26th of August. Back in Vincennes, he would soon fill his hours with pen and paper.

  224173122

• 4. Writing Behind Bars

  ›

  In the summer of 1782, inside Vincennes, Sade drafted the Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, his first substantial prose work. It is not pornographic. It lays out ideas he would return to for decades: that God and the afterlife do not exist, that nature is almost divine, that matter is always in motion, and that morality is relative. It also defends libertinism. That same summer he began The 120 Days of Sodom. He was also writing a stream of letters, mostly to his wife, and continuing his Voyage d'Italie and a number of plays.

  Vincennes closed in February 1784 and Sade was moved to the Bastille. There he produced a fair copy of The 120 Days of Sodom, which many critics treat as his first major work. It was written in 1785 and would not be published until 1899. He also began the novel Aline and Valcour. He completed the novellas The Misfortunes of Virtue in 1787 and Eugénie de Franval in 1788. Across his first long imprisonment he wrote about twenty plays, a lifelong interest rooted in his schooldays on stage.

  His best-known books are the libertine novels. Besides The 120 Days of Sodom, the major ones are Justine, which appeared in two versions in 1791 and 1797-99, and Philosophy in the Bedroom, a novel in dialogue published in 1795. The fourth is Juliette, published in 1797-99. Each pairs scenes of extreme sexual violence against adults and children with long speeches in which characters argue that such acts follow the laws of nature. The mixture draws on pornography, Gothic fiction, moral tales, dark fairy tales in the manner of the brothers Grimm, and social and literary satire. The Misfortunes of Virtue was later expanded into the two versions of Justine.

  He also wrote about fifty shorter tales, and eleven were printed under his own name in the 1800 collection The Crimes of Love. They are not pornographic but deal with incest, libertinage and disaster. Its preface, "Reflections on the Novel", traces the form from classical times to the 18th century. Sade tells would-be novelists to stay within what is possible, to avoid repetitive digressions, to leave moralizing to their characters and never to write mainly for money. The critics Phillips and Edmund Wilson praised his grasp of fiction's history but noted that his libertine novels broke most of his own rules. Phillips was less kind to the plays, calling them "overwritten melodramas" unlikely ever to attract much critical interest.

  Many scholars think his lasting achievement lies elsewhere. More than 200 of his letters have been published, and Laurence Louis Bongie calls his prison letters "his lasting literary achievement". Richard Seaver says they reveal more about this "most enigmatic of men" than any other work. Phillips cautions that Sade was often playing a role in them, building a fictional version of himself. Many other manuscripts were lost or destroyed, and the surviving journals cover 1807-08 and July to December 1814.

  130122817

• 5. Revolution and Asylum

  ›

  On the 2nd of April 1790, Sade walked out of detention, a few days after the National Constituent Assembly abolished lettres de cachet. His wife sought a legal separation, and the marriage was dissolved in September. In August he met Marie-Constance Quesnet, a 33-year-old actress, and their relationship lasted until his death. He now styled himself "Louis Sade, man of letters". Justine appeared anonymously in June 1791. His play Oxtiern opened that October at the Théâtre Molière in Paris and closed after two performances amid an audience uproar. In March 1792, Jacobin activists disrupted the premiere of Le Suborneur at the Théâtre Italien, and it lasted a single night.

  His politics shifted with the times. In 1791 his Address to the King called for a constitutional monarchy. In 1792 a pamphlet proposed that every law passed by the legislature be ratified by local assemblies of active citizens. As republican feeling grew, his noble birth, his monarchist record and the emigration of his two sons made him a target. He turned radical and rose in his local revolutionary section, the Section des Piques. After the monarchy fell in September 1792, he became its commissioner for health and charitable institutions. In October 1793 he delivered the funeral oration for the martyrs Marat and Le Peletier, whom he called "sublime martyrs of liberty".

  In November, his section sent him to the National Convention with a petition against religion. The speech probably alienated Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, who were trying to suppress 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 the 27th of July 1794, the day known as 9 Thermidor. Bribery or a clerical error saved him, and that same day Robespierre fell, ending the Terror. Sade was freed in October.

  He went back to writing, publishing anonymous novels. Philosophy in the Bedroom and Aline and Valcour came out in 1795, and the first volumes of The New Justine and Juliette appeared in 1797-99. Money was tight. The Vaucluse department had wrongly listed him as an émigré, which exposed him to arrest and seizure of his property. In October 1796 he sold La Coste, though his former wife collected most of the proceeds. He appealed in 1798 to Paul Barras, a leader of the Directory, without success. The listing was lifted only in December 1799, by which time he had registered as indigent. In 1800 he put his own name on The Crimes of Love. Hostile reviews followed, along with a wave of articles naming him as the author of Justine and Juliette.

  In March 1801, the Napoleonic Consulate was cracking down on public immorality, and Sade was arrested at his publisher's office and held at Sainte-Pélagie. The police minister Joseph Fouché ordered detention without trial. He judged the pornography laws too weak to punish Sade properly and feared that a trial would only add to his notoriety. After Sade tried to seduce young prisoners, he was declared insane with "libertine dementia" and sent to the Bicêtre Asylum. Relatives then arranged a move to Charenton, where his former wife and his children agreed to pay for his keep. Marie-Constance joined him there by posing as his illegitimate daughter.

  Charenton's director, the Abbé de Coulmier, ran the asylum on humane principles, with an emphasis on "moral treatment". He let Sade write, direct and act in plays and encouraged balls, concerts and dinners. In 1805 he built a theater seating about 200. Performances with professional actors and inmates became fashionable among the elite of Napoleonic society. In April 1807 Sade finished Les journées de Florbelle, a ten-volume libertine novel, but police seized it after searching his and Quesnet's rooms. In 1812-13 he wrote three conventional historical novels: Adelaide of Brunswick, Princess of Saxony; The Secret History of Isabelle of Bavaria; and The Marquise de Gange.

  Official circles disliked all this. In 1810 new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and took away his pens and paper, though Coulmier gradually restored most of his privileges. In 1813 the government ordered all theatricals, balls and concerts stopped. By then Sade was involved with Madeleine Leclerc, the teenage daughter of an employee, which upset Quesnet and fed fresh charges of immorality. In September 1814 the new director asked the Bourbon government to move him elsewhere. Sade was already gravely ill and died on the 2nd of December 1814 of "prostrating gangrenous fever".

  His will asked to be buried at Malmaison, his property at Émancé, with no autopsy and no "pomp of any kind". Malmaison had been sold years before, so he was buried with religious rites at Charenton. His skull was later taken from the grave for phrenological study. His surviving son, Claude-Armand, then had all the unpublished manuscripts burnt, including Les Journées de Florbelle.

  2431221736

• 6. Ideas in Dispute

  ›

  John Phillips warns that Sade's real opinions are hard to pin down, because his fiction speaks through a crowd of characters with no single authorial voice. Arguments that characters use to excuse their worst conduct are often satire, parody or irony. That uncertainty drives most of the quarrels that follow.

  Phillips traces Sade's thinking to the materialism of La Mettrie and Holbach and the determinism of Hume. In that view, God does not exist, the universe is only matter endlessly reshaped, and free will is an illusion. If nature fixes the character of a libertine, punishing him is pointless. Sade's libertines sometimes treat nature as a replacement for God and sometimes as a rival to their own power. John Gray calls the system fundamentally religious, since nature takes God's place, and confused, since it rails against nature while urging people to follow its destructive impulses.

  Lester Crocker went further, calling Sade the first to build a complete system of nihilism. In it morals are mere human convention, and the only value is the selfish pursuit of passion. Sade's libertines hold that charity, pity and respect for parents offend nature, while murder and theft are natural. They even rank the pleasures of crime, with failing to help someone in need at the bottom and the torture and murder of children at the top. Crocker saw Sade as anticipating Freud by linking the sex drive to destruction. He also found the system inconsistent, since Sade drew values from nature while claiming no objective moral laws exist.

  Albert Camus, writing in 1951, saw the sex drive at the center of Sade's thought. After the overthrow of a king ruling by divine right in 1792, Camus argued, Sade proposed absolute moral license. But if murder is allowed, everyone is at risk, so freedom turns into a struggle to dominate. In Camus's reading, freedom of desire for the few requires the enslavement of the many, so Sade foreshadowed totalitarianism. Geoffrey Gorer read the politics differently. He noted that Sade denied any right to property and saw the Revolution as every faction united against the people, so he could "with some justice" be called the first reasoned socialist. Peter Marshall saw a precursor of anarchism, a man who imagined a society without laws but finally settled on minimal ones.

  One proposal from Philosophy in the Bedroom is bitterly contested. It is voiced by a character, Le Chevalier, who calls for free brothels paid for by the state. Marshall reads it as a plan to cut sex crimes and satisfy the urge to command and obey. Andrea Dworkin counters that it describes compulsory prostitution from childhood, with women and girls open to rape. Phillips says the characters' views cannot simply be assigned to Sade, and Gray suggests the speech is subversive irony.

  Maurice Lever, Laurence Louis Bongie and Francine du Plessix Gray give a plainer verdict. They see an opportunist whose only steady principles were libertinage, atheism, opposition to the death penalty and defense of his own property and privileges. Before the Revolution he demanded that feudal customs be observed, and afterward he backed whichever side was winning. Gray concludes: "relentlessly opportunistic in his public stances, the ci-devant marquis... was an unswerving moderate horrified by political excess".

  281923526

• 7. The Verdicts

  ›

  When his play Oxtiern premiered in 1791, the critic for the Moniteur granted it "interest and energy" but called its title role "a revolting atrocity". A reviewer of Justine in the Journal Général de France admired his "rich and brilliant" imagination, yet found it hard "to not often close the book out of disgust and indignation". Rumors held that Danton and Robespierre read it to stoke their appetite for blood. In 1798 Rétif de la Bretonne published a rebuttal, Anti-Justine. By 1800, writers everywhere were naming Sade as the author, and one reviewer of The Crimes of Love called it a "detestable book" by a man suspected of an even worse one.

  The hostility lasted through the 19th century. The historian Jules Michelet named him the "professor emeritus of crime". Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Byron and Poe admired him, while Swinburne found the books unintentionally funny. Anatole France wrote that their most dangerous ingredient was "a fatal dose of boredom". In 1886, the sexologist Krafft-Ebing treated his work as a catalogue of sexual pathologies and gave the term sadism its clinical definition.

  The 20th century reversed the mood. In 1909 Guillaume Apollinaire called Sade "the freest spirit that has yet existed", and André Breton hailed him as "a surrealist in Sadism". Raymond Queneau, writing soon after the Second World War, argued that his moral universe foreshadowed Nazism. Simone de Beauvoir asked in 1951-52, "Must we burn Sade?" She called him a second-rank writer and "unreadable", but valued him for forcing us to rethink "the true nature of man's relationship to man". When unexpurgated editions appeared in France, the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s, scholarship surged. In 1971 Roland Barthes published Sade, Fourier, Loyola, an influential analysis that largely set aside psychological, social and biographical readings.

  Several women praised him. Angela Carter argued in 1978 that he put pornography in the service of women by claiming sexual freedom for them and showing them with power. In 1990 Camille Paglia called him a rigorous philosopher of power and a satirist answering Rousseau "point by point". Annie Le Brun said he was best read as poetry. Andrea Dworkin responded that in his fiction women are naturally prostitutes and men have a natural right to rape them. She added that the female libertines enjoy power only on male terms. She condemned his veneration in 1981. In 1996, Roger Shattuck said Sade's defenders stress transgression, wordplay and irony while pushing aside the sexual violence at the core of his work. Michel Onfray called it "intellectually bizarre" to make a hero of a man who was, even by his admirers' accounts, "a sexual delinquent".

  The arguments reach back to the real events. Marshall observes that Sade's known conduct, a housemaid beaten and one orgy, falls well short of the clinical picture of active sadism. Phillips sees no reason to think it was compulsive. Dworkin replies that the question is whether one believes Sade or the women who accused him, and she says admirers play down assaults that records confirm. Gray calls his method "psychic terrorism" and says it was often more mental than physical. Bongie notes that violent sexual assaults on prostitutes, aggravated by death threats and repeated offenses, "could easily get an offender into similar difficulties today".

  2718203217

• 8. Afterlives

  ›

  In 1963, Lester Crocker wrote that "Sade speaks with the loudest voice to our time", arguing that the twentieth century had lived the truths he revealed. After the Second World War, Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault took him up as an early thinker on sexuality, the body, transgression and nihilism. Surrealists such as Breton and Éluard rated him highly, and Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel put Sadean themes into art and film. The stage and screen followed with Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss in 1964, Madame de Sade by Mishima in 1965, Pasolini's film Salò in 1975 and Kaufman's Quills in 2000.

  Sexual sadism disorder is a mental condition named after him. It is defined as arousal at causing extreme pain, suffering or humiliation to others without their consent, as described in his novels. It is distinct from consenting partners using mild or simulated pain. Shattuck points out that the serial killers Ian Brady and Ted Bundy read and admired Sade. He fears that Sade's moral nihilism has entered the cultural bloodstream at both the highest intellectual and lowest criminal levels. Phillips counters that Sade's enduring legacy is a materialist humanism that makes all absolutisms suspect. Scholars still disagree about whether he or violent pornography generally influenced later crimes.

  The books sold well once they were freely available. The American edition of Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom alone sold 350,000 copies between 1965 and 1990, then about 4,000 a year until 1996. In 1966, the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert issued a 30-volume edition of the complete works. In 1990 Sade entered the Pléiade series, an honor Shattuck compares to an artist being admitted into the Louvre. In 2014 the novelist Pierre Guyotat called him "in a way, our Shakespeare".

  For many years his descendants treated his life and writing as a scandal to be hidden. That shifted in the mid-20th century, when Comte Xavier de Sade reclaimed the long-disused marquis title and took an interest in the manuscripts. At the family château of Condé-en-Brie he found a store of papers. The documents found in 1948 became the basis of Gilbert Lely's two-volume biography, published in 1952 and 1957. Volumes of letters and journals have appeared since 1949. Xavier's youngest son, the Marquis Thibault de Sade, has continued the work, and the family has claimed a trademark on the name. They sold the Château de Condé in 1983.

  Sade's favorite castle at Lacoste was bought and partly restored by Pierre Cardin. Since the restoration it has served as a venue for theater and music festivals.

  1932281614