Donatien Sade
From Philosopedia
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de [Comte de] (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814)
Known as the Marquis de Sade, he was author of Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1791), which admittedly is pornographic. However, his work has been considered a part of the pantheon of such French authors as Rousseau, Balzac, Racine, and Proust, and is included as part of the French canon in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series.
Sade described himself as “atheistic to the point of fanaticism.” He also wrote, “Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be made to believe in him, and in the second a fool.”
Sade held the marquis title before becoming count when his father died in 1767. After fighting in the Seven Years War and marrying, he was imprisoned because of his allegedly scandalous conduct (for example, persuading Rose Keller, an unemployed widow, not a whore, to come to his villa in 1768, where he tied her to the bedposts, gagged her with a fur muff, whipped her until she bled, then poured sealing wax into her wounds.).
Philosophy in the Bedroom' (1795), in which he declared that “Religions are the cradles of despotism,” has a daughter sodomize her mother with a dildo. Worse, so the mother will further agonize, Sade has the mother raped by a syphilitic servant, her orifices are sewn, and she cannot excrete, causing her body the utmost of pain.
Psychologists, as pointed out by Laurence L. Bongie’s Sade: A Biographical Essay (1998), have had wide discussions as to what must have been Sade’s hateful feelings toward his mother as well as his mother-in-law.
A French critic, Pierre Klossowski in 1933, suggested that the root of Sade’s malignant condition was a “negative Oedipal complex,” involving an inability to work through a normal rivalry with his father, whom he considered a weakling, and by identifying with his father turned his libido against his mother by punishing her in his fictional mother-torture fantasies.
Others, however, claim Sade’s mother did not abandon him nor his father. In 1771, three years after his liberation from Pierre-Encize, the Sades and their three children moved to La Coste in an attempt to avoid his reputation and his creditors. In 1772 dressed in a vest of marigold-yellow satin with matching breeches, a plumed hat on his head and a gold-knobbed cane in his hand, he organized a party in Marseilles that was held in a prostitute’s room. His valet, Latour, assembled four girls for his pleasure, and de Sade not only had active and passive sodomy with Latour but also copulated with the prostitutes, whipped them, and was whipped by them. The Aix-en-Provence parlement, after convicting him of sodomy and an attempt to poison – actually, he had fed the women Spanish fly that looked like candy and they became so sick they called the police–sentenced him in absentia to death to death, then had him beheaded and burned in effigy. Sade understandably fled to Italy.
For twenty-seven years he was confined in places such as the Bastille (by some, Sade was credited with causing the Bastille riot), the dungeon at Vincennes, and at Charenton asylum. During this time he wrote ribald romances and, released during the revolution, had some of his plays produced by the Comédie Française.
Sade believed that inasmuch as both sexual deviation and criminal acts exist in nature, they are natural, a premise which the Church fought strenuously. His notion may have come from his reading of d’Holbach and libertine literature, according to Robert Darnton (The New York Review of Books, 14 January 1998). He also believed that sex that involves pain is not necessarily bad and can, in fact, be gratifying.
This, however, was considered perversion, and because of such “sadism” (the term was first included in a dictionary in 1834) his work was banned for its obscenity. He also was put in prison and later sent to an insane asylum for having written a pornographic novel, Zoloe and Her Two Acolytes, in which the chief characters were based on Napoleon and Josephine.
In addition to his many affairs with women, he preached in his novels the superiority of male attractions and he had homosexual relations, according to his helpful and cooperative valet. Aldous Huxley termed Sade “the one complete and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.” Sade’s depictions of horror, although revolutionary, were not particularly colorful or picturesque. They included matter-of-fact descriptions of acts which both church and state have committed throughout history, allegedly to enforce good behavior in keeping with judicial standards which had been set by the religious and governmental leaders. What other authors had not done so well, however, was to describe the humiliation which humans have experienced.
Charles Rosen, author of The Romantic Generation, has observed that Sade knew that all sexual intercourse is basically an act of violence and rape. Further, Rosen suggests, “Sade is impressive because he makes hypocrisy almost impossible to sustain in considering the erotic imagination. There are many reasons for thinking that pornography does not actually stimulate or inspire sadistic acts, and if this is the case, Sade’s work might reasonably be made required reading for high school students (he is perhaps a bit strong for the elementary level).”
Maurice Lever, in a biography entitled Sade (1993), wrote that the Marquis richly deserves his terrible reputation. For example, his 120 Days of Sodom, written while Sade was in the Bastille, describes the possibility of multiple incest: a nobleman programs three generations so that he is able to show that, “in fucking [his daughter], he fucked his sister . . . and his daughter-in-law, and . . . also constrained his son to fuck his own sister and mother-in-law.” Imprisoned, he did more than just imagine: He sent his wife, which humiliated her, to arrange for and deliver pastries and some custom-made wooden ebony dildos (“six inches in circumference by eight or nine inches long”), then recorded 6,536 “introductions” (to sodomize himself) in order to obtain prestiges, or orgasms, by stuffing himself at both ends. Lever’s book reads like a surrealist creation, including Sade’s taunt to his enemies: “Kill me or take me as I am, because I will not change.” Francine du Plessix Gray, in At Home With the Marquis de Sade (1998), noted that Sade and his wife, Renée-Pélagie, were married for twenty-seven years, fifteen of which he was running from the police or was in jail.
On the evening he was released from the Bastille, she obtained a formal separation: “Having survived greater measures of passion and devotion than most women experience in ten lifetimes, she returned to being the placid, conventional creature she had been before she met Donatien de Sade. Reclusion, religious devotion, the petty groveling of a provincial Catholic life, would now be the measure of her days.”
Under the Directory he sank into poverty, was returned to Charenton as a criminal and insane madman, and at age seventy-three bought the sexual services of Madeleine Leclerc, daughter of an employee at Charenton. He was with her until a week before his death, 2 December 1814. Ms. Du Plessix Gray, in summing him up, writing,
- He never grasped the fundamentals of civilised life: which have to do with accepting, with a measure of serenity, the ultimate necessity of compromise.
That, however, could explain people’s continued fascination with him. Although as a young man Octavio Paz was enthusiastic about de Sade, after examining the ontological impossibilities and philosophic weakanesses of Sade’s views Paz finally found his youthful admiration had vanished. In An Erotic Beyond: Sade (1998) he came to view the infamous libertine as a philosophically tyrannical bore. “Let us renounce,” Sade wrote, “the ridiculous theory of the immortality of the soul, made to be scorned as relentlessly as that of a God as false and as ridiculous as it is. Let us abjure with equal courage both of these absurd fables, the fruits of fear, ignorance, and superstition.”
Upon his father’s death, Sade’s son burned at least two volumes of a projected ten-volume novel, The Days of Florabelle, or Nature Revealed. His remains were scattered, for his 1806 will requested that “all traces of my grave disappear from the face of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men.”
(Angela Carter wrote a feminist defense, The Sadean Woman; in 1989 Arlette Farge’s Le Goût de l’archive related that in 1766, furious that a horse and carriage would not allow his own carriage to pass through a narrow street, Sade buried his sword in the horse of the carriage blocking his way.)
