A Very Short Introduction - The Marquis de Sade

Hailed by the early 20th-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire as ‘the freest spirit who ever lived’, but demonized throughout the last two hundred years as a misogynistic pornographer, and as the original proponent of sexual sadism and lustmurder, the Marquis de Sade is a creature of myth. The popular assumption that Sade was as sadistic as his monstrous fictional villains is still current today among the majority of the population who have never read a line of his work. In fact, Sade’s thought, which is expressed at great length in novels, short stories, plays, critical essays, and personal correspondence, is considerably more complex than allowed by any of the simplistic labels, positive or negative, associated with this mythical reputation. Best known as the author of four sexually violent novels that were destined to shock readers for centuries to come, Sade was, certainly, a subversive iconoclast and life-long rebel. Yet, most of his writings contained neither obscenity nor extreme violence, and many of his works of fiction are considered masterpieces of their genre. The sheer breadth and intellectual complexity of Sade’s creative output encompasses the whole range of human experience, from sexuality to morality, from politics to religion, from metaphysics to aesthetics, from literature to life and death. Standing at the end of the classical era and the beginning of the modern age, Sade is, for Michel Foucault, a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy. Spanning two centuries and successive political regimes, from monarchy to empire, he is also the only French philosopher of importance to live through the French Revolution and to comment on its events as they happened. Sade was a writer of astonishing energy and remarkable courage. He was unafraid to speak his mind, and paid for this temerity with his freedom. What makes him unique, however, is a dogged determination to tell the truth about the human condition, a truth that he located, not in a soul or spirit, as most previous philosophers had done, but simply, scandalously, in the sexual body, which for him was the only reality. Were it not for his explicit use of language and complete disregard for the artificially constructed taboos of a religious morality he despised, the novelty and profundity of Sade’s thought, and, above all, its fundamental modernity, would have long since secured him a place alongside the greatest authors and thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Contents Preface ix Acknowledgements xi List of illustrations xiii 1 Beyond the myth: the real Marquis de Sade 1 2 Man of letters 12 3 Martyr of atheism 32 4 Sade and the French Revolution 44 5 Theatres of the body 60 6 Representations of the feminine 84 7 Apostle of freedom 112 Further reading 125 References 131 Index 135