The man known to history as the Marquis de Sade was born on the 2nd of June 1740 in the Hotel de Condé in the city of Paris in France. His full Christian name was Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. His father was Jean Baptiste Francois Joseph de Sade, Marquis or Count de Sade in the French minor nobility. The de Sade family was of the ancient aristocracy, able to trace their lineage back to the High Middle Ages over five centuries earlier. Consequently, Jean Baptiste had obtained a number of senior governmental positions during the 1730s as both a
military commander and a diplomat. Donatien’s mother was Marie-Eleonore de Maillé de Carman. She came from an even more esteemed branch of the French aristocracy that was a junior branch of the Condé family. The Princes of Condé were some of the most senior aristocrats in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was owing to her background that de Sade was born in the Hotel de Condé in Paris. The Condés were also related to the House of Bourbon, the royal house in France since the late sixteenth century. As such, de Sade was distantly related to King
Louis XV, the ruler of the country from 1715 to 1774. His family ties would ensure that de Sade escaped punishment for many of his misdeeds in the 1760s and 1770s as he grew older but also that he acquired a public notoriety which might have been avoided had his family been more obscure. Donatien spent his first years growing up in Paris, often at the Hotel de Condé where he was born and where his mother served in the household of the Condé family during a period of transition as Prince Louis Joseph became Prince of Condé in 1740
when he was little more than an infant, right around the time Donatien was born. De Sade and the Prince of Condé were playmates here during the early 1740s, though the relationship became tempestuous. It is believed that Donatien may have struck Louis Joseph at some point in 1744. A brawl between children is perhaps not the worst of crimes, but Donatien had struck a royal prince and so he had to be punished. He was dismissed from the Hotel de Condé and sent to live with his grandmother in Avignon in the south of France. A year later he
was then transferred to the home of another relative, his father’s brother, the Abbé de Sade. Donatien’s uncle was an ecclesiastical lord, though one with a liberal streak and he was much influenced by him in his youth. Meanwhile, in Paris, Donatien’s parents’ marriage collapsed at the end of the 1740s as his father fell out of royal favour and his mother went to live eventually in a convent. Biographers have noted the irony of the fact that de Sade’s mother became a nun, though perhaps his objection to the church in later years was in part owing to this
development in his childhood years. In examining de Sade’s life, it is worth bearing in mind the social and political circumstances in which he grew up and lived. Europe in the eighteenth century was still broadly mired in the restrictive social circumstances that had prevailed for centuries. Christian morality predominated, with all of its prohibitions on promiscuous sexual activity and also on modes of thought and social activities. Social life was also regulated, in so far as people thought there were acceptable and unacceptable codes of conduct. This is not unusual. For all of our own age’s alleged libertarianism, there
are all manner of rules and regulations for how we behave within society and towards others, some socially regulated, others politically and legally regulated. The same was true in de Sade’s time, in particular in the realm of pornography and open discussion of sexuality activity, things which were not only socially prohibited, but which it is fair to say, nobody even really considered writing about in a public way. However, de Sade was also living in an age of social and political change. The eighteenth century was the era of the Enlightenment, when men and women began to question a
great many firmly held views about everything from religion and politics to sex and social interaction. This created an environment in which somebody might begin to discuss sex in a more open manner, though as will become clear, the sexual activity which de Sade would describe in his work was of a kind which was deemed to be so depraved that he soon ran into legal jeopardy and even in our time he is still a very controversial figure. Donatien’s relatively sheltered upbringing in the south of France was to change in the early 1750s when he was still very
young. In 1750 he was sent to a Jesuit college in Paris. Here he received a good education, but biographers have speculated that he also suffered corporal punishment and possibly even abuse while there. In 1754 he headed to a French military academy. This was a not altogether an uncommon avenue for a son of a French noble at the time and in December 1755, when he was just 15 years of age, he was commissioned into the King’s Foot Guard as a sub-lieutenant. France was already at war by that time in North America against the British and their
Native American allies, however, this soon expanded into the Seven Years War in Europe after Britain allied with Prussia and France with Austria in a growing continental conflict over a wide range of disputes. De Sade spent the entire war in service, until 1763 when it ended in a stalemate in Europe, and a British victory in North America with the transfer of the French colonies in what is now Canada to England. Donatien’s military career had been mixed. He was praised by his commanding officers as an intelligent sub-commander, though one who had problems with authority and the chain
of command, not ideal characteristics for a military career. Unsurprisingly, he was discharged from his post when the war ended. Even in these early years there were difficult elements emerging surrounding Donatien’s character. While in the army, he developed a taste for cards and games of chance. Gambling was a perennial problem of the nobility in early modern Europe and more than a few aristocratic families had been bankrupted and destroyed in France, England and other regions on the back of a delinquent member running up huge debts and then having to sell off their estates. On top of this,
de Sade quickly developed a reputation as a reckless spendthrift, spending beyond his means and having a taste for the high life. On the surface, as a distant relative of the royal family he might have had the money to pay for this, but in reality, the de Sade family were not doing well financially and his father regularly lambasted Donatien for his excessive expenditure. Combined with all of these was his marked tendency towards what was deemed libertine behaviour at this time, a general tendency to disregard the social mores of the day and to ignore the rigorous morals
of Christianity, instead showing a dispensation towards atheism and a disregard for social conventions. As much as his father might have tried to correct his son, he ultimately failed, and when Jean Baptiste died in 1767, Donatien succeeded to the resources that came with becoming the Marquis de Sade at just 27 years of age. By the time Donatien became the Marquis he had been married for several years. Back in 1763, as the Seven Years’ War came to an end and Donatien was discharged from the military, his father organised an arranged marriage for him. The prospective bride was
Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, a member of another French noble family, though one whose financial circumstances were much better than the de Sades. Donatien’s father had hoped that the marriage would both improve the family’s financial affairs through a large dowry and also set the future Marquis on the straight and narrow. Donatien was unenthused by the prospect. He already had a lover in the early 1760s, Laure de Lauris, though she eventually rejected him. It is unclear if the venereal disease he began to suffer from around this time was a by-product of their fling. In any event, he eventually
agreed to marry Renée-Pélagie, doing so on the 17th of May 1763 after the king had given the union involving his distant cousin the royal blessing. Initially the marriage was a relatively stable one and over time they had three children, Louis, Donatien Jnr. and Madeleine, born respectively in 1767, 1769 and 1771. However, even by the time the eldest, Louis, was born in 1767, de Sade had grown weary of his wife’s Catholic moralising and the marriage was strained. She was nevertheless determined not to divorce or separate and they would remain married for 27 years, with Renée-Pélagie becoming
the epitome of the long-suffering wife in the process. Just months after he married Renée-Pélagie, de Sade became embroiled in the first of numerous affairs and scandals which would result in personal and legal difficulties and eventually land him in prison for ever expanding periods of time. This first incident centred on de Sade’s hiring of a prostitute by the name of Jeanne Testard in October 1763. After spending the night in an apartment which de Sade had rented in Paris, she went to the police the next day alleging that de Sade had behaved in an abominable manner towards
her. Amongst her claims were that de Sade had locked the apartment and refused to let her leave. He had then unleashed a wave of atheistic obscenities and had allegedly desecrated a holy chalice with bodily fluids. He had apparently also asked her to flagellate him, while Testard claimed that de Sade had requested her to perform illegal lewd acts on his fundament, something which she had drawn a line at. Not only were the acts illegal but sacrilege and unacceptable in Catholic France at the time. Just over a week later, de Sade was arrested and imprisoned with the
consent of the king who had been consulted on the matter. He was sent to a prison in Vincennes near Paris. Exactly what we should make of the whole affair is unclear. Many of these things de Sade was accused of were not criminal by today’s standards. One of Testard’s accusations was that the Marquis had read atheistic poetry to her. De Sade was quickly free. He began writing to the court expressing his deep regret for his actions and his desire to see a priest who would hear his confession so that he might get back to a more
Christian life. This certainly wasn’t what happened though. Released through the intervention of the king after just a few weeks, de Sade left Paris thereafter and spent much of the mid-1760s living between a property owned by his wife’s family in Normandy and one of his own family’s chateaus in the south of France. He had little choice in this initially, as the terms of his release from the prison in Vincennes had been that he did not return to Paris for some time. However, eventually the king sent word that he could return to the capital. De Sade chose
not to, instead harbouring a series of mistresses in his new home in Provence and beginning his literary career as a would-be dramatist, even setting up a small theatre in his country retreat. The birth of his first child ended this period of exile and in 1767 he largely returned to Paris to live with his wife. Not long after De Sade settled back in Paris, a fresh scandal arose. At Easter 1768 he hired a woman by the name of Rose Keller. Accounts of what occurred are mixed. The Marquis later claimed that he had hired her as a
prostitute, but Keller stated that she had been homeless and begging near the Place des Victoires in Paris when de Sade offered her a position as a housekeeper. Having been duped, she then claimed that de Sade sought to engage her sexually and had effectively imprisoned her in his country house at Acrueil. She escaped out of a window and went to the authorities, whom she informed that de Sade had threatened her with a knife and had tried to coerce her into sordid activities involving ropes, horse whips and candle wax. When he was questioned several days later de
Sade claimed that he had hired Keller as a prostitute and that some of what she was claiming was not accurate. After the king was informed of the case, he ordered his distant cousin’s arrest and the Marquis spent several weeks imprisoned yet again. Eventually, after several months of toing and froing, de Sade was fully released and the charges dropped, after he agreed to make a charitable donation to the poor of Paris. His release on this occasion, seemingly followed his wife’s family’s intervention with the king. While de Sade was once again out of legal trouble by the
end of 1768, the case had generated a lot of publicity in Paris on account of it involving a minor noble who was a distant cousin of King Louis XV who was also married to a woman hailing from another aristocratic family. In an age of growing disaffection with the crown and nobility and the aloof manner in which they lived at Versailles outside of Paris, here seemed to be evidence of the perversity of some of these people. In annoyance, the king banished de Sade from Paris yet again and ordered him to maintain a lower profile. The Marquis
responded by once again taking up residence at his country estate in the south at La Coste near Vaucluse. He spent much of 1769 here, though he also re-entered the military at this point, in large part in an attempt to improve his financial situation. He spent part of 1769 and 1770 commissioned as an officer in a regiment stationed near the eastern border of France in the Burgundy region. His financial troubles briefly led to him being sent to debtors’ prison. If de Sade managed to remain largely out of trouble for a year or two after the Keller
Affair in 1768, the early 1770s saw a new bout of sordid behaviour which would eventually culminate in him going on the run from the authorities and then landing in prison for the first really sustained period of time in his life. Matters began in 1771 when the Marquis’s sister-in-law, his wife’s younger sister, Anne-Properé, visited the de Sades where they were living at the time in their chateau at La Coste. During the visit, Donatien is believed to have begun an affair with the 19-year old sister-in-law, doubtlessly creating further problems for his long-suffering wife and within her family.
At the same time, de Sade’s literary and cultural ambitions were evident during this time as he established a small theatre at La Coste and began to stage plays there, while also writing himself. Here was the mix which would characterise the rest of his life: literary ambitions walking hand in hand with personal turmoil. His legal difficulties began afresh in the summer of 1772. At this time the Marquis and one of his manservants by the name of Latour visited the city of Marseille. The trip was ostensibly to acquire some lines of credit to aid the de Sades
in their difficult financial circumstances at La Coste, or at least this is what de Sade told his wife he was visiting the southern city for. In reality, de Sade organised elaborate acts of depravity with multiple persons while there. For the purposes of this, de Sade had Latour hire the services of four women. What followed apparently involved group copulation and the use of implements for the purpose of heightening physical arousal. Lewd acts involving the fundamental orifice, which was a crime at the time in France, may also have been involved, though the details were disputed. What created
a problem was that de Sade had seemingly introduced some cantharidin into the mix, a substance which is secreted by the blistering beetle and which is more commonly known as ‘Spanish Fly’. It was used extensively as an aphrodisiac in early modern times but can be poisonous and extremely harmful if used incorrectly. In the aftermath of the event, one of the prostitutes by the name of Marianne became very ill and a second, Marguerite, filed a report with the local magistrate in Marseille. Thus, after remaining largely out of trouble for three years after the Keller scandal in Paris
back in 1768, de Sade once again found himself under investigation. As with previous scandals, de Sade’s Montreuil relatives tried to intervene to stop details of the incident becoming widely known and to keep Donatien out of prison. One might ask why? The simple reason would seem to be that for all his mistreatment of her, de Sade’s wife remained committed to their marriage, perhaps partly for the sake of their growing family and her Catholic unwillingness to divorce but also because, for all his flaws, de Sade was believed to have been charming in some respects. One modern study
has argued that part of this was owing to his unusual personality, he was a figure who seemed to be interested solely in the personal domain when so many men of the French nobility were obsessed with public affairs. Whatever the reasons, it led Renée-Pélagie to stay with him for far longer than she should have, even dropping goods off for him multiple times a week when he was imprisoned throughout the 1780s. In 1772, it led her to yet again intervene to have her family pay off the prostitutes involved in the scandal in Marseille to drop their charges.
They did so, but the case had come to public attention and the magistrates in the city decided to continue the investigation, while in September 1772 the people of Marseille executed straw effigies in the city centre which were meant to represent de Sade and his servant Latour, an indication of public revulsion at the scandal. The next two years were chaotic in de Sade and his wife’s lives. The Marseille case refused to go away and as the authorities in the city continued to press for the Marquis’ arrest, Donatien decided to abscond abroad to Italy for a time,
spending several months living in the Kingdom of Sardinia, which, contrary to its name, was centred on the Piedmont region straddling the modern-day border between France and Italy, the rulers of which had latterly acquired the island of Sardinia as a territorial possession. Warrants were active for de Sade’s arrest during this time and his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, had also turned on him this time, wishing to see the apparent monster that her daughter had married removed to prison. She was petitioning King Louis XV to follow through on imprisoning de Sade for a sustained period over the Marseille
charges, but the king died in May 1774 before Donatien could be imprisoned again. The royal warrant against de Sade lapsed thereafter, though his mother-in-law continued to petition the new king, Louis XVI, for the Marquis’ arrest. Meanwhile, back in France in the mid-1770s, de Sade began writing a book entitled Voyage d’Italie, or Italian Voyage based to some extent on his brief period as a fugitive in northern Italy. If there was a pattern to de Sade’s behaviour in the 1760s it was one of general quiet for a few years at a time, punctuated by periods of him
engaging in certain reprehensible actions which turned his life upside-down. By the 1770s the direct opposite was the case. There seemed to be very few periods in which he was not engaged in one scandalous action or another. In this vein, shortly after the Marseille affair seemed to be behind him and he was able to return to live at La Coste unhindered, he created another crisis. In the winter of 1774 into early 1775 he saw to it that his wife hired several young women as servants at La Coste. Given de Sade’s behaviour over the previous decade, it
was no surprise to find that charges soon emerged that the Marquis had engaged in copulation with his new household staff, in a sordid party involving flagellation. He was soon being investigated anew by the authorities, this time based out of the city of Lyon. It only added to the growing scandal that one of the servants in question died at La Coste a few months later, although there is no evidence to suggest that this was related to some form of mistreatment and given the prevalence of fatal diseases like smallpox in Europe at the time it was possibly
unrelated. The exact specifics of everything that occurred are debated. What is known is that several of the staff involved remained working at La Coste for some time to come, but de Sade was not there after a time. With legal jeopardy mounting yet again, he repeated his earlier disappearing act and headed to Italy for a time. By 1776 the Marquis was back in southern France as the legal investigations over the events of the previous year died down. Incredibly, he made no efforts to reform his behaviour or to avoid coming quickly to attention again. In the winter
of 1776, for instance, he hired several new servants and was soon involved in a fresh outrage centred on a 22-year old woman by the name of Catherine Treillet. It was largely based on the Marquis offering to pay some of his servants to engage in sexual activities with him, an offer which led several of his staff to understandably leave their employment at La Coste. Treillet’s father learned of these developments, and he took matters into his own hands in a way which de Sade had not previously experienced, arriving to La Coste and shooting at the Marquis, who
only survived because the gun misfired but the fallout was more damaging. De Sade was soon arrested in 1777 and in the months that followed a trial commenced. This time the Marquis could not abscond to Italy. Instead, he was held while the trial was proceeding in Vincennes prison outside Paris where he had spent several months a decade earlier. Convicted in 1778 of, quote, “debauchery and immoderate libertinage ”, he would now spend the next twelve years in prison. The Marquis’ scandalous and criminal behaviour had finally caught up with him. De Sade’s time in prison between 1778 and
1790 was under better circumstances than was typical of most prisons in the eighteenth century. He was provided with material needed to write and maintained an extensive correspondence with his family and others. This was especially the case from early 1784 after he was moved from Vincennes to the Bastille Prison near the centre of Paris, a prison where his wife was nearby and was able to call regularly. Incredibly, despite the humiliations she had been through over a period of fifteen years before he was finally imprisoned for an extensive period of time, she continued to call to the
Bastille regularly to drop off packages for him. Resigned to his fate, he became quite productive here, writing with considerable energy and producing plays, treatises and books. The prison authorities at Vincennes and at the Bastille were well aware of his reputation and would have checked the material he was writing. To avoid having his more extreme writings confiscated, de Sade stored many of them in a copper cylinder which he was able to hide in a crevice in the wall of his cell at the Bastille. De Sade’s first major work produced during his imprisonment and his most well-known
today was written in the mid-1780s. 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage is not for the faint-hearted and if it is read literally contains some remarkably unpleasant content. The book is set in the early eighteenth century towards the end of the reign of King Louis XIV of France who had died in 1715. In it, four wealthy aristocrats representing the nobility, the church, the legal system and the business class in France isolate themselves in a chateau on a mountain in the Black Forest. Their accomplices are four women and eight male attendants, while they have
numerous younger victims. The plot, such as it is, revolves around four months or 120 days of the aristocrats and their servants inflicting a wide array of torture and humiliations on their victims ranging from corporal punishment, coprophilia, and much worse besides. Many of those involved are murdered, while acts of group copulation occur amongst the aristocrats intermittently. The events at the chateau culminate in part four of the book in the fourth month of its narrative, February, with some of the aristocrats murdering some of their own daughters and family members. The content of the book is shocking, even
today, but as we will see, it has been reconsidered over the two and more centuries since it was written to focus more on what de Sade was trying to say about society at large and people within it through his violent allegories rather than as a literal promotion of the activity he was describing. 120 Days of Sodom was just one of numerous works which de Sade composed while imprisoned throughout the 1780s. The others are often far less graphic and controversial. A good example of this is the Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man. Written around
1782, it is written in dialogue form, a common literary form of the early modern era, and is essentially a study of the growing atheism and libertinism of eighteenth-century France. Another well-known work of his from these years is Histoirettes, Contes et Fabliaux, translating as Small-Histories, Tales and Fables. This consisted of 25 different short stories of varying length. One, The Mystified Magistrate, is lengthy enough to be considered a novella of a kind. The story here revolves around a judge who is due to marry a woman who is simply marrying him for social advancement. The action concerns a
series of efforts made by the prospective bride’s brother-in-law to undermine the judge and prevent the wedding. Again, there are elements to some of these stories which are unpleasant, but some are explicable as efforts by de Sade to condemn sections of French society. The Marquis was surely toying with the judge who is central to The Mystified Magistrate as a form of literary therapy, condemning on the page a legal official as a way of working out his rage at the French legal system which had sent him to prison. How these writings of de Sade should be analysed
has been a subject of intense debate over the years. Some scholars have dismissed them as vile pornography, the product of a quasi-deranged mind that viewed torture, and worse besides as acceptable topics for depiction. Others have in turn dismissed these criticisms and argue that de Sade’s work has to be viewed more as allegory and that in presenting absurdist or outlandish stories he was actually trying to reflect on the absurdity of society. In this light, it should be noted that the four central characters of 120 Days of Sodom are meant to represent the tiers of French high
society: the aristocracy, the church, the judiciary and the mercantile and banking class. It is held that de Sade was effectively satirising the depravity of the elites of France prior to the French Revolution through an outlandish account of what they got up to behind closed doors. There were precedents for writing in this absurdist strain to highlight political and social issues. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, written towards the start of the eighteenth century, was a tale of a bizarre land called Lilliput inhabited by tiny people which Swift used as an allegorical means of assessing Britain’s policies in Ireland,
while in his Candide, published a quarter of a century before de Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom, Voltaire effectively tortures his titular character by having him suffer through an appalling array of physical and social disasters including two earthquakes and torture at the hands of the Portuguese inquisition. As such, de Sade was writing within a well-established absurdist and satirical tradition during the Enlightenment. It many ways it is peculiar that de Sade’s work is read so literally by critics of his. Consider the fact that de Sade was writing just a few decades before the Germanic folklore revival
in Germany and Scandinavia saw writers like the Brothers Grimm begin to compile compendia of what we call fairy tales today. Some of the tales they presented are actually quite shocking. In the tale of Sleeping Beauty the huntsman is instructed to take Snow White into the woods and kill her before bringing her organs back to the Evil Queen as evidence that he has murdered her. In another Grimm Brothers story, The Juniper Tree, a woman kills her son before cooking him in a stew and serving it to her husband. Barely concealed innuendos abound throughout tales like Rapunzel
and there are passages of the original Cinderella where in an effort to make the slipper fit on their feet, Cinderella’s step-sisters cut off their own toes and in Hansel and Gretel the action centres on a witch who is a cannibal. However, despite these shocking scenes the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm have become central to the stories told to children in modern times and the core of Disney’s twentieth-century film output. The reason is that nobody reads them and thinks that the Brothers Grimm were actually advocating the things that happened in the stories. The difference with
de Sade is that people are conflicted as to whether or not he was condoning and promoting the behaviour he described or whether books like 120 Days of Sodom should also be read as allegory or satire of a kind. Of course, in any such evaluation of de Sade’s intent, his own personal conduct comes into consideration. The Brothers Grimm, for all that they might have liked collecting and editing shocking tales of violence in the woods of Germany, were two fairly upstanding middle-class academics. The most controversial thing they ever did was to join a protest at the University
of Göttingen against some constitutional changes in the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. In contrast, de Sade was implicated in numerous sexual scandals and spent much of his life imprisoned. Owing to this, critics of de Sade’s writings have tended to suggest that he wasn’t just writing about sexual depravity as a means of critiquing French society but was describing his own perversions and thoughts. Even here, though, there is a debate. For all that he was mired in scandal and spent much of his life imprisoned, de Sade didn’t engage in many of the crimes that he described, though
admittedly he was fond of prostitutes, engaged in sadomasochistic behaviour and by any modern standard breached many people’s boundaries and rights. His activities also involved teenagers, however, while it is not to defend him, it should also be noted that the understanding of the age at which people reached sexual maturity differed considerably in early modern times. Marie Antoinette, for instance, was just 14 years old when she married the future King Louis XVI in 1770. Indeed, the things which the authorities were most concerned with in de Sade’s behaviour were his engagement in sordid acts and his general atheism
and immorality. However it is assessed, it should be noted that, the wanton acts and murder which he described in his writings can’t be attributed directly to him in real life. Analysts of de Sade’s personality have suggested he was an ESTP type on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. ESTP stands for extraverted, sensing, thinking and perceiving. De Sade was certainly extraverted, though his extraversion more often than not had fairly harmful consequences. ESTP personality types often engage in risky behaviour, but are good at escaping consequences by thinking and arguing their way out of their predicaments, characteristics which certainly
fit to some extent with de Sade’s life in the 1760s and 1770s until he was sent to jail for a prolonged period. At the same time, it could be argued that he managed to escape extensive punishment for so many years simply owing to his privileged position within French aristocratic society. There were also other elements to him. As we will see shortly, the Marquis eventually ended up in an insane asylum. This was broadly the result of a society that had no real understanding of psychology from a clinical perspective and which shoe-horned people with all sorts of
psychological maladies into their ‘one size fits all’ definition of being ‘insane’. That said, it also seems clear that he was prone to bouts of depression and severe mood swings which exacerbated his tendency to mire himself in scandal. De Sade’s circumstances changed dramatically in 1789, as a result of events out in the wider world. The same forces of social and intellectual change which had created a figure like de Sade in the first place were also changing French society. In 1789 King Louis XVI had convened the Estates General, the French parliament, for the first time in 175
years in order to acquire a financial subsidy from the French political nation as a means of escaping from an economic crisis which had enveloped France. As is well-known, matters slipped quickly out of the king and his government’s control once the Estates met at Versailles and the parliamentarians quickly took over the government in the start of what became the French Revolution. The Revolutionaries were committed to changing French society in a host of different ways in line with the ideals of the Enlightenment. Everything from the French calendar to the system of weights and measurements in the country
was changed during the course of the 1790s. A new approach to those who were imprisoned prior to the Revolution also opened up, one in which individuals like de Sade who had been imprisoned under the old regime of king, nobility and church were suddenly being released from prisons across France. De Sade’s release was not immediate. He remained under detention in the Bastille prison in Paris. In fact, his few liberties there were further restricted when he was informed in June 1789 that he would no longer be able to walk outside in the yard as the prison guards
were wary of the tense, revolutionary atmosphere in the streets of Paris. De Sade responded to this development by shouting out of the windows of the prison that the warders inside the Bastille were killing the prisoners. Fearing a riot, the guards then had de Sade sent to the Charenton asylum at Saint-Maurice in the suburbs of Paris. Consequently, he was not in the Bastille when the prison was stormed by the revolutionary mob in Paris on the 14th of July 1789. The event was significant, as de Sade’s revised and completed copy of 120 Days of Sodom had been
left behind in the Bastille when he was moved and he believed it had been destroyed and otherwise lost when the prison was attacked. It would not be published until 1904. Meanwhile, de Sade did not have to remain at Charenton for long. In the spring of 1790, as the revolutionary overhaul of French society continued, he was placed on a list of those to be released. In early April 1790 he walked out of Charenton a free man. Peculiarly, one of the first things to happen after de Sade was released from prison in 1790, was that his wife
sought a divorce. She had not sought one during all his years in prison and had actually remained loyal to him in some senses. The possibility of a return to the chaos of the 1770s, though, appears to have been too much for her and in September 1790 they legally separated. In the new spirit of the Revolutionary period, de Sade was somewhat rehabilitated following his release as many of the views which he had espoused on atheism and sexual licence became less controversial. He intended to fully capitalise on this, reinventing himself as a man of letters and attempting
to launch his literary and dramatic career. This included staging his play Oxtiern in Paris in the autumn of 1791, but the most notable output in the first years after his release was the publication of the novel Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue which he had begun and written a full draft of while imprisoned in the Bastille. In 1791 he finished a revised version and published it anonymously. The novella focuses on a woman called Justine and her passage through her teenage years into her young adult years up to the age of 26. Over a period of
a decade and a half, Justine suffers innumerable indignations, many perpetrated by the monks of a monastery she seeks shelter in, others take place out in wider French society. Large parts of the book diverge from this theme of sexual violence and are concerned more with her own efforts to establish her freedom within society. Consequently, much like 120 Days of Sodom, the book has produced widely differing interpretations. Some view it as another example of the perversity of de Sade’s mind and writings. Others have argued that the novella is actually a story about the many horrors of French
society in which de Sade presents Justine as the heroine, who eventually breaks free of her many oppressions, though in typical de Sade absurdist form Justine is killed by a bolt of lightning at the end. By the time Justine was published, de Sade was married again, having met and wed an actress by the name of Marie-Constance Quesnet shortly after his first marriage ended. Curiously, this second marriage was more settled and de Sade continued to be a productive writer throughout the 1790s, avoiding the overt scandals of the 1770s, perhaps thinking better of it, in a time when
the revolutionaries were more prone to behead people they disagreed with than throw them in prison as King Louis XV and King Louis XVI’s governments had done. He published numerous works in the years that followed, notably Philosophy in the Bedroom, a dialogue form treatise in which the two protagonists debate the centrality of libertinism and atheism to the French Revolution. An expanded version of Justine was published anonymously in 1797 as The New Justine, while at the end of the decade he produced a collection of short stories entitled Crimes of Love. By then, many were aware that several
scandalous publications which had appeared anonymously in print in France in the 1790s were the work of the infamous Marquis and unrest was once more beginning to build up around him. The last months of the eighteenth century saw events occur in France as a whole, which as with those which had occurred in 1789, would have implications for de Sade’s freedom and the course of the remainder of his life. While the Revolution ten years earlier had ushered in a period of reaction against the old order which had conspired to make the Marquis a free man in 1790,
in November 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte, a Corsican general who had risen to immense popularity in the Republic on the back of his victories in Italy in 1796 and 1797, seized power in Paris in a coup. He now set up a dictatorship in all-but name, known as the Consulate with himself as First Consul of France. One of the major decisions Napoleon took was to reverse some of the social changes which had been initiated under the revolutionaries during the 1790s. For instance, it was Napoleon who reached a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church after years of revolutionary attacks
on Catholicism. This drift towards a more conservative social outlook on the part of the Consulate government ensured that public morals and social views drifted away from the libertine approach of the 1790s towards a more conservative outlook. De Sade once again became a figure of dubious views in France in the process. The spring of 1801, by which time de Sade had reached his sixtieth year, saw growing censorship of the Marquis’ work. Thousands of copies of his books were confiscated from booksellers in Paris. Then, after eleven years at large in French society, de Sade was arrested again.
There would be no show trial such as had occurred back in 1777 and 1778 on the strength of his crimes in the 1770s. Instead, de Sade was initially held under the pornography laws active in France at the time and additional charges were added in the weeks that followed, culminating in the Marquis being declared insane. He was sent initially to the Bicetre Hospital to the south of Paris, an asylum which had variously functioned over the past century as an orphanage, a prison and then a hospital for the mentally ill. In the 1780s it was viewed as
the most notorious of all the prisons in France and its reputation had clearly not improved by 1801. De Sade’s wider family petitioned the government for his removal and so he was sent to the Charenton asylum where he had spent the last months of his initial prolonged period in jail back in the second half of 1789 and into early 1790. De Sade would spend the remaining thirteen years of his life at Charenton. Life for De Sade at Charenton over the 1800s and early 1810s was certainly not as bad as might have been the case in other
prisons or institutions. One of the products of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was an attempt to understand mental illness and psychological maladies in a more scientific fashion, rather than attributing them to some sort of divine judgment against the afflicted. Consequently, there were growing efforts to treat those who were psychologically disturbed in a more humane fashion and the director of the asylum, the Abbé de Coulmier, ran the asylum in a liberal fashion. The result of this for de Sade was that he was given materials with which to continue to write and direct plays there. There
was even a theatre with seating for scores of guests built at the asylum in 1805 as the Abbé conjectured that pursuits such as acting or viewing plays might be therapeutic for the inmates at Charenton. There were issues from time to time, mostly from the authorities in Paris who pressured the Abbé to be less lenient on de Sade, and on at least one occasion he was placed in solitary confinement for a time in the early 1810s, but for the most part de Sade was given a remarkable degree of liberty to write at Charenton during the last
thirteen years of his life. Whatever one may think of them, there is no doubting that there were a lot of works produced during the 1800s at Charenton by de Sade. Les journées de Florbelle, for instance, was seemingly a ten-volume work. We have, though, no idea what it might have been about or how extensive those volumes were, as de Sade’s copies were seized in 1807 after a crackdown on de Sade’s literary activities and another copy was destroyed by his eldest son several years later. Several of the works he produced in those years were plays. Others were
novels. One was The Marquis de Gange, based on the true story of the murder of Diane-Elisabeth de Rossan, a noted beauty of seventeenth-century France. The novel diverged from de Sade’s usual style, instead being more of an early example of the Gothic novel, which was to be popularised in years to come by Mary Shelley and others in England and by Edgar Allen Poe in the United States. The Marquis de Gange was completed in 1813. By then events in the outside world were once again bringing forth the possibility of a change in de Sade’s circumstances. Napoleon had
invaded Russia in the summer of 1812 and after a disastrous retreat from Moscow earlier that winter his empire had begun to crumble. When he finally abdicated in April 1814 it paved the way for the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. King Louis XVIII had other things on his mind when he first assumed power in Paris, but by the autumn of 1814 a new director was appointed to run Charenton and one of the first instructions he had from the government was to move de Sade from the asylum, who clearly was not insane in the way that the
other patients there were. Yet he would never be transferred. By then he was 74 years of age and in declining health. He died at Charenton on the 2nd of December 1814 after his condition rapidly deteriorated in November. The exact cause of his death is unclear. On the evening that he passed he had complained of severe pains in his chest and stomach and it was quite possibly a heart attack or coronary problems which killed him. He was buried at Charenton. A specific request that he had made for his body to be left intact was ignored and
several years later his skull was taken on a peculiar tour of Europe as interest in the father of sadism increased. Though reviled in his own time, judgements of de Sade and his writings have oscillated over time in the two centuries since. In the nineteenth century his work influenced a number of important European intellectuals. In France the poet Charles Baudelaire was clearly referring to some of de Sade’s work in his most notable collection of poems called The Flowers of Evil, first published in 1857, while the great German philosopher and philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, was considerably influenced by
de Sade, though neither he nor Baudelaire acknowledged the debt. However, the foremost influence of de Sade’s writing in the nineteenth century was within the Vienna school of the burgeoning psychoanalysis movement. There several individuals, including Sigmund Freud and following the psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing who coined the term, began to refer to the act of receiving sexual gratification through the inflicting of pain or the observation of the same, as sadism after de Sade. The word was soon being used in combination with the term masochism to form the modern term sadomasochism. The masochism element derives from Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian writer who in 1870 had published Venus in Furs, a work in which the male central character obtains gratification by being humiliated by his mistress. Freud compared de Sade’s and Sacher-Masoch’s writings dialectically in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, written in 1905. By the time Freud’s theory of sadomasochism was first published, Europe was reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899. It features a central character, Kurtz, who has become a wild ivory trader in the Congo, and who could have easily been lifted out of the pages of one of de
Sade’s novels. De Sade was perhaps the most influential though in the twentieth century when it came to influencing the work of the French Surrealists. Guillaume Apollinaire was the first French writer to try to openly rehabilitate de Sade’s reputation by stressing the absurdist and surrealist qualities of his writings. Georges Bataille followed in this pattern in the interwar period, while French existentialist writers such as Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were also concerned with de Sade’s writings after the Second World War. For sure, many have continued to criticize the surface layers of unethical and objectionable topics that
de Sade wrote about, notably the prominent American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who suggested that the rehabilitation of de Sade’s reputation in the twentieth century constituted veneration of an extreme misogynist. A film version of 120 Days of Sodom produced by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in the mid-1970s right before Pasolini was murdered, was banned in most countries either before it was ever shown in theatres or within days or weeks of release. As such, de Sade’s legacy has been complex, from influencing the field of psychanalysis to being both venerated and reviled within different twentieth-century social and
artistic movements. The Marquis de Sade has been an enormously controversial figure for the last two centuries since his death, just as he was in his own lifetime. It isn’t hard to understand why. His works such as 120 Days of Sodom and Justine are concerned with a wide range of deviant practices from people deriving gratification from inflicting bodily harm on others and a wide range of other perversions. His writings are explicit even today and were unprecedented in their pornographic content in their own time. Were they to be read literally by everyone, de Sade would probably be
dismissed as something of an abomination. However, there is a debate which will seemingly never be fully concluded as to whether these texts should be read literally or interpreted as allegorical stories designed to illustrate elements of the absurdity of human society, while even for those who do read de Sade’s texts in a literal fashion, they often find them of significance, as constituting the first written expression of numerous sexual disorders which were only studied in a scientific fashion from the late nineteenth century onwards. Overshadowing all of this was de Sade’s own life. He spent much of it
in prison, accused of deviancy and even insanity. Given all of this, over 200 years after he died, the Marquis de Sade remains something of an enigma. What do you think of the Marquis de Sade? Was he a revolutionary writer who used tales of overt deviancy to explore power structures and the mores of society in innovative ways or was he simply a depraved deviant himself? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
