The Marquis de Sade: A New Biography

I have my graduate psych class read parts of this. Loaded with entertainment, but also teaches. Otherwise, I find it entertaining, shocking, and, when in class - thought-provoking in a debate.DrK

Love it... but then I enjoy his writing....

Donald Thomas is more sympathetic to De Sade than we might expect from his reputation, explicitly so in the last chapter.So he tells us that libertine behaviour was quite common at the French court in the environs of which De Sade grew up. The Regency Court was notorious for its debauchery; so was the personal life of Louis XV. The contemporary penal system in France was extremely "sadistic" - and De Sade actually denounced it. Thomas also draws what read like exculpatory parallels between De Sade's notorious writings and those of Samuel Richardson, Mrs Ratcliffe or Matthew Gregory Lewis.All the same, De Sade went to extremes even by the standards of those days. In 1763 (he was then 23 and had not long been married) a young girl complained to the police: she had been able to talk herself out a terrifying situation in which the marquis proposed to sodomize her and to whip her with metal-tipped thongs, and De Sade had his first spell in prison, this time for only a few months. He soon resumed his hobby of flagellating young women, sometimes as many as four at a time brought to his rented "petite maison" from a working class district in the east of the city, while having more orthodox sexual encounters in his own house with a series of mistresses which, in due course, would include his sister-in-law.De Sade was a compulsive recividist. There would be three more incidents (1768, 1772 and 1774) which would lead to prison sentences. Thomas comments that in the one in 1768 De Sade had been "the victim of a certain degree of bad luck", and that the girl's ordeal was "trivial" compared with the vicious whippings inflicted on women criminals were far worse. The 1772 case was a multiple orgy involving four girls and Latour, De Sade's man-servant; it again involve whipping and, according to the girls, sodomy. Two of the girls took pills from de Sade, which turned out to be Spanish fly. In small quantities they were said to be aphrodisiacs, but in larger doses they created violent and sometimes fatal stomach cramps. "Dosage", says Thomas indulgently, "was never Sade's strong point", and the girls fell violently ill, though they survived. They went to the authorities, who charged de Sade with the capital charge of poisoning. (Thomas says the pills were analyzed and declared harmless, so de Sade "was held in captivity for most of the rest of his life "for a crime which he may well not have committed.") The sentence was eventually quashed on the ground of irregularities, but a lettre de cachet was issued and he now spent 14 years in prison.In prison he was allowed books and writing materials, and it was now that he began to write. He began to write the plays and novels for which he would become infamous and which would scandalize the world. Unable any longer to indulge in the real thing (though in 1814 he would manage one more night of "libertinage" with a 17 year old girl working in the mental hospital at Charenton three days before he died at the age of 74!), these books were substitute orgies of sexual depravity. Thomas repeats the revolting incidents in his main text in still greater detail in the penultimate chapter, containing the summaries of De Sade's major writings. Thomas concludes that chapter by saying that De Sade "owes the survival of his name to his reputation rather than to the texts in which he expressed his ideas" - as if the texts were less vile than his reputation rather than even more repulsive.De Sade adds commentaries reflecting the atheist philosophies of the period; but whereas the atheists of the time still believed in virtue, De Sade scoffed at the concept: Nature knows no such thing, as she shows in the animal world: murder, rape and incest are natural and therefore not to be condemned. (Actually there is very little cruelty for its own sake in the animal world.) Virtues and vices were merely human constructs which differ from one society to another.The French Revolution set free all prisoners held under a lettre de cachet. De Sade enrolled in the National Guard, actually became secretary of one of the sections of Paris, wrote on behalf of a constitutional monarchy, but after Varennes wrote in defence of a Republic and would write a eulogy of the assassinated Marat in 1793. In that year he was actually made a judge and then chairman of one of the revolutionary courts. But his sadism did not extend to politics and in general tended to establish the innocence of many who were brought before the court.But then Robespierre came to power, and in December 1793 De Sade was arrested for the fifth time, charged with having joined the National Guard when this was still technically in the service of the King and with having been too lenient as a judge. He was due to appear on July 27th, 1794, before Fouquier-Tinville Revolutionary Tribunal, in a batch of 28 others, to be tried and guillotined straight afterwards. A spelling mistake in his name, Aldonze instead of Alphonse, meant that the guards did not take him. On the next day Robespierre was overthrown and killed, and the Jacobin Reign of Terror was at an end. De Sade was set free three months later, in October.In 1797 he published a new novel, in ten volumes (about twice the length of War and Peace), with over a hundred lurid illustrations and crammed with the usual gross and revolting material, called "The New Justine ... and her Sister Juliette". He vehemently disclaimed authorship; but in 1801 a police raid on his publisher found that De Sade was indeed the author. Once again he found himself, first in prison, for the sixth time, and then, in 1803, back in the lunatic asylum of Charenton where he remained for the remaining eleven years of his life.Thomas' last chapter is devoted to the detractors and the devotees of De Sade. It contains the extraordinary statement that "for sheer finesse in sadism, the marquis fell far short of the Victorian public school system", though it is not clear whether this is the opinion of Thomas or of Swinburne whose response to a reading of The New Justine was, "Is that all?" The word "sadism" was popularized as a psychopathic condition by Krafft-Ebing in 1886 - Thomas thinks wrongly - I can't follow his argument. I see De Sade as a psychopath and, at best, a pathetic victim of his own sick compulsions - certainly not, as some people do, as "a tragic hero battling against the forces of repression". It is a good thing that the modern world has become less censorious and more permissive in sexual matters than it was - officially, at least - in the 18th and 19th centuries; but that still does not - or should not - mean that "everything is permitted" in that area, which was De Sade's position in his theory and his practice.

This helped satisfy my curiosity about De Sade. Good reading.

un libro de un personaje que ha empactado realidades de la vida

Good book