Few writers have a reputation as large as the Marquis de Sade, born 260 years ago this month. His name is known in nearly every household, though very few people have read his actual works. In the burgeoning field of psychology in 1890—76 years after the Marquis’ death—Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the term sadism, which has come to mean “Enthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others; spec. a psychological disorder characterized by sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviour involving the subjection of another person to pain, humiliation, bondage, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary) The term sadism was later used by Freud and soon became a staple of psychosexual studies along with masochism, coined after the lesser known Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and his novel Venus in Furs.
As happens with tropes, the new psychological meaning has come to encompass the actual body of work by the author who bears its name. The Marquis de Sade was much more than a psychosexual deviant and his contributions to the literary and philosophical western canon are to this day only recognized by a very few scholars. Much has been made of the Marquis’ personal life, but it is important as with any author, to focus on the writings themselves. An analysis of the Marquis de Sade’s writings, especially in the historical context in which they were written, reveals a deep, albeit sardonic, rebuttal to several prevailing philosophies of the day, statements of rebellion against governments, churches and authority in general, and delve into the heart of what things like freedom, individuality, ethics, and power actually mean.
Beginning with his most well-known philosophical passage, the ironical Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans, from the novel Philosophy in the Bedroom, we can see how Sade, like Jonathan Swift, satirizes his contemporaries and their beliefs and through this satire viciously condemns them and points out their hypocrisy. Sade’s basic argument in this mini-essay is clear and simple: if France must dethrone the king and the monarchy to be free, must not they also dethrone the King of Kings and his tyrannical power structure? The entire philosophy of French republicanism was centered on autonomous rule by free individuals, rather than the rule of the many by an oligarchic few. Sade argues that in order to achieve this lofty goal that God too must be deposed and replaced by individual autonomy. Challenging the proponents of “freedom” to declare their limits was one of Sade’s favorite techniques. How could the same people who advocated the murder of the king in order to free the people, be averse to the freedom to murder?
If we examine all of Sade’s works, even the strictly “erotic” passages, as a rejection of all arguments-from-authority, it is easy to find a steady thread of philosophical satirization throughout. Sade took what he saw happening around him to the ultimate extremity. He offered proof against the rationalist treatises of the day. His proof was his own mind. If man was naturally good and pure, if reason commanded him, how could he conceive of a parade of horrors such as The 120 Days of Sodom? How could people find it titillating? The idea that people viewed—and to this day still view—Sade’s work as pornography only serve to prove Sade’s point. Rational man, striving for purity and enlightenment, the idea-pedestal of philosophers such as Rousseau and Hobbes, was only a fiction. Man is also capable of unspeakable horrors, the most deviant sexual practices and he possesses the singular trait of schadenfreude: the ability to derive pleasure from another’s suffering. This was not a specifically “sadian” trait, only something that was brought out in the people who read his works as erotic, gothic fiction rather than ironic philosophical essays.
This same error of the masses occurred when Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom into the infamous Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini was demonized for making a disgusting, pornographic work, and was violently killed, himself, immediately after making it. However, like the original, Pasolini’s film is by no means pornographic. There is nothing in the film that inherently provides voyeuristic sexual gratification. In fact, Pasolini goes so far as to show the sickness in the act of voyeurism in the very last scenes as a condemnation of the audience watching the film.
Sade, like Pasolini, was condemned for possessing the qualities he brought out in his readers. That someone could and can read Juliette or Justine and acquire sexual gratification or excitation from it speaks to the heart of the Marquis’ argument that man is in fact not the ideal creature the enlightenment thinkers would make him out to be.
In truth, Sade made many gestures to suggest he was not the deviant monster that history has painted him. He took a fierce stand against Robespierre’s reign of terror, consistently decried the death penalty, and may have incited the mob outside the Bastille immediately before its storming, a key event in the French revolution. His fight against censorship, his committal to his philosophy no matter how much it deviated from the norm, and his questioning not only of secular authority but of ecclesiastic authority as well are all traits that mark him as one of the most important minds of his time and a precursor to the existentialists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The contributions to human psychology that have been made by those who coined and used the terms sadism and masochism have been great. But it is important to remember the historical chain of events that led to these terms and not to pre-judge or make assumptions about the authors themselves or their works. Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov is often cited as saying “All is permitted.” This idea and the ramifications behind it are rather better assigned to Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, who spent a good portion of his life without even basic freedom in order to espouse the ultimate freedom of all men and the horrible responsibility that comes with it.
Mark Brendle is a writer living in Oregon. His short fiction is available on the web at http://brendlewords.blogspot.com
