The Revolutionary Ideas Of The Marquis De Sade

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OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LEBRARYt

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The
REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS

of the
MARQUIS DE SADE

The
REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS

of the
MARQUIS DE SADE

h
GEOFFREY GORER

With a foreword by
PROFESSOR J. B. S. HALDANE, F.R.S.

1934

WISHART & CO
9 JOHN STREET ADELPHI LONDON

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BT WESTERN PRINTING SERVICES LTD., BRISTOL

CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Professor J. B. S. Haldane, F.R.S. -

PREFACE

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

.CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.

LIFE 1740-1814
LITERARY WORK-

i. Literary principles,
ii. Miscellaneous works,
iii. Aline et Valcour.

iv. Les 1 20 Journees, Justine y and
Juliette.

v. Literary Influence.

PHILOSOPHY -

i. La Metric.

ii. General principles.
GOD AND NATURE -

POLITICS I. DIAGNOSIS -

i. Class Divisions,
ii. Nature of Property.

iii. The ruling classes their
policies and mechanism.

iv. Their relation to the poor.
The poor.

v. Law and Justice. Prisons.
The death penalty.

vi. Other considerations.

vii. Butua & parable of civilisa-
tion.

5

Page

7

ii

'9
25

7*

IO2

118
129

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI.

Page
156

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED
SOLUTIONS- - - -
i. Utopia. 1788
ii. Plan for a European Federa-
tion. 1788
iii. Anarchy. 1 794 ?
iv. Plan of legislation for the new re-
public. 1795

CHAPTER VII. SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE 200

CHAPTER VIII. SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA 218

ANOTHER JUDGMENT 247

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES - - 255

FOREWORD

EITHER of two courses is openj^hej^^
jo preservFTus^self-respect. He may dismiss this book
unread as aiiotKeFa^nipt by a L high-brow^ to Whitewash
a mongterT Or ^Kelmay.j:eaa lt"._ He will then discover
that if 3e~Sade^ on several occasions indulged in abnormal
pleasures, he also risked his life to save that of a woman
who had caused him to be imprisoned for thirteen years ;
that if a psychologist has attached his name to a form of
cruelty, he was actually an inveterate opponent of capital
punishment.

When the monster legend is dissipated, it becomes
clear that de Sade was a very remarkable and original
thinker. To-day we find the philosophical fathers of the
French Revolution slightly ridiculous because they
generally assumed that with the abolition of a particular
set of abuses the golden age would return. De Sade saw
a great deal further. He had no illusions about the
natural goodness of man, but he believed that with com-
plete economic and sexual equality human conditions
could be greatly bettered. He anticipated the views of
Mai thus on population, and the tolerance of the Danish
penal code as regards sexual behaviour.

In certain other respects he went far beyond even the
most 'advanced' social thinkers of the present day.
Whether the attempt will ever be made to put his ideas
on sexual morality into practice is doubtful. Nevertheless
they are interesting because they are logical less of a
compromise with our existing morality than those of
Plato or More. If de Sade had not passed twelve years
in almost solitary confinement in the Bastille his political

FOREWORD

system might have been more practical and have stood
a greater chance of adoption. But it would have been
less intellectually coherent, and therefore less interesting
to the student of political ideas.

It is unlikely that the original documents on which
Mr. Gorer's work is based will be made available to the
public within our own time. For this reason his book
will be absolutely indispensable to the student of political
thought who wishes to trace the genesis of many ideas
which are now accepted, and others which are still
violently controversial. It will furnish intellectual
ammunition to both sides. The conservatives will be
able to say that sexual and economic equality are part of
the same system of ideas as the tolerance of murder and
rape. The radicals will find in de Sade a political thinker
who foresaw with considerable accuracy the failure of the
French Revolution to achieve liberty, equality and
fraternity, and pointed to the causes of this failure.

Mr. Gorer has not attempted to disguise his sympa-
thies, and it is probable that his book would have been
less valuable had he done so. It would have been beyond
the powers of one who did not share many of de Sade's
opinions to reconstruct them, as he has done, from the
fragmentary remains of his works. His bias is at least
undisguised and can therefore* be allowed for without
difficulty.

As a biologist I cannot conclude without a few words
on de Sade's outlook on sex. It was based on actual
observation, and forms a contribution to the natural
history of man. Unfortunately our knowledge of human
biology is still so fragmentary that a comprehensive study
of human erotics lacks an adequate background, and
stands out as an obscenity. A man or woman who has
studied the anatomy of the rest of the body can approach
that of the reproductive system without undue excite-
ment, and in the same way, when human physiology is

8

FOREWORD

part of common knowledge, the physiology of sex will
find its natural place in our intellectual equipment. And
a study of its abnormalities will throw considerable light
on the normal process, as it has already done in the hands
of Freud.

The time will then have come when de Sade's novels
will be appropriate for the educated public, and it may
well be that he will be regarded not as a purveyor of
filth, but as a man who was greatly in advance of his age
in the range of his interests. It may be remarked that in
no other form but fiction could his observations on human
behaviour have been published 140 years ago. Mean-
while, Mr. Gorer has done a service to students of psycho-
logy in pointing out that de Sade must be regarded as
a pioneer in their study, even though his work might
have been of greater value had he been born a century
later.

I do not wish to suggest that de Sade was a man of
perfectly balanced mind, whose works are to be taken as a
guide either to thought or morality. He would perhaps
have been unhappy in any age. But he was doubly
unfortunate, not only in incurring imprisonment under
the ancien regime but in surviving the period of the French
Revolution during which some at least of his ideas were
put into practice. If Mr. Gorer's book had no other
justification, it would deserve an audience because it
renders a posthumous justice to a very remarkable writer
who was the victim both of himself and of his fellow men.

J. B. S. HALDANE.

PREFACE

Two excuses are usually demanded for a book about the
Marquis de Sade; firstly a justification for writing at all
about such a monster, and alternatively the reason for
adding yet another book to the existing quantity con-
cerning him. My excuse for both actions is that I have
found the unfolding of his ideas extremely interesting,
and hope others will do the same; and that without
exception all the books already published deal exclusively
with his life and legend, and with the mechanics of the
plots of his novels, occasionally with a faint and distorted
summary of his ideas concerning sex, but never with any
development of his theories either on that or any other
subject.

I claim, therefore, that this is the only book in any
language which has presented the ideas of this extra-
ordinary man in any way; and the only one which allows
the general public to judge him through his own words.
To as great an extent as possible I have quoted him
verbatim: and to avoid making a bilingual book I have
translated him into English, paying more attention to the
accuracy than to the elegance of the translation. The
quotations have involved me in an awkward code of dots ;
de Sade himself frequently employs . . . three dots for
his own effects; so I have been driven to use four dots
.... to indicate the omission of some words in a

sentence and five dots to indicate the omission

of complete sentences.

I imagine the chief reason why there has been no book
on the ideas of de Sade during the hundred and twenty
years since his death is due to the difficulty of obtaining

ii

PREFACE

copies of his works and to the astounding obscenity of
many of these works once obtained. (Throughout this
book I distinguish 'obscenity' and * pornography' in the
same way as D. H. Lawrence did obscenity referring to
the subjects discussed and language used, pornography
to the titillating intentions of the writer.) From most
booksellers a demand for his works will produce an
ignorant stare, violent indignation, or the leering offer
of the kind of pornographic works of which de Sade said
" these miserable little volumes composed in caffs or
brothels demonstrate simultaneously two voids in their
authors their heads and their stomachs are equally
empty." 1 *

By chance I happened to find copies of Aline et Vakour
and of Juliette on the open shelves of booksellers in
Cambridge and London respectively and bought them
out of curiosity. As they were respectable shops the
books were not outrageously dear. In Juliette at first
reading I only found that boring and nauseous perversity
I had been led to expect, but Aline et Vakour^ which on
account of its lack of obscenity has been almost completely
neglected by people writing about de Sade, appeared to
me so full of pregnant ideas that I returned to Juliette
with new eyes. I then found that if the obscenity can
be, if not overlooked, taken in one's stride, there was
presented a Weltanschauung of curious originality and
force. I thereupon set about trying to collect the rest
of his works with indifferent success ; and had it not been
for the energies of one man and the great kindness of
another I should probably still be searching. Monsieur
Maurice Heine has since the war been collecting and
editing de Sade's books and manuscripts in limited
editions and various magazines, which has placed at our
disposal a great deal of hitherto unknown material ; and
Mr. C. R. Dawes, whose book on de Sade is within its

* For the sake of tidiness I have placed all references to sources at the end of
the book.

12

PREFACE

self-imposed limits the best yet written on the subject,
responded to a plea for assistance from a complete stranger
with a kindness for which I can find no adequate thanks.

This summer, in a discouraged rest from the vain
efforts to get a hearing as a playwriter, I decided to try
to systematise de Sade's ideas with the double object of
trying to clear my own head by measuring my own ideas
against those of an original and extreme thinker, and to
gain some understanding of the events around us, both
at home and abroad, which seemed to correspond so
closely with the circumstances depicted by de Sade. This
book is the outcome, I have found that it has given for
myself pretty well the results I wanted; if it succeeds in
doing so for anyone else I shall be gratified.

Before the discussion of de Sade's ideas I have placed
a short biography and an attempted criticism of his
writings. The biography was necessary to situate him
historically the development of his thought is bound up
with the history of his times and to attempt to dispel
the bluebeard legend surrounding him. As far as I have
been able I have given the main sure facts about him and
nothing else ; I have not kept any of the legends and in
only one case have I gone into any detail. That is the
story of the scandal of Marseilles, of which the true facts
were first brought to light by M. Maurice Heine this
summer; and I thought it was advisable to try to dispel
the false versions which have to now perforce been given
of this incident. I have not mentioned the other details
of his sexual life which are now known as they do not
seem to me to have any importance or interest except for
impertinent and rather morbid curiosity. The chief
originality of this chapter lies in the autobiographical
quotations which, with one exception, have not (as far
as I know) been collected together or noted before.

In trying to give an account of de Sade's intentions and
their result in his works I have done a thing which has

13

PREFACE

never been attempted to my knowledge so far. The plots
of the main works have been given several times, but,
as my analysis of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes shows, this
can better than any other way disguise the spirit and the
bearing of a book. The rest of the book is simply
exposition.

Many of his ideas are still so novel and so revolutionary
that they must inevitably offend some people. I have
tried my utmost to reduce this offence to the minimum
without distorting his real thought. I may enter a caveat
that I am presenting the ideas of de Sade, not my own ;
I have been as objective as I can and cannot accept respon-
sibility for his theories, some of which shock my sen-
sibilities as much as they can shock any reader's.

The chief pitfall of which I have been conscious is the
danger of picking out phrases and sentences which suit
my purpose and distorting them away from their context.
To guard against doing this, or the suspicion of having
done it, I have given some long and uninterrupted quota-
tions, of which perhaps the whole is not apposite to the
matter discussed but which illustrate the tendencies of the
passage. When I have wished to give my own opinion
I have done so in the first person, thinking it dis-
honourable to hide behind the impersonal or editorial
attitude and undignified to squirm behind the Chinese
fan of 'the present miserable author.'

When I first contemplated this book I thought in my
ignorance of history that it would be possible to say
definitely whether de Sade was original or not in advancing
his ideas, such as the theory of the optimum population,
or of equal rights for men and women ; but I soon aban-
doned this attempt and have contented myself with
stating his ideas and leaving to those who are more
learned in such matters than I am the question of priority.
The priority of statement of some political ideas which I
claim for him is justified by Guido de Ruggiero's History

H

PREFACE

of European Liberalism \ his originality on the subjects
of psychology and sex is unquestioned, for such subjects
were only discussed in the century after his death.

This book is open to attack from two different sources ;
from those who consider such a monster better buried in
oblivion and who will find in the ideas I have attempted
to assemble but further proofs of his monstrosity; and
from that smaller group, with its nucleus in the
Surreelistes, who will consider that any attempt to
rationalise and explain the arch-criminal and arch-rebel
is blasphemy. To both such possible detractors I will
reply in the words de Sade used in the preface to Aline et
Valcour\

" Nevertheless we will have critics, contradictors and
enemies without a doubt:

It is a danger to love men,
A crime to enlighten them.

So much the worse for those who will condemn this work,
and will not feel in what spirit it has been made: slaves of
prejudice and habit, they show that they are swayed
solely by opinion, and the torch of philosophy will never
shine for them." 2

August October ', 1933.

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

. . . . Le MONSTRE-AUTEUR . . .

Restif de la Bretonne. 1 797.

Readers acquainted with the Justine and Juliette of the Marquis de
Sade will comprehend my horror and indignation at the style of
amusement these dens afforded. The volumes referred to (the most
blasphemous and obscene ever painted and which came hot from hell
soon after the date of this letter) are filled with the records of experi-
ments tried for the purpose of exciting by every species of torture the
most unheard of debaucheries.

W. Beckford. Note added to
a letter written in 1784.
(// may be noted that de
Sade had published nothing
at this date.)

Get atroce et sanglant blasphtmateur, cet obscene historien des plus
formidables reveries qui aient jamais agite la fievre des dimons y le

Marquis de Sade Croye%-moi y qui que vous soyex, ne

touches pas a ces livres, ce serait tuer de vos mains le sommeil, le doux
sommeil . . . J. Janin. 1834.

Ce frtnttique et abominable assemblage de tous les crimes et de toutes
les saletts. F. Soulie. 1837.

De Sade une des gloires de la France un martyr.

P. Borel. 1839.

y'oserais affirmer, sans crainte d'Stre dtmenti, que Byron et de Sade
(je demande pardon du rapprochement) ont peut-etre ttt les deux plus
grands inspirateurs de nos modernes, l'un afficht et visible^ Vautre
clandestin pas trop clandestin. Saint-Beuve. 1 843.

19

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

That Illustrious and ill-requited benefactor of humanity.

Usually the work is either a stimulant for an old beast or an emetic
for a young man> instead of a valuable study to rational curiosity.

I only regret that in justly attacking my Charentonjw* have wilfully
misrepresented the source. I should have bowed to the judicial sen-
tence if instead of "Byron with a difference" you had said "De Sade
with a difference." The poet, thinker, and man of the world from
whom the theology of my poem is derived was a greater than Byron.
He indeed \ fatalist or not, saw to the bottom of gods and men.

Did he lie? did he laugh? does he know it?

Now he lies out of reach, out of breath,
Thy prophet, thy preacher, thy poet? . . .

A. C. Swinburne (between
1 860 and 1880).

Ilfaut toujours en revenir a de Sade, c'est-a-dire a Vhomme nature/,
pour expliquer le mal. C. Baudelaire.

yournaux Intimes.

Flaubert, une intelligence hantie par de Sade

Causerie sur de Sade, auquel il revient toujours.

Journal des Goncourts.

The Marquis de Sade is perhaps one of the most extraordinary men who
ever livedanda very interesting subject for a psychological 'study; Nature
has produced some strange abortions, both physical and mental, but
probably never a greater mental monstrosity than de Sade.

Pisanus Fraxi (H. S. Ashbee).
1880.

Le Marquis de Sade fut Vhomme indiquS pour synthitiser et pousser
jusques a ses derniers limites Vart de la spermocracie anormale et
monstrueuse. 11 depassa dans ce genre toute l y antiquitf, ilfixa dans un
monde d'horreurs les colonnes d'Hercule des dtmentes priapees.
Jamais heureusement on n*ira dtsormais aussi loin, de Sade aura
bornf r horizon du champ trotique. Octave Uzanne. 1901.

C'est le 2 juin y 1 740 qui vit naitre un des hommes les plus remar*
quables du dixhuitieme siecle, disons m$me de Vhumanitt en gtntral.
. . . Les (Euvres du Marquis de Sade constituent un objet de

20

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

l y histoire et de la civilisation autant que de la science mfdicale. . . .
11 y a encore un autre point de vue qui fait des ouvrages du Marquis
de Sade pour rhistorien qui s'occupe de la civilisation y pour le mtdecin,
le jurisconsult e, Veconomiste et le moralise un veritable puits de
science et de notions nouvelles.

Eugene Dilhren (Ivan BlochJ.igoi, 1904.

Get homme qui parut ne compter pour rien durant tout le dixneuvieme
siecle, pourrait bien dominer le vingtieme . . . Le Marquis de Sade,
l y esprit le plus libre qui ait encore exist f. . . . Le lecteur qui aborde
ces romans ne remarque souvent que la lettre, qui est dtgoutante, et
l y analyse ci-dessous n'en peut malheureusement pas livrer l y esprit.

G. Apollinaire. 1909.

Sade, D. A. F. French licentious writer . . .

Encyclopedia Britannica. 1 3th Edition.

De Sade wrote according to his lights and though his ideas were
extravagant he was at least sincere. It is just that, perhaps, which
makes him such a sinister figure. Mere obscenity is always disgusting
and nearly always dull; but there was much more than that here and
he was savagely in earnest.

C. R. Dawes. J 9 2 7-

ye n y arrive pas a le prendre au sfrieux.

P. Bourdin. !9 2 9-

Un ecrivain qtiilfaut placer sans doute parmi les plus grands.

J. Paulhan. *93 O -

II y a done lieu de croire que Sade> apres avoir inquittt tout un siecle
qui ne pouvait le lire, sera de plus en plus lu pour remfdier a
rinquietude du suivant. M. Heine. J 93-

Del/o scrittore non diciamo poi dello scrittore di genio mancano al
Sade le qualita piu elementari. Poligrafo e pornografo a maggior
titolo d'un Aretino, tutto il suo merito sta nell 9 aver lasciato dei
documenti che rapresentano la fase mitologica infantile del/a psicopato-
logia: informafiabesca egli da laprima sistematologia delle perversioni.

M. Praz. J 93-

21

SOME PRELIMINARY JUDGMENTS

Hier also, wenn irgendwo, 1st Sade unnormal, defekt. Statt der
Spannung liegt Spaltung vor und zwar eine Spaltung die nicht mit
Dammerxustanden und Stdrungen des Bewusstseins verbunden ist.
Er weicht dem Konflikt aus, verantwortet sich nicht vor sich selbst

und empfindet nie die Notwendigkeit, sich zu ordnen Wie

man mit dieter doppelter Buchfuhrung ein genialer Mensch wird
%eigt Kierkegaard: wie ein negativer von armer nutzloser Tragik:
Sade. O. Flake. 1930.

Rien en saurait plus tenir a Fecart de cette voix inouie ceux qui sont
capables de I* entendre et ne mtconnaitront jamais le sens profond de sa
revelation. M. Heine. I 93 1 '

That frenzied pornographer .... Sade was born in Paris in 1 740
and in 1772 was condemned to death for the sexual practices to which
he has left his name. He made his escape and he was afterwards
imprisoned at Vincennes and in the Bastille, where he wrote several
phantastic romances in which his imagination dwelt upon those objects
and scenes which excited and satisfied his peculiar sex-mania. He
died insane in 1 8 1 4.

Desmond Macarthy. 1933-

22

I care not whether a man is Good ^r Evil ? all that T
Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool.

W. BLAKE,

Jerusalem.

CHAPTER I
LIFE, 1740-1814

Si les hommes, en entrant dans la vie, savaient les peines qui les
attendent: qu'il ne dependit que d'eux de rentrer dans le n&mt, en
serait-il un seul qui voulut remplir la carridre!

DE SADE,

Aline et Valcour.

The Bastille trembles . . .

And the den named Horror held a man
Chained hand and foot: round his neck an iron band, bound to the

impregnable wall;
In his soul was the serpent coil'd round his heart, hid from the light,

as in a cleft rock,

And the man was confined for a writing prophetic.

W. BLAKE,

The French Revolution.

"CONNECTED by my mother with the highest in the land;
by my father with all that was most distinguished in
Languedoc; born in Paris in the midst of luxury and
abundance, I believed as soon as I could think that nature
and fortune had joined together to cover me with gifts.
I believed this because people had been foolish enough
to say so to me and this absurd prejudice made me
haughty, despotic, and quick to anger; it seemed to me
that the whole world should give way to my caprices and
that it was only necessary to form them for them to be
satisfied. I will give you one example from my child-
hood to convince you of the dangerous principles that
were so idiotically allowed to grow in me.

"Born and brought up in the palace of the illustrious

MARQUIS DE SADE

prince (a connection of my mothers) of nearly my age,
I was encouraged to be with him as much as possible,
so that my childhood friend should be useful to me all
my life; but my vanity at the time, which didn't under-
stand anything of this calculation, took offence one day
in our childish games because he wanted to take some-
thing from me, and more especially because, doubtless
with great reason, he thought his rank entitled him to it;
I revenged myself by many reiterated blows, without any
consideration stopping me; only force and violence could
separate me from my adversary.

"At about that time my father was engaged in diplo-
matic negotiations ; my mother went with him and I was
sent to my grandmother in Languedoc whose too blind
kindness encouraged in me all the faults I have mentioned.

" I returned to Paris to go to school, under the guidance
of a firm and intelligent man, doubtless most suitable to
shape my youth but whom unfortunately I did not stay
with for long. War broke out. My people, in a hurry
for me to serve, did not finish my education and I joined
my regiment at an age when I should naturally have
been going to school.

". . . . The campaigns opened and I venture to say I
did well. The natural impetuosity of my character, the
fiery soul I had received from nature only added further
force and activity to that ferocious virtue called courage,
doubtless incorrectly considered the only one necessary
for a soldier.

"When our regiment was crushed in the penultimate
campaign of that war we were sent to barracks in
Normandy; from there my misfortunes began. ~

"I was just twenty-one; till then entirely occupied
with the work of war, I had neither known my heart nor

realised that it was sensitive (He describes the

26

LIFE 1740-1814

seduction and abandonment of a young girl of good
family, the usual custom in the mess.)

" My father called me to Paris that winter and I hurried
to him: his health was failing, and he wished to see me
settled before he died; this project and the pleasures of

the town diverted me I spent two years in different

pleasures. , . ."*

This is the account Valcour, the hero, gives of himself
at the beginning of the novel Aline et Valcour \ the details
have nothing to do with the plot and correspond so
entirely with what we know of de Sade that it is justifiable
to treat them as autobiographical.

Louis-Donatien-Franfois-Alphonse (or Aldonze there
is considerable ambiguity concerning de Sade's Christian
names: an ambiguity which was later to cause him con-
siderable inconvenience and danger during the later
years of the Republic when one version of his name was
inscribed on a list of dmigrs.) |vlarquis and later Comte
de Sade was born on the second of June, 1 740, in the
house of the great PrinceT Cond, wHcTwas a connection
of his mother's. He was the first and apparently the
only child of the Comte de Sade, Chevalier-comte de
la Coste et de Mazan, Seigneur de Saumane, Lieutenant-
gn6ral pour le roi de la Haute et Basse Bresse, Bugey,
Valromey et Gex. The family, whose title of nobility
dated from the first years of the fourteenth century, was
one of the most important of Provence. One of de Sade's
direct ancestors was Hugue de Sade, husband of the
Laura who inspired Petrarch's delicate and platonic son-
nets. It is more than usually pointed irony that the
representatives of the two extremes of sexual imagination
should be so directly joined.

De Sade's father was a typical grand seigneur, cold,
restrained and formal to the highest degree. He was also

27

MARQUIS DE SADE

extremely extravagant and when he died left little behind
him except inalienable land and debts. He had filled the
post of Ambassador, first in Russia and later in London.
His numerous brothers and sisters were with a single
exception ecclesiastics.

At the age of four de Sade went to stop with his grand-
mother at Avignon ; some time later he was given into the
care of his uncle, the Abb Francois de Sade, who had at
that date withdrawn from the fashionable life in Paris to
devote himself to the study of Petrarch at Vaucluse. The
Abba's researches on the family poet are said to be still
useful to students.

In 1750 he went to the college of Louis-le-Grand, then
the most famous in Paris, and stayed there for four years.
There is a tradition, unverifiable as far as I can tell, but
not improbable, that he was already developing his
senses, becoming a good musician, dancer and fencer,
and spending a great deal of time in the picture galleries
of the Louvre. In later life his fondness of the arts con-
tinued; I have not been able to discover in what direction
his musical taste lay, but in painting his preference went
to the classical Italian masters, particularly Titian, Tin-
toretto and Veronese.

In 1754 the seven years' war with Germany broke out
and he was sent to his regiment. He served with dis-
tinction, rising from sub-lieutenant in the royal regiment,
to captain of a regiment of cavalry. Most of his time was
spent in Germany, where he learned the language, and it
is possible that he travelled further north. In 1761 he
returned to France.

Nothing is known of the two following years. Possibly
the story of the seduction and desertion of a young girl
quoted above is true. His return to Paris and his enjoy-
ment of the pleasures of the capital certainly is.

28

LIFE 1740-1814

In 1 763 the father of de Sade decided that his son, now
iged nearly twenty-three, should settle down and there-
: ore arranged a marriage for him. The bride he chose
aras Rene, the twenty-year-old eldest daughter of Mon-
jieur de Montreuil, President de la Cour des Aides a
:itle corresponding roughly to that of high court judge.
The Montreuils were extremely rich, though correspon-
dingly avaricious, and Renee's dot was munificent. They
were striking examples of the rise of the 'robinocracie,'
:he preponderance of lawyers which marked the end of
:he ancien regime. The President was almost entirely
xlipsed by his wife, who managed the affairs of her
family and of everyone with whom she came in contact
with an energy, an unscrupulousness and a zeal which
demand a certain admiration. She was extremely
influential at the Court and she possessed a charm which
ie Sade averred she must have got from the devil. She
bad a very strong family pride, and excused her most
inexcusable actions by pointing to family interests.

The first time de Sade went to visit his intended bride
it happened that Rene was indisposed and he was left
to be entertained by one of her younger sisters, the
thirteen-year-old Louise. Louise was blonde and lively,
well developed in every way; she entertained the young
marquis by singing and playing on the harp in a touching
and accomplished manner; by the end of the interview
the two young people were deeply in love and de Sade
had taken a dislike to his intended bride before he had
met her. His entreaties to be allowed to marry Louise
were repulsed both by his parents and hers. Louise was
easily her mother's favourite child and Madame de
Montreuil had for this daughter a most jealous affection.
It was possibly this jealousy which first aroused the deep
dislike for her son-in-law which drove her to attack and

29

MARQUIS DE SADE

ruin him to the best of her ability during the next thirty
years. She is, incidentally, one of the only two women of
whom we have any record who resisted de Sade's great
charm. The other was the dancer Mademoiselle Riviere
of the Opera, whom in the autumn of 1767 de Sade was
unable to persuade to spend with him at his house at
Arcueil those evenings when she was not appearing.

Succumbing to family pressure de Sade married Rene
on the seventeenth of May, 1763, in circumstances of the
greatest pomp, in the presence of the King and Queen and
most of the members of the Court. Presumably a short
honeymoon followed the marriage, for a son was born
in the following year, but almost immediately he turned
to debauchery, and in September of the same year he was
arrested for the first time and imprisoned in Vincennes.

Beyond the fact that de Sade was concerned in some
orgy which made a considerable scandal at the time,
nothing is known, or, to my knowledge, even guessed at
about this first contact with the law. He was apparently
imprisoned for about two months, after which he was
released, perhaps by his wife's intercession, but exiled for
nearly a year to L'Aigle, in Normandy.

It is from this period that dates the first writing we
possess of de Sade. It is a letter to the governor of the
prison and in view of future developments is worth
quoting at some length. I do not think it is hypocritical.

"Unhappy as I am here, sir," the letter goes, " I do not
complain. I deserved the vengeance of God and feel it:
to bemoan my sins and weep over my faults are my only
employ. Alas, God could have annihilated me without
giving me time to repent: what thanks must I give Him
for allowing me to return to the fold. Sir, I pray you to
allow me the means to accomplish this by permitting me
to see a priest. Through his good offices and my own

30

LIFE 1740-1814

sincere repentance I hope soon to be fit to approach the
holy Sacraments, whose complete neglect was the first
cause of my fall

" I hope also that you will be good enough to refrain
from telling my family of the true reason of my im-
prisonment: I would be utterly destroyed in their esti-
mation.

"I venture to remark also that I was married on the
seventeenth of May and can assure you that I only set
foot in that house in June. Then I went to the country for
three months. . . . However short may have been the
period of my sins I am none the less guilty: it has been
long enough to enrage the supreme Being whose just
anger I now feel."

The governor noted on the letter that a priest had been
sent to him.

In September, 1764, de Sade returned to Paris. It is
likely that at that time he was already pursuing those
ingenious experiments in sensuality that have since made
him infamous, for in that year Police-Inspector Marais
reports that he has strictly advised la Brissaut, without
further explanations, not to provide him with girls to go
with him to his little house. It is most probable that
during the next three years he took part in the fashionable
life in Paris and was then given the sobriquet of 'the
divine marquis, 1 in emulation of the divine Aretino, for
his father died in 1767 and he then succeeded to the title
of Comte. He was still nominally in the army; he did
not retire till the age of thirty-one, in 1771, when he held
the rank of mestre de camp, the equivalent of colonel
in a cavalry regiment.

In October, 1767, his reputation was already bad, for at
that date the police-inspector notes, "We will soon be
hearing again of the horrors of the Comte de Sade." At

MARQUIS DE SADE

Easter of the following year the affair Keller occurred, anc
his reputation was fixed for ever.

This affair has been so much written about that it is
unnecessary to describe it again at length. Those curious
to know the full details should see the books referred tc
at the end of the chapter, or better still the appropriate
letters of the Marquise du Deffand to Horace Walpole
which are the only contemporary account of the affair
Apparently de Sade was solicited in Paris by a widow oi
thirty, took her to his house near Arcueil, forced her tc
strip, whipped her, anointed her with some ointment anc
put her comfortably to bed. The woman was frightened
escaped from the window by knotted sheets, and com-
plained to the police. She said he had also cut her aboui
with a small knife but was unable to show any scars twc
days later, which makes the fact improbable. Foi
although contusions might leave no surface marks aftei
treatment by some ointment, there is no known salve
which will make cuts disappear. De Sade was probabl)
being funny when he said to the police that far from being
reprimanded he deserved public thanks for calling atten-
tion to an ointment which could miraculously heal al
wounds. In any case the affair caused an enormous
scandal. The magistrates threw themselves with gusto or
to such a savoury case; the chief judge was the Pr^sideni
de Maupou, a sworn enemy of de Sade's father-in-law
In a humorous story de Sade wrote about this persona
enemy later; 2 he makes one of the enemies of de Maup^oi
remark, " Recall to the memory of the judges of Paris
.... that famous adventure of 1 769 (sic) when their hearts
far more moved to pity by the whipped bottom of a street-
woman than by the people, whose fathers they style them-
selves and whom nevertheless they let die of hunger
determined them to accuse a young officer who on his

LIFE 1740-1814

return from the sacrifice of the best years of his life in
the service of his king found his only laurels in the
humiliation prepared for him by the greatest enemies of
the country he had been defending." It is also possible
that Sartine, the infamous Sartine who made a fortune by
his corruption and then retired from office on the ground
that he was ruined, the Sartine whom de Sade never tired
of attacking, was already on his tracks.

The results of this case however were not very serious
for de Sade. He was condemned to pay Rose Keller a
hundred louis (with which dowry she remarried a month
later) and was imprisoned for six weeks, first at Saumur
and then at Lyons. He was then released through the
good offices of his wife and his mother-in-law on condition
that he should not return to Paris but should live at the
family property of La Coste, near Marseilles.

For the next three years he lived there luxuriously but
discreetly. His wife was with him some of the time,
either at La Coste or at Saumane, a property of his in the
neighbourhood. His two other children were born at
that period. Part of the time, however, he had a dancer
called La Beauvoisin living with him, and is said to have
introduced her as his wife, while his real wife was in Paris.
He had a private troupe of actors, who performed plays
he wrote. There is still extant an invitation to a Monsieur
Girard, dated January, 1772, asking him to come to the
second performance of his comedy and asking for his
frank criticism of his work. This is the first indication
we have of de Sade's writing. For the rest of his life he
was connected with the theatre as author, actor and pro-
ducer, finding in it on different occasions relaxation,
friendship, love, and even a means of subsistence.

At some time towards the end of this period his wife
brought with her her young sister Louise, now a woman

33 c

MARQUIS DE SADE

of twenty-one, released from her convent. She probably
considered that eight years should have been sufficient
to damp their mutual love, but she was wrong,

In June of 1772 occurred the second important scandal
in the life of de Sade, the scandal of the poisoned sweets.
Until last year the truth about this affair had been com-
pletely unknown and all accounts of it have been far
from the facts ; but Maurice Heine, the untiring revealer
of de Sade's life and works, has discovered the copies of
the original indictment and published them in the review
Hippocrate (Number One, March, 1933) together with the
depositions of the witnesses. This article should be con-
sulted for the full details.

De Sade went to Marseilles on some business, accom-
panied by his valet La Tour, a tall, pock-marked man
dressed in sailor's clothes. Wishing to amuse himself
without too much publicity he sent his servant to make all
arrangements for him for two consecutive evenings;
owing however to a subsequent supper arrangement the
arrangements for the two evenings were compressed into
one. He visited a woman called Marguerite Coste with
his servant, whom, by some caprice, he called Monsieur
le Marquis, while he himself was addressed as La Fleur.
He gave the woman a number of sweets flavoured with
aniseed and containing cantharides, enjoyed her in a
simple way, since she refused more complicated ones, and
left. Some time after the woman was taken extremely
ill with a great deal of vomiting and continued in a critical
state for some days before recovering.

The same day, probably a little earlier, had taken place
another orgy, also arranged by the valet. Three girls
were engaged from a bawd, but taken to a newer and more
discreet part of the town, as the brothel was too public.
There they were received one after the other by the

34

LIFE 1740-1814

marquis and his valet and slightly beaten by him. They
were then asked to beat him in his turn, and he took out
of his pocket a whip made of parchment studded with big
and little nails and covered with bloodstains. This was
more than the girls could stand soft-hearted and simple
as most whores so he had a twig broom sent for, and
received from the three girls and his valet no less than
eight hundred strokes, if the score he kept on the wall
is not an exaggeration. He also bedded with the girls
and his valet, treating the girls as his valet treated him,
which so 'suffocated' the onlookers that they burst into
tears. He also gave these girls some of the sweetmeats;
one ate them, the others threw them away. The girl
that ate them was also sick, though much less so than
Marguerite Coste.

I have given this case in some detail (though very much
modified and shortened as comparison with the article
already quoted will show) as it is of very great interest
for the study of de Sade. It is the only known account
of his sexual habits and is as far removed as possible from
what is ordinarily considered 'sadistic 1 behaviour. I do
not think, however, that any generalisations can be made
from the behaviour of this one day; de Sade was almost
certainly exploring conscientiously and practically all
possible extensions of sensual pleasure, from which he
was to draw his theory and criticism some years later.
Both his physical and mental courage were adequate to
the task.

Within a week his arrest and that of the valet were
ordered; but they had both left the country, de Sade at
last accompanied by his dearly loved Louise. A few
weeks later he and his valet were both condemned to
death for poisoning (which was absurd: all the invalids
were completely recovered) and sodomy, for which the

35

MARQUIS DE SADE

death penalty was no longer inflicted; de Sade was to be
beheaded and the valet hanged after making public
penance. In their absence they were condemned as
defaulting and contumacious, and de Sade's property was
seized.

The complete disproportion between the severity of the
sentence and the alleged crime (it must be remembered
that we only have the accounts of hostile witnesses) is
so great that further explanations are needed. A variety
are forthcoming.

Firstly, by an unfortunate coincidence, the Parlement at
Aix, where the judgment took place, was under the
influence of the same de Maupou who had condemned
de Sade in Paris four years before. This man appears to
have been a puritan, with the salacious mind and bitter
cruelty that one associates with puritanism. Also, as
explained before, he was a personal enemy of de Mon-
treuil, Sade's father-in-law, and anything which would
disgrace his family would be of advantage to him. This
would partially account for the continuance of the case,
even after the 'poisoned' girls had withdrawn their com-
plaints. It would also account for the charge, if true,
de Sade brings against him 3 of manufacturing false
evidence ; he makes de Maupeou say in the story already
referred to: "Well, wasn't it a scandalous affair? Didn't
a thirteen-year-old valet whom we had bribed come and
tell us, because we wished him to tell us, that that man
was murdering whores in his chateau, didn't he tell us a
story of Bluebeard which nurses to-day wouldn't deign
to use to put their children to sleep ?" In the same story
he says 4 "Colic is an important illness at Marseilles and
Aix, since we have seen a troop of idiots, fellows of this
judge here, decide that some prostitutes who had the colic
had bztn poisoned" and further: 5 "In 1772 a young noble-

36

LIFE 1740-1814

man of the province wanted in playful revenge to whip
a courtesan who had made him a bad present; this joke
was treated as a criminal affair, as murder and poisoning,
and this judge won all his colleagues over to this ridiculous
opinion, destroyed the young man and had him con-
demned to death by contumacy, since they could not get
hold of his person.'' These judgments of de Sade on
his own condemnation, written in 1787, are interesting
and have not as far as I know been pointed out before.

But there is also another possibility, equally mentioned
by de Sade and also so far ignored; it is that the actual
charge was merely an excuse, the real reason for his con-
demnation being political activities. The passage in
question 6 is discussing the later capture of de Sade in
Paris in 1777 and will be quoted at the appropriate time;
when the judge (as always a favourite villain with de
Sade, quite understandably) boasts of the way the accused
was caught six years after the crime his interlocutor says,
"'Sir, your story horrifies me: I suppose the man in
question must have been guilty of high treason/ 'Not
at all, writings against us magistrates . . . against kings ;

some other youthful adventures '" and, lest any

reader should fail to recognise the subject of this passage
he adds a footnote, " Monsters capable of this horror, you
grow pale as you recognise your victim. . . ."

The probability of this interpretation is encouraged by
the fact that in March of the following year when he was
in prison in Chambry, the ambassador de la Marmora
wrote to the governor "to keep the prisoner as close as
possible, to prevent him flooding the public with his
terrible writings and memoirs." Certainly the word
'memoirs' is ambiguous, but surely even at that period
an ambassador would be more concerned with political
than with immoral pamphlets.

37

MARQUIS DE SADE

Another reason which makes me think this likely is
the letter from Mademoiselle de Rousset, the friend of
his wife, who in 1 780 succeeded after great risks in seeing
the indictment against him. She writes: "By this bold
stroke we have discovered that the Prsidente is not so
guilty as we had thought. He has deservedly even more
powerful enemies. Before he can hope for anything some
people must die and the others forget." This is certainly
vague enough; but since in his debaucheries he seems to
have been involved exclusively with whores, servants and
peasants, his more powerful enemies must have been
instigated by some other motive.

Before this new arrest in December of the same year
de Sade and his sister-in-law had been enjoying in Italy
their nine-year-long frustrated love. But not for long.
Within a few weeks de Sade was alone again. It is not
quite clear what happened. The generally accepted
version is that Louise fell ill and died suddenly, at the age
of twenty-two. There is a possibility however that they
separated and that Louise returned home. Certainly a
Mademoiselle de Launay, by which title Louise was
known, was living until 1780, when she died of smallpox.
If, however, Louise had died it is possible that her title
had passed to a younger sister. The whole incident is
obscure.

In any case the elopment had so infuriated Madame de
Montreuil that she used all her influence at the Court and
in the embassies to get de Sade arrested; and by her
machinations he was eventually captured at Chamb^ry in
Savoy, then part of the kingdom of Sardinia. She dis-
covered his whereabouts by intercepting his letters. It is
probable that before this new imprisonment de Sade
passed through Geneva and he may then as he claims 7
have visited Rousseau and been encouraged by him in

38

LIFE 1740-1814

his intention to devote himself to literature. The passage
is of interest. "Rousseau was then living/' Valcour, who
as we have seen is in part a self-portrait of de Sade, is
made to say, "and I went to see him; he had known my
family and received me with great kindness; he praised
and encouraged the project that he saw that I had formed
to renounce everything to give myself over entirely to the
study of literature and philosophy; he gave me good
advice and taught me to separate true virtue from the
detestable systems under which it is smothered. . ,

"'My friend/ he said to me one day, 'as soon as the
rays of virtue shone on men, they, too dazzled by their
radiance, put in the way of these waves of light the
prejudices of superstition, and the only sanctuary that
remained for virtue was the bottom of the heart of honest
men. Detest vice, be just, love your neighbours, en-
lighten them; then you will feel virtue resting sweetly in
your soul, and you will have daily consolation for the pride
of the rich and the stupidity of the despot.*"

If this passage is not autobiographical it is difficult to
understand its existence, for there is no other example in
the whole book of a famous person being mentioned by
name; moreover Valcour in the story is not a writer but
exclusively an unhappy lover. And surely it is not
improbable that de Sade, so recently bereaved and so
nearly ruined financially should have made at that time
the resolve to change his life entirely. It is pleasant to
think that these two great revolutionaries, the one
romantic, the other realist, should have met, though it is
distressing that the influence of the romantic should have
so entirely dominated both his century and the following
one.

De Sade was a prisoner in Chamb&y for five months.
He seems to have been fairly comfortable there, spending

39

MARQUIS DE SADE

a good deal on his upkeep and gambling with his fellow
prisoners. On the first of May in 1773 he broke his
parole and escaped through a lavatory window, leaving
behind him an ironical note of condolence and advice for
the governor. The details of the escape the dummy in
the bed, the light left burning, the ladder made out of
sheets are in the best tradition of the adventure novel.
Travelling under an assumed name and by night he made
his way back home to the chateau of La Coste and to his
wife.

Of the many enigmas which make the interpretation of
de Sade's life so difficult, none is more obscure than the
character of Madame de Sade. She has been called a
saint of married life, a convenient but misleading label.
Not only did she submit to her husband, she actively
aided and abetted him ; indeed some of her actions seem
to indicate that she was also his procuress. One of the
young girls whom she had taken into her service and who
later was reclaimed by her parents gave the most lurid
accounts of de Sade's behaviour towards her; of his wife
however she had only praise, adding that she was usually
the first victim of a rage which was near madness. (There
is no certainty that this girl's story is true; de Sade's
reputation at the time was so bad that anything could be
believed against him, and the story was dragged out by
his enemies.) But he undoubtedly did make a chamber-
maid pregnant, and in order to prevent this girl telling
inconvenient tales she had her arrested and kept in a
convent under a completely false charge of theft. She
seems to have abandoned her children to their grand-
mother without a murmur; she fought for her husband
against his family and hers; she humiliated herself out of
all measure ; and yet she maintained to the end an almost
unmitigated innocence.

40

LIFE 1740-1814

She cannot possibly be considered simple-minded; she
was not particularly religious; passionate love is not
altogether an adequate explanation, for love demands
some return, and although de Sade generally treated her
kindlily and affectionately, he can never have given the
impression of being in love with her. I think if we had
a portrait of her, her conduct might be more under-
standable. I imagine her to have been very plain we
know she was tall, gawky, ungraceful, and extremely
shabby in her dress, wearing clothes ten years old and
her love for de Sade to have been the endless gratitude of a
passionate woman with no sort of sex appeal for the one
man who had gratified her. It cannot be argued that she
was constrained in any way; on the contrary every sort
of device and bribe was used to separate her from her
husband; in 1778 threats were used to prevent her
rejoining him; her mother, who was working for what she
considered to be her daughter's interests, became for
fifteen years her daughter's greatest enemy.

Madame de Montreuil is easier to understand. She
was a very rich and very clever woman with too little to
do, so that all her energies went into intrigue. After
de Sade's elopment with her favourite daughter her one
aim was de Sade's destruction. He must be imprisoned
for life. At the same time the sentence against him must
be quashed and all scandal concerning him hushed up;
for otherwise her daughter and grandchildren would be
dishonoured and her numerous other children would lose
all chance of marrying well. With this double aim in
view she used her very considerable influence with the
judges and the Court to get the sentence revised; at the
same time she used every method to insure that once
formally acquitted de Sade would stand no chance of
freedom, by bribing more or less overtly de Sade's

MARQUIS DE SADE

relations and servants; she even bought his lawyer, so
that de Sade could make no move of which she did not
know immediately. During his enforced absences de
Sade left his keys with this lawyer-steward; Madame de
Montreuil took advantage of this fact to get the lawyer to
break into his desk and steal some notes of his which could
be used against him. Although de Sade seems to have
suspected this double-crossing on the part of his lawyer
he was never quite convinced of it ; moreover this man
Gaufridy was on the spot and could collect his money
during his many absences; so that despite his suspicions
he never broke with him.

On de Sade's return to La Coste his wife used what
money was left to them to turn the chateau into a real
fortified place, with high walls and a drawbridge ; and for
a great part of the next four years the pair lived there in a
state of siege, seeing no one except the servants and the
lawyer; the bridge was only down for a few hours in the
middle of the day. It is possible that secret rooms were
built, for in the beginning of 1774 a party of soldiers
came to search for de Sade ; but although they turned the
place upside down they did not find him.

In 1 774 Louis XV died and the lettre de cachet against
de Sade under his name lost its validity; moreover de
Maup^ou was finally disgraced and there was considerable
hope of de Sade's rehabilitation, Madame de Sade started
a lawsuit against her mother for persecution and later went
to Paris to try to interview the necessary people to get
the sentence quashed. She received a great deal of
encouragement but nothing concrete; in the autumn her
funds were completely exhausted and she had to return
to La Coste; with her back turned the mother was able
to destroy all that her daughter had accomplished. The
lawsuit against Madame de Montreuil seems to have

42

LIFE 1740-1814

petered out inconclusively. On her return she brought
with her two young girls from Lyons and Vienne, and
also a young secretary for her husband. In November
the chateau was closed for the winter.

Whether there were any orgies at the chateau this
winter, and if so of what nature and who took part in them
can only be guessed at. Certainly in the spring the
parents of the three young people Madame de Sade had
brought with her all turned up to demand the return of
their children; but Madame de Montreuil was so
intimately concerned with the whole affair that it is diffi-
cult to tell whether she was really trying to cover up the
traces, as she claimed, or to manufacture fresh evidence.
Considering de Sade's character there is reason to suppose
that there was considerable foundation for complaints ; in
which case the r6le his wife played becomes even more
peculiar. She imagined she was again pregnant this
winter, but inaccurately; on the contrary it was her
chambermaid who was in this interesting condition; to
shut her mouth Madame de Sade had her arrested on a
false charge and held under a lettre de cachet, until her
father also turned up.

Either this winter or two winters later de Sade started
his systematic study of sexual psychopathology. He had
written two volumes before his arrest in 1778, and had
also made numerous notes. There seems to be little
question that the famous papers which Madame de Mon-
treuil had stolen from de Sade's desk were notes for this
work; in all probability they were each an analytical
description of the behaviour of all the people with whom
he had to do, and also possibly second-hand accounts.
This early work was all destroyed by the order of his
mother-in-law, to his great distress; thirteen years later
he was still trying to recover these papers.

43

MARQUIS DE SADE

The complaints made by the little girls in the spring
made it unsafe for de Sade to stay at La Coste ; he there-
fore went to Italy, and spent a year visiting Florence,
Rome and Naples. At the last place he was presented at
Court, and it is possible that he had an interview with the
Pope. It is not known whether he travelled alone; in a
footnote to Juliette* he claims complete accuracy for the
description of the various historical personages, on the
ground that he visited Italy with a very beautiful woman,
whom " uniquely on the principle of sexual philosophy I
introduced to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to the Pope,
to Princess Borghese, and to the King and Queen of
Naples." This is obviously unverifiable.

In 1776 the President of the Parlement at Aix sent a
memoire to the Garde des Sceaux protesting against the
excessive condemnation of de Sade; so that it was probably
with a feeling of some hopefulness that he returned to
La Coste. He did not guess that in his absence his
mother-in-law had bought over his lawyer. Moreover
both he and his wife were so short of money that they had
barely enough to eat. At the end of the year another
parent of another chambermaid turned up to demand his
daughter; he shot at de Sade but missed him. This
chambermaid was called Justine. She was a very plain
girl

At the beginning of 1777 de Sade and his wife set out
separately for Paris, he in the company of a valet, she with
the maid Justine. He had barely arrived when his
mother-in-law had him arrested, on February 1 3th.

It has always been supposed that the reason of this visit
was some debauchery neither his detractors, or with
few exceptions his defenders, are willing to find anything
else either in his life or works but he has again given an
explanation 9 : "A gentleman, who had a case against him

44

LIFE 1740-1814

at the Parlement of Aix . . . and which the Parlement
.... was only willing to compose with his wife's family
on the condition of a long detention, this gentleman, I
say, who had been in hiding for several years, carried away
by the imbecile delicacy of wanting to care for his dying
mother came to Paris in spite of dangers. Hardly was he
in the dead woman's room than his wife's family had him
arrested. He complained of this procedure . . . they
laughed in his face and threw him into a dungeon of the
Bastille, where amusingly enough he could weep at the
same time for the loss of his liberty, the death of his
mother, and the barbarous stupidity of his relations."
This is the passage to which de Sade draws attention by
identifying himself in a footnote. The old Comtesse de
Sade did die in January of this year. Since the autobio-
graphical facts have recently been proved true, there
seems no cause to doubt his explanation of the real reason
of his persecution.

He was held in Vincennes for a little over a year. He
got permission to communicate with his wife and their
joint efforts, accompanied by his protestations of penitence
for his contumacy, succeeded in having his case re-heard
at Aix in June, 1778. The previous conviction was
quashed as 'erron et vicieux de forme' and the punish-
ment altered to a fine of fifty francs, an admonition from
the bench and an order to keep away from Marseilles
for three years. From that date to the end of his life (with
the exception of a few months in 1793) no accusation was
ever brought against him, yet he spent all but ten of the thirty-
seven years that remained to him in close confinement.

The means by which he was kept in prison till the
revolution was a lettre de cachet, granted to his mother-
in-law. This monstrous piece of tyranny, by which a
person is kept in preventive imprisonment, was a well-

45

MARQUIS DE SADE

known feature of the ancien regime. It was made
doubly intolerable by being granted to certain private
persons for reasons of family interest or private revenge.
Nowadays, of course, it is only used by the State. (Cf. the
almost universal preventive arrest of Communists before
announced manifestations, or the imprisonment of Tom
Mann under a statute of Edward III; in the latter case
the magistrate was good enough to tell the prisoner that
it was not necessary for him to be charged with any
crime.)

It is possible that de Sade was forced to acquiesce to
this lettre de cachet. In the story about de Maupou
already referred to he says, 9 " The idea of a lettre de cachet
revolts you, but wasn't it by barbarously advising it that
you finished the destruction of that gentleman ? Did you
not dare by a prevarication as dangerous as it is punishable
to place this unfortunate soldier between the choice of
prison and infamy, and only suspended your powers on
condition that he should be crushed by those of the
King?"

Here again de Sade came against one of his implacable
legal enemies. The police-inspector Marais, who was
working against him fourteen years earlier, was once more
in charge of him ; and it was from him that he escaped for
the last time at Lambesc on the road from Aix to Paris.
The details of this escape are given in several different
versions, more or less contradictory. He succeeded in
getting a boat to Avignon and returned to La Coste for
the last time. His wife was in Paris, in ignorance of what
had happened; when she learned of her husband's freedom
she tried to rejoin him but was restrained by force by her
mother. De Sade had stopping with him as a guest a
friend of his wife's who was also perhaps a relation of his, a
Mademoiselle de Rousset an indefatigable, sprightly,

LIFE 1740-1814

provincial blue-stocking, well-meaning, muddle-headed
and consumptive, incurably arch and daring in her con-
versation and letters. She espoused the cause of the de
Sades wholeheartedly, living with Madame de Sade in
Paris for several years and helping her in her efforts to
regain her husband's freedom; she carried on for a time
a flirtatious correspondence with the prisoner, in which
they exchanged verses in Provencal, somewhat to Madame
de Sade's disturbance, though quite unjustifiably; even-
tually, when there was no hope of de Sade's release she
returned to La Coste with the intention of putting things
in order, made a fantastic muddle of everything, and died
there.

De Sade was only at La Coste for a couple of months,
but he seems to have cherished the illusion that he was
now to be left in freedom, that the anger of his mother-in-
law was satisfied; his wife, too, tried to mollify Madame
de Montreuil but her mother refused to see her and
returned her letters unopened. In September Marais
succeeded in tracking him down and he was taken to
Vincennes without further incident.

The inspector, however, over-reached himself. When
he arrested de Sade he said, "Now then, little man, speak
up. You're going to be shut up for the rest of your life
for having done this and that in a black room upstairs
where there are dead bodies!" This complete realisation
of the bluebeard legend in all its details seems merely
laughable; but police-inspectors must learn that even if
they are sent by a lady to arrest her son-in-law they must
treat their prisoner with the respect due to one of her
relations 1 The unfortunate Marais was dismissed and
ruined.

At Vincennes for the first time de Sade experienced the
full bitterness of imprisonment. He was kept in a cold

47

MARQUIS DE SADE

and damp dungeon, furnished only with a bed that he
had to make himself. He was fed like a fierce animal in a
menagerie, the food being pushed through a hole in the
door. He was refused both writing-materials and books,
except for one letter he was allowed to send and receive
each week. A couple of pathetic little notes of that period
have been preserved. One complains of being " Without
air, without paper, without ink, without everything in the
world/' The other is probably a request for " An hour's
exercise and permission to write, once a week."

A regime of this sort for any man must be murderous ;
for a person like de Sade, who prized liberty above every-
thing, and who was removed from the greatest sexual
licence to complete abstinence at the age of thirty-seven,
the physical and mental torture must have been over-
whelming. We know very little of the psychosexual
effects of imprisonment on adults ; the only book I know
of on the subject is Karl Plattner's Eros im Zuchthaus,
which is mostly autobiographical and unscientific, but
nevertheless sufficiently revealing. It explains a good
deal of de Sade's behaviour, especially the way he acted
towards his wife.

There is little wonder that de Sade went nearly mad
under this treatment; there is rather cause for wonder
that he did not become permanently insane. That he
was not far from madness at the time is proved by his
annotations to his wife's letters that have since been
recovered and published. The forms his obsessions took
were an idea (not unfounded) of persecution by his wife's
family and her connivance with them (which was untrue)
and also of his wife's infidelity. He also went mad about
numbers. Numbers had a permanent fascination for
him; in Juliette, for example, he is continually working
out the exact state of his heroine's finances, and deducing

48

LIFE 1740-1814

her income from her present capital; he also insisted on
the numerical values of the excesses of his various charac-
ters. In Marseilles, as we have seen earlier, he kept a
tally of the strokes he had received, and he informed the
last of the girls that he had still twenty-five strokes to
give. In the present circumstances he attached mystical
ideas to the numbers he could find in his wife's letters;
e.g., "The connection you make between the number
thirteen and treachery proves that you deceived me on the
thirteenth of October, 1777," and again on a note from
his daughter which was added to a letter: "This letter has
seventy-two syllables corresponding with the seventy-two
weeks of my imprisonment ; it has seven lines and seven
syllables which are exactly the seven months and seven
days from the seventeenth of April till the twenty-second
of January, 1780." He also covered the letters of his
wife with obscenities and suspicions.

His wife, however, understood or overlooked his
behaviour and continued to work for him and provide
him with what luxuries she could. The restraints of his
imprisonment must have been relaxed by the end of the
year, for we find his wife sending him clothes, books,
perfumes, writing-materials and home-cooked food. Her
letters as always are full of solicitude and submission;
he seems after a time to have lived in a little comfort.
Moreover he had an external diversion; he started the
literary flirtation with Mademoiselle de Rousset.

In 1779 de Sade had still some hopes of release. The
principal inhabitants of La Coste sent a petition for his
release, and his wife and Mademoiselle de Rousset were
working in Paris. Madame de Montreuil, however, was
able to counter every move and at the end of the year de
Sade resigned himself to what seemed likely to be a life-long
imprisonment and turned his back on the world. His wife

49 D

MARQUIS DE SADE

was supposed to be looking after his estates; and except
for occasional interviews with her, which were often for-
bidden by the governor on account of de Sade's violence
(Plattner's book gives several examples of equally violent
behaviour between husband and wife, even when they
were deeply in love with one another. Such behaviour
should not be taken at its face value), he had no contact
with the outside world. He refers to this period of his
life as his 'pressurage,' taking the metaphor from the
wine-press.

For a number of years Madame de Sade devoted her-
self to her husband's interests, despite the warning of her
uncle that thereby she was ruining the matrimonial
prospects of her brothers and sisters ; but gradually she
got older and lazier; she became an invalid and money
got harder and harder to find; Madame de Montreuil
changed her tactics and became kind; her children grew
up and replaced her husband in her affections; finally in
1787 she abandoned the administration of her husband's
estate to trustees; she retired into a convent and left her
husband to himself. Madame de Montreuil had won.

It was at this period that de Sade took his vocation
as a writer with full seriousness. He was reading
omnivorously I do not think there is one major writer
in any European language whom he does not refer to
either directly or by implication and studying the
technique of writing. Of his work in Vincennes only two
small fragments have been published a short dialogue on
religion and the plan for a comedy and I do not know if
much else has survived. All through his imprisonment he
kept a diary, partly written in cypher, but it has either
been destroyed or is still in the possession of his descen-
dants. It is probable, however, that he worked out his
technique of writing that he afterwards adhered to,

50

LIFE 1740-1814

It was his custom first of all to make a rough plan of
the work in project just a few pages noting the salient
traits of his characters and working out the time schedule
and similar mechanical details. When his mind was clear
on the main outlines of the work he would write the first
draft extremely quickly, abbreviating and not revising.
He would do about four thousand words a day. His
handwriting was neat and even, and very close. He left
big margins, in which at the first revision he would insert
all necessary additions and corrections. Longer additions
he would write in a separate notebook. When the original
draft had been improved and reshaped to his complete
satisfaction he would make a fair copy of the whole. The
only exceptions were made when he was short of paper,
as in the case of the 120 Journees^ of which the first draft
(all that survives), written in almost microscopical hand-
writing, covers both sides of a thirteen-yard roll of paper.
He also kept notebooks filled with quotations and odd
sentences. His technique of writing has been compared
with some justice to that of Balzac and Proust.

In February, 1784 de Sade was transferred to the
Bastille and given quarters in the ironically named Tour
de la Libert. But though physical freedom was denied
to him he attained with his pen such mental freedom as
few have known either before or since his time. Every
variety of human behaviour was scrutinised and criticised
by him with an extraordinary individual independence.
In his twelve-year isolation he developed a complete
philosophy. The only interruptions of his solitude were
the occasional visits of his wife, and these were discon-
tinued after a time.

By far the greater part of the writings of de Sade that
we possess were written during this period. A great deal,
however, was lost or destroyed and we know only a

5 1

MARQUIS DE SADE

fraction of his output. He wrote in every conceivable
style plays in verse and prose, short stories of a comic
and also a dramatic nature, novels, essays and miscellanies.
From notes and fragments we know the titles of some of
the works that have been lost. There are thirty-five acts
of plays, of which we barely know the titles. There was a
large collection of short stories to be published as Les
Contes et Fabliaux d*un Troubadour Provenfal, in which a
dramatic and even tragic story was to be followed by a
comic one, in the style of the Decameron, to the number
of fifty. There was a four-volume literary miscellany
La Portefeuille d'un Homme de Lettres, of which all but a
few traces have disappeared. The four-volume novel
Aline et Valcour was written in 1788. The draft of Les 120
Journees de So dome is dated 1785, The first version of
Justine was written in 1787, the second probably the
following year; and it is to my mind almost certain that
the first three volumes of Juliette also were written before
1790.

Catalogued in this way the output of de Sade seems
enormous; but it must be remembered that for six years
at least he had no other occupation than reading and
writing; all his work was carefully planned and written
and intentional^ he did not use his powers of imagination
as others have done, including Mirabeau who was for
some time his fellow prisoner, as a sedative,

De Sade clearly foresaw the revolution that was
approaching, even prophesying it in some of his writings.
It is even tempting to say that he caused it. In June of
1789 he tried to escape by forcing his way through the
sentries but was prevented. Thereupon he had the idea
of inciting the people against the Bastille, which he did
by scattering from his windows notes describing the
bad treatment the prisoners were receiving; on July 2nd

LIFE 1740-1814

he improvised a loudspeaker from a tube and a funnel and
called on the populace to rescue the prisoners who were
having their throats cut. A crowd was gathered by this
device and the governor of the prison thought sufficiently
seriously of the danger to write: "If Monsieur de Sade is
not removed to-night from the Bastille I cannot be answerable
to the King for the safety of the building." On July 3rd he
was therefore transferred to the asylum of Charenton.
Eleven days later the ancient and almost empty fortress
of the Bastille was stormed by the mob, whose anger
against it had been so inexplicably roused. Three-
quarters of de Sade's manuscripts " whose loss he wept for
with tears of blood " were lost on this occasion, thanks to
the dilatoriness of his wife, who put off fetching them from
day to day. She also had destroyed some other manu-
scripts of his which he had confided to her, on the grounds
that they might be possibly politically dangerous.

In March 1790 the constituent assembly released
all prisoners held by lettre de cachet, and on Good Friday
in 1790 de Sade re-entered the world, a free man at the
age of fifty, after thirteen years almost continual imprison-
ment, mostly in virtual solitary confinement. It is pos-
sible that his sons met him at his release; but the elder
shortly after emigrated to Germany, thereby causing his
father considerable danger; the younger was a knight of
Malta and stayed at his post abroad during most of the
Revolution. His wife had obtained a separation and
refused to see him, nor did they ever meet again; their
only contact was through their lawyer in quarrels over
money, Madame de Sade kept their daughter Laura,
who seems to have been almost a mental defective, with
her. It seems as though the two women emigrated during
the Terror.

When de Sade first came out of prison he was homeless

53

MARQUIS DE SADE

and penniless and found the re-entry into the world very
difficult, as indeed is generally the case with released
prisoners. In a letter to the lawyer he describes his con-
dition as follows: " In prison my sight and my lungs have
been ruined (he seems to have been practically blind in
one eye since 1784); being deprived of all exercise I have
become so enormously fat that I can hardly move; all
my feelings are extinguished; I have no longer any taste
for anything, I like nothing any more; the world which
foolishly enough I so wildly regretted seems to me so

boring . . . and so dull I have never been more

misanthropic than I am now that I have returned among
men, and if I seem peculiar to others they can be assured
that they produce the same effect on me. I had been
very busy during my imprisonment, and had fifteen
volumes ready for the press; on my release I have only
about a quarter left, thanks to the criminal carelessness of
Madame de Sade. . . ."

For the next ten years he is in continual communication
with his lawyer, always demanding money, money,
money. He has never enough, for with the inflation the
value of money is always descending; moreover he had
great difficulties in collection, firstly as being the father
of migrs, and later as being erroneously inscribed by a
mistake in Christian names as an Emigre himself. These
letters show the worst side of his character, testy and
sycophantic in turns, disingenuous to the point of dis-
honesty, disproportionately avaricious. Where money is
concerned de Sade shows all the vices of his family, and
of many of his compatriots. His only excuse is his age
and infirmity, and the fact that he was a great deal of the
time in actual want. Also his behaviour is very much on
a par with that of the rest of his relations and in-laws with
whom the lawyer had to deal. There are few people who

54

LIFE 1740-1814

would appear to advantage in their dealings with their
lawyer and steward; de Sade, who had a Frenchman's
reverence for the centime, certainly does not.

Almost as soon as de Sade was freed he regained the
administration of his estate, and accepted the deed of
separation from his wife, by which he agreed to, but did
not, pay her alimony. For a little while his sons were with
him. In June he went to live with a forty-year-old widow,
la Pr^sidente de Fleurieu, through whom he made some
useful acquaintances; but the arrangement was not a
success and in the autumn he set up house with a woman
called Constance Renelle, the wife of a Monsieur Quesnet.
Madame Quesnet was probably an actress (by another
account she was the wife of an emigr) ; but she was a
cultivated and intelligent woman with a large and useful
circle of acquaintances ; according to de Sade she was a
paragon of all the virtues. They were very devoted to
one another and shared good and bad fortune together;
their mutual affection only ended with de Sade's death.

In the winter of 1790, as soon as he had settled down
with Quesnet he nicknamed her * Sensible' and she
responded by calling him 'Mo'ise' he sent for his books
and furniture from La Coste and settled down to the
business of being a professional writer. He had con-
siderable success with his plays. One was accepted
unanimously by the Comedie Fran^aise, but for some
reason was never performed. Le Comte Oxtiern was acted
with a certain success at the Theatre Moliere in 1791.
Several others were accepted by different theatres. He
appears to have mixed a great deal with actors at this
time ; one Monvel, a revolutionary, was one of his chief
friends, and he took lessons in acting from another called
Mol. As far as we can tell from the indications all the
manuscripts have disappeared he seems to have special-

55

MARQUIS DE SADE

ised in the dramatic comedy in verse, in the classical
tradition. Considering himself a professional playwright
he was ready to write pieces to order; and it is his admis-
sion of this fact in a letter to his lawyer which has led
some people to suppose that his pen was always venal
despite the consistency of all his published work.

In 1791 also the first version of Justine appeared ; it had
a considerable success and ran through five editions in
the next ten years. The novel Aline et Valcour was also
accepted, but for various reasons connected with the pub-
lishers did not appear till two years later.

At this period he was nearly ruined, for his name had
been included in the list of former nobles published in
1791. Also his health was bad. Nevertheless he worked
for the Revolution to the best of his abilities ; he became
secretary and speaker for the Section des Piques (formerly
Venddme), the section to which Robespierre belonged.
It was in the latter function that he was chosen to make a
funeral oration in favour of Marat and Le Pelletier, which
oration had so much success that it was printed and dis-
tributed through France at the public expense.

I do not know whether it is pure chance that thus
joined these three names together, but it is a happy coin-
cidence. De Sade has much in common with both the
subjects of his eulogy. Marat was a scientist before he
was a revolutionary; his work on the diffraction of light,
though considered incorrect nowadays, was far nearer to
what is to-day held to be the truth than that of his con-
temporaries ; but because of its very novelty he had the
heresy to try to criticise Newton he was excommunicated
by the learned bodies of the time. His revolutionary
activity was chiefly journalistic, starting under the old
regime and continued despite persecution and illness to
the day of his murder. He was continually critical;

56

LIFE 1740-1814

neither success nor reputation were safe from him. It
was only in his savagery that de Sade, sworn enemy of the
death penalty, could not follow him.

Le Pelletier was also a strict egalitarian who achieved a
certain power. He believed, as did de Sade, in the
enormous possibilities of education for the alteration of
man's habits, and until he too was murdered devoted his
energies to that end.

De Sade was assiduous in his functions with the
Societe, and wrote another petition in their name to the
people of France. He also made a petition about religion,
which he claims was the origin of all the anti-religious
movement; this, however, has not been preserved, unless
the first part of the pamphlet quoted in Chapter VI is an
elaboration of it. He was also engaged in the inspection
of hospitals.

But when the senseless butcheries of the Terror
occurred de Sade could follow the revolutionaries no
longer. Those people who are surprised at his gentleness
and moderation at this time show a very superficial under-
standing of both his character and his work.

Among the innumerable other victims of the mob's fury
were the President and Madame de Montreuil, his wife's
parents who were the immediate cause of his misery for
the last twenty years. By a curious coincidence de Sade
was president of the bench before which they came to
trial. With a magnanimity worthy of his heroine Justine
he voted against their execution; and like Justine he
found that virtue was always punished; he was imprisoned
for moderantism.

I do not think that it is necessary to seek elaborate
explanations for de Sade's behaviour on this occasion. He
had the courage now as throughout his life to act up to his
theories. He had already voiced his complete disbelief in

57

MARQUIS DE SADE

the death penalty. And his own account of his actions
explain his motives. "I am broken, done in, spitting
blood," he wrote, "I told you I was president of my
section ; my tenure has been so stormy that I am exhausted.
Yesterday, for example, after having been forced to with-
draw twice I was forced to abandon my seat to the vice-
prsident. They wanted me to put to the vote a horrible,
an inhuman project. I definitely refused. Thank God,

that's the end of that During my presidency I

had the Montreuils put on a liste ^puratoire (for pardon).
If I had said a word they were lost. I kept my peace. I
have had my revenge/'

For the next ten months he passed through four
different prisons, each more ghastly than the other,
expecting death any minute. His final prison at Picpus
was the worst of all. It was a beautiful place with a lovely
garden. In the centre of the garden was the guillotine.
More than a thousand people were executed under his
window and buried in the garden during a month of his
imprisonment there, a great number being his fellow-
prisoners. It is possible that he had to help in the burial.
The date of his own execution was fixed but the reaction
occurred just in time. There is little wonder that a year
later he was still haunted by this nightmare. It is neces-
sary to keep this experience of his in mind when con-
sidering his work.

Finally in October he was released by the efforts of
Madame Quesnet. It is possible that the deputy Rovre,
though unknown to him personally, may have been
responsible for this. He later sold to him his estate at
La Coste; the cMteau had been pillaged and destroyed
by the peasants.

In the winter of 1794 life in Paris was torture. Paper
money was practically valueless, food nearly unobtainable,

58

LIFE 1740-1814

and the weather the coldest of the century. (It is a curious
coincidence that excessive cold and excessive misery often
seem to go together.) Under these circumstances de Sade
set about trying to earn a living.

There is still in existence a letter of his dated February,
1795 to the Conventionnel Bernard demanding employ-
ment in any form, whether as ambassador, writer, keeper
of a library or a museum or indeed any position where he
could gain a subsistence. His application seems to have
been unsuccessful and he had to rely on his writing. The
novel Aline et Valcour was issued by a different publisher
with some success; and he wrote and published at the
same period La Philosophic dans le Boudoir. This is not
only the shortest of his works but also the most nearly
pornographic; it was probably written with the direct
aim of money-making. The ideas in it are almost entirely
repetitions from his major works, and were it not for the
incorporation of a very important political pamphlet which
will be considered later in detail it would not be of much
interest. It is possible also that from this year should be
dated the pamphlet entitled Une Idee sur le mode de la
sanction des Lois in which he proposes that laws should be
brought forward by the deputies but voted on directly
by the people, because "one should admit to the sanction-
ing of laws that part of the people who are most
unfortunate, and since it is them that the law strikes
most frequently they should be allowed to choose the law
by which they consent to be stricken."*

De Sade's vision of a real revolution faded away.
Socialism had disappeared and nationalism was trium-
phant. Private property was still respected, there was still
glaring inequality, office seekers and rogues were still in
power. Babeuf 's egalitarian revolt, with which de Sade

* M. Heine dates this pamphlet 1792.

59

MARQUIS DE SADE

was certainly in sympathy if he was not implicated in it,
was bloodily crushed by authority; business was as usual;
the revolution, at any rate as he envisaged it, had failed.
In his pessimism, his disgust and rage at mankind, he
threw on to the booksellers' shelves those poisoned bombs,
the ten volumes of La Nouvelle Justine ou les Malheurs de
la Vertu suivie de VHistoire de Juliette sa sceur. With
terrific irony he presented a copy bound in white vellum
to each of the five directors.

These volumes were published if not written during the
only five years in the whole history of Christendom in
which they could be openly sold. Despite the engravings
which adorned the first edition and which stress
exclusively if rather naively the obscenity of the work,
these books were openly displayed in the bookseller's
windows. In 1801 Napoleon had all the copies that he
could find destroyed, and since that date his work has
been persecuted and burned. Organised authority has
vowed an inveterate war against his work and his ideas;
only recently have a few people dared to start republishing
his books in small, costly, limited editions ; and though he
is now in some quarters praised as rashly as he was blamed
before (chiefly with a desire to shock) he still remains
almost completely unread.

But although the publication of this work may have
aided the reputation of de Sade (albeit his life long he
officially denied the authorship with considerable vigour)
it did not help him financially, and in 1797, the same year
as these volumes appeared, we find another letter from
him asking to be paid as soon as possible for some work
he had done. In the summer of the next year he returned
to Provence for the last time accompanied by Quesnet, in
an effort to get some money from thence. The journey
was in every way disastrous. Not only did he get no

60

LIFE 1740-1814

money, he found his name was by mistake on a list of
migrs from which, owing to the confusion in Christian
names, he could not get it removed ; he was also involved
in an action for slander. From this date until about 1 804
when his family settled an annuity on him in exchange for
all his property (except a small portion he had settled on
Quesnet) he was in the greatest misery and poverty
imaginable. In 1799 he was glad to get a job at the
theatre at Versailles for forty sols a day, which sum had to
keep both him and Quesnet's son by her husband, while
the faithful Sensible' made every effort in Paris to get
work or help. His play Oxtiern was revived there with
some success; he himself acted the r6le of Fabrice, the
young lover. A letter from him covering two copies of
this play has been preserved ; he begs the addressee to try
to get the same play performed at Chartres ; he would be
willing to act in it again, and in any case would come to
supervise rehearsals.

His already broken-down health gave way under this
regime ; his sight became so bad that he could no longer
see to write ; he was forced to spend three months of the
winter of 1799-1800 in the public hospital at Versailles,
absolutely penniless, with only the food and clothes of
charity. Even from this refuge he was finally turned out
44 dying of hunger and of cold," and in danger of being
imprisoned for debt. In the spring his situation must
have improved; either his sons, who had now returned,
or Quesnet, or his incurably dilatory steward must have
come to his help.

He had already in the July of the previous year been
in communication with the Theatre Fran^ais (not for the
first time) urging them to perform a patriotic play of his
called Jeanne Laisne or the Siege of Beauvai$\ the subject is
historical and he explains at some length how he had gone

61

MARQUIS DE SADE

to the original records to verify the heroine's name and
other details. The theatre, however, would not accept it
because Louis XI appears on the stage, and a year later
he appealed over their heads directly to the Conventionnel
Goupilleau de Montaigu. This letter, coming from a
once proud man, now nearly sixty and destitute, has a
rather tragic interest. It is too long to quote more than
a portion of it. After some rather fulsome compliments
he writes: "You are all agreed, Citoyens Repr^sentants,
as are all good republicans, that it is extremely important
to elevate the public spirit by good examples and good
writing. My pen is said to have some energy, my philo-
sophical novel, Aline et Vakour^ has proved it ; then I offer
my talents to the service of the Republic, and offer them
willingly. I was unhappy under the old regime, so you
can understand that I must fear a return to an order of
which I should inevitably be one of the first victims. The
talents I offer to the Republic are disinterested ; if a plan
of work is made out for me I will execute it, and I dare to
say that it will be satisfactory. But I pray you, citizen,
put a stop to that horrible injustice which is cooling for
me the feelings with which I am warmed; why do they
wish to give me cause for complaint against a government
for which I would lay down a thousand lives if I had them ?
Why has all I own been confiscated for the last two years,
and why during that period have I been reduced to charity
without in the least deserving such horrible treatment?
Aren't people convinced that instead of emigrating I was
occupied in all sorts of employment during the most
terrible revolutionary years ? Do I not possess the most
authentic certificates possible? Then if they are per-
suaded that I am innocent, why am I treated as guilty?
Why do they try to force into the ranks of the enemies of
the Republic one of its warmest and most zealous par-

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1740-1814

tisans ? It seems to me such conduct is as unjust as it is
impolitic.

" In any case, Citoyen Reprsentant, I offer my pen and
my talents to the government, but don't let unfairness,
poverty and misery weigh on me any longer, and have
me taken off the list (of ex-nobles) I beg of you, aristocrat
or not, what difference does it make: have I ever acted
like an aristocrat ? Have I ever been known to share their
conduct and their sentiments ? My actions have destroyed
the wrongs of my origin, and it is to that reason that I
owe all the attacks that the royalists have made on me,
especially Poultier in his paper of the I2th fructidor last.
But I defy them as I hate them. . . .

" In a word, citizen, as a first sample of what I can offer
I propose to you a tragedy in five acts, a work most com-
petent to awake in every heart love for their country. . . ."

He then goes on to describe the plot of his tragedy.
Goupilleau seems to have answered politely and kept him
dangling; the play was not, as far as is known, performed.

It will be seen that de Sade protests almost over-
emphatic admiration for the republic, which, as I pointed
out earlier, had fallen so far short of his ideals. But bad
as the republic was, it was better than the danger that de
Sade, with his keen political foresight, saw approaching,
the danger of a new tyranny, of an empire, of Napoleon.
With quixotic rashness this old man tried to warn his
lethargic fellow citizens; in the summer of 1800 he
printed and published at his own expense a roman d cle>
ZoloS et ses deux Acolytes^ in which Napoleon, Josephine
and their chief friends, Monsieur and Madame Tallien,
Barras, Madame Visconti and others could be easily
recognised, either by the anagrammatic names of the
characters or by the detailed physical descriptions. In
this work de Sade applied his own principles of attacking

63

MARQUIS DE SADE

by mockery, rather than by indignation and force. 10 He
made Napoleon and Josephine ridiculous.

It is hard to understand nowadays how this book pro-
voked such a violent storm and scandal; it is nearly
incomprehensible. We can only suppose that his claim
that it represents history is true ; that he displayed in the
most ludicrous light anecdotes then current about these
people and that they were accepted as true by his readers.
The only passage that has any interest for us is his analysis
of the reasons for Napoleon's future success, reasons that
are equally valid to-day for the rise of dictators. He
says 11 : "All the parties in France cross and shock one
another there is no rallying point. The so-called aris-
tocrat detests the rule of men covered with blood and
crime. The mad demagogue is furious that people dare
to muzzle him and that those in power leave him to dis-
grace. The nervous and indifferent who form the greatest
number pray for a single master who joins courage to
vision, virtue to talent, and they find him in d'Orsec
(Napoleon). His marriage with Zolo (Josephine) gains
him the adhesion of the proscribed class. " Elsewhere he
pays tribute to Napoleon's military abilities.

He paid the penalty of his rashness. He should have
remembered the distich he had placed at the head of Aline
et Valcour.

"It is dangerous to love men,
A crime to enlighten them."

In March, 1801, he was arrested with his publisher
Bertrandet on the specious excuse that he intended pub-
lishing Juliette (which had actually been on sale for five
years), "an immoral and revolutionary work." The
charge against the publisher was soon after withdrawn.

He was imprisoned first at Sainte-P^lagie, then at

LIFE 1740-1814

BicStre. His case did not come up for hearing. In a
letter of June, 1 802, he demands that he should be judged :
he had been imprisoned for fifteen months although
legally he should have been tried within ten days. The
Minister of Justice replied by giving an order that he
should be forgotten for a while. In April, 1803, ^ e was
declared mad and transferred to the asylum at Charenton,
officially at the request of his family.

This was a favourite trick of Napoleon's, to declare
mad any enemy of his whom he could not catch on a
criminal charge. The poet D^sorgues, M. de Laage, the
Abb6 Fournier, to mention only a few of the best known,
were similar victims of an odious despotism.

There is no question that de Sade was really insane;
even the doctors in charge of him denied it. It would
have been perhaps more merciful for him if he had been.
Even the consolation of his writing was denied to him
now; periodically police officers came to hunt for his
manuscripts, wherever he hid them, and confiscated them.
Some were kept, some were seized at his house prior to
his arrest, others after his death; the greater part were
burnt by the police at the request of his son. The old age
of Lear was not more tragic than that of this man, living
too sane among lunatics.

By a piece of good fortune the asylum was under the
conduct of an exceptionally sensible man, the ex-Abb^
Coulmier, who understood and sympathised with de Sade.
Under his protection de Sade developed a project which
saved him from dying from boredom; he instituted a
theatre for madmen. Occasionally he got actors and
actresses from outside; more often he trained the less
violent of the lunatics to act themselves, coaching them
and producing the spectacles ; they acted both the ordinary
repertory and plays specially written for them by de Sade

65 E

MARQUIS DE SADE

himself. We cannot know to what extent he did this
consciously as a therapeutic measure ; it is anyhow a line
of approach that could be developed with advantage by
alienists to-day. As a method of re-education play-acting
offers enormous possibilities.

It was possibly due also to Coulmier's benevolence
that the novel Les Journees de Florbelle a work in which
Louis XV, Fleury and the Comte de Charolais were
among the characters got so near publication before
it too was seized by the police in 1807, an d that La
Marquise de Gange, if it is by him, was published in
1813.

It was also due to Coulmier that he was able to enjoy a
certain amount of freedom of communication and to
receive visits. Quesnet, whom for the sake of appearances
he described as his natural daughter (there is certainly no
truth in this statement) visited him freely; it is even pos-
sible that she lived in the asylum for a certain time. One
of the only two letters which survive from this epoch bear
both their names; it is concerned with the settlement de
Sade made on her. The other letter is about a variety of
subjects ending up "/ am not happy but I am in good
health. That is all I can say/'

The performances in the asylum became quite a social
event. Guests came in from outside, though the issuing
of invitations depended entirely on the director. We have
a list of invitations for May 23rd, 1810, which includes
the local mayors and curates, doctors, a lady-in-waiting of
the Queen of Holland and various other people; also
thirty-six employees of the building and sixty patients.
On these occasions de Sade acted as producer and master
of ceremonies. On special occasions, such as the director's
birthday, or a visit to the asylum of a notability such as
the Cardinal Maury, de Sade composed special allegorical

66

LIFE 1740-1814

pieces or else wrote a poem to be recited or sung for the
occasion. The verses written for the visit of the Cardinal
in 1812 still exist; they are such as one might expect
as competent as a poet laureate would produce on a
similar occasion, and equally untouched by poetry.

But even now de Sade was not free from persecution.
In 1808 the head doctor wrote to the chief of the police
(incidentally it would be interesting to know what the
police had to do with an asylum) a violent attack on de
Sade, grudging him his comparative freedom of move-
ment and communication and demanding his removal to
some fortress. He attacks the play-acting by the lunatics
as unorthodox and liable to bad effects (though it had
been going on for some years he could not show any) and
states formally that de Sade was in no way mad "his only
delirium being that of vice." Coulmier, however, was
able to resist this impertinence and de Sade stayed at
Charenton and the play-acting was continued till 1813.
Then the same doctor got his way and the plays were
forbidden; they were replaced by concerts and balls.

In 1808 de Sade appealed vainly to Napoleon for his
release. In his letter he stated that he had spent over
twenty years of the most miserable life in the world in
prison, that he was now nearly seventy, almost blind, and
suffering from gout and rheumatism in the chest and
stomach.

There are several accounts of him in his old age. They
show him to be quick-tempered as always, extremely
polite, graceful in his movements, rather fat and white-
haired; we can picture him to some extent. There is no
known portrait of him at any time of his life and the only
description of him in his youth that I can find is the rather
summary one of the witnesses at Marseilles where he is
described as shorter than his servant, fair-haired and

67

MARQUIS DE SADE

rather plump. At that time he was smartly dressed and
wore a sword.

Of the last years of his life we know nothing. He died
on December 2nd, 1 8 14, at the age of seventy-four. The
cause of his death was given as " pulmonary congestion."

Nine years earlier in a fit of great bitterness he made
his will, which was found after his death. The last
paragraph was as follows :

"I expressly forbid my body to be opened under any
consideration soever. I ask with the greatest emphasis
that my body shall be kept for forty-eight hours in the
room I shall die in, placed in a wooden coffin which shall
only be nailed down on the expiration of the time men-
tioned ; during this interval an express messenger shall be
sent to the sieur Lenormand, wood merchant, at Versailles
to pray him to come himself accompanied with a wagon
to fetch my body to be transported under his escort to
the wood on my property at Malmaison in the commune
of Mance near Epernon, where I wish it to be placed,
without any sort of ceremony, in the first thicket on the
right in the said wood, entering from the direction of the
old chateau by the large road which divides the wood.
My grave shall be dug in the thicket by the Malmaison
farmer under the inspection of M. Lenormand, who will
only leave my body after it has been placed in the said
grave ; if he wishes he can be accompanied in this cere-
mony by those of my relations and friends, who, without
mourning of any sort, will have the kindness to show me
this last mark of attachment. Once the grave has been
filled it shall be sown over with acorns so that subsequently
the said grave being replanted and the thicket being
tangled as it was before, the traces of my tomb may dis-
appear from the face of the earth, as I flatter myself that
my memory will be wiped away from the minds of men.

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LIFE 1740-1814

1 'Made at Charenton-Saint-Maurice, while of sound
mind and body, January 3Oth, 1806.

(Signed) D. A. F. SADE."

Even in death he was thwarted. The passionate atheist
was given Christian burial and a stone cross set over him.
But that was not sufficient indignity. Hardly was the
earth settled over his coffin when body-snatching disciples
of Gall, the phrenologist, dug up and stole his skull, as a
subject for their 'science/ They pronounced that this
skull "Resembled that of all old people; it was a curious
mixture of vices and virtues, of benevolence and crime.
It was small and well-shaped; at first glance it might be
taken for a woman's head, especially as the bumps of
tenderness and love of children are as prominent as
in the head of H61oise, that model of tenderness and
love."

They seem to have thought that these conclusions were
paradoxical. Actually it is not a bad epitaph.

Note. The facts in this chapter are mainly selected from previous
books on de Sade, particularly 'Eugene Diihren,' Der Marquis de
Sade und seiner Zeit y Guillaume Apollinaire, preface to L'CEuvre
du Marquis de Sade y Dawes, The Marquis de Sade, and numerous
articles and prefaces by Maurice Heine.

The collection of letters written to the lawyer Gaufridy and
published by Paul Bourdin in 1929 under the title of La Gorrespon-
dance intdite du Marquis de Sade gives a good deal of information,
especially about the years 1774-1777 and 1790-1800. About
half the letters are from de Sade, the rest being from his relations, his
wife, his mother-in-law, Mademoiselle de Rousset, and various people
with whom he had business. Nobody's character comes particularly
well out of this correspondence; they are mostly about money,
speculations about wills, and methods of defrauding the revenue,
etc. They do however clear up a number of riddles in the life of
de Sade. Unfortunately the letters are only a selection, and M,

MARQUIS DE SADE

Bourdin has such a bias against de Sade that one cannot tell to what
an extent such a selection is representative. Anything which is
against de Sade is true, anything in his favour is an exaggeration or a
lie. He cannot even mention a list of de Sade's books without
suggesting that he has bought but not read them. M. Bourdin
is a very superior person, but despite his prejudices the book is
informative, though not interesting.

CHAPTER II
LITERARY WORK

The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.

ST. PAUL.
The Second Letter to the People of Corinth.

I must create a system or be enslaved by another Man's$
I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.

W. BLAKE,

Jerusalem.

I. LITERARY PRINCIPLES

ALMOST the last piece of writing from de Sade's pen that
has come down to us is an Essay on the Novel which he
wrote as a preface to Les Crimes de r Amour ^ a collection of
eleven of the tragic and dramatic short stories (their
length almost allows them to be called short novels) from
his projected Contes et Fabliaux du Dixhuitieme Siecle par
un Troubadour Provenfal, which he had written in 1787.
This Essay, written and published in 1800, when all his
major work was written, is of considerable interest, for
not only does it give his ideas on the function and art of
the novel, and fiction generally, but is also a tacit criticism
and justification of his own work. The fact that he
formally denies the authorship of Justine therein is of no
importance; at the date of writing it was the only policy.
He starts by sketching the origin of the novel.
Deriding those people who would seek an origin in one
country or in one people, he places the origin of fiction
in two ingrained human weaknesses prayer and love.
The first fiction arose when the first religion was invented.
Man's mythopoeic faculties were first occupied with gods,

MARQUIS DE SADE

then demi-gods and finally heroes. Somewhat later ideal
and lyrical love-stories were written. He glances over
the novels of the Romans and Greeks incidentally he
states that Petronius' Satyricon should not be considered
a novel; he shared with his contemporaries the idea that
it was a personal satire on Nero to consider in greater
detail the productions of Christian Europe, and especially
France. Neither the chansons de geste nor the fabliaux
can be considered as real novels, though the latter come
nearer to being so ; it was only when gallantry was added
to observation that the novel was born. Almost at once
the novel reached its apogee Don Quixote is for him the
best novel ever written. He also rates very highly the
Princesse de Cleves of Madame de Lafayette, mentioning
in passing the absurd supposition that being a woman
she must have had help from men to make a masterpiece ;
women, he says, are more fitted to novel-writing than
men, owing to their greater delicacy. His judgments on
the French novels of the eighteenth century are so just
and so much in accordance with the accepted taste of
to-day that they do not need repeating; he gives Voltaire
and Rousseau their just praise, and takes to task Crebillon,
Tanzai and their followers writers who are considered
typically 'eighteenth century' for their immorality.
From these he excepts Provost, whom he admires very
much.

He then turns to the English novel. "Richardson and
Fielding," he says 1 "taught us that only the profound
study of man's heart, nature's maze, and that alone can
inspire the novelist whose work shows us not only the
man as he is or pretends to be that is the historian's
task but as he can be, as he is influenced by vice and all
passion's shocks; so that one must know and employ
them all to use that style; they taught us, too, that virtue's

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LITERARY WORK

continual triumph is not always interesting. . . ," He
adds that virtue is only one of the heart's phases.

He then deals with the 'Gothic 1 novel. 2 "Then there
are the new novels, nearly whose whole merit lies in magic
and phantasmagoria, with the Monk at their head, which
are not entirely without merit; they are the fruit of the
revolution of which all Europe felt the shock. For him
who knows the misery the wicked can inflict on mankind
the novel became as difficult to write as it was boring to
read; there was no one who did not undergo more mis-
fortunes in five years than the best novelist could describe
in a century; therefore hell had to be called in to help and
interest, to find in nightmare merely what one knew
ordinarily just by glancing over the history of man in this
age of iron. But how many inconveniences this style
offers ; the author of the Monk has not avoided them any
more than Radgliffe (j/V); there is the alternative of
explaining the magic trickery, and then there is no more
interest, or else of never lifting the curtain, which causes
complete lack of verisimilitude. If a successful work
appeared without being wrecked on either point, far from
blaming the means employed we would offer it as a
model." It is hardly open to doubt that in this paragraph
he is explaining his own intentions in his major works,
particularly Justine.

After this historical survey he makes some general
considerations on the novel. He defines it as "The
picture of contemporary manners," "/<? tableau des
mceurs stculaires" and claims that it can be as useful as
history to the philosopher; the one shows the fa?ade, the
other the whole man.

He then proceeds to give advice to other writers.
"The most essential knowledge is certainly that of the
heart of man, to be learned by misfortune and travel : one

73

MARQUIS DE SADE

must have seen men of all nations to know them and one
must have been their victim to appreciate them; mis-
fortune's hand, in exalting the character of him whom it
crushes puts him at the right distance to study men;
he sees them there as the traveller sees the furious waves
break against the rock on which the storm has thrown
him; but in whatever situation nature or chance has
placed him let him keep quiet when he is with other
men; one doesn't learn by speaking but by listening;
which is why chatterers are usually fools/' 3

The only rule is verisimilitude. Descriptions of places,
unless imaginary, should be exact. It is not necessary to
keep to the original plan, for ideas that come in the course
of writing are just as useful, provided the interest is
kept up. Incidents the short story inserted into the
body of the main work was still general when this was
written must be even better than the main body to
justify themselves. An author should never moralise,
though his characters may. But above everything don't
write unless you have to; if you need money make boots
and we will respect you as a competent cobbler; if you
write for money your work will show it.

Finally he justifies himself for the attacks made on
Aline et Valcour. "I don't want to make vice amiable;
unlike Crbillon and Dorat I don't wish to make women
adore their deceivers but to loathe them. ... I have
made my heroes who follow the career of vice so loath-
some that they will surely inspire neither pity nor love;
thereby I make bold to say I become more moral than
those who allow themselves * toning down"'; 4 and in an
outburst of justifiable pride he adds, "We^ too> we know
how to create"

Even a work as innocuous as this was not allowed to
go without detractors. An otherwise unknown journalist,

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LITERARY WORK

Villeterque, filled a column in attacking de Sade as
advocating crime and immorality; in an extremely witty
and spirited reply de Sade justifies himself, analysing his
essay and stories; he applies the Aristotelean canon of
purging by pity and terror and asks, "From what can
terror spring, save from pictures of crime triumphant, or
pity save from virtue in distress?" 6

II. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS

De Sade's work can conveniently be divided into three
groups, depending upon his attitude towards his readers ;
the first group which is directly addressed to all readers,
the third of works written principally for himself and of
which he himself says, "I only address myself to those
capable of understanding me; such people can read me
without danger.' ' The second group is midway between
the two, and is only represented by Aline et Valcour\
this very curious novel is extremely personal and exhibits
the various facets of de Sade's mind as clearly as any of
his works; but the 'gauzes' to use his own word
with which parts are enveloped show a sensitiveness to
the reader's prejudices which prevent its inclusion in the
third category.

If de Sade's work had come down to us in its entirety
it is practically certain that the first or * public' group
would be of preponderating bulk ; but by a curious irony
it is that part of his work more than any other that has
been destroyed or lost; so that our judgment of his con-
tribution to conventional literature is purely provisory.
All his theatrical work obviously falls into this category,
for a play is only still-born till it is acted before an
audience ; but of his twenty or more comedies and dramas
in verse and prose we know nothing save the plots of
three of them and the titles of a few more. In the given

75

MARQUIS DE SADE

plots he employs the devices which he also uses in his
novels babies changed in the cradle and the Aristotelean
Anagnorisis, or recognition of characters by one another,
either just in time or just too late (the chief distinction
between melodrama and tragedy); we cannot know the
way he developed these very general devices. He appears
to have shown some originality in form, if not in content,
for we possess the plan for an entertainment made up of
five different pieces tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime
and ballet respectively, each complete in itself yet each
adding to the main plot or frame which held the pieces
together. I have much sympathy with this idea per-
sonally, for to me a visit to the contemporary theatre is
almost always an agony of boredom ; after the first quarter
of an hour the style is set and not deviated from till the
final curtain. He also wrote three full-length historical
novels; these again we only know of by their titles.
Incidentally in his renovation of the historical novel also
he seems to have been a precursor; I do not know of any
other eighteenth-century novelist who used history as a
frame for romance and went to the original sources and
documents for verisimilitude. Waverky was published
some years after his death.

His four-volume Portefeuille d'un Homme de Lettres
has fared little better; we only know a very rough plan of
the work and a few isolated scraps. It was to be in the
form of a correspondence between a man in Paris and two
young ladies in the country and was to cover a very wide
range of subjects, from the art of writing a comedy to the
etymology of words ; there was to be a dissertation on the
death penalty, a plan to employ criminals in such a way
that they should be useful to the State, a letter on luxury,
and another on education, treating of forty-four points
of morality. The letter on play-writing was to contain

76

LITERARY WORK

fifty rules which would give all the necessary guidance for
such an art. The more serious subjects were to be
diversified by anecdotes; of these a dozen have come down
to us. They are amusing and well told. A certain
number are definitely indecent in a humorous 'gaulois'
style the last thing one would have expected from
de Sade; a couple deal with well-attested local ghost
stories. After his diary from 1 777-1790 this is the work
whose disappearance I regret the most. The diary, if it
could be found, would almost certainly be the most
extraordinary document humanity has ever known.

The rest of the works which have disappeared but
the existence of which we know of may be mentioned
here. They include four novels, one of them humorous ;
memoirs and confessions; plans for a public brothel, and
for a spectacle similar to that of the Roman gladiators
(his intention in this proposal will be found in Chapter
VIII); and the strange historical novel already mentioned
Les Journees de Florbelle in which public characters
whom he may well have known figured. A great deal of
his correspondence chiefly dealing with business or
family affairs has been published. His political pam-
phlets have been referred to in the first chapter. He
probably wrote more which have not been identified.

In brief, all that remains to us of his normal literary
work, besides the essay already referred to, are thirty-
seven short stories. Of these eleven were published in
his lifetime, a twelfth under the editorship of Anatole
France in 1881, and the remainder in 1927, edited by
Maurice Heine, who transcribed them from the manu-
scripts in the French National Library. On the whole
they are very competent, written in a sober and economical
style (though, as are nearly all his works, bespattered by
fixed epithets and mechanical similes of the order of

77

MARQUIS DE SADE

1 beautiful as a rose'); the denouement is well worked up
to and dramatically emphasised; Les Crimes de V Amour
are nearly all on the thesis of the struggle between virtue
and vice usually with disastrous results to the actors of
either side ; they are chiefly remarkable for the meticulous
accuracy of the local and historical details.

The humorous stories are much slighter; they are
chiefly surprising in that they show in de Sade a sense of
humour and gaiety that could never have been suspected
from his other work ; they have an epigrammatic neatness
which would give the author an honourable place among
his lighter contemporaries. I give two short quotations
as samples of this style :

" There is a sort of pleasure for one's pride in making
fun of faults one doesn't possess oneself, and such
pleasures are so sweet to all men, and particularly to fools
that it is extremely uncommon to see them give them
up ... also it gives an opportunity for spiteful remarks,
pale jokes and flat puns; and for society that is to say
for a collection of people whom boredom brings together
and stupidity modifies it is so pleasant to talk for two or
three hours without saying anything, so delicious to shine
at others' expense and to mention and blame vices one is
far from having ... it is a sort of tacit self-praise ; for
that people even consent to join together, to unite to
crush the person whose great crime consists in not
thinking like the rest; then they go home mightily
pleased with the wit they have shown, when obviously
they have thereby merely proved their stupidity and their
pedantry." 6

The second quotation is from the story already men-
tioned, The Mystified Magistrate^ in which de Sade makes
fun of his judges. It is by far the longest of his humorous
stories and very spirited; the backbone which holds the

78

LITERARY WORK

different incidents is that old hardy annual of French
farce, the prevention of the consummation of a marriage.
The magistrate has been made drunk and is giving his
profession of faith in his office ; unfortunately the pun is
untranslatable. "Dame, voyez-vous," he says, "J'aime
les moeurs, j'aime la temperance et la sobrit, tout ce qui
choque ces deux vertus me revoke et je svis; il faut
tre severe, la sverit< est la fille de la justice . . . et la
justice est la mere de . . . je vous demande pardon,
madame, il y a des moments ou quelquefois la m^moire
me fait faux bond. . . Oui, oui, c'est juste, repondit la
folle marquise. . , ," 7

In this category of works addressed entirely to the
general public I would include La Philosophic dans le
Boudoir, in spite of its erotic content and vocabulary; its
chief raison d'etre is the hundred-page pamphlet French-
men, a further effort if you wish to be republicans, which
occupies about a third of the book and which will be
considered in great detail later; the frame in which it is
placed was, I think, an attempt to diffuse the pamphlet
more effectively than would be done if it was offered by
itself, and also to make money.

The plot of the work is the sexual education of a young
girl, a perpetual device of pornographic writers. True,
it is done with more verve and greater variety than in
most similar books, and the intellectual equivalent of
sexual emancipation receives at least as much space as
the physical side; there are many traces of de Sade's
individual approach to such problems; but the aim of
the book is obviously to excite the reader and therefore
pornographic; it is the only work of de Sade's against
which such an accusation can be laid with honesty. It
is written in dialogue form; the seven actors are little
more than lay figures and have no existence 'off the stage/

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MARQUIS DE SADE

D'Alm^ras, one of the first French writers to take Sade
seriously, believed this book was not by him, probably
because it is unworthy of him; but he acknowledges it
himself in Justine and the style and intellectual attitude
make the attribution doubly certain; it must be regret-
fully accepted and excused, if an excuse is necessary, by
the author's circumstances at the time of its writing.

in. "ALINE ET VALCOUR"

I had hoped that in this criticism of de Sade's works I
should be able to dispense with the necessity of detailing
the plots, referring any readers who might be curious to
the books already published about him ; the remainder of
his books have been dealt with at length, but Aline et
Valcour has, as far as I know, only been carefully con-
sidered once in a work published in a small limited edition
in 1901 ; later writers have been content with the merest
caricature of a summary and a regretful remark to the
effect that the book contains no obscenities, and with the
exception of one poisoning and a few flagellations, no
scenes of cruelty. It is possible however for a book to have
interest, even with the exclusion of these two subjects.
I am forced, therefore, to give a rather long account
of it.

It is really three completely distinct novels, linked
together by rather slight threads of a secondary intrigue.
The main book (occupying the first and fourth volumes)
is a dramatic and tragic story told in letters; the second
volume is an account of a symbolical voyage, somewhat
in the style of Swift; the third volume is an adventure
story. For convenience I shall refer to these different
parts as the story of Aline and Valcour, the story of Sain-
ville, and the story of Leonora respectively.

The story of Aline and Valcour is told in letters and

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was undoubtedly influenced by Richardson and Choderlos
de Laclos. A poor young man, Valcour, is in love with
Aline, the daughter of the Magistrate de Blamont.
Aline loves him in return and his suit is favoured by her
mother, a charming woman and a sincere Christian.
These three are all honourable people, governed by their
heart rather than by their head, sentimental, virtuous,
religious and stupid. Aline's father disapproves of the
match owing to its imprudence; he has found for his
daughter a thoroughly acceptable husband in the financier
Dolburg, a rich man already three times widowed, a friend
of de Blamont's and his companion in debauchery.
Aline, however, is constant in her love, and seconded by
her mother uses every possible device to postpone the
arranged wedding, De Blamont, infuriated by this
resistance uses all his powers to cause the wedding to
take place.

The scene is set for the conflict. On one side there is
sentiment, honour, religion the heart; on the other the
intellect which acknowledges no laws but those of reason,
no prejudices, no tacit agreements. The heart is bound
to lose, for it considers itself bound by conventions and
decencies at which the intellect laughs.

The action is straightforward. When all legal means
of forcing his daughter to the marriage have been foiled
either by Madame de Blamont or friends, de Blamont
tries to have the girl kidnapped. This too fails, as does
an attempt to bribe Valcour to renounce his claims, and a
subsequent attempt to have him assassinated. De
Blamont therefore decides to isolate the girl, removing
by one device or another all her friends, and finally
causing her mother to be poisoned by a servant he had
seduced. Alone and powerless, the girl is taken to a
distant country property of her father's, where she is

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MARQUIS DE SADE

held a prisoner by her father and Dolburg. Escape is
impossible, all her appeals for pity are dismissed; in
complete despair the girl commits suicide.

The book is extremely well written. The characters
and beliefs of the different actors are excellently revealed
in their letters; the emotion continually and carefully
heightened, and the climax is handled with considerable
restraint and deep feeling. Unfortunately there is a
sub-plot, concerned with a lost elder daughter of Madame
de Blamont, which, although it helps the intrigue (it is
the excuse for the introduction of the two other novels)
and serves to reveal de Blamont's character, is the cause
of a great deal of diffuseness, and is probably the chief
reason for the book never having been accorded its due.
Slightly pruned, the novel could stand against any other
product of its country and century.

The dominating figure of the whole book is de Blamont,
the prototype of the * sadistic' villain. Although he only
writes six of the seventy odd letters of which the book is
formed, his shadow is cast on every page. He is a
materialist, an intellectual, guided entirely by his own
pleasures and advantage ; he has worked out a philosophy
to justify his conduct. He gives an impression of deathly
coldness. Even his debauches and atrocities heighten
that impression. In face of his single-minded, un-
scrupulous, cold determination the rest of the characters
are like birds trying to escape from a snake. He is
probably the most terrifying character ever created, the
more so as we see him chiefly through the eyes of his
victims. Although de Sade's later works abound in far
greater monsters their very number and the lack of con-
trast lessen their effect.

It has already been remarked that this novel is partly
autobiographical, Valcour's life-story is de Sade's; in

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Aline, so charming, so gay, so constant in her love despite
all opposition it is surely not too far-fetched to see a
portrait of the long-loved Louise de Montreuil ; and the
broken-hearted letter that Valcour writes on hearing of
Aline's death is, in its intensity, certainly an echo of the
author's own despair. The charitable and long-suffering
wife of de Blamont may well be a picture of Madame de
Sade.

The story of Sainville is completely different. It is an
account of a voyage, but such a voyage as only Gullivers
make. It is principally concerned with two countries,
Butua on the Gold Coast, and Tamoe, somewhere in the
South Seas. In the preface de Sade says, " Nobody as yet

has penetrated to Butua .... save the author If

with the more agreeable fictions of Tamoe he tries to
console his readers for the cruel truths he has been obliged
to paint in Butua, should we blame him?" Although
nobody perhaps has penetrated to Butua, we all live
in it; for, by a curious coincidence, he has adopted the
same device as Miss Edith Sitwell for exposing existing
civilisation in the symbols of African barbarity; and
though he nowhere approaches the level of Gold Coast
Customs,* one of the finest, if not the finest poem of this
century, he produces effects and contrasts which are not
unworthy of the comparison. In Tamoe de Sade has
painted his Utopia. This volume will be analysed in
subsequent chapters.

The story of Leonora is the longest of the three, the
most full of incident, and the dullest. The young lady
is kidnapped and goes through adventure after adventure
all over the world before returning home. She is a most
disagreeable character, cheating and lying, using her

* When writing this I had not seen Miss SitwelTs Romance, which surpasses
both her own earlier works and all her contemporaries'.

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MARQUIS DE SADE

beauty to lead men on and extort favours and help from
them with promises she has never any intention of ful-
filling. She manages to preserve her virtue through all
dangers. She has somewhat unjustly been compared with
Juliette; but the latter paid for what she got: she wasn't
that sort of a cheat. In Spain, Leonora undergoes some
of the vicissitudes which later afflict the unhappy Justine
the cut-throat inn, the murderous monks, the band of
beggars. Some of the incidents and minor characters are
of great interest; the salient points will be dealt with as
occasion arises,

In several different places de Sade prophesies the
imminence of the Revolution. The book was twice sup-
pressed in the early nineteenth century as being politically
subversive.

iv. "LES 1 20 JOURNEES," " JUSTINE" ET "JULIETTE"

From every point of view Les 120 Journees de Sodome
is one of the most extraordinary books in the world.
Even its history is peculiar. The manuscript we possess
is a single roll of paper about thirteen yards long and not
quite five inches wide, covered on both sides by an almost
microscopical writing (in print the work covers nearly
500 pages of royal quarto) ; this was written by de Sade
in thirty-seven evenings, writing from seven to ten every
night, starting August 2oth, 1785,^ the Bastille. On his
removal from there the manuscript was lost, or stolen,
and came into the possession of a French family where it
remained for over a century. Then a hundred and twenty
years after its composition it was published by Dr. Ivan
Bloch (' Eugene Diihren') in a very limited edition; a
second and corrected edition was started in Paris in 1931,
but the enterprise seems to have fallen through.

And yet this monstrous work perhaps 150,000

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words is the merest skeleton of what was originally
intended. It was to be in four parts, preceded by an
introduction and perhaps followed by an epilogue; but
except for the introduction and the first part, which have
been fairly fully developed, it is only in the form of
detailed notes. We shall probably never know whether
de Sade used this canvas to write the complete book. As
with The Castle of Kafka we have only the fragment of
the intended whole; and these two fragments, utterly
opposed as they are in every way, can both be qualified as
masterpieces.

The central portion of the book is a description of every
form of sexual perversion, to the number of six hundred,
"expressly excluding all the pleasures allowed or for-
bidden by that brute of which you talk ceaselessly, with-
out knowing it, and which you call nature/' 8 This is
not only the first psychopathia sexualis, but by far the
most complete ever written, despite the scientific and
pseudo-scientific collections of the last fifty years. It
includes every range of intellectual, sensual and physical
activity which can possibly be brought into this category.
Dr. Bloch was undoubtedly justified in claiming for this
work a very high place as a scientific document, and
claiming that it alone would place de Sade among the
very first writers of his century.

These perversions were to be described by four old
women, who were to place them in the stories of their
lives, thus giving four detailed life histories with their
economical and social background.

These historians were to recount the perversions, to
the number of five every evening during a four-month
orgy, lasting from the end of October till the beginning
of March, to four excessively debauched war-profiteers,
their four wives, and their harem of twenty-eight subjects

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MARQUIS DE SADE

of every age and sex in a lonely and desolate medieval
castle in Switzerland. During the four months the
development of the thirty-six characters and their mutual
interaction was to be described.

The introduction sets the scene and gives elaborate
physical and mental portraits of the actors. This portrait
gallery is an astounding performance, as a piece of writing
hardly ever equalled. They are monstrous figures, well
over life size, painted with extreme naturalism, yet
crystallised to an individualism the naturalist school never
attained. De Sade is absolutely merciless; we are not
spared a single wrinkle, a single sore, unpleasant smell or
habit, not a single meanness or treachery; no detail of
cowardice or filth is hidden. But the canvas is not
monotonous; religion and beauty are there too, childish-
ness and romanticism; the whole gamut of human
possibilities are exhibited in their extremest development.

The work starts off with a thunderclap. "The exten-
sive wars which Louis XIV had to wage in the course of
his reign, which ruined the State's finances and the
people's faculties, none-the-less found the secret of
enriching an enormous quantity of those bloodsuckers
who are always on the look out for public calamities,
which they engender instead of appeasing, in the direct

intention of thereby making greater profits It

was at the end of this reign .... that four of these con-
tractors imagined the singular party of debauchery we
are going to describe. It would be a mistake to imagine
that only business people took part in this malpractice,
it had at its head very great gentlemen indeed. The
Duke de Blangis and his brother the bishop had both
made enormous fortunes by these means, and are suffi-
cient proof that the aristocracy did not disdain this
method of making a fortune, any more than other people.

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These two illustrious persons, intimately bound by
pleasure and interest to the financier Durcet and the
Judge de Curval, were the first to imagine the debauch
we are going to describe; they communicated it to their
two friends and these four formed the principal actors
of those famous orgies." 9

This single paragraph gives a good sample of de Sade's
penetrating social criticism. It is no accident that his
four villains are representatives of the four groups which
represent law and order.

This very slight sketch will give some notion of the
scale on which the work is planned. Details of the plot
can be found in the books mentioned at the end of the
chapter.

De Sade was driven by two motives to write this work.
The first was undoubtedly scientific; as he himself
writes 10 : "Men already so different from one another in
all their other manias and in all their other tastes, are
even more so sexually, and he who could fix and detail
these perversions would accomplish one of the finest
works on morals one could wish for, and perhaps one of
the most interesting." In Justine he offers a similar
explanation. "But shall we not wear out our reader's
patience in describing new atrocities?" he asks. "Have
we not already sufficiently soiled their imaginations with
tales of filth? Should we hazard new ones? Hazard
hazard, replies the philosopher. People don't realise
how important these pictures are to the soul's develop-
ment ; our great ignorance of this science is only due to the
stupid modesty of those wont to write on such matters.
Held in by absurd fears they only tell us of puerilities
that every fool knows and do not dare to lay hands fear-
lessly on the human heart and portray its gigantic divaga-
tions. We will obey since philosophy commands and

8?

MARQUIS DE SADE

will fear no more to paint vice naked/' 11 His sincerity
cannot be doubted; it is only his lack of a polysyllabic
vocabulary which makes him scientifically suspect to-day.

The second motive which actuates this work is a mis-
anthropy unequalled in human history. Lear and Timon
are but pale shadows compared to de Sade at this epoch.
His aim is no less than to strip every covering, both
mental and physical, off man and expose him to our
disgusted gaze as the mean and loathsome creature he is.
It is the supreme blasphemy. Our gods you may attack,
individuals you may show to be monsters, but to attack
the human race is unforgivable. Even the paler
'scientific' exposures of the Viennese psychoanalysts have
called forth the most indignant remonstrances; no wonder
de Sade, with his cold and objective exhibition of the
most carefully hidden corners of our unconscious minds,
of our daily weaknesses and meannesses, has been tracked
and pursued by authority all over the world.

In this work the blasphemy reaches Mephistophelean
heights. Curval complains that there are only two or
three crimes to commit. "How many times," he cries,
"Have I not wished that I could catch the sun and deprive
the world of it, or use it to burn up the earth ?" 12 Never
again did de Sade reach this pitch; though when the
Revolution falsified all the hopes he had set on it he drew
near the same level in La Nouvelle Justine. He allows
himself to make paradoxical moralising asides; "If crime
has not the delicacy of virtue, has it not ceaselessly a
character of grandeur and sublimity that surpasses and
will always surpass the monotonous and effeminate
features of the latter?" 13 And again, "Beauty is simple,
ugliness extraordinary." 14

De Sade realised the unique quality of this work. At
the end of the Introduction he calls on his friend the

LITERARY WORK

reader "to prepare your heart and spirit for the most
impure tale that has ever been written since the world
exists, such a book not existing either among the ancients
or the moderns/' 15 As Maurice Heine has pointed out
with considerable perspicacity, when de Sade lost the
manuscript (? manuscripts) of this work he lost his
masterpiece, and knew it; and it is probably due to the
vain effort to repair this loss, from the scientific point of
view, that we get the numerous obscenities in the final
edition of Justine and Juliette. The account of the
monastery Sainte-Marie-des-Bois in La Nouvelle Justine
in particular seems to be a vain effort to reconstitute the
lost work.

In contrast with the fragmentary remains of Les 120
Journees we have no less than four complete versions of
Justine, written over a space of ten years. The first
version, Les Infortunes de la Vertu^ is the original rough
draft; it is a long short story written in a fortnight in
1787, and was never intended by the author for pub-
lication. It was transcribed from the manuscript by
Maurice Heine in 1930. This manuscript was worked
over, corrected and expanded by the author in his usual
fashion during the following year, and a version Justine^
ou les Malheurs de la Vertu was published soon after de
Sade's release, in 1791, in two volumes. The following
year it was brought out again by another publisher with
slight alterations the chief being that it is his mother,
and no longer his aunt, that the 'homosexual' de Bressac
feels so strongly about psychologically an important
change. This version had a considerable success in the
ten following years. Although the sexual element is
present none of the first three versions can be considered
obscene. Finally in 1 797 the book was entirely re-written
and expanded to more than double its size, largely by

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MARQUIS DE SADE

the inclusion of the life-story of two minor characters;
probability is destroyed, the natural development is lost,
the story is drowned in a deluge of blood and semen.

The basic fable is the same throughout all the versions ;
it is the story of a young girl left suddenly without
resources who tries to make her way through life following
the precepts of religion in which she believes completely,
and the misfortunes and discomforts she undergoes. In
its original conception it was almost certainly meant to
be an ironical tale in the style of Voltaire-Zrf<^/ indeed
is quoted on the first page; it was to be as it were a pen-
dant to Candide, the story of the chaste but unfortunate
Cunegonde. Justine was to pass from the hands of one
extraordinary character to another's, a miser's, a 'homo-
sexual's,' a coiner's, a vegetarian and a temperance
reformer's. In every case the exercise of some Christian
virtue, chiefly pity or charity or the negative abstention
from crime, was to land her in one predicament after
another. The final moral was to be not 'cultivate your
garden,' but 'learn how to correct the caprices of fortune'
anglice 'God helps those who help themselves.'

But almost immediately de Sade saw that this subject
necessitated more serious treatment, for he was not
attacking a minor foolishly optimistic philosophy, but
the whole basis of Christianity and the Christian con-
ception of human nature, Christianity assumed that
gratitude, remorse, a natural leaning towards gratuitous
kindness and charity were fundamentals of human
behaviour in a Christian country, and that, there was a
providence which especially looked after the good and
pious. De Sade intended to show how unfounded such
assumptions were, how worldly success was only to be
obtained by a facade of virtue combined with a strict
attention to business unalloyed by scruples or unneces-

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sary honesty, and how indifferent was providence to the
characters of the people it struck through its instrument
nature. Justine is killed by lightning.

So from being the Candide of Christianity Justine
became the Don Quixote. The parallel is very close. Both
protagonists believe in a state of affairs and a humanity
which in fact do not exist; both prefer to stick to their
delusions rather than to learn from experience, and in
consequence go from one disastrous and ridiculous situa-
tion to another, finally dying in misery, still convinced
that their vision of the world is a true one. Justine is
consoled by her assurance that she is right, comforted by
prayer, and upheld by her hopes of heaven.

In this spirit the first published version of Justine was
written (as also the rough sketch). The tale is well told
and the incidents lively and diversified; it is one of the
most depressing books ever written. For, in spite of
experience, we all have a tendency to hope that virtue
will be rewarded in the end; the continuous triumph of
vice, as the continuous triumph of common sense in
Don Quixote^ lends a certain monotony to the work. Not
that Justine meets exclusively vicious people ; at Grenoble
she is befriended by at least three disinterested people,
including an honourable judge; a certain Monsieur
Servan, whom de Sade designates by the initial 'S,' is
honoured by being especially pointed out by de Sade as
a just and disinterested magistrate in a naughty world.
But the good are in a terrible minority; and except in
this one case they are never in a position to influence their
fellows; the world is composed of rogues and their
victims.

The history of Paris between 1791 and 1797 is amply
sufficient to account for the alterations between the two
versions. During that time de Sade had witnessed the

MARQUIS DE SADE

incredible brutalities of the Terror, the fever of blood and
lust and crime which had swept the masses in whom he
had hoped ; he had seen the failure of the Revolution to
right any of the major wrongs of a suffering country, the
reinstatement of private property and profit, the bloody
suppression of BabeuFs egalitarian revolt. The first
version of human nature in Justine must be re-written ;
man was not merely a self-seeking hypocrite, he was the
most bloodthirsty, cruel and lustful animal that had ever
encumbered the face of the earth. La Nouvelle Justine
is the final vomiting of de Sade's disgust and disappoint-
ment.

In the preface he claims that he has acquired the right
to say everything and then goes on to remark that in a
century as philosophical as this no one will be scandalised
by any descriptions or systems he may employ! (Com-
mentators on de Sade are so fascinated or appalled at his
obscenity that they have no eyes for. any other quality;
yet his irony is sufficiently strong to be appreciated, even
if he had not stressed his intention in several foot-notes.)
He then goes on: "As for the cynical descriptions, we
believe that since every situation of the soul is at the dis-
position of the novelist, there are none which he has not
the right to employ; only fools will be scandalised; true
virtue is never frightened or alarmed by pictures of vice,
only finding therein a further motive for the sacred pro-
gress it has imposed on itself. Perhaps there will be an
outcry against this work; but who will protest? The
libertines, as formerly the hypocrites against Tartuffe"

This last sentence needs a little consideration,
for in it de Sade gives away the intention which motivated
the writing of the book. It was certainly not porno-
graphic he lacks every qualification for that; he neither
beautifies nor romanticises sex, his descriptions are of

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the most summary, his vocabulary business-like and
monotonous, the half-a-dozen necessary and common-
place words (the distinguishing mark of pornography,
after its romantic, poetic attitude to sex is its peculiar
vocabulary of synonyms); it was not primarily the
demonstration that in present civilisation virtue is oppressed
and crime prosperous; it was the exposition of human
nature at its greatest development, untrammelled by fear,
and particularly in this book of that tangle of instincts
called sex. His prophecy about his detractors has proved
correct; starting from his personal enemy, Restif de la
Bretonne, it has been the gallants, the lady-killers, the
successful amorists who have attacked de Sade with the
greatest violence and have been the most distressed by his
debunking of their behaviour.

If Justine may be compared with Don Quixote the story
of Juliette her sister is an earlier and intensely serious
version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The last-mentioned
delightful work, it will be remembered, is the story of a
poor young girl who becomes the mistress of her employer
whom she shoots ; at her trial she gains the favour of the
judge and jury by sexual means; she then goes to Holly-
wood where she is taken as mistress by an elderly and
unpleasant button-manufacturer; she deceives him when
and as occasion arises ; she involves a rich young man in a
breach of promise suit and compromises with his relatives
for money. The man who is keeping her then sends her
on a trip to Europe; on the way over she indulges in a
little espionage; in London she makes love to a man till
he gives her an extremely valuable diamond tiara ; in the
Central of Europe she makes the acquaintance of an
austere but extremely rich young man whom, by the aid
of considerable lying and subterfuge, she persuades to
propose to her; she makes every effort to prepare for a

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MARQUIS DE SADE

breach of promise case to obtain heavy damages, but at
the last moment, after the robbery of some uncut diamonds,
decides to marry him so that she can finance another man
with whom she fancies herself in love.

This will probably be claimed to be a wilful distortion
of a charming and humorous work; but I do not think
the actual plot can be otherwise described ; and (with the
necessary changes made for time and place) if the actual
complaisances which Lorelei was forced to have with her
different lovers, the details of the business plans of Mr.
Eisman and the political intentions of Major Falcon had
been given, you would have a very fair idea of the con-
tents of Juliette.

When Juliette, like her sister, was suddenly left an
orphan without resources and was equally denied both
help and charity from the quarters from which she
expected it, she decided to utilise the one asset she pos-
sessed and went into a brothel. Her religious con-
victions had already been undermined by the Mother
Superior of the convent where she was educated, and
convinced that no one would help her unless she helped
herself she set about the task of getting money by every
possible means. She spent a couple of very unpleasant
years at the brothel, robbing her clients as much as she
could, when she met an elderly, disagreeable, criminal
and extremely intelligent business man, whose mistress
she became. After some time she met at dinner at his
house a person called Saint-Fond, a 'statesman,' the most
powerful and richest man in the kingdom, a repulsive
megalomaniac; she became less his mistress than the
supervisor and administrator of his pleasures, a sort of
Pompadour. She retained this position for some time,
enjoying very great wealth and numerous privileges, but
she was always in a dependent state, She lost Saint-

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Fond's patronage by betraying her horror at a monstrous
project of his to starve to death two-thirds of the popula-
tion of France. At the age of twenty-two she found her-
self again nearly as poor as she was seven years earlier,
but a good deal more experienced. She went to Angers
and started a gambling-den; she there met a respectable
provincial nobleman and became his wife. For two years
she endured the boredom of matrimony, then poisoned
her husband and went to Italy to seek her fortune in
company with a card-sharper. She travelled through the
different states of which the peninsula was then composed
making money by every possible means stealing and
swindling, running brothels and gambling-houses,
occasionally prostituting herself. At the age of twenty-
five she needed alcohol and opium to stimulate her, she
was so exhausted. In her travels through Italy she met
the most important people of the time, the King of
Sardinia, the King and Queen of Naples, the Pope, and
the most prominent members of the aristocracy. She
amassed a second large fortune, but that in turn was partly
confiscated for a time by her refusal to supply the Doges
of Venice with poison. She returned to France to enjoy
the money she had sent ahead of her ; eventually the Doges
restored the rest of her fortune and she settled down to
enjoy the ten years of life that remained to her; she died
at the age of forty. As might be guessed from the life
she was forced to lead she was not very fond of men ; her
deepest and most passionate friendships were with
women. The chief of these were a woman named Clairwil,
a cold and vicious person, Princess Borghese, and a
strange person with 'psychic* powers called la Durand,
an exploiter of the quack magical religions of the time
and a vendor of poisons.

The principal motive of this book is not sex, but

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MARQUIS DE SADE

money, the means of acquiring it, the power it gives,
the civilisation and institutions which surround it in
a word, capitalist society. There is hardly a single phase
of the contemporary civilisation, from education to the
Church, from care of the poor and disabled to politics,
which is not scrutinised. The characters are all capitalists,
business men, aristocrats, kings and the higher clergy;
they are condemned out of their own mouths. All
through the book there is a tentative search for some form
of civilisation which would do away with the misfortunes
of virtue and the prosperities of vice at the same time;
the conclusions reached will be examined later.

This is by far the most realistic of de Sade's books.
Research has shown that one after another of the institu-
tions and persons that de Sade denounced were not
figures of a diseased imagination but historical truth.
Two hundred and fifty pages of Diihren's book are filled
with parallels between de Sade's work and the history of
the epoch. From the description of the brothel where
Juliette started her apprenticeship to the horrible
behaviour of Ferdinand and Caroline, King and Queen of
Naples, there is little that is not historically true. Even
the man-eating ogre Minski has a historical counterpart
in the famous Blaise Ferrage. With regard to the
Italian part of the book we have seen that de Sade claimed
complete accuracy for all the details, which are based on
personal experience. This may be true, for Casanova has
shown how easy it was for people of far less distinction
than de Sade to approach foreign royalty. His description
of Ferdinand and Caroline is certainly not an exaggeration
of the facts. Juliette's interview with the Pope is in
another category.

Although this book was not published till 1796 I feel
certain it was written earlier. The optimism alone dates

LITERARY WORK

it. Moreover the footnotes bringing the work up to date
show conclusively that the first three volumes, up to
Juliette's marriage, were written before the death of
Mirabeau in 1791. De Sade comments on his erotic
works, saying of him, " Mirabeau, who wanted to be
smutty to be something, and who is not and never will
be anything all his life." And he adds in a footnote,
"Assuredly not a legislator; one of the best proofs of the
folly and delirium which characterised the year 1789 in
France is the ridiculous enthusiasm inspired by this vile
spy of the monarchy. What is the impression that
remains to-day of this immoral and unintelligent man ?
That of a hypocrite, a traitor and a fool." 16

The rest of the work, with the possible exception of
the rather sickening ending, was almost certainly written
in 1793 or '94, when anti-monarchical feeling was at its
height, possibly during de Sade's imprisonment for
moderantism. It is the only time when de Sade shows a
disposition to take kings seriously; at other times he
looked behind and beyond them. In the story Juliette
et Raunai he makes his point of view quite clear when he
says, " Tyranny, which first frightens sovereigns, or
rather those that govern them, ends almost always in pro-
viding them with pleasures." 17 In the present case he
was probably trying to use the popular feeling against
kings to carry the people with him in his attack on the
far more sinister powers which lay behind these figure-
heads.

As a historical document this book is of considerable
value, and it contains many extremely pregnant ideas;
as a novel it is poor, losing by its very accuracy, diffuse
and episodic; some of the characters, particularly the
statesman Saint-Fond, who has nearly a whole volume
devoted to him, are well drawn ; but regard for truth, and

97 G

MARQUIS DE SADE

de Sade's comparative ignorance, make many of the others
little more than lay figures. There are a large number of
well-written descriptions of Italy its countrysides, its
towns, its ruins and its works of art; but I have never
personally found much pleasure in the Baedeker school
of writing, however minute the observation and however
exquisite the language, Juliette's methods of getting a
living necessitate a good deal of obscenity; but there is
far less attempt at analysis than in La Nouvelle Justine;
rather was de Sade trying to reconstitute the lost
1 20 Journees by presenting a collection of sexual mono-
maniacs and fetishists, but he nowhere approaches the
level of the earlier work. It would be possible though
difficult to make a bowdlerised version of Juliette which
would still be of considerable interest, a feat quite impos-
sible with the two other works.

V. LITERARY INFLUENCE

Although the ban on the greater part of de Sade's works
has never been lifted since 1801 (save for a small number
of extremely limited and expensive editions) his books by
means of clandestine reprints have enjoyed a long and
wide circulation. How wide it is impossible to estimate,
but there have been learned books quoting him from
nearly every country in Europe; and probably the greater
number of readers have used him, to employ the
admirable phrase of Swinburne, "either as a stimulant
for an old beast or an emetic for a young man, instead of a
valuable study to rational curiosity" During the nine-
teenth century de Sade's work must have appeared com-
pletely satanic ; before some corners of the veil of taboo
covering sex had been lifted by the psychologists and
psychoanalysts, and the findings given a fig-leaf of
scientific respectability by a vocabulary free from associa-

98

LITERARY WORK

tions, his knowledge and ideas must have been considered
infernal. His revolutionary ideas too must have been
extremely upsetting, when not incomprehensible; that
they often were (and are) misunderstood can be proved
by the fact that the ghastly projects he puts into the
mouths of his reactionary 'fascist* characters were taken
to represent his own desires; as I have already pointed
out, sex is for most people so overwhelmingly important
and exclusive, obscenity so fascinating and repulsive,
that they put aside all other considerations when faced
with such subjects; and the fact that de Sade treats sex
objectively as merely one of the major factors of life
completely escaped them. To treat religion ironically is
understandable, if reprehensible; to treat sex ironically is
inconceivable.

De Sade's influence on the literature of Europe since
his death has been considerable. Saint Beuve, who was a
canny critic, bracketed him with Byron as one of the twin
inspirations of modern writers. His influence was
obvious and openly confessed in the cases of Flaubert,
Baudelaire, Swinburne,* Dostoievski, and Lautreamont.
To-day his most open disciples (though they completely
caricature him) are the French surreelistes, with their
rather impotent desire for violence, both intellectual and
physical.

Despite numerous pointers de Sade has been completely
neglected by the historians of literature, with a single
exception. At the end of 1930 a learned and polyglot
Italian called Mario Praz wrote a * reproving' work to
use Saki's charming phrase on the romantic literature
of the nineteenth century, chiefly French and English,

* Swinburne particularly was soaked in de Sade, reading and quoting him
constantly ; a great deal of Atalanta and Poems atid Ballads First Series are inspired
by him. The Fourth Chorus in Alalanta> Anactoria and Dolores especially are
practically transcriptions (see Lafourcade, Jetmesse de Swinburne, Vol. II.).

99

MARQUIS DE SADE

with side-glances elsewhere at other politically suspect
countries and individuals, with the horrific title La Carne^
La Morte et il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica. The
chief originality of this work lies in the study of the
influence of de Sade ; in the index de Sade has easily the
greatest number of references, only approached by the
'sadic' poets Swinburne and Baudelaire. With peculiar
ingenuousness he starts by denying de Sade any merit
soever: "Dello scrittore non diciamo poi dello scrittore
di genio mancano al Sade le qualit piu elementari.
Poligrafo e pornografo a maggior titolo d'un Aretino,
tutto il suo merito sta nell' aver lasciato dei document!
che rapresentano la fase mitologica, infantile della
psicopatologia."* After which downright statement he
proceeds to show his influence on a list of authors which
seems, at first glance, to contain most of the major names
of French literature of the century, and some quite respect-
able ones outside; of course all these authors may have
been without any sensibility or discrimination. Among
those listed are the following: Baudelaire, Shelley (in
The Cenci\ Swinburne, Maturin, J. Janin, Soulie, Petrus
Borel, de Musset, Sue, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier,
Georges Sand, the painter Delacroix, Flaubert, Lautr^a-
mont, O. Mirbeau, d'Annunzio, Stendhal, Huysmans,
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Peladan, Barrs, Rachilde, Villiers
de Tlsle Adam, Remy de Gourmont and Dostoievski.
This list is not exclusive, and possibly one or two of the
names are wrongly included as undergoing direct
influence; but in any case the catalogue is sufficiently
remarkable when it is considered that these authors were
all influenced by the works of a man who lacked the most
elementary qualities of a writer. I should hesitate to

* It is interesting to note that the correct attitude to-day to de Sade's work is
no longer indignant disgust, but boredom and a refusal to take him
seriously.

IOO

LITERARY WORK

suggest that any of Signer Praz* pontifical judgments are
fallible, especially as he has actually read Justine and
Juliette (I am not certain of this : there is an extraordinary
identity between his quotations and those made by G.
Lafourcade in his treatise on Swinburne), and gives quite
long if slightly ridiculous quotations from them; a number
of these quotations are derived from the manichaean
theology of the 'statesman' Saint-Fond, a subject only
introduced to add superstition to the other cowardices
and vices of this monster, and which is afterwards very
thoroughly refuted; obviously such ideas are ridiculous;
they were intended to be so.

It is not, however, with de Sade as a writer, but as a
thinker and precursor that I am primarily interested; and
the rest of the book will be occupied with him in those
capacities.

Note. For details of the plots of de Sade's works any of the books
mentioned at the end of the first chapter should be consulted.
Guillaume Apollinaire gives the best account of Les 120 Journees^
Dawes of Justine et Juliette. Diihren's account is sketchy, with
much emphasis on details which are chastely given in Latin. A
German called Otto Flake has also written a book on Sade, mostly
founded on Diihren; he gives some notion of the plots, but the
book so overflows with moral indignation that it is chiefly interesting
as a proclamation of Herr Flake's pure mind.
Addendum. Since writing this chapter I have seen an article by
Maurice Heine on Le Marquis de Sade et le Roman Noir (Nouvelle
Revue Franfaise, August, 1933) in which he claims priority for
dc Sade in the use of Gothic trappings to the adventure novel, on
the historical ground of the dates of his books, compared with those
of Mrs. Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis.

This seems to me difficult to justify, when the work of Clara
Reeve and the wide diffusion of such German books as Boden's
Children of the dbbey are taken into account. From the purely
literary point of view de Sade's chief originality still seems to me to
lie in his use of history for romance.

101

CHAPTER III
PHILOSOPHY

Chi disputa alegando I'autoritA non adopra lo'ngegno, ma piuttosto
la memoria.

LEONARDO DA VINCI,

Notes.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following
errors:

1. That man has two real existing principles, viz., a Soul

and a Body.

2. That Energy, calPd Evil, is alone from the Body; and

that Reason call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following

his Energies.
But the following contraries to these are true:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call'd

Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five
Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and

Reason is the bound or outward circumference of
Energy.

3. Energy is eternal delight.

W. BLAKE,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

I. LA METRIE

WHEN dealing with a thinker so widely read, so eclectic
and at the same time so original as de Sade it is difficult
to speak of masters or predecessors. The number of
authors he quotes is prodigious, ranging through all
classical and modern literature from Rousseau and
Hobbes to the Bible, from Herodotus and the Christian
Fathers to the travels of Captain Cook, Thomas More and

102

PHILOSOPHY

the Encyclopedists. But there is one author whom he
quotes more often than any other and who obviously had
a preponderating influence on the formation of many of his
ideas; that author is La Metric, a philosopher now so
completely forgotten that I may perhaps be forgiven for
giving a short account of his life and principal ideas.

Julien Offray de La Metric was born in 1 709, the son
of a merchant. He was trained for the Church as a
Jansenist, but after a precocious bout of piety he wrote
an apology at the age of fifteen he became disgusted with
theology and started the study of medicine. He was
qualified at Rheims at the age of nineteen and practised
for five years ; he then went to Leyden and studied under
the famous Boerhaave. He translated his master's work
on venereal diseases, and added his own work on the same
subject, a work which received considerable abuse. In
the course of the next few years he published several
other medical books. In 1742 he returned to Paris and
was made doctor to the army corps of the due de Gram-
mont, in which capacity he took part in the siege of
Fribourg. During these operations he caught a fever
and was so struck by the alterations in his personality
as the result of delirium that he wrote a book on the sub-
ject called The Natural History of the Soul which was
published at the Hague in 1745, supposedly as a trans-
lation from the English. He was at once attacked by the
ecclesiastical authorities and forced to resign his com-
mission. In compensation he was made inspector of
hospitals ; but he employed his leisure in writing a couple
of plays which made fun of the doctors and medicine of
his time. This did not lessen the animosity felt against
him and in 1746 his books were burned by the public
executioner and he was forced to flee for his life. He first
went to Saz near Ghent, but he was accused of spying

103

MARQUIS DE SADE

and had to escape to Ley den. There he wrote Man a
Machine a work which with characteristically impudent
wit he dedicated to the extremely pious Haller as an
offering to his love of truth. The outcry caused by this
work was enormous and his life was in constant danger.
By a piece of luck he managed to cross the frontier into
Prussia, where he was given asylum by Frederick the
Great, "the Solomon of the North/ ' as he constantly calls
him. Frederick created a nominal post for him Reader
to the King and gave him a pension. They quickly
became very friendly, somewhat to Voltaire's annoyance
and jealousy. He wrote a number of essays in the next
three years, the most important being The System of
Epicurus and the Anti-Seneca^ or Discourse on Happiness.
The minor works include UHomme Plante, Les Animaux
plus que Machines^ La Volupte^ and L? Art de Jouir, the last
two being delicate 'eighteenth-century' lucubrations on
love and gallantry. He presented a collected edition of
his works to Frederick in 1751 and died in November of
that year from eating poisoned food. Frederick pro-
nounced a discourse in praise of him before the Berlin
Academy in I752. 1

We must now examine the ideas that gained for
him the attacks not only of the representatives of ortho-
doxy, but even such comparative free-thinkers as Vol-
tair?, Maupertuis, Diderot, Holbach, Grimm and many
others. Even Goethe many years later praised him
extremely grudgingly. His principal heresy was the
statement that the object of science is the discovery of
truth and that this can be obtained exclusively by the use
of evidence and experiment. In short he posited the
basis on which all modern scientific work rests. He fol-
lowed this up by the equally shocking statement that man
must be considered as an animal that if as Descartes

104

PHILOSOPHY

said, animals were machines, then so was man ; if man
was more than a machine, then so were the animals.
In short he posited the basis on which all modern
medicine and biology rests. Finally he claimed that the
idea of a ' soul ' deprived of senses is inconceivable, and
that the soul developed and decayed with the body and
was subject to the same modifications as the body
e.g., various intoxications, delirium, neurosis and mad-
ness. The dualism of Descartes, Malbranche or Leibnitz
was untenable, because unverifiable. In short he posited
the basis on which nearly all modern psychology rests.
For all science to-day is materialist in its assumptions,
whatever it may be in its popularisations ; it is a pity that
it has forgotten this precursor and well-nigh martyr in
the cause of objectivity.

It is difficult to realise to-day the strangle-hold main-
tained by religion on every department of thought up to
the middle of the last century. In most countries to-day
religion is so much on the defensive, so 'broadminded'
and complaisant and unassuming, that we can hardly
throw our minds back to the time when Darwin was
preached against in every pulpit and Hegel denounced
as heretical. Similar conduct to-day in the Bible Belt of
the United States is smiled at and deplored even by the
most pious of churchmen. In the middle of the
eighteenth century affairs were very different; not only
the central ideas but even the minor dogmas of the
Catholic Church must not be questioned. For La Metric
never called himself an atheist, but an agnostic ; he con-
sidered the existence of God and some sort of survival
after death as probable but unverifiable and therefore to be
excluded from philosophy; he adds that we have no means
of knowing which cult pleases God the most; and all cults
are objectionable on account of the wars they engender.

105

MARQUIS DE SADE

In the preface to his collected works he makes a rather
disingenuous apology for himself. He admits that
philosophy is contrary to both morality and religion,
but denies that it can destroy or harm them. Philosophy,
which is entirely concerned with evidence, stands in the
same relation to nature as morality does to religion. But
it can never affect the masses, for its appeal is based on
reason, to which the masses are blind, whereas religion
is based on emotion, and therefore potent. Although it
never touches politics it is useful to rulers as it enables
them to see through rhetoric and similar emotional
appeals. Legislators will control men better as philo-
sophers than as orators, as reasonable rather than
reasoning beings. Philosophy for him is materialist,
pragmatical, atheist. (" Atheists are virtuous by con-
viction, theists if at all by superstition/ 1 ) It can only be
based on physical science, derived from sensual observa-
tion, and must be completely unbiased by pre-conceived
ideas of any sort.

He then makes a personal justification, claiming that
there need be no correspondence between an author and
his work, for he writes for truth and speaks and acts for
convenience. Finally he closes with an exordium that
must have touched de Sade very closely. He demands a
'republican' freedom of thought and writing, and exalts
spiritual over physical liberty. And he advises the future
philosopher to write anonymously and "as though you
were alone in the universe, or as though you had nothing
to fear from man's jealousy and prejudice."

The Treatise on the Soul is an exposition of his
mechanistic view of man. A great deal of his theory is
invalidated for us by the central position he gives to
the theory of the animal spirits or electric fluid in the
nerves, by means of which all perceptions are conveyed

1 06

PHILOSOPHY

to the brain. This idea, which originated in Mal-
branche, was universally held till the beginning of the
nineteenth century; de Sade takes it over unquestioned;
it gave a satisfactory, but oversimplified account of
sensations. He denies the metaphysical conception of
the soul, claiming that it only exists through sensations;
he defines it as the motive principle of passive matter.
Later he makes the assumption, which de Sade places
in a central position in his metaphysics, that motion, at
any rate potential motion, is a property of matter. He
then examines the various faculties from this point of
view. Judgment is the comparison of ideas founded on
memory and association. Too good a memory is bad
for judgment. Imagination is the voluntary reproduction
of sense impressions. In health it is weaker than external
impressions, but in delirium or under drugs it can be
stronger, and in any case need not be true. Hysteria
is voluntary there is no wish to be cured. Love is a
soitjrf madness^. Passions are based on the pleasure-pain
principle. Instincts are mechanical reactions, equally
valid for humans and animals, as can be seen by the
latter's pantomime. Sensations of the sou/ are due to know-
ledge and pleasure and pain caused by modifications of the
self. Happiness is an involuntary manner of thinking and
feeling; men are happy by accident, but philosophy
teaches resignation. Will is the result of pleasure-pain
stimuli. Good taste is majority taste. Genius is general
excellence. It is easy to be a good mathematician because
the subject is so limited. Free Will is probably a true
conception. Faith is necessary to explain the origin of
evil, the nature of the soul, and life after death.

Man a Machine is a development of the same thesis ; it
is primarily a refutation of Descartes. The human body
is defined as a self-winding machine, with courage as a

107

MARQUIS DE SADE

coefficient of food, but a machine so complicated that
it is impossible to get a clear idea of it or a definition.
Character and morals differ with temperament, heredity
and environment. Mind and body are interdependent,
the one modifying the other (fever and anxiety both
prevent sleep). Anatomically there is a great similarity
between men and mammals, the chief difference being that
man speaks and that he possesses the heaviest and most
complicated brain. Man at birth is the weakest and
stupidest of all animals, for his instincts are feeble; the
more sense an animal has, the less instinct. Imagination
image-forming is the chief function of the soul, all
other faculties deriving from it. Philosophy is imagina-
tion^plus self-crjtjcigm. "**" ""

In the course of this essay he lets drop a number of
generalisations, unconnected with the subject, which
have either directly or through the criticism they provoked
from him a great significance in the study of de Sade,
Nature^he sa^jiot God, is the primejpiavjer^.hutLN^faLire
is purposeless and inequality is one of.lier characteristics.

IT i. * ^ - " ~~" '- -~ ~ _ - '

THenatural law is, " Don't do to others what you wouldn't
have done to you." In people appearance and character
correspond (an idea de Sade held very firmly). Motion
is a property of matter, vide the muscular reactions of
dead animals. Anything which doesn't touch the senses
is an impenetrable mystery. In the eyes of nature all
creatures are equal ; there is only one substance, differently
modified in the universe. Finally three axioms: " Never
generalise in science"; "Only good doctors should be
judges"; "We were not^born to be wise but to bejjjjppy,
from the WOTmjojhe eagle."

The System of Epicurus is a number of apothegms
defining his attitude to life. It is definitely hedonistic
and pragmatical. It jsjaQjLOiil^^

1 08

PHILOSOPHY

causes^ but useless to worry about them.. _ Nature is the
prime mover and is amoral, indifferentjind purposeless.
Man waTtEe last in creation because he is the most com-
plicated. Lifej^

jtoo seriously; materialism is the antidote to misanthropy.
Man is not responsible for his qualities or defects, and
therefore remorse is useless, nor is he criminal for
following his instincts. Death is annihilation, and there-
fore unimportant; what do we risk in dying? and what
don't we risk in living? Knowledge is only gQodLiitJs
usefuL^^^Just as medicine is often only a science of
remedies with fine names, philosophy is only a science of
fine words : it's doubly lucky when the first cure and the
second mean something."

The Anti-Seneca is a plea for sensibility against stoicism.
Happiness, depends on character and is nn in

One can be happy in refraining from what causes
remorse: but thereby one often refrains from pleasure,
from the demands of Nature." nius^^s^i^jferable Jo
an unpleasant^reality. Knowledge is~only good, in so
far as it is conducive to happiness, and to worry about the
future is folly. Menj]eJ^

education; nevertheless the disposition to evil is such
tKaFTriS easier for the good to become bad than for the
bad to become good. Virtues and vices only exist
relatively to society, and the appearance of virtue is as
good as virtue itself. Happiness comes from con-
sciousness, not from fame, and remorse is a childish and
useless feeling. Crime is also a search for happiness
it is a question of character. Happiness is irrespective
of virtue and a man who has a greater satisfaction in evil-
doing will be happier than he who has less in good works.
There are criminal natures who enjoy torturing. The
instincts are stronger than education. Happiness does

109

MARQUIS DE SADE

not depend entirely on sensuality^thcmgh the pleasures
ofjhe intellect arr nn ty partial *-Men rqn

socially JjgfLJ^Ppy personally. .^ Public opinion is
unimportant and famejdecfiitful. Adversity is the mid-
wife of the virtues; suicide is justifiable but stupid.

In La Folupte and UArt de Jouir he gives his pre-
scription for happiness. It is very delicate, very sen-
timental, and very erotic, illustrated with excerpts from
imaginary classical idylls. He dislikes obscenity and
obscene books (which he considers dangerous as destroy-
ing illusions) and prefers what I can only qualify as
elegant poetic pornography. For him, pleasure is
inexistent without sentiment. Within the limits he sets
himself he shows considerable interest and knowledge
in sexual technique and variations, even going beyond
what is generally considered permitted with the explana-
tion that "Tout est femme dans ce qu'on aime." Des-
pite, and partly on account of, his boastings, one gets the
impression that he was not particularly potent.

II. GENERAL PRINCIPLES

I have found it desirable to give this rather detailed
precis of La Metrie's ideas in the somewhat boring style
one associates with the works of Aristotle as it is a con-
venient point from which to consider de Sade's general
philosophy. He accepted from La Metric completely
the materialist conception of man and the universe, much
elaborating the thesis, but not questioning it, and with it
La Metrie's view of nature. He also accepted from him
the idea that the pursuit of happiness is the main object
of all activity after self-preservation, and the fatalistic
acquiescence in the irresponsible divagations of character.
He seized on and elaborated at enormous length the
purely temporal and local aspect of actions regarded as

no

PHILOSOPHY

virtuous and vicious; he makes huge catalogues of
examples drawn from the literature and folklore of every
country to show that actions regarded as virtuous in
eighteenth-century France were considered vicious at
other times and places, and conversely; so much so that
an early critic considered this to be his main object in
writing. It is an interesting part of his work, and is one
of the earliest examples of systematic comparative an-
thropology from the moral rather than the physical
aspect. Finally he accepted the paramouncy of imagin-
ation in intellectual, and sensation in physical activity,
the uselessness of remorse, the value of truth for its
own sake and the supreme importance of educa-
tion.

His chief difference with La Metric was one of
character. La Metric was a happy and contented man,
an epicurean, with epicurean pococurantism. He was
interested in truth as an abstract idea, not as it affected
his fellows; like many scientists and philosophers he had
no desire to apply his results to life. Even his
devotion to truth was not fanatical; he quotes with great
approval Montaigne's remark, "La verite doit se soutenir
jusqu'au feu, mais exclusivement." He was quite happy
to be illogical and he never attempted to develop his ideas
to their logical conclusion.

De Sade on the other hand was a fanatic his moderan-
tism during the Terror is sufficient proof and mercilessly
logical, " Philosophy is not the. jxt .of . consoling .fools :
its only_ aim_j_s__ to .Xeack- truth .and .destroy prejudices." 2
Also he was only interested in truth as it affected mankind
here and now and all his original work was concerned
with man in his relations to God, to the State and to his
neighbours in other words religion, politics and what
for convenience can be called sex; but before examining

in

MARQUIS DE SADE

his diagnoses and suggestions in these three departments
of human life it will be convenient to deal in more detail
with a few of his more general ideas.

Perhaps the most important of his philosophical con-
ceptions is his distinction between 'real' and 'objective*
ideas and his treatment of the idea of cause-and-effect;
the passage in question 3 is rather long and elaborated;
I have abbreviated it as much as possible. The Mother
Superior is instructing Juliette.

"What is reason ? It is the faculty given to me by nature
to determine me in favour of one line of conduct as opposed
to another, according to the pleasure or pain involved;
a calculation obviously determined by the senses. Reason,
as Fret says, is the balance with which we weigh objects
and by which .... we know what we ought to think

by their mutual relation The first effect of reason

is to assign an essential difference between the object
that appears and the object that is perceived. Repre-
sentative perceptions of an object are again different.
If it shows us objects as being absent, but formerly
present, that is called memory. If it shows us objects
without warning us of their absence that is called imagina-
tion, and that is the true source of all our errors .... in
that we suppose a real existence in the objects of these
interior perceptions and believe that they exist apart from
us, since we conceive them apart from us. To make this
distinction clear I will give to this branch of idea the name
of Objective idea,' to distinguish it from a true perception
which I will call a 'real idea.' .... The infinitesimal
point, so essential to geometry, is an 'objective idea';
bodies and solids are 'real. 1 .... Before proceeding
further it must be remarked that the confusion of these

two groups of ideas is extremely common People

were forced to imagine general terms for groups of

112

PHILOSOPHY

imilar ideas; and they called * cause* any thing which
)roduces some change in a body independent of it, and
effect * any change produced by a cause. As these terms
:all up for us a more or less confused image of existence,
iction, reaction, change, the habit of using them has made
as think that they correspond to a clear and distinct

Derception People are unwilling to reflect that

since all things act and react on one another incessantly

:hey produce and undergo change at the same time "

This idea has considerable importance in his analysis of
sex and other instincts and is the chief reason for his
difference with the 'causal' findings of psychoanalysis.

It follows from this that words should be examined
with the greatest caution. "Like all the fools with the
same principles you will reply to me that all these (prob-
lems of the soul, etc.) are mysteries; but if they are
mysteries you understand nothing about them, in which
case how can you decide affirmatively about a thing of
which you are incapable of forming any idea? To
believe in or affirm a thing one must at least know what
one is believing in and affirming. To believe in the
immateriality of the soul is equivalent to saying that one
is convinced of a thing of which it is impossible to form
any 'real' notion; it is believing in words without attaching
any meaning to them; to affirm that a thing is what one
says it is is the height of folly and vanity." 4

On materialism. "People offer us as an objection that
materialism makes man simply a machine, which they
find very derogative to humanity; will that humanity be
much more honoured when you say that man acts under
the secret impulsions of a spirit or something which
animates him somehow ?" 5 And again: "The esteem
which so many people have for spirituality seems to have
its only motive in the impossibility in which they find

113 H

MARQUIS DE SADE

themselves of defining it in an intelligible manner

when they say to us that the soul is finer than the body
they tell us nothing except that that of which we have
absolutely no knowledge must be far more lovely than
that of which we have some faint idea.'' 6 Unlike most
of his contemporaries de Sade did not believe that the
sum of possible knowledge was now in the possession of
his generation, though he considered that the development
of chemistry and physics might one day render everything
possible. 7

He categorically denies the existence of free will. He
places the following speech in the mouth of the Cardinal
Bernis, at the time the Ambassador of France, formerly
reputed to be one of the Pompadour's lovers ; his reputa-
tion for chastity was not above suspicion (see Casanova)
nor were his verses particularly moral; and although de
Sade allows him considerable wit and intelligence, as was
his due, his reputation and his rank are sufficient to
embroil him in some of Juliette's most disreputable
adventures. I give the speech in full as it is a good
example of de Sade's methods.

"The faculty of comparing different methods of action
and deciding on the one which appears to us to be the
best is what is meant by free will. Does man possess
that faculty? I make bold to affirm that he doesn't
possess it, and that it would be impossible for him to do
so. All our ideas owe their origin to physical and
material causes which lead us in spite of ourselves, because
these causes belong to our organisation and the exterior
objects which influence us; our motives are the results of
these causes, and consequently our will is not free.
Assailed by different motives we hesitate, but the instant
when we make up our mind doesn't depend on us; it is
necessitated by the different dispositions of our organs;

114

PHILOSOPHY

we are always led by them, and it never depends on us to
take one mode of action rather than another; always
moved by necessity, always the slaves of necessity, the
very instant when we think we have the most completely
demonstrated our free will is the one in which we are led
most invincibly. Hesitation and indecision make us
believe in the freedom of our will, but that pretended
freedom is only the instant when the weights in the
balance are equal. As soon as a decision is taken it is
because one side is heavier than the other, and it is not
we who are the cause of the inequality but physical objects
which act on us and make us the plaything of all human
conventions, the plaything of the motor force of nature,
like the animals and plants. Everything depends on the
action of the nervous fluid and the difference between a
criminal and an honest man consists in the greater or less
activity of the animal spirits which compose this fluid.

'"I feel/ said F&nelon, 'that I am free, that I am com-
pletely in the hands of my own decisions.' This gratuitous
assertion is impossible to prove. What makes the Arch-
bishop of Cambrai so sure that, when he made up his
mind to embrace the pleasant doctrine of Madame
Guyon, he was free to choose the opposite path? The
most that he can prove to me is that he has hesitated, but
I defy him to prove to me that he was free to take the
other path, from the moment that he decided as he did.
'I modify myself with God,' this author continues, 'I am
the real cause of my own will.' But F^nelon has not
considered in saying this that since God is the stronger he
has made Him the real cause of all crimes ; also he has not
considered that nothing destroys God's omnipotence as
man's free will, for that omnipotence of God which you
suppose, and which I grant to you for a moment, is only
such because God has ordained all things from the begin-

"5

MARQUIS DE SADE

ning, and it is in consequence of this invariable ordina-
tion that man can be no more than a passive being who
can change nothing in the order of things and who con-
sequently has not free will. If he had free will he could
at any moment destroy this first established order, in
which case he would become as powerful as God. A sup-
porter of the divinity like Fenelon should have considered
this subject more carefully.

"Newton skated warily over this great difficulty, daring
neither to go into it deeply nor to embroil himself in it;
Fenelon, more positive though far less learned, adds,
'When I will a thing it is in my power not to will it;
when I do not will a thing it is in my power to will it. 1
No. Since you didn't do it when you wanted, it is
because it wasn't in your power to do so, and because all
the physical causes which must direct the balance pressed
it down, this time, on the side of the action that you did
take, and choice was no longer in your power from the
moment that you had been determined. Therefore your
will was not free; you have balanced, but your will was
not free and never is. When you let yourself go in the
direction that you have chosen, it is because it was impos-
sible to you to choose the other. You have been blinded
by your indecision, you have believed yourself capable
of choice because you have felt yourself capable of
balancing. But that indecision, the physical effect of
two external objects presented simultaneously, and the
freedom to choose between them are two very different
things. " 8 Earlier in the work de Sade had for con-
venience defined everything capable of acting on man,
including memory, prejudices, etc., as external objects.

I am going to close this chapter with an exhortation to
consistency which is not particularly apposite, but which
I want to bring in and for which I can find no other

116

PHILOSOPHY

opportunity. It is from the consistent villain de Blamont
to his vacillating companion in vice. He writes: 9

"That's what your end will be; I see you from here
surrounded by priests proving to you that the devil is
waiting for you, and you trembling and blanching,
crossing yourself and forswearing your tastes and your
friends, and then dying like an imbecile. And why will
you be like that . . . because you have not any prin-
ciples ; I have told you that you only listen to your passions
without reasoning about their causes, you have never had
enough philosophy to submit them to systems which can
identify them with yourself; you have jumped over all
your prejudices without trying to destroy any of them;
you have left them all behind you and all will return to
distress you when there will be no longer any means of
fighting against them."

Would that our innumerable well-meaning muddle-
headed socialists and pacifists would take the gist of this
passage to heart!

117

CHAPTER IV
GOD AND NATURE

Remove away that black'ning church.
Remove away that marriage hearse.
Remove away that man of blood
You'll quite remove the ancient curse.

W. BLAKE,

Gnomic Verses.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good
and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is
the active, springing from energy.

W. BLAKE,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Are gone to praise God and His Priest and King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.

W. BLAKE,

Songs of Experience.
I

ALL his life de Sade was obsessed by God. People who
wish to denigrate him by calling him mad would have
far more justification in calling him a religious, rather
than a sexual maniac. There is not a single one of his
writings but is occupied with religion; quite a number
deal with sex not at all, or at most summarily.

We have seen that in his youth in 1763 he attached
great importance to the sacrament and speaks of religion
with considerable piety. There is little reason to question
his sincerity; his family, during its seven hundred years
of recorded existence, has had a continual connection
with the Church; faith in God and His service was a
family tradition.

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GOD AND NATURE

In 1782 he had changed his position. It is from that
year, the third of his continual imprisonment, that date
the first writings of his that have come down to us ; and
the very first that is developed is an elegant little Dialogue
between a Priest and a Dying Man. This short essay in
the style of Fontenelle is concerned with the inadequacy
of the religious description of the universe; the addition
of the mysteries of God to the mysteries of Nature only
make the understanding of the latter more difficult;
with the unsatisfactory nature of prophecies, martyrs,
miracles ("To believe in a miracle I should want to be
absolutely sure that the phenomenon you claim as such is
absolutely contrary to the laws of Nature for only so
can it be a miracle : and who knows enough of Nature to
be able to swear that this is the precise point at which she
draws a line and where she is outraged?" 1 ). The whole
opuscule is a well-reasoned piece of dialectic; it is
moderate and dignified in its language.

From this time onwards de Sade cannot leave God and
religion particularly the Catholic Church alone. By
comparison he showed a certain amount of respect and
toleration to Protestantism, I do not think there are
fifty pages in any of his works in which the subject is
not mentioned. His knowledge of the literature con-
cerned with it is encyclopaedic. He would seem to know
the Bible almost by heart; he quotes and deals with
Christian apologists from the early Fathers to Scot,
F^nelon, Pascal and even more recent theologians; he
mentions the Koran and Confucius ; he deals in theological
quibbles of the greatest niceness and subtlety ; he is aware
of the distinctions of the heresies which have at different
times rent the Church; he discusses at length every one
of its central dogmas.

All this learning is employed in an attack on God and

119

MARQUIS DE SADE

the Church which for length and intensity can seldom
have been equalled; he attacks them with reason, with
ridicule, with imprecations, with blasphemy; he attacks
from the philosophical, the economic, the political, the
ideal and the pragmatic angle; he ranges from the dis-
cussion of inconsistencies in the Bible (in the style of the
question, "How could Pharaoh's cavalry pursue the Jews
in a country where cavalry cannot operate, and further
how did Pharaoh come to have any cavalry since, in the
fifth of the plagues of Egypt, God had caused all the
horses to perish?" 2 ) to the Black Mass, from the history
of the Papacy to the pre-Christian origin of the Eucharist,
from the dogma of Hell to the economic foundations of
the Church's property.

The basis of all this is obvious. De Sade was a pas-
sionate idealist and could neither forgive a God who
permitted all the evil and misery of which he was so
terribly aware, nor a Church whose explanations could
not satisfy his reason, and whose practice and representa-
tives so completely belied the principles they professed
to observe. The culminating point of his attack is
Juliette's interview with Pope Pius VI ; it opens as follows :
44 'Haughty phantom,' I replied to this old despot,
'your habit of deceiving other men makes you try to
deceive yourself. .... Listen to me, you Bishop of
Rome, and allow me to analyse for a moment your power
and your pretentions.

'"A religion is formed in Galilee whose bases are
poverty, equality and hatred of the rich. The principles
of this holy doctrine are that it is as impossible for a rich
man to enter into the kingdom of heaven as for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle ; that the rich man is
damned, uniquely because he is rich. The disciples of
this cult are expressly forbidden to make any provision,

120

GOD AND NATURE

Their head Jesus says positively, "I have not come to
be served but to serve . . . There shall be neither first
nor last amongst you . . . He among you who would
raise himself shall be debased, and he who will be first
shall be last" (a). The first apostles of this religion earn
their bread in the sweat of their brow. That is all
true?' 'Certainly/ 'Well, then, I ask you what relation
there is between these primitive institutions and the
enormous riches that you have given to you in Italy.
Does your wealth come from the Gospel or from the
roguery of your predecessors ? . . , Poor man, and you
think you can still impose upon us!' 'Atheist, at least
respect the descendant of Saint Peter.' 'You're not

descended from him ()'" 3 Juliette then proceeds

to analyse the origin of the papacy and to account for its
growth by its political usefulness to the different rulers
during the troubled centuries of the middle Empire;
she blames the Church's obscurantism in the Middle
Ages, and then gives a brief but comprehensive history
of the crimes and inconsistencies of the Papacy.

To the passage quoted de Sade adds two curious foot-
notes. The first (a) follows the quotation from the
Gospels; he writes, "It is amusing that the Jacobins in
the French Revolution wished to destroy the altars of
a God who used absolutely their language, and even more
extraordinary that those who detest and wish to destroy
the Jacobins do so in the name of a God who speaks like
the Jacobins. If this is not the nee plus ultra of human
absurdity I should like to know what is." The second ()
is an elaborate discussion of the real meaning of the name
Peter and the Holy Pun made on that word in which he
decides that the Christian Peter is the same as Arnac,
Hermes and Janus of the ancients, all of whom had the
gift of opening the gates to some paradise; and he employs

121

MARQUIS DE SADE

Phoenician, Hebrew and Latin etymology to prove
that Peter, or Kephas, can mean Opener as well as
Rock.

Again and again he reverts to the inconsistency between
Christian profession and practice; the most savage
reactionary in his works is the Bishop of Grenoble. Con-
tinually, too, he stresses the political reasons which
allowed the Church to emerge and which account for its
continual support. The statesman Saint-Fond is made
to say, "The force of the sceptre depends on that of the
thurible; these two authorities have the greatest interest
in mutual help and it is only by dividing them that the
masses will shake off the yoke. Nothing makes people
so abject as religious fears; it is right that they should fear
eternal punishment if they revolt against their king;
that is why the European powers are always on good terms
with Rome." 4 When Juliette is talking to Ferdinand of
Naples, she says, with a strange echo of Lenin's famous
epigram, "You keep the people in ignorance and super-
stition .... because you fear them if they are en-
lightened ; you drug them with opium .... so that they
shall not realise the way you oppress them." 5

He attacks the Church as an economic racket. "Un-
questionably priests had their motives in inventing the
ridiculous fable of the soul's immortality; could they
otherwise have made moribunds contribute?" 6 This
theme is developed with several variations.

Religion is dangerous as a basis on which to build
morality; for if the falseness of the foundations are
recognised, the whole edifice will tumble down. 7
Similarly the fact that it may be a consolation to some is
not a sufficient reason for it. "I cannot see that the desire
to appease a few fools," says the Mother Superior to
Juliette, "is worth the poisoning of millions of honest

122

GOD AND NATURE

folk; and anyhow is it reasonable to make one's desires a
measure of the truth?" 8

Saint-Fond, the reactionary statesman, is superstitious
and credulous; it is the last insult that de Sade can give
to his villains. He believes in a sort of Manichaean
diabolism, in which hell plays a central part; and he thinks
that by some ritual he can make his victims sell their
souls to the devil. The confession of this weakness is an
excuse for a fifty-page examination of the dogma of hell
considered from every possible angle. 9 First of all the
Old and New Testaments are examined with great detail
to prove that the idea of eternal damnation does not exist
in them, that the idea of Gehenna was purely local and
temporal; secondly he demonstrates the inefficacy of
the fear of hellfire as a method of restraining men from
evil-doing, for the damned, who cannot repent, are
invisible and therefore no use as a warning to the living,
and crime is if anything more common in the countries
where such beliefs are held; thirdly he ridicules the
muddled thinking which can associate fire and torments
with disembodied spirits; and finally he expatiates on the
barbarity of a God who can punish finite faults with
infinite pains. This is the centre of his complaint; for
him, as for Blake the great 'sadistic' poet, the Christian
God is too base and too immoral to be accepted. "So,"
he writes, " after having made man extremely unhappy
in this world, religion gives him the vision of a God ....
who will make him even more so in the next. I know
they get out of this dilemma by saying that God's good-
ness will give place to his justice; but a goodness which

gives place to terrible cruelty is not infinite Would

it not have been more in keeping with his goodness, with
reason and with equity only to have created plants and
stones, rather than to form men whose conduct can bring

123

MARQUIS DE SADE

on them infinite pain? A God treacherous and evil
enough to create a single man and then to expose him to
the danger of self-damnation cannot be considered as

perfect; he can only be considered as a monster "

And finally, "If you want a God, let Him be faultless and
worthy of respect ! "

This cry is continually re-appearing; man has made
God in his own image, 10 God is either impotent or cruel; 11
give us a God worthy of respect !

His hatred for the God that had deceived him is rabid.
No opportunity for reviling, for ridicule, for imprecations,
for blasphemy is neglected; the mockery and insults are
so intense that they tend to miss their effect. With con-
siderable inconsistency (at least on the surface) a number
of black masses are described. (It is an interesting com-
ment on human frailty that the engraving illustrating
one of these is nearly always torn out from the first
edition; the possessors didn't mind reading the descrip-
tions or admiring the naive obscenities of the other ninety-
nine plates ; but a line had to be drawn somewhere !) De
Sade indeed feels called upon to make excuses; the
importance others would attach to such acts is their
justification.

ii

In place of the God he could not respect, de Sade
enthroned Nature as the prime mover of the universe;
but this Nature is not a consistent conception; in the
fifteen years covered by his writings the idea undergoes
constant modifications. In the Dialogue she is considered
as pleasant, beneficent and philanthropic, somewhat in
the style of Rousseau; within three years she becomes
"That unknown brute" 'bete,' I think, carries the idea
of stupidity without any moral inflection; another three
years and it is "the disorders of that stepmother,

124

GOD AND NATURE

Nature "; until finally in La Nouvelle Justine she becomes
a sort of malevolent goddess, entirely occupied in harming
mankind, and who is best seen in the Sahara desert or the
crater of Etna. 12

This degradation of Nature is accompanied by_a
deradation of man and of "The kw nf

latter changes from "MaW r^/*rc oc K^ppy as yon wish
to be yourself " to "Please yourself no matter at whose

sole object in creation is to have

the pleasure of destruction; while man is destroying, is
giving free vein to all the criminal instincts Nature has
planted in him, he is being natural, following in Nature's
plans; virtue, and education which leads to virtue, is
unnatural. It follows that ethically man's mission is an
endless battle against this adversary, this ogress Nature;
but pleasure and pain are her weapons, and the former
can only be achieved from following her will.

From this personification of Nature there emerges a
version of Bernard Shaw's peculiarly unscientific worship
of the "Life Force" a Force which possesses all the
ascetic, benevolent and partly informed qualities of its
inventor; de Sade's version is not so personal. "Once
man has been launched on to the earth he received direct
laws from which he cannot depart; these laws are those
of self-preservation and propagation . , . laws which
affect him and depend on him, but which are in no way
necessary to Nature ; for he is no longer a part of Nature ;
he is separated from her. He is entirely distinct, so much
so that he is no longer useful to her progress ... or
necessary to her combinations, so that he could quadruple
his species or completely annihilate it, without in the least
altering the universe. If he multiplies he does right in
his own eyes, if he decreases he does wrong, equally in
his own eyes. But in the eyes of Nature it is quite dif-

125

MARQUIS DE SADE

ferent. If he multiplies he does wrong, for he deprives
Nature of the honour of a new phenomenon, the results
of her laws being necessarily creatures. If those that
have been launched didn't multiply, she would launch
new beings, and would enjoy a faculty she has no longer.
Not that she could not have it if she wished to, but she
never does anything uselessly, and as long as the first
beings launched propagate themselves by the faculties

they have in them, she will not propagate any more

You will object perhaps that if this faculty of self-propaga-
tion, which her creatures have, harmed her, she would not
have given it to them . . . but she is not free, she is the
first slave of her laws . . . she is enchained by her
laws which she cannot alter in any jot or tittle, and one
of these laws is the vital urge of her creatures once made
and their faculty for self-propagation. But were these
creatures to stop propagating or be destroyed then

Nature would regain her primal rights Does she

not prove to us how much our multiplication irritates
her .... by the plagues with which she ceaselessly visits
us, the divisions she sows amongst us .... by the wars
and famines, plagues and monsters, criminals like
Alexander, Tamberlaine, Gengis Khan, all the heroes
which devastate the earth. . . ," 14 The Pope, who
makes this speech, goes on to prove the equality of all
things in the eyes of Nature, and therefore the unimpor-
tance of murder, whether through passion, ritual, custom
or war, with examples drawn from every country.

This view of Nature, with its implications, is the best
known in fact practically the only known part of de
Sade's Weltanschauung; for La Nouvelle Justine, by far
the most notorious of his books, is almost exclusively
occupied with the development and application of this
theory; in this book almost all the characters are anti-

126

GOD AND NATURE

social 'natural' men, as in Juliette they are anti-social rich
men. The epigraph to the book :

On n'est point criminel pour faire la peinture
Des bizarres penchans qu'inspire la Nature.

stresses the point.

Nature proceeds by destruction and corruption:
" When the seed germinates in the earth, when it fertilises
and reproduces itself is it otherwise than by corruption,
and is not corruption the first of the laws of generation ?" 15
and consequently human destruction and corruption
follow Nature's laws. Do not our instincts urge us to
such actions, and are not our instincts the voice of
Nature? 16 It follows that we are in no way responsible
for our tastes and inclinations: "Is man the master of his
tastes ? One should be sorry for those that have strange
ones, but never insult them; their wrong is Nature's; they
were no more capable of coming into the world with
different tastes than we are of being born plain or beauti-
ful. " 17 ; and he who abandons himself most recklessly to
the promptings of Nature will be happiest, although
nowadays "we are more creatures of habit than of
Nature/' 18

This conception has far more extensive results than
the removal of responsibility from man for his criminal
behaviour; it is an implicit and explicit criticism of the
backward-looking optimism of Rousseau and all his
school, including Condorcet and Babeuf. It completely
dethrones the 'noble savage' with what glee does not
de Sade comb the accounts of foreign travel for instances
of savage barbarity, lust and superstition 1 and the notion
that man can revert to justice and happiness. If the idea
that a satisfactory civilisation must be man-made, planned
and unnatural had been able to gain currency when de

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MARQUIS DE SADE

Sade first formulated it the history of the revolutions of
the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth
century would not be so disheartening.

For de Sade, savage man knows only two necessities
hunger and lust; 19 there is only one distinction
force, 20 the result of Nature's inequality. "What mortal
is fool enough to assert, against all the evidence, that men
are born with equal rights or strength? Only a mis-
anthropist like Rousseau would dare to establish such a
paradox, because, being very weak himself, he prefers
to degrade to his own level those to whom he did not dare
raise himself. But how can a pigmy be the equal of ....
Hercules? .... In the beginning of societies .... a
family or village being forced to defend itself chose amongst
its members the person who seemed to unite the qualities
(strength, cleverness, etc.) mentioned above. Once the
chief had been given this authority he took slaves from

amongst the weakest When societies became

established, the descendants of these first chiefs, accus-
tomed to represent their fathers, although often far from
equalling them in physical or moral qualities, continued

to exercise authority This was the origin of

aristocracy They inherited a power handed over

to their predecessors by necessity; they abused it by
caprice " 21

This view of the origin of society has the double
advantage over Rousseau's of being more in accordance
with probability, and of placing the golden age of man-
kind in the future, rather than in the past. The next two
chapters will be occupied with de Sade's diagnosis of
contemporary civilisation and the various remedies he
proposed.

128

CHAPTER V
POLITICS I. DIAGNOSIS

Prisons are built with the stones of law,
Brothels with bricks of Religion.

W. BLAKE,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In every cry of every Man
In every Infant's cry of Fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning church appals;
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
W. BLAKE,

Songs of Experience.

I. CLASS DIVISIONS

IN Europe society is divided into two antagonistic
classes the haves and the have-nots. This point is so
fundamental for de Sade that he stresses it in every book.
In Aline et Valcour the good king Zam begins his
description of his visit to Europe by saying :" Every where
I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable;
in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures;
in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never
found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter
the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes
were working for their common misery ....;! saw the

129 i

MARQUIS DE SADE

rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while
doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and
despised by the other, did not even receive the encourage-
ment necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality
and was told it was Utopian; but I soon saw that those
who denied its possibility were those who would lose by
it "!

At.

He defines his conception of these classes very exactly.
"Don't think that I mean by the people the caste called
the tiers-etat [bourgeoisie in the limited sense]; no, I
mean by the people . , . . those who can only get a living
by their labour and sweat/' This is the beginning of a
treatise on the class-war by the extremely savage fascist
Bishop of Grenoble ; and de Sade, trying to guard against
the misunderstanding of which he has been a perpetual
victim, adds a footnote saying, "Considering in whose
mouth we place these projects of despotism and terror,
our readers will not be able to accuse us of trying to make
them liked." He deceived himself on his readers'
acuity.

The Bishop continues: "That is the class that I would
abandon to perpetual chains and humiliation . . . . ; all
others ought to join together against this abject class ....
to fasten chains upon them, since they in their turn will
be enchained if they relax." He then outlines a series of
oppressive measures to be enforced against the workers
and peasants, which include public torture and execution,
and adds, "By these projects how well will the hatred
be satisfied of those numerous gentlemen for this wretched
class of which Saint-Pouanges, Archbishop of Toulouse,
could not see a representative without belabouring him
with abuse and blows, or having him set upon by his
servants l" a

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POLITICS I. DIAGNOSIS

II. NATURE OF PROPERTY

This distinction of classes is founded on property;
and with unaccustomed epigrammatic terseness de Sade
defined property as "a crime committed by the rich
against the poor." 3 But he examined this institution
more closely. " Going back to the origin of the right of
property/' he writes, "we come necessarily to usurpation.
But theft is only punished because it attacks the right
of property; but that right is in origin itself a theft, so

that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft

As long as there is no property legitimately established
(which is impossible) it will be very difficult to prove
theft a crime." 4

He accepts Rousseau's premise of the Social Contract
but his elaboration of the idea is individual. "When laws
were made and the weak consented to lose some of his
liberty to preserve the rest, the continued and peaceful
enjoyment of his possessions was undoubtedly the first
thing he desired, and the first object of the restraints he
asked for. The stronger consented to laws he knew he
could wriggle out of, and they were made. It was pro-
nounced that every man should possess his heritage in
peace, and anyone troubling it should be punished. But
that was not the work of Nature but of man, henceforth
divided into two classes; the first who gave up a quarter
of its rights to possess the rest in peace ; the second who,
profiting by this quarter and seeing it could have the
other three portions when it wanted consented to prevent,
not his class despoiling the weak, but the weak despoiling
one another, so that it alone could despoil them at its
ease. So theft .... was not banished from the earth
but changed its form; people robbed legally. Magis-
trates robbed in having themselves paid for a justice they
should give gratuitously. The priest robbed in having

MARQUIS DE SADE

himself paid for acting as a mediator between man and
his God. The merchant robbed by profiteering, by
having his goods paid at a third more than their real
intrinsic value. Sovereigns robbed in imposing on their
subjects arbitrary taxes and imposts, etc. All these
thievings were permitted and authorised under the
specious name of 'rights,' and action was only taken
against the most natural, that is to say against the man
who lacked money and tried to get it from those whom he
suspected to be richer than him, without considering that
the first thieves, to whom not a word was said, were the
unique cause of the crimes of the second. . . . When
the miserable peasant, reduced to charity by the enormous
taxes you impose upon him, leaves his plough, takes arms
and goes to await you on the highroad you commit an
infamous action if you punish him ; it is not he who is
in fault. . . ." 5

III. THE RULING CLASSES THEIR POLICIES AND

MECHANISM

These remarks on property come at the beginning of
"Juliette^ and are obviously intended to act as guide to the
motives of the politicians, kings, and financiers who
people the six volumes of this work. The first three
volumes deal with France, the fourth with Italy; and most
of the fifth consists of a brief review of the sovereigns of
Northern Europe, with the exception of England. With-
out giving a precis of the whole work it is difficult to
illustrate de Sade's very thorough examination of the
ruling classes; he exposes a system of corruption and
intrigue which often reads like a description of the United
States to-day, together with a hard-heartedness and
sanctimonious cynicism which might have served as a
model to Hitler's Germany or our own National Govern-

132

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

ment. The astounding feature of the book is its
modernity; it is difficult to realise that it is the eighteenth
and not the twentieth century he is describing. The
following speech of Saint-Fond, for example, might easily
be part of a manifesto by one of the franker members of
the front Tory benches. "We are frightened/' he says,
"of a revolution in the kingdom shortly; we see its germ
in a too numerous population. The greater the extension
of the masses, the greater the danger ; the more enlightened
they are the more they are to be feared. First of all
we are going to suppress all the free schools whose lessons,
propagating too rapidly, give us painters, poets and
philosophers where we only want labourers. What need
have people like that of talents, and what use is there in
giving them to them? Let us rather diminish their
number; France has need of a vigorous bleeding, and it
is the shameful parts we must attack. To attain this
aim we are first of all going to attack the unemployed with
the greatest rigour; it is almost always from that class that
agitators appear; we are going to destroy the hospitals
and refuges; we don't want to leave the masses a single
asylum which can encourage their insolence. Bound
under chains a thousand times heavier than those they
bear in Asia, we want them to crawl like slaves, and we will
spare no means to accomplish this aim. 'These pro-
ceedings will be long,' said Clairwil, 'and if you want to
act quickly you want speedier ones: war, famine, plague.'
'The first is certain,' replied Saint-Fond, 'We are shortly
going to have a war. We don't want the third for we
might be among the victims. As for famine, the corner
in grain at which we're working, will firstly cover us with
riches and will soon reduce the masses to eating one
another. The Cabinet has decided on it because it is
prompt, infallible, and will cover us with gold.'"

133

MARQUIS DE SADE

(It may be remembered that in 1932-33 the National
Government attacked the principle of free secondary
education and scholarships; lowered the dole by the
means test; and sent up the price of bread and many other
foodstuffs by means of tariffs, quotas, import boards and
the like. Their preparations for war on the other hand,
are far too efficient to allow criticism.)

Saint-Fond then continues his speech with an exaltation
of the State which neither Hitler nor Mussolini could
improve on. " 'For a long time,' continued the minister,
* penetrated as I am with the principles of Machiavelli,
I have been completely persuaded that individuals are of
no account in politics. Secondary machines of govern-
ment, men should work for the prosperity of the govern-
ment, and not the government for the prosperity of men.
Governments occupied with the individual are weak, the
only vigorous one is that which counts itself for every-
thing, and men for nothing; the greater or lesser number
of slaves in the State is indifferent, what is essential is
that the chains weigh heavily on the people, and that the
sovereign should be despotic. While Rome was a
democracy she was weak and feeble; when tyrants took
authority she was mistress of the earth. All force should
be concentrated in the sovereign, and since that force is
only moral, since physically the masses are the more
powerful, it can only be by an uninterrupted series of
despotic actions that the government can acquire the
physical force it lacks; otherwise it will only exist in
ideal. When we wish to impose on others we must
accustom them little by little to see in us what really
doesn't exist, otherwise they will see us as we are and we
will infallibly lose.' 'I have always believed/ said
Clairwil, 'that the art of governing men is the one which
demands the maximum of hypocrisy/ 'That is true/

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POLITICS I. DIAGNOSIS

replied Saint-Fond, 'and the reason is obvious; you can
only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypo-
critical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never
let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him
of enlightenment to lead him as we want, and that can
only be done by hypocrisy. . , . The government must
have more energy than the governed ; well, if that of the
governed is mixed with crimes, how can you expect the
government itself not to be criminal ? Are the punish-
ments used against men anything except crimes ? What

excuses them? State necessity '" 6 Elsewhere he

(Saint-Fond) develops his desire for a plutocratic oligarchy
with a slave basis; 7 he gained his position by sleeping with
the king's mistress.

I have thought it better to give one fairly long and
exhaustive quotation, rather than the large number of
shorter ones that I had originally prepared. They are all
of much the same tenor; they all exhibit the same greed
for money and power; Machiavelli is continually quoted;
and all exhibit the same hatred and fear of the masses.
The chief of the police at Rome, e.g., plans to kill off all
the unemployed on the grounds that "they are not only
a charge on the honest man, but will become dangerous
if the dole is stopped." 8 Juliette is one of the most
thorough, as it is by fifty years the first, analysis of a
society ruled by money.

Noirceuil, one of Juliette's earlier lovers, gives her as a
present an income of a thousand crowns with the remark
that it was intended for the hospitals: "The sick will have
a few soups less, and you a few more fal-lals." 9 and in
Aline et Valcour the judge remarks: "The happiness of
being above others gives one a right to think differently
from them; that is the first effect of superiority; the second
is its abuse .... which allows one man to betray the

'35

MARQUIS DE SADE

State, make his fortune and retire on the grounds that
he is ruined (the abominable Sartine), another to destroy
the internal trade of France, because his mistresses'
absurd plan is worth two million to him (the criminal
Lenoir); and a hundred others get together to make a
corner in the people's food, and then starve the same
people by re-selling to them the food they have stolen
from them at ten times its proper value." 10

These passages read as though they were extracts from
some work of Upton Sinclair's describing the American
Red Cross scandals, or the operations of Chicago's magis-
trates and speculators. Indeed there is a certain resem-
blance between the two authors, including the gusto with
which they describe capitalist villainy; but de Sade's
more firmly embedded and logical principles would never
have led him into making a hero and martyr of such a
person as William Fox. Both, for instance, might have
remarked: "He conducted his business honestly; wasn't
that more than enough ground for him to be promptly
crushed?" 11

At the head, at any rate nominally, of the different
States, were kings. Nominally, for in some States the
financiers and politicians held the real power; Saint-
Fond is more powerful than the king himself. De Sade
gives a rapid glance at the holders of the greater number
of European thrones. He wrote in a period when royalty
was particularly unfortunate in its representatives and
rich in fools and monsters. France possessed the some-
what ludicrous Louis XVI and his wife; Tuscany,
Leopold; Naples, the appalling Ferdinand and Caroline;
Russia, Catherine the Great, nymphomaniac and poisoner
. . . the list is tedious. De Sade has a certain amount of
praise for Gustavus III of Sweden and more for Frederick
of Prussia, the philosophical king; and he passes over

136

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

in silence the King of England. De Sade never takes
them very seriously, though his criticisms are not
unfounded; he makes the perspicacious remark that if
kings are beginning to lose credit in Europe it is their
humanity which is destroying them. 12

The accompaniment of tyranny is organised religion.
"When the strong wished to enslave the weak he per-
suaded him that a god had sanctified the chains with which
he loaded him, and the latter, stupefied by misery,
believed all he was told." 13 This point was dealt with in
the last chapter, but a curious passage in Aline et Falcour^
a discussion between a Frenchman and a Portuguese, is
worth quoting. The Portuguese is complaining of the
damage done to his country's commerce and agriculture
by the Inquisition, and the preponderating place the
English have gained in their internal commerce; the
Frenchman advises a revolt against the Inquisition:
"Destroy and annihilate them; enchain these dangerous
enemies of your freedom and commerce in their own
chains; let the last autodafe in Lisbon be these criminals.
But if you ever had the courage to do this a very funny
thing would happen; the English, who are quite rightly
the enemies of this monstrous tribunal, would neverthe-
less become its defenders; they would protect it because
it serves their purpose; they would support it because
it holds you in the subjection they desire; it would be all
over again the story of the Turks protecting the Pope
against the Venetians, so true is it that superstition is a
powerful arm in the hands of despotism, and that our
own interest often forces us to make others respect what
we ourselves despise." 14

Politics and finance are succinctly summed up in two
sentences: "Politics, which teach men to deceive their
equals without being deceived themselves, that science

137

MARQUIS DE SADE

born of falseness and ambition, which the statesman calls
a virtue, the social man a duty, and the honest man a
vice. . . ," 15 "The financier taught me about the
raising of taxes the atrocious system of enriching one-
self alone at the expense of many unfortunates . . .
without thereby helping the State." 16

War is simply public and authorised murder, in which
hiredmen slaughter oneanother in the interests of tyrants. 17
It proves nothing except the ambition of the people
promoting it "The sword is the weapon of him who is
in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and
stupidity/' 18 It is merely imperial brigandage. "When
Bras-de-fer and his companions join together to rob a
coach, are they any different to two sovereigns who join
together to despoil a third ? Yet the latter expect laurels
and immortality for crimes unnecessarily committed,
while the former will only get contempt, shame and the
gibbet for crimes authorised by hunger, the most
imperious of laws." 19 The inconsistency of governments
is laughed at when "they teach publicly the art of murder,
and reward him who is most successful in practising it,
and yet punish the man who gets rid of his enemy for a
private reason." 20 He had no patience with the notion of
honour whether it concerned private duels or war. "It
is pride, not necessity, which makes tyrants order their
generals to destroy other nations." 21 About duels, he
says, "Honour is an illusion born of human conventions
and customs, which are merely based on absurdity; it is
equally untrue that a man gains honour by assassinating
his country's enemies and that he loses it by assassinating
his own." 22

The object of colonial expansion is to acquire cheap
labour and raw materials: "As long as a State's riches is
counted in gold, the mineral being in the bowels of the

138

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

earth, labour is necessary to get it up, therefore slavery
is necessary and the subjugation of negroes by the

whites " 23 We are shown colonial expansion at

work, in the person of a kindly and honourable Portu-
guese delegate employing every form of lying, bribery
and treachery for the aims of State ; when he is acting for
his prince he can commit crimes which would make him
tremble if they were personal. 24 Understandably the
great fear of the people of Tamoe in the South Seas is
European colonisation.

We have seen that de Sade described the English
penetration of Portugal ; similarly of Sweden he writes :
"The English are always ready to serve those they think
they can swallow up one day, after having disturbed their
trade or weakened their power by means of their usurious
loans. " 25 It may be remarked in passing that de Sade
seems to have had a great liking for the English; he is
continually excluding them from his strictures and
praising them for their honesty. He also prophesies a
great future for the United States: "The Republic of
Washington will grow little by little, like that of Romulus,
and will first subjugate America, and then make the rest
of the world tremble.'' 26

IV. THEIR RELATION TO THE POOR. THE POOR

Besides contractual relations there are also emotional
connections between the haves and have-nots. The
feelings of the rich for the poor can be divided into two
groups dislike and fear on the one hand, pity and
charity on the other. The former are the commoner.
When Juliette was suddenly left orphaned and penniless
she appealed for charity to the Mother Superior of the
convent where she was being educated, thinking that as
she had always been a great favourite of hers when she

139

MARQUIS DE SADE

was rich, she would get help when she was poor. She
was rudely rebuffed and at first could not understand why.
" Alas, I said to myself, why does my misfortune make her
so cruel? Are rich Juliette and poor Juliette two dif-
ferent creatures? .... Ah! I did not realise yet that
poverty was a charge on wealth, nor did I know how much
it was feared by the latter ... to what extent wealth
flees from it, and that the fear it has of being forced to
relieve it results in a strong antipathy for it. But,
I continued reflecting, how is it that that libertine, nay
criminal woman, does not fear the indiscretion of those
whom she treats so brusquely? Another puerility on
my part; I didn't know the insolence and effrontery in
vice displayed by wealth and credit. Madame Delbene
was the Superior of one of the most famous Abbeys in
Paris, she had an income of 60,000 livres, influence with
everyone of importance at Court and in town; to what
extent should she not despise a poor girl like me, young,
orphaned and penniless, who could only oppose her
injustice with reclamations which would soon be disposed
of, or complaints which, immediately treated as libels,
would perhaps have gained for the girl who had the

boldness to utter them, eternal loss of liberty!

Very well," I said to myself, "my only plan is to try to
become rich in my turn, then I will be as shameless as
this woman, and will enjoy the same rights and the same
pleasures." 27 Her plan succeeded; as Saint-Fond's mis-
tress she became excessively rich, and a local famine gave
her an excuse to put in practice the lesson she had learned.
"People came to beg for charity; I was firm and with
great impertinence coloured my refusal with the excuse
of the enormous expenses my gardens were causing me.
4 How can I afford to give charity/ I said insolently, * when
I have to have mirrored boudoirs in my woods and alleys

140

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

adorned with statues ?'" 88 (c.f., the continual cry that
crushing taxation makes the upkeep of large estates
impossible, and yet people loll in luxury on the dole).

This is the most common attitude ; it is adorned some-
times by the pleasure people feel in their opulence con-
trasted with the surrounding misery. This trait is most
general with financiers. 29

Among others, however, and particularly among the
less rich, this attitude is replaced by the exercise of the
vile virtues pity and charity. "Pity is a purely egoistical
feeling, which makes us be sorry for the misfortunes of
others which we fear for ourselves. If there was a person
exempt from all human ills, not only would he not feel
any sort of pity, he could not even conceive it. Another
proof that pity is only a passive reaction .... is that we
are always more moved by a misfortune that happens to
an unknown under our eyes than that of our dearest friend

a thousand miles away Another proof that this

sentiment is founded purely on weakness and cowardice is

that it is stronger in women and children than men

Similarly the poor, who are nearer to misery than the rich,
are naturally more touched by the misfortunes chance
offers to their eyes ; since these ills are nearer to them they
have greater sympathy with them. . . ." 30 He goes on
to claim that it is an undesirable and insulting feeling.

Similarly charity "is bad for the poor .... and even
more dangerous for the rich, who thinks he has acquired
all the virtues when he has given a few shillings to the
clergy or idlers a sure method of covering your own
vices by encouraging others. '" 31 Elsewhere charity is
defined as "a vice of pride, rather than a virtue of the
soul." 32 De Sade continually harps on this theme, per-
haps with the presentiment that in his old age he would
be reduced to this indignity, (Despite his general

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MARQUIS DE SADE

scepticism, de Sade admits as verified presentiments,
thought-reading, dowsing, clairvoyance and phantasms
of the living. 33 )

The attitude of the poor to the rich varies between a
religious and patriotic resignation and complete cynicism.
The poor do not figure largely in his works, nor are they
very articulate. The adventuress la Dubois says to the
resigned Justine, "The hard-heartedness of the rich
legitimises the rascality of the poor; let their purse be
opened to our wants, let humanity reign in their hearts,
and virtues can establish themselves in ours; but as long
as our misery, our patience in supporting it, our honesty
and our slavery only help to double our burdens our
crimes become their work. ... It amuses me to hear
rich people, judges, magistrates, preach virtue to us; it is
indeed difficult to refrain from stealing when one has
three times more than one needs to live, indeed difficult
never to think of murder when one is surrounded with
flatterers and prostrate slaves, terribly hard truly to be
temperate and sober when pleasure intoxicates them and
the most delicate food surrounds them, a real hardship to
be truthful when they have no interest in lying/' 34 Later
in the book, when Justine, more miserable than ever,
meets la Dubois who has achieved prosperity, the latter
explains, "I want equality, I only preach that. If I have
corrected the caprices of fate it is because, crushed and
annihilated by the inequalities of fortune and rank, seeing
on the one side tyranny and on the other misery and
humiliation, I desired neither to shine with the pride of
the rich nor to vegetate in the humility of the poor." 35
De Sade has some extremely moving passages in which
he describes the life of the poor. "The unhappy man
waters his bread with tears; a day's hard work hardly
gives him enough to bring back in the evening to his

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POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

family the wherewithal to preserve life; the taxes he is
obliged to pay take away the greater part of his thin
savings; his naked and illiterate children dispute with
the beasts of the forest the vilest food, while his wife's
breasts, dried up by want, cannot give to the nursling
that first part of nourishment which will give him the
strength to go, to get the rest, to share that of the wolves ;
till finally, bowed down under the weight of years, ill-
treatment and grief, always under the hand of misfortune,
he sees the end of his career coming, without the star of
heaven having for one instant shone pure and serene on
his humbled head." 36

In La Philosophic dans le Boudoir the young chevalier
reproaches the libertine Dolmanc: "When your body,
tired out by pleasures alone, rests languidly on beds of
down, look at theirs, worn out by the work which makes
you rich, gather a little straw to protect them from the
cold of the earth, whose surface they, like the beasts,
have as only resting-place; give a glance to them when,
surrounded by succulent dishes with which twenty chefs
tickle daily your sensuality, these poor people dispute
with the wolves the bitter roots of the dried earth ; when
laughter, graces and sport lead to your impure couch the
most charming objects of Cythera's temple, see this
unhappy man lying beside his sad wife, satisfied with the
pleasures he gathers among tears, without suspecting
that others exist; look at him when you refuse yourself
nothing, and float in the midst of superfluity; look at
him, I say, lacking even the first necessities of life; cast
your eyes on his desolate family; see his trembling wife
tenderly dividing herself between the attentions she owes
to her husband languishing beside her and those ordered
by Nature for the pledges of their love; deprived of the
possibility of fulfilling any of these duties, so sacred for a

H3

MARQUIS DE SADE

sensitive mind, hear her, without trembling, if you can, a!
you for the superfluity your cruelty refuses her, . . .
Dolmanc replies: "You are young, as your conversatic
proves, and inexperienced; later you will not speak so w<
of men, when you know them. Their ingratitude dri<
up my heart, their perfidiousness destroyed in me tho
virtues for which I was born perhaps as much
you. . , ." 37

These passages are over-written, but they do, I thin
show real feeling of a sort which the reputation of tl
monster-author would not lead one to expect; and it w
probably of himself that de Sade thought when he quot<
Marmontel's remark: "II y a un exces dans la sensibili
qui avoisine Tinsensibilit^." 38

V. LAW AND JUSTICE. PRISON. THE DEATH
PENALTY

It follows from the foregoing analysis of society th
the law-courts only dispense a class justice, in favour
the rich. "The judge generally takes the part of t]
stronger both by personal interest and the secret ai
invincible inclination which makes us all favour o
equals/' 39 "The case against a poor woman witho
credit or protection is quickly dealt with in Franc
Honesty is believed to be incompatible with miser
and in our law-courts poverty is sufficient proof again
the accused. . . ." 40

The object of the law is not to prevent crime, but
keep crime within certain prescribed limits. "Ti
difference that laws have made is that instead of t!
strong having power as primitively, it is now the ri<
and well-born" 41 (c.f. origin of laws in last chapte
"The laws of a people are never anything but the ma
and the result of the interests of the legislators." 48 " Ti

14.4.

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

object of laws is either to multiply crimes, or to allow them
to be committed with impunity." 43 Only the smaller
fry among criminals get caught: "I didn't steal enough,
a little more vision and all would have been kept quiet;
it is only second-class malefactors who get caught." 44
" There are two sorts of criminals, one whose powerful
fortune and immense credit put out of danger, and the
other, born poor, who will not be able to escape if he is
taken." 45

When the law gets hold of a guilty man (or a supposed
guilty man: "A hundred innocent for one guilty, that is
the spirit of the law" 46 ) its object is not reformation, but
revenge, "The laziness and folly of legislators led them
to invent the law of talion. It was much easier to say,
4 Let us do to him what he has done/ than to proportion
spiritually and equitably the punishment to the crime." 47
The stupidity of punishments made de Sade cry: "Mur-
derers, imprisoners, fools of every country and every
government, when will you prefer the science of knowing
man to that of shutting him up and killing him?" 48

The ideas of justice and crime are anyhow purely local
and arbitrary, as de Sade points out at great length. "The
claim of your semi-philosopher Montaigne that justice
is eternal and unalterable at all times and places is false;
it depends on human conventions, characters, tempera-
ments, local morality. If this were so, the same author
continues, it would be a truth so terrible .that one would
have to hide it from oneself. But why disguise such
essential truths ? Should man hide from any of them ?" 49
In this connection his pamphlet on the manner in which
laws should be sanctioned, already described in the first
chapter, should be remembered.

The punishments of the law were motivated by the
spirit of revenge, and de Sade, who pronounced revenge

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MARQUIS DE SADE

unworthy of an honourable man (even reporting to the
police) 60 five years before he so signally put his theories
into practice considered the penalties then in vogue as
barbarous as they were useless.

"I don't say that one should let crimes continue, but I
claim that it is better first of all to decide, which hasn't
been done, what really troubles society and what in fact
doesn't do it any harm; once the tort is recognised people
should work to cure it and extirpate it from the nation,
and you don't succeed in doing that by punishment;
if the law were wise it would never inflict any punishment
except one which tends to correct the guilty and preserve
them to the State. The law is false when it merely
punishes, detestable when its only object is to destroy the
criminal without teaching him, to frighten without
improving him, and to commit an infamy as great as the
original one without gaining anything from it." 61

The punishments used, then as now, were torture,
imprisonment and death. Torture, whether used for
discovering evidence (third degree) or for punishment
(the cat, etc.) were for de Sade such obvious barbarities
that their only use was to make the citizen of a country
where they were employed blush for shame. 62

Mere deprivation of liberty was equally useless. " The
only excuse (of prisons) is the hope of correction; but
you must know very little of man to imagine that prison
can ever have that effect on him; you don't correct a male-
factor by isolating him, but by giving him back to the
society he has outraged; from there he should receive his
daily punishment, and it is the only school at which he
can improve; reduced to a fatal solitude, to a dangerous
vegetation, to a tragic abandonment, his vices germinate,
his blood boils, his head ferments; the impossibility
of satisfying his desires fortifies the criminal cause of

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POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

them, and he comes out slyer and more dangerous

If your prisons .... had produced even a single con-
version .... there would be some point in continuing
them, but you cannot quote a single example of a man
made better by chains. How can he be ? How can one
become better in the midst of depravity and degradation ?
Can one gain anything in the midst of the most contagious
examples of greed, roguery and cruelty? Characters
become degraded, morals corrupted; you become vile,
lying, ferocious, sordid, treacherous, mean, underhand,
a perjurer like those who surround you; in a word all
your virtues are changed to vices and you come out full
of horror for mankind, occupied only in harming them
and revenging yourself." 53

As an example they are equally useless; crimes are
committed for two reasons either want or passion. If
either stimulus is strong enough no amount of fear is
going to restrain the criminal ; the heaviness of penalties
does not decrease the amount of crimes ; their only result
is to make the petty criminal more desperate. 64 New
laws merely create new crimes ; the only solution is to change
society to a form in which crime does not become a
necessity for anyone. " Destroy the interest a person has
in breaking the law and you will take away the means
from him of contravening it." 65

The only exception to this rule is the case of criminal
natures who commit crime because it is a crime, for the
sole pleasure of breaking laws. " Against such it is useless
to make laws; the stronger the ramparts raised against
them, the greater the pleasure in breaking them down
.... such people are rare .... one should try to win
them by kindness and honour, or else attempt to make
them change the motives of their habits" (sublimation). 56

His final conclusions are: "Honour is man's guiding

147

MARQUIS DE SADE

rein ; if you know how to use it properly you can lead
him where you will; with a whip always in your hand
you humiliate, discourage and finally lose him/' 57 "If
you destroy a man's self-respect you make a criminal out
of him." 58 "Once a criminal is recognised as dangerous
he must be withdrawn from society .... either by
banishment or by making him better by forcing him to
be useful to the people he has outraged. But don't
throw him inhumanly into those poisoned cloacas, where
all that surrounds him is so gangrened that it becomes
uncertain which will finish his corruption the quicker,
the frightful examples he receives from those in charge
of him or the hardened impenitence of his unhappy
companions . . . murder him even less, for blood
repairs nothing and instead of one crime you now have
two. . . ." 59

The whole passage on crime and punishment is quite
extraordinary; had space permitted the whole fifty pages 60
from which the above extracts are drawn were worthy
of quotation; doubly extraordinary indeed, for not only
is it in accordance with the ideas and experience of the
most modern penologists both theoretical and practical
(cf., for example Lawes' 20,000 Tears in Sing Sing);
it is unique in being the considered opinion of a prisoner
written while he was still in prison.

Both in his works and in his life de Sade showed him-
self an inveterate enemy of the death penalty; it is a theme
continually recurring in his works from the earliest
onwards. The one case in which he hesitated was that
of a crime against the State ; but even for this he preferred
exile. His numerous arguments against it reduce to the
syllogism, "Is murder a crime or not? If it is not, why
punish it? If it is, why punish it by a similar crime?" 61
His account of its origin is curious. "The Celts justified

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POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

their horrible practice of human sacrifice with the excuse
that the gods could only be appeased by the redemption

of one man's life by another's When contact

with the Romans altered their customs the victims
destined to the gods were no longer chosen among the
old men or the prisoners of war; only criminals were
sacrificed, always under the absurd supposition that
nothing was so pleasing to God's altars as the blood of
man When governments became Christian any-
thing which that doctrine condemned was turned into
a capital crime; little by little your sins were turned into
crimes; you thought you had the right to imitate the
thunder you placed in the hands of divine justice, and you
hanged and broke on the wheel because you imagined
that God did so. ... Nearly all the laws of St. Louis
are founded on these sophistries. We know it and we
don't change, because it is far simpler to hang men than
to find out why we condemn them. . . ," 62

VI. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

(a) Patriotism. De Sade was always a strong local
patriot. In his earliest work he writes: " Kings and their
majesties alone impress me; he who does not love his
country and his king is not fit to live." 63 His respect
for kings soon diminished, but his love for his country
continues all through his writings. He was, however,
always against imperialist aggression; he advises his
country to " Fortify its frontiers . . . and renounce the
spirit of conquest; only occupied in protecting your
boundaries you will no longer have the necessity of
keeping up a large army. By this means you would give
back a hundred thousand men to agriculture and do away
with the licence and debauchery of the barracks. . . ." 64
The enthusiasm he professed for the republic has already

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MARQUIS DE SADE

been seen. This love of his land did not, however, carry
with it necessarily the idea of a sovereign State ; one of
the characters in Juliette is made a member of a Lodge at
Stockholm, in which the oath is taken "to exterminate all
kings; to wage eternal war on the Catholic religion and
the Pope; to preach the liberty of nations; and to found a
universal republic." 65 See also Section ii in the following
chapter.

() The Directoire. Obviously de Sade could not
express openly his criticisms of the actual government at
the time of publication; and although Juliette and in a
less degree La Nouvelle Justine are a tacit criticism in
nearly every line, there is only one occasion in which de
Sade openly criticises the Republic, and then only in a
footnote. The occasion is the initiation of a minor charac-
ter into the Masonic Lodge at Stockholm mentioned
above where a senatorial anti-monarchical conspiracy is
being hatched; de Sade takes advantage of this oppor-
tunity to attack the Masons for their self-seeking under
the cover of philanthropy. The following interrogation
between the Master and the man who wants to become a
member takes place :

"6* What motives make you detest the despotism
of kings ?

A. Jealousy, ambition, pride, desperation in being
lorded over, the desire to lord it over others myself.

Q. Is the people's happiness of any importance to
you?

A. Not in the least. I am only interested in my own.

Q. And what r6le do the passions play in your way
of thinking about politics ?

A. The strongest. I have never believed that the
so-called statesman had any other real intentions than the
fullest gratification of his desires : his plans, the alliances

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POLITICS I. DIAGNOSIS

he makes, his projects, his taxes, even his laws are
designed for his personal happiness. The public good
never enters his thoughts and all that the duped masses
see him do is merely to increase his own wealth or power/*
To this dialogue he adds the revealing footnote: " Spirit
of the revolution of Stockholm, have you not somehow or other
come to Paris?"**

(c) Family Group and Position of Women. In the family
group de Sade saw the greatest danger to equality and to
the State; family interests are necessarily anti-social. He
proposed to avoid this inconvenience by the establishment
of national schools for all children. 67

He considered that the position of women both sexually
and legally was anomalous and unfair; consequently he
demanded complete equality of women and men in every
circumstance. 68 This notion of de Sade's is indeed so
important that Guillaume Apollinaire, one of his most
intelligent commentators, considered that it was chiefly
to illustrate this thesis that he wrote Justine and Juliette
and chose heroines instead of heroes.

(d] Education. Education was for de Sade potentially of
supreme importance, and it is therefore comprehensible
that he complained of the current education, which was
then even more stupid and unsuitable than it is to-day.
" Instead of teaching young men what they ought to
know they put in its place a thousand idiocies which are
only good to be trampled on as soon as one reaches the
age of reason. It would seem that they were only trying
to produce monks bigotry, fables, useless follies, and
never a sensible moral maxim. Go further, ask a young
man his true duties to society, ask him what he owes to
himself and to others, what line of conduct he should take
to be happy; he will tell you that he has learned to go to
Mass and recite litanies, but he doesn't understand a word

MARQUIS DE SADE

of what you are talking about, that he has learned
to sing and dance, but not to live among men/' 69 If for
litanies you substitute what is drolly called 'history,' and
for singing and dancing, cricket and football, the passage
is just as pertinent to-day.

(e) Agriculture. De Sade agreed with the contemporary
physiocrats in considering agriculture not only the main
industry of man and of countries, but also as the only
true source of all wealth. 70 "The man who goes to mine
gold from the bosom of the earth and leaves the friendly
soil which would nourish him with far less trouble is an
extravagant fool worthy of the greatest scorn.' ' 71 He
considered that to a great extent the actual impoverish-
ment of France was due to the too great centralisation and
the absence of the proprietors from their lands, so that
"instead of lords living despotically on their own lands
.... thirty thousand intriguing slaves fawn before one
man" 72 a criticism which history amply justifies.

(/) Population. De Sade was much occupied with the
idea of the optimum population, and in La Philosophic
dans le Boudoir he reaches conclusions very similar to those
put forward by Malthus three years later in his Essay
on Population. He did not pronounce definitely whether
France had passed the optimum, though he rather sus-
pected it had; the future danger was anyhow grave. 73
He pointed out the contradiction of France complaining
of a falling birth-rate, and insisting on the celibacy of
monks, nuns, soldiers and other functionaries. He was
against the preservation of malformed or diseased chil-
dren: "Any child who is born without the necessary
qualities which will allow him to become one day a useful
citizen has no right to life and the best thing to do is to
deprive him of it the moment he gets it." 74

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POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

VII. BUTUA A PARABLE OF CIVILISATION 75

The second volume of Aline et Valcour consists of the
description of the strange voyages of a young man called
Sainville. By a series of odd adventures he is cast on to
the Gold Coast in Central Africa. He tries to make his
way across the continent and after some days' hard
travelling he has the misfortune to observe a scene of
torture and cannibalism practised by one negro tribe on
their captured enemies ; but, as de Sade remarks in a foot-
note, "If it is a crime among savages to be conquered,
why should not they be allowed to punish criminals in
this way, just as we punish ours by similar proceedings?
So that if the same horror is found in two nations the one
has no right to be indignant with the other, because the
first acts with a little more ceremony: it is only the
philosopher who admits few crimes and kills no one who
has a right to be indignant with both."

Sainville is taken prisoner and led before the King of
Butua, who grants him his life provided he will take up the
post of inspecting the candidates for his harem, a post up
till then occupied by a renegade Portuguese, who is
appointed his mentor and guide.

The inhabitants of Butua are cruel and licentious can-
nibals. Women are in a completely inferior position,
little above that of the beasts of the field, whose work they
have to do. The king, who is also the high priest, is an
absolute monarch; the provinces are under the rule of
chiefs only answerable to the king, to whom they have
to pay tribute; but since they have merely to collect it
by any means they see fit from the peasants this doesn't
present much difficulty.

The only people who equal the king and his nobles in
power are the priests. They worship a god half human
and half snake, who is the cause of all things, the prime

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MARQUIS DE SADE

mover of the Universe. This god delights in human
sacrifice, and after a man has transgressed his rules he
can only be absolved by a sacrifice (preferably the object
of his transgression) and a payment to the church.
There are numerous other superstitions, including a
belief in the resurrection and paradise, in which white
women and freshly cooked little boys will be at their
complete disposal. There is complete collaboration and
understanding between the king and the priests, and the
latter can use the law to enforce or punish any neglect,
slight, or failure to pay tithe, with the utmost rigour, as in
Europe.

The priests have complete charge of education. The
principal and practically the only thing they teach women
is the most entire resignation to the will of their husbands;
the men are taught to submit themselves, first to the
church, then to the king, and lastly to their particular
chiefs ; they should be ready to lay down their life for any
of these causes.

Outside the family, in which the father is complete
master, with power over life and death, the peasants are
severely punished for the slightest crimes. "For it is
not as though there were no laws, there are perhaps too
many, but all have a tendency to favour the strong against
the weak." Theft and murder are disregarded among
the nobles but punished with the utmost rigour among
the people ; they are punished personally by the local chief
who calls in his friends to help him; for such occasions
are parties of pleasure, corresponding to hunting parties
in Europe.

With the exception of the king, whose succession is
gained by trials of strength and endurance, property
goes exclusively from father to eldest son ; this, however,
actually only applies to the nobles, for the poor possess

POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS

practically nothing, and what little they do is always liable
to be taken from them.

The people are devout, credulous, superstitious and
almost illiterate. Their few sciences, such as astronomy,
are frowned on by the priests, and almost smothered in
superstition. What little medicine is known is in the
hands of a sort of secondary priesthood, who never give
help except for payment. The population is falling
rapidly, owing to the ill-usage of the women. The people
get drunk on a sort of alcohol made from maize. They
have absolutely no thought for the future. Their com-
merce consists of the exchanging of rice and maize for
fish from their neighbours; this trade is often a cause of
war.

The king is an exaggerated image of his countrymen,
even more cruel, lecherous and superstitious than they
are. The description of him and his habits is completely
nauseating. The people might have revolted against
him without the aid and support of the priests.

This people and their customs are explained and com-
mented on by the renegade Portuguese, who, after a first
revolt, bowed to the necessity of living among such
people, and even ended in acquiring most of their habits.
The most monstrous and revolting aspects are justified
by him as being natural, since they do not upset the
natives, and are found elsewhere in the world,

I have not emphasised the numerous descriptions of
cannibalism, cruelty, infanticide and lust which are given,
as I think I have already made tolerably clear the nature
of the country into which de Sade claimed that he alo#e
had penetrated.

'55

CHAPTER VI
POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

What is now true was once only imagined.
W. BLAKE,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Nought loves another as itself.
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible for thought
A greater than itself to know.

W. BLAKE,

Songs of Experience.

I. UTOPIA. 1788

BY good fortune Sainville managed to escape from
Butua; he made his way to the coast where he succeeded
in hiring a ship with which he intended to make his way
home. But a series of storms drove him far out of his
course into unchartered and temperate waters in the
South Seas. When provisions and water were nearly
exhausted he arrived at an unknown island; he approached
it in the hope of being able to re-provision. The natives
were friendly, and one who spoke French conducted him
to the king. To make his way to his house he had to pass
through the city of Tamoe; it was town-planned, con-
sisting of circular boulevards set with uniform two-storey
houses surrounded by gardens. When he reached the
king's house he was astounded to notice that except for
its slightly larger size it was no different from any other;
there were no guards and no parade of any sort; people
entered freely. The old King Zam came t<5 greet him;

POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

he offered him hospitality and anything he might require ;
he kept Sainville as his guest for a fortnight, telling him
his history and showing him his kingdom; he talked
French fluently.

In his youth Zam6 had been sent by his father to
Europe to learn what civilisation could teach him which
would be of benefit to Tamoe ; and plentifully equipped
with gold, which was the island's only metal, he made the
grand tour. Except for some mechanical devices all
that he saw of Europe frightened and disgusted him ; and
he returned home with the intention of avoiding as far as
might be the terrible inequalities and oppressions, the
superstition, the misery, the fear, and the crimes with
which he saw the lives of all but a handful of Europeans
darkened. He brought back with him a number of tools
for agriculture and manufacture, and a certain amount of
skill in various trades.

He found the greatest causes of European misery in
four things private property, class distinctions, religion
and family life. He therefore proceeded to abolish or
transform these institutions. Absolutely all property was
made over to the State. Under certain conditions people
had the usufruct of property, provided they developed it
properly, during their life-time; on death it reverted
automatically to the State. The State controlled all manu-
factures. Since everybody was working for the State,
directly or indirectly, and since all had equal wealth or
rather commodities and comfort class distinctions were
abolished.

As soon as a child was weaned he or she was put into a
State school, where they remained till marriage at the age
of fifteen. The parents could visit them at these institu-
tions as often as they wished, but the children must not
leave. They became there just as good sons and better

MARQUIS DE SADE

citizens. The children were divided into three groups,
up to six, six to twelve, and twelve to fifteen. In the
first two groups they were taught such things as are
suitable to their years, including reading, writing and a
little arithmetic; in their last three years they were taught
their civic duties and practical agriculture; the colleges
were supported by gardens worked by the students. They
were also prepared for marriage and it was impressed on
them that such a state is a mutual partnership and can
only be happily maintained by the efforts of both parties.
The boys in addition were taught military drill, and as
recreation dancing, wrestling and all sports, the girls
cooking, sewing and clothes-making, these latter being
exclusively women's jobs. When a boy reached the age
of fifteen he was taken to a girl's school to choose a wife,
unless through temperament or tastes he felt a strong
aversion for matrimony, in which cases he was allowed to
remain single on condition that he undertook public
works. When a boy had chosen a girl he met her daily
for a week under the supervision of the school masters
and mistresses. At the end of that period they were asked
to decide whether they would be married or not; if either
of the parties disliked the idea the boy had to choose again,
continuing until a mutual agreement was reached.

When a couple finally decided they were given a
house and ground by the State. For the first two years
they were helped and advised by their parents and neigh-
bours a service which they had to repay by assistance
in old age.

The greater part of the population were engaged in
small-holding agriculture. If, however, a man preferred
some other job he was allowed to take it. If it was a job
which only called for occasional practice, such as building,
medicine, etc., they had their plot of land the same as the

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

others and during their enforced absences the land was
looked after by the bachelors and divorced ; if, however,
it was a full-time job, such as work in a factory, they were
given a landless house and supplied with goods by the
State. The only direct taxation was in kind for this
purpose and for public granaries which held two years*
supply of corn against famine.

Divorce was granted at the request of either party on
the following grounds: ill-health, sterility (either volun-
tary or otherwise), bad temper, cruelty or adultery.
Nobody was allowed more than two divorces. Unmarried
and divorced people had smaller houses and less
land.

There were asylums for lonely or infirm old age
attached to the schools ; in the capital they were attached
to the king's house.

If people neglected their land they were moved to
uncultivated ground where greater effort was required
for the same result; if they showed improvement their
original home was given back to them.

There were no prisons and no death penalty. Moral
faults were punished by a distinguishing dress and the
refusal of privileges, chiefly visiting the king. More
serious crimes were announced by the town crier through
the town. A convicted murderer was put into an open
boat with food for a month, and his description circularised
so that he could not land elsewhere on the island. People
with irremediable anti-social characters were exiled.
Outstanding civic virtue was rewarded by military titles
which are meaningless but flatter the holder. In passing
judgment on a man all his actions were taken into account.
Only crimes which harm society were taken any notice of.
Brothels were forbidden, as the fifteen-hundred-year-old
error of France which sacrifices part of its female popula-

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MARQUIS DE SADE

tion to preserve the honour of the other part is as repug-
nant as it is foolish. All civil cases were satisfied by
compensation.

All luxury arts were forbidden. Painting, music,
dancing, the theatre were encouraged but were only
developed by amateurs. All the art was inclined to
furnish moral propaganda.

The boys' schools and the towns other than the capital
were under the direction of elderly bachelors, to show that
if they could not be useful in one way they are in another.
They were only excluded if the temperamental reasons
which caused them to choose celibacy were obviously
anti-social. The commanders of the towns were changed
annually. The girls' schools were under the direction
of widows, or divorced women if the reason for their
divorce did not render them unsuitable.

There was no standing army but all male citizens were
potential soldiers. Their only fear was European invasion
and colonisation, against which they had erected defences.
They occasionally had field days.

All priests were banished and religion reduced to a
vague theistic Nature worship, of a voluntary nature.
There were no temples and no vested interest in religion.
There were also no professional lawyers and discussion of
theology or law was punished as one of the gravest anti-
social crimes. There was no money and commerce was
restricted to exchange within the island. Any surplus
was given away to their less advanced neighbours.
Zam advocated economic self-sufficiency.

By these measures Zam6 claimed to have practically
eliminated misery and crime. By suppressing luxury
and introducing equality he did away with pride, greed,
covetousness and ambition. By suppressing religion he
did away with wars and massacres. By doing away with

1 60

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

the family group he destroyed the greatest enemy of
equality and the State; by doing away with heritable
property he abolished the reasons for patricide and
infanticide. With equality there was no reason for theft
or revolution or possibility for charity, except the help
of neighbours and the sick. The ease of divorce and the
equality of the sexes did away with the greater number of
sexual crimes; such vices as were not affected by these
measures were done away with not by suppression
which is the best means of propagation but by public
opinion, which was manifested by disgust, ridicule and
tolerance. Economic self-sufficiency eliminated a great
deal of the friction which leads to war. The State was the
unrivalled and unquestioned possessor of all wealth.

As for Zam himself, his chief object had been not
to be feared but loved. " Your sovereigns only know how
to be kings: I have learned to be a man/' he claimed in
almost the same words as the author of the Zauberflote
used three years later. He had nothing which the poorest
of his subjects hadn't got. Like them he was a vegetarian
and water drinker, not from motives of religion, but of
diet and humanity. At Sainville's expressed surprise he
retorted: "Do you think I could eat if I thought that the
gold dishes in which I was served were got at the expense
of my fellow citizens and that the weakly children of those
who make such luxury possible would only have to sup-
port their sad life black bread ground with misery,
washed down with the tears of grief and despair?"
But his work was nearly done; when he has finished his
task which included re-educating his son, who showed
'homosexual' tendencies, to the love of the beautiful
artisan's daughter to whom he had been married he
will lay down his crown; even so modified a kingship is
unsuitable to his country; for them, as for France, only a

161 L

MARQUIS DE SADE

complete republic would satisfy their true desires. Fre-
quently Zam prophesies the coming republic. 1

It was probably this portion of Aline et Valcour which
was the cause of its condemnation in 1815 and 1830.

II. PLAN FOR A EUROPEAN FEDERATION, 1788

The following is part of a dialogue between a sort of
Robin Hood chief of a band of robbers called Brigandos
and a noble he is holding to ransom.

Brigandos: Since we are talking about politics let me
tell you of a plan of mine; I want to redivide Europe and
reduce it to four republics the Northern, Southern,
Eastern and Western.

Nobleman: Why do you choose that vicious form of
government ?

Brigandos: It is the best of all.

Nobleman: Which is precisely why you will never be
able to make people who have been weighed down by the
yoke of monarchy accept it. It is possible to pass from
good to evil it is the progress of nature which tends
ceaselessly to degradation ; the contrary is not practicable.

Brigandos: Rome started with kings; she only became
republican after having realised all the dangers of a
monarchy.

Nobleman: Granted; but Republican Rome was sub-
jugated in its turn, and the chains of the Caesars were
heavier than those of the Tarquins ; I assure you that you
will not find a single republic which the aristocracy has not
gangrened. And since aristocratic government is the
worst of all, don't wish that sort of rule on Europe. I
repeat that despotism is always nearer a republican than a
monarchical government.

Brigandos: Yes, when it has the nobles at its head, as
in Venice; then obviously the complete oppression of the

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

people would follow. But a people who would revolt,
destroy the monarchy and establish its base on the impre-
scribable rights and duties of man would be a model to
all, and that is the form of government I desire to give to
Europe. Let me go on with my divisions, for the multi-
tude of little states drives me to despair. I divide our
continent into four republics, as follows: The Western
Republic will consist of France, Spain, Portugal, Majorca,
Minorca, Corsica and Sardinia, on condition that these
countries get rid of all their inquisitors and clergy and
send all such garglers of blest bread to the middle of
Africa to say their Masses. The Northern Republic will
be composed of Sweden and its dependencies, England
and its dependencies, Belgium, Holland, Westphalia,
Pomerania, Denmark, Ireland and Greenland. Russia
will form the Eastern Republic ; I want her to give to the
Turks whom I expel from Europe all her Asiatic posses-
sions, which could only be useful to her on the supposition
of her wishing to trade by land with China, which she
doesn't do; in recompense I give her Poland, Tartary
and Turkey in Europe. The Southern Republic will con-
sist of the whole of Germany, Hungary, and Italy, from
which I exile the Pope, for nothing could be more useless
to my project than a sodomitical priest with an income of
twelve millions, whose only business is to distribute useless
indulgences and agnuses. This Republic will have Sicily
and all the islands between her and Africa. That is my
division. I desire eternal peace between these four
governments; I want them to give up all dealings with
America, which is merely ruining them, and to limit
themselves to mutual trade ; and above all I want them to
have a single religion, a simple and pure cult free from
idolatry and monstrous dogmas ... a religion in fact
that the people can follow without having recourse to that

163

MARQUIS DE SADE

insolent vermin which is erected as mediator between
their weakness and heaven; and which only succeeds in
deceiving without improving them. According to my
plan Danzig will be a free city where each republic will
have a senate. There all discussions will terminate
friendlily and the decisions of the judges will become the
laws of the states; if the decisions arrived at are not
satisfying, ten deputies from each republic can come and
fight in person, without exposing millions of men to the
danger of killing one another for interests which are
very rarely theirs.

Nobleman: This plan was imagined by a certain French
Abb6 de Saint-Pierre who wrote about it at the beginning
of the century.

Brigandos: Not at all, sir; I know the book you speak
about. The Abbe didn't divide Europe in this way; he
left all the little sovereign states which agitate and divide
it; he didn't, as I do, join these powers together, while
suppressing what is harmful in them; in a word the
Abbe de Saint-Pierre renounced the system of equilibrium
in favour of that of alliances ; I only erect the system of
alliances as a consolidation of that of equilibrium, and
therefore my plan is better.

Nobleman: It wouldn't insure eternal peace.

Brigandos: To the extent that it equalises it diminishes
the chances of war.

Nobleman: Ambition will still be the same; it is the
poison of man's heart and will only disappear with him,

Brigandos: This passion would now be motiveless. The
reason why one nation declares war on another is because
it wishes to recover or to invade territory in any case
because it wishes to have as much as or more than the
nation it attacks. But if the nations are equal the attack
becomes unjust, whence, in my system you would have

164

POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

three states against one, and the aggressor, knowing this,
would keep the peace. It is very difficult to establish
equilibrium between a large number of unequal weights;
nothing is easier when the four weights are of the same
measure.

Nobleman: But you must at least have a patriarch if you
drive away the Pope; religion must have a head.

Erigandos: My dear sir, a good religion only needs a
God; start by reaching a unanimous agreement on the
essence and attributes of the one you admit by agreeing
that he only needs our hearts and that the rest is as
dangerous as it is useless. Since there would be then no
necessity for you to cut one another's throats concerning
the fashion in which God should be served you would
have no need of a head ; it is almost always on his account
that you have fought one another about your gods;
without the head's debaucheries and disorders Luther
would never have separated; and consider the oceans of
blood that disagreement has spilt. No, sir, no Pope; a
God is already plenty; I must consider you all very sensible
to allow you that; the system of such an existence is
the most dangerous present one can give to fools. 2

III. ANARCHY. 1794?

The following is a portion of a conversation between
two Italians in Rome.

A. If we were convinced of the indifference of all our
actions, if we realised that those we call just and unjust
are seen quite differently by Nature, we would make less
false calculations. But the prejudices of childhood deceive
us and will continue to lead us into error as long as we
have the weakness to listen to them. It would seem as
though the torch of reason only lights us when we are
no longer in a position to profit from its rays, and it is

MARQUIS DE SADE

only after folly has succeeded folly that we manage to
discover the source of all those that ignorance has made
us commit. The laws of the land still almost always serve
us as compass to distinguish the just from the unjust.
We say such an action is forbidden by the law, therefore
it is unjust; it is impossible to find a more mistaken
manner of judging than this, for the law is founded on the
general interest; now nothing is more in contradiction
with the general interest than particular interest, and at
the same time nothing is juster than the latter; therefore
nothing is more unjust than the law which sacrifices all
particular interests to general interests. But man, you
object, wishes to live in society and therefore must
sacrifice some portion of his private happiness to that of
the public. Agreed; but why do you want him to have
made such a pact without being sure of gaining as much
as he sacrifices? Now, he gains nothing from the pact
he has made in consenting to the laws; for you inhibit
him far more than you satisfy him, and for one occasion
in which the law protects him, there are a thousand when
it stands in his way; therefore either the laws should not
be consented to or they should be made infinitely milder.
The only use of law has been to postpone the annihilation
of prejudices, to keep us longer under the shameful yoke
of error; law is a restraint which man has placed on man,
when he saw with what ease he broke all other restraints ;
how, after that, could he suppose the supplementary
restraint could ever be of any use ? There are punish-
ments for the guilty; agreed, but I only see in them
cruelties and no means of making man better, and that is,
to my mind, what one ought to work at. Besides one
escapes these punishments with the greatest ease, and that
certainty encourages the spirit of the man who has made
up his mind. Let us convince ourselves once and for all

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

that laws are merely useless and dangerous; their only
object is to multiply crimes or to allow them to be com-
mitted with impunity on account of the secrecy they
necessitate. Without laws and religions it is impos-
sible to imagine the degree of glory and grandeur human
knowledge would have attained by now; the way these
base restraints have retarded progress is unbelievable;
and that is the sole service they have rendered to -man.
People have dared declaim against the passions and
enchain them with laws. But compare the one with the
other ; let us see whether passions or laws have done more
good to mankind. Who can question the truth of Hel-
vetius' remark that passions in the moral sphere corres-
pond to movement in the physical? The invention and
the marvels of the arts are only due to strong passions;
they should be regarded, the same author continues, as
the productive germ of the spirit, and the mighty spring
of great actions. Individuals who are not animated by
strong passions are merely mediocre beings. ( It is only
strong passions which can produce great men; when one
is no longer, or when one ceases to be passionate one
becomes stupid./ This point established, how dangerous
are not laws which inhibit the passions? Compare the
centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism
in any country you like and you will see that it is only
when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
If they regain their despotism a dangerous lethargy dulls
all men's spirits; if you no longer see vices you can hardly
find a virtue; the springs get rusty and revolutions are
prepared.

B. Then you would do away with laws ?

A. Yes. I maintain that man, returned to a state of
nature, would be far happier than is possible under the
ridiculous yoke of the law. / don't want man to renounce

MARQUIS DE SADE

any portion of his strength or potentialities. He has no
need of laws to get justice done to him; Nature has given
him the instinct and the necessary force to get it for
himself; and that justice he will make for himself will
always be more prompt than that which he can hope for
from the languorous hand of the law, because in the
former case he will merely consider his own interest and
the wrong he has suffered, whereas a people's laws are
never anything else but the mass and the result of the
interests of all the people who have co-operated to their
erection.

B. But without laws you will be oppressed.

A. What does it matter to me if I am oppressed if I
have the right to do likewise ; I would rather be oppressed
by my neighbour whom I can oppress in my turn, than
by the law against which I am powerless. I have far less
reason to fear my neighbour's passions than the law's
injustice, for my neighbour's passions are controlled by
mine, whereas nothing stops or controls the injustices
of the law. All man's faults are in Nature; therefore
there can be no better laws than hers; she imprints a
single one in the heart of all men to satisfy ourselves,
to refuse our passions nothing, whatever the cost to
others. So do not try to inhibit the impulsions of this
universal law, whatever the effects may be; you have no
right to stop them; leave the care of that to him who is
outraged; if he is harmed he will know how to defend
himself. The men who thought that from the necessity
of living together that of making laws derived fell into
the greatest error; they had no more need of laws united
than isolated. A universal sword of justice is useless;
this sword is naturally in the hands of everyone.

B. But everyone will not use it properly, and unfair-
ness will become general. . .

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POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

A. That is impossible. Peter will never be unjust to
Paul if he knows that Paul can revenge himself im-
mediately for the injustice; but he will be if he knows he
has merely to fear the laws which he can get round, or
from which he can escape. I will go further, I will grant
you that without laws the sum of crimes increases, that
without laws the universe would be a volcano from which
the most horrible crimes would erupt every minute; in
that state of perpetual lesion there would be even fewer
disadvantages; there would doubtless be far less than
under the rule of laws, for often the law strikes the
innocent, and to the mass of victims produced by the
criminal you must add that produced by the unfairness of
the law; under anarchy you would have those victims less.
Certainly you would have those sacrificed by crime, but
you will not have those immolated by the iniquity of the
law; for since the oppressed would have the right to
revenge himself he would surely only punish his aggressor.

B. But anarchy which opens the door to arbitrariness
gives necessarily the cruel image of despotism. . .

A. That too is a mistake ; it is the abuse of law which
leads to despotism; the despot is the man who makes the
law . . . who makes it speak or who uses it to further
his own interests. Take away this method of abuse from
the despot and you will have no more tyrants. There
has not been a single tyrant who hasn't made use of laws
to exercise his cruelties; everywhere where man's rights
will be sufficiently fairly divided for everybody to be in a
position to revenge himself for the injuries he receives
there will surely never be a despot, for he would be struck
down by the first victim he would try to immolate.
Tyrants are never born in anarchy, you only see them
raise themselves up in the shadow of the law or get
authority from them. The reign of laws is therefore

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MARQUIS DE SADE

vicious and inferior to anarchy; the strongest proof of my
proposition is the necessity a government finds itself in to
plunge itself into anarchy when it wishes to remake its
constitution. To abrogate its old laws it is obliged to
establish a lawless revolutionary regime; and from this
regime finally other laws are born. But this second state
is necessarily less pure than the former, since it derives
from it, since it has been necessary to bring into force the
first good thing, anarchy^ to arrive at the second good
thing, the Constitution of the State. Men are only pure in
a state of Nature ; as soon as they go away from it they
are degraded. Give up, I say to you, give up the idea of
making man better by laws ; you merely make him thereby
more cunning and more wicked . . . never more virtuous.

B. But crime is a plague on the earth; the more laws
there are, the fewer crimes.

A . That too is wrong. The multitude of laws makes
the multitude of crimes 3

This theme is again developed at length in the last
volume of Juliette by another Italian. "Give man back
to Nature, she will lead him far better than your laws.
Above all destroy those vast cities, where the conglomera-
tion of vices forces you to repressive laws. What need
has man to live in society? Give him back to the wild
forests where he was born and let him do there all that
he can ; then his crimes, as isolated as he, will do no harm
and your restraints become useless: savage man knows
only two needs 'copulation* and food both natural,
and nothing which he can do to obtain either can be
criminal. All that produces in him other passions is the
work of civilisation and society " 4

This last volume, with its added bitterness, and its
lack of notes to bring it up to date, is probably later
than the rest of the work, and may well date from 1796

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

when the whole work was first published. By the time
the passage quoted above was written de Sade had lost
all hope. He had returned to the hopeless pessimism of
earlier years when he had written, "How tempted I am
to go and live among bears when I consider the multitude
of dangerous abuses, the crowd of intolerable follies,
which, thanks to a few musical comedies and songs,
people don't even seem to suspect/' 5

IV. PLAN OF LEGISLATION FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC

1795

About a third of the Philosophic dans le Boudoir is
occupied by a pamphlet entitled Frenchmen, a further effort
if you wish to be Republicans! this pamphlet is a hundred
pages long and therefore it is impossible to give more than
a precis of it; it is a pity as it shows de Sade at his most
typical and vigorous. The passages which are quoted
verbally will be distinguished by quotation marks. It is
divided into two sections religion and laws or morals.*

Religion.

"I am going to offer you far-reaching ideas; if people
will listen to them and reflect on them some if not all
may rest; I will have contributed in some part to the
progress of illumination and will be content. I do not
disguise the fact that I am troubled at the slowness of our
advance; and I am disturbed by the realisation that we
are on the eve of missing our aim again. Can one believe
that it will be reached when we have been given laws?
Don't imagine it. What are laws without religions?
We need a cult, and a cult made for the republican
character which will remove the danger of ever returning

* The word 'mceurs' is ambiguous, containing at the same time the ideas
of 'morals' and 'customs.' I have used only the first, but hope readers will
keep in mind the double significance.

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MARQUIS DE SADE

to that of Rome, In an age when we are convinced that
religion should be founded on morality, and not morality
on religion, we need a religion which goes with our
customs, which would be as it were the development and
necessary consequence, and which can raise the soul and
hold it at the level of that precious liberty which is to-day
its only idol.

" Can Christianity be suitable for a free warrior people ?
No, my compatriots, don't believe it. If unhappily for
him the Frenchman should bury himself again in the
veils of Christianity the pride, tyranny and despotism of
the priests . . , and the lowness, stupidity and platitudes
of this religion would lower the pride of the republican
soul and quickly place it again under the yoke its
energy has just thrown off. Never let us forget that this
puerile religion was one of the best arms in the hands of
our tyrants; one of its first dogmas is Give unto C<esar
the things which are Cesar's, but we have dethroned
Caesar and we do not intend to give him anything more.
You would be deceiving yourselves, Frenchmen, if you
think that a clergy which has given the oath will be any
different from a refractory one there are some vices
which are incurable. Within ten years by means of
Christianity with its superstitions and prejudices, your
priests, despite their poverty, would regain their former
empire over your soul; they would chain you to kings
again because these two powers mutually aid one another,
and your republican edifice would fall down, deprived of
foundations/'

It is not enough to prune the tree of superstition, it
must be eradicated root and branch; freedom and equality
are so far from the ideas of Christ's ministers that they
would do everything to destroy them, overtly or covertly.
Their actual poverty is no restraint; it was the same at the

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beginning of Christianity. " Annihilate for ever that
which one day may destroy your work. Consider that
the fruit of your efforts is destined to your grandchildren,
and your duty and your honour demand that you do not
leave them any of the germs which could one day replunge
them into that chaos from which we have emerged with
such difficulty/'

These prejudices are already being dissipated; the
people have suppressed the temples and thrown over the
idols ; it is agreed that marriage is now merely a civil act.
But you mustn't stop there. " The whole of Europe, with
its hand already on the bandage that blinds it, awaits
from you the effort which should tear it from their eyes.
Make haste; don't allow holy Rome y which is making
every effort to repress you, the opportunity to keep a few

proselytes Frenchmen, I repeat that Europe

awaits from you deliverance from the sceptre and the
thurible. You cannot free it from royalist tyranny without
breaking the reins of superstition; the two are too in-
timately linked ; if you allow one to subsist you will soon
fall back under the empire of both. A republican should
not bow the knee either before an imaginary being or a
vile impostor; his unique gods should be courage and
liberty. Rome disappeared when Christianity was
preached, and France is lost if she still reveres it

"To convince ourselves of this let us examine the few
individuals who remain attached to the senseless cult
of our fathers and we will see that they are the irrecon-
cilable enemies of the present system, that in their number
is that caste, so justly despised, of royalists and aristocrats.
Let the slave of a crowned brigand bow, if he will, before
an idol of flour such an object is suitable for his muddy
soul; he who can serve kings should adore gods! But
for us, my compatriots, for us to crawl under such des-

MARQUIS DE SADE

picable restraints, rather a thousand deaths than another
enslavement! Since we consider some cult necessary let
us imitate those of the Romans ; actions, passions, heroes
were the worthy objects of their worship. Such idols
elevated the soul and electrified it; they did more; they
communicated the virtues of the object worshipped. The
adorer of Minerva wished to be prudent; courage was in
the heart of the man at the altar of Mars." All heathen
idols personified some active virtue; Christianity on the
contrary merely passive ones. Theism is equally useless,
both philosophically and ethically; atheism alone is
suitable.

All leaders of religion made their gods a tool for their
secular advancement; and there is only one step from
superstition to royalism. Always one of the first of the
king's oaths at his coronation is the maintenance of
the religion in vogue, as one of the strongest political
bases of their throne. Religion and liberty are incom-
patible.

"Let us stop thinking religion can be of any use to
men. Have good laws, and you can do without religion.
But the people want one, you say; it amuses them and
keeps them quiet. Very well ! Then give us one suitable
to free men .... but not Christianity, which we will
relegate to the perpetual neglect from which the infamous

Robespierre wished to drag it Let us treat the

idols as we have treated the kings; we have placed the
symbols of liberty on the pedestals which formerly held
kings; similarly let us place the effigies of great men
(whose reputations are long established) on those formerly
occupied by saints." It is a mistake to think the peasants
will resist. Place statues of Mars, Minerva, Liberty in
conspicuous places, and hold festivals annually in which
prizes will be given to those who have served their

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

country best. In that way at last some virtues will be
produced by religion.

There is no need for such a revolution to be other than
bloodless; " Believe me, the people are far more sensible
than you think and will shake off the chains of superstition
as easily as those of tyranny. You fear them without this
restraint; how absurd! A person who is not restrained by
the material sword of the law will not be by the moral
fear of hell's tortures. . . . Perhaps people will say the
time is not ripe to consolidate our revolution in so striking
a fashion. Ah! my fellow citizens, the road that we have
travelled since 'eighty-nine was far harder than that which
remains in front of us

4 'Frenchmen, if you strike the first blow, your national
education will do the rest; but start work at once on this
task ; let it become your chiefest care ; above all base it on
that essential morality which religious education so
neglected. Replace theistic follies by excellent social
precepts; instead of learning to recite useless prayers,
which they will make a point of forgetting as soon as they
are sixteen, teach your children their duties to society;
teach them to cherish those virtues of which you barely
spoke before, and which suffice for their individual hap-
piness without your religious fables; make them realise
that happiness consists in making others as fortunate as
we wish to be ourselves. If you found these truths on the
chimeras of Christianity, as you had the stupidity to do
before, as soon as your pupils realise the futility of the
bases, they will pull down the whole edifice and will
become criminals, simply because they believe that the
religion which they have rejected, forbade them to be so.
On the contrary, if you make them realise the necessity
of virtue, because their own happiness depends upon it
they will be honest people by egoism. ... A simple

MARQUIS DE SADE

philosopher should instruct these new pupils in the
incomprehensible sublimities of Nature" and teach them
what is known of science and biology, and show that
religion is founded on ignorance and fear. By these
means you will produce good soldiers, good fathers and
good husbands; you will make them men the more
attached to their country because no idea of subservience
will enter into their heads. Then true patriotism will
flower in every heart; "it will reign in all its force and all
its purity because it will be the only dominant sentiment,
and no other idea will modify its energy; then your second
generation is safe, and your work, consolidated by it,
will become the law of the universe.

"But if by fear or cowardice these counsels are not
followed and you leave in existence the foundations of the
building you thought to destroy, what will happen?
These foundations will be rebuilt on again and the same
collossi will be replaced, but with the cruel difference that
they will be cemented this time so strongly that neither
your generation nor those that will follow you will be
able to overthrow them

"At the same time I do not propose massacres or
exportations ; such horrors are too far from my mind for
me to think of conceiving them a second. No, do not
assassinate or export; these atrocities belong to kings and
the criminals who imitate them; it is not by acting as
they do that you will bring them in horror. Let us reserve
our violence for the idols ; we only want ridicule for those
that serve them; the sarcasms of Julian did more to
destroy Christianity than all the tortures of Nero. Let us
destroy all idea of God and turn our priests into soldiers ;
some are already and let them stay in a profession which
is so noble for a republican; but don't let them speak to
us any more either of their God or his religion.

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

44 Let us condemn whoever first mentions these subjects
to be mocked at, made fun of, and covered with mud in
the market place; eternal prison will be the lot of him who

commits twice the same fault In six months it

will be all over, your infamous God will have disappeared,
and that without ceasing to be just and jealous of the
esteem of others, without ceasing to fear the sword of the
laws and to be honourable men, because we will have
realised that the true friend of his country should not,
like the slave of kings, be led by phantoms; because in a
word it is neither the frivolous hope of a better world nor
the fear of greater evils than those that Nature sends us
which should lead a republican, whose sole guide is
virtue and only restraint remorse."

Morals.

" After having shown that theism is completely unsuit-
able to a republican government, it appears to me neces-
sary to prove that the present morals of France are equally
unsuitable. This is the more essential as it is the morals
which will serve as motives for the laws which are going to
be promulgated.

"Frenchmen, you are too enlightened not to feel that
a new government calls for new morals; it is impossible
for a citizen of a free State to act in the same way as the
servant of a despot; the differences of interests, duties and
mutual relations necessarily demand a quite different line
of conduct; a crowd of little errors, of little social crimes
which were considered extremely essential under the
government of kings, who had to make ever more and
impose ever new restraints to make themselves respected
and unapproachable by their subjects, will not exist now;
other crimes, such as regicide and sacrilege should equally
disappear in a republic which no longer recognises kings

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MARQUIS DE SADE

or religion. In addition to liberty of the conscience and
liberty of the Press, citizens, one should accord, with few
exceptions, liberty of action, and except for crimes which
disturb directly the bases of the State, there are practically
no crimes for you to punish in a State founded on liberty
and equality; for under thorough examination it appears
that only that is criminal which the law reproves; for
since nature dictates to us equally vices and virtues,
according to our organisation .... her inspiration would
become a certain rule for what is good or bad. To
develop further my ideas on such an essential subject, I
am going to classify the different actions in man's life
which up till now have been called criminal, and measure
them against the true duties of a republican.

" At all times man's duties have been divided into three
classes towards God, towards his neighbour, and towards
himself. 1 '

The first series of crimes towards God obviously
have no more existence. "If there is one thing more
extravagant than another in this world it is to see men who
only know their God and what he demands by their
limited ideas, try to decide on the nature of what pleases
or annoys Him. I don't want to stop at the freedom for
all cults; I would like people to be free to laugh at and
ridicule all of them," and a congregation be treated like
a comic spectacle, "But don't destroy the idols in anger,
break them up in play."

The second class is the duty of man towards his neigh-
bour and is the most extensive of all.

"Christian morality, far too vague about the relations of
man with his fellows, uses bases so full of sophistry that it
is impossible to admit them, for if one wants to erect
principles, great care must be taken not to found them on
sophistries. This absurd morality tells us to love our

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

neighbour like ourselves. Nothing could be more sub-
lime, were it possible that what is false can be beautiful.
It is impossible to love our neighbour like ourselves, for
it is against all the laws of Nature and her organ alone
should direct us ; we can only love our neighbours as good
friends which Nature gives us, and with whom we should
live more easily in a republican State, since the disappear-
ance of distances must necessarily draw the links closer.

" Therefore let humanity, fraternity and kindness pro-
scribe for us our reciprocal duties, and let us each fulfil
them with all the energy that nature has given us on this
point, without blaming and above all without punishing
those whose colder or more atrabilious temperaments do
not find in these bonds, which are yet so touching, all the
pleasures which others discover in them; for it will be
agreed that it would be absurd to prescribe universal
laws; it would be as ridiculous as a general who would
order uniforms of the same measure for the whole army;
it would be a terrible injustice to demand that men, whose
characters are different, should obey the same laws ; what
suits one does not suit another.

"I agree that we cannot make as many laws as there
are men ; but the laws can be so clement and so few that
all men whatever their character can comply with them.
I would also demand that this small number of laws be of
a sort that could adapt themselves to all different charac-
ters ; the directing spirit would be to punish more or less
according to the character of the person in question. It
has been shown that there are some virtues whose practice
is impossible to certain men, as there are some remedies
which are intolerable to certain physiques. Would it
not be the height of injustice if you make the law strike a
man when he cannot possibly obey it; it would be like
forcing a blind man to distinguish colours.

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MARQUIS DE SADE

"From these first principles results the necessity to
make clement laws, and above all to do away for ever
with the death penalty, for a law which attacks man's life
is impracticable, unjust, inadmissible. As will be shown
later, there are cases when men may be justified in attempt-
ing another's life, but the law cannot be, for it is passion-
less, and "passion is the only excuse which can legitimise
the cruel action of murder; man receives from Nature
impressions which may make such an action pardonable,
but the law on the contrary is always in opposition with
Nature and receives nothing from her; since it has not the

same motives it cannot have the same rights The

second reason for doing away with the death penalty is
that it has never repressed crime, since it is committed
daily at the foot of the scaffold.

"In a word, this penalty should be suppressed because
there is no calculation more stupid than that of killing one
man for having killed another, since obviously instead of
one man the less you have two ; and it is only executioners
and fools who can be happy with such arithmetic."

The crimes which can be committed against our neigh-
bour fall into four categories Calumny, theft, acts of
impurity which can cause distress to others, and murder.

"All these actions were considered as capital offences
under a monarchical government, but are they equally
grave in a republic ? That is what we intend to analyse by
the light of philosophy the only way in which such an
examination should be conducted. Do not tax me with
being a dangerous innovator; do not say that there is a
risk of lightening, as perhaps these writings may do, the
remorse in the malefactor's heart, or that there is a greater
evil in increasing, by the mildness of my system, the
inclination these same malefactors have for their crimes;
I here protest formally that I have no such perverse views ;

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POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

I am exposing those ideas which have been identified with
me since I reached the age of reason, and against whose
diffusion the infamous despotism of tyrants was directed
for so many ages ; so much the worse for those whom these
great ideas would corrupt; so much the worse for those
who can only catch hold of the evil in philosophical
opinions and who are susceptible to corruption from
everything 1 Who knows if they wouldn't be tainted by
reading Seneca or Charron! It is not those whom I speak
to; I only address myself to people capable of under-
standing me, and such can read me without danger.

"I confess quite frankly that I have never thought
calumny an evil. . . ." Either the calumny falls on a
wicked or a good man. In the former case a useful service
has been done; in the latter it will encourage the good
man to further efforts, so that he can throw off the un-
warranted opprobrium. It is therefore not to be con-
sidered as a crime.

"Theft is the second fault to be considered. If we
examine antiquity we will see that theft was allowed in

many republics, like Sparta ; some other people

regarded it as a martial virtue; it is certain that it
encourages strength, courage and address, all virtues
useful to a republic. I will make bold to ask impartially
if theft, whose effect is to equalise riches, is a great evil
in a government whose aim is equality? Undoubtedly
no, for if it tends to equality on either side, it makes the
possessor more careful in guarding his goods. There was
a people who used to punish, not the robber, but he who
let himself be robbed, in order to teach him to take care
of his property. This leads us to wider reflections.

"God forbid that I should wish to attack or destroy
here the oath for the respect of property which the nation
has just pronounced; but may I be allowed some remarks

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MARQUIS DE SADE

on the injustice of this oath ? What is the spirit of an
oath pronounced by all the members of a nation ? Is it
not to maintain complete equality among citizens, to
submit them all equally to a law which protects the
property of all ? Then I ask you if it is a just law which
orders him who has nothing to respect him who has
everything? What are the elements of a social pact?
Doesn't it consist in abandoning a little of one's freedom
and property to assure and maintain the preservation of
both?

"All laws are based on this supposition; it is the motive
of the punishments inflicted on him who abuses his
liberty; also it authorises taxes; and the reason why a
citizen doesn't complain when he receives demands is
because he realises that by means of what he gives he
preserves the remainder; but once again by what right
will he who has nothing bind himself to a pact which
only protects him who has everything? If you are acting
justly by preserving with your oath the properties of the
rich, are you not acting unjustly in exacting this oath
from the preserver who has nothing ? What interest has
he in this oath of yours ? and on what grounds do you
demand that he promise a thing which is uniquely
favourable to the man who by his riches is so different
from him? Assuredly nothing could be more unjust;
an oath should have an equal effect on all who subscribe
to it; it cannot possibly bind a man who has no interest in
its maintenance, because it would then no longer be the
pact of a free people; it would be an arm for the strong
against the weak, against which the latter should revolt
continually; the rich alone enslaves the poor, the rich
alone has an interest in the oath the poor pronounces
with so little consideration, that he does not see that by
means of this oath, extracted through his good faith, he

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

binds himself to do a thing which cannot be done for him
in turn.

"If you are convinced, as you ought to be, of this bar-
barous inequality, do not aggravate your injustice by
punishing him who has nothing for having dared take
something from him who has everything; your unfair oath
gives him more right than ever. When you forced him to
perjury by this oath, which is absurd for him, you
legitimise all the crimes this perjury leads to; therefore
you have no right to punish that which you have caused.
I will not insist further in trying to make the horrible
cruelty of punishing thieves felt. Imitate that wise law
of which I spoke and punish the man who is careless
enough to let himself be robbed, not the robber; consider
that he is authorised by your oath, and that by so acting
he is merely following the first of Nature's laws that of
self-preservation, no matter at whose expense.

"The next class of crime that we have to examine con-
sists of actions motivated by lust, especially those which
can harm others prostitution, adultery, incest, rape and
sodomy. It is indisputable that all what are called moral
crimes, of the sort we have just named, are completely
indifferent to a government whose sole duty is to preserve
by any means possible its essential form. That should be
the unique morality of a republican government. But
since it is always being attacked by the despotic govern-
ments which surround it, one can hardly reasonably sup-
pose that its methods of preservation would be moral
methods ; for it can only preserve itself by war, and nothing
is less moral than war.

"Now I ask how it can be shown that in a State which
is immoral by obligation it is essential that the individuals
should be moral? I go further and say that it is good that
they should not be. The legislators of ancient Greece

MARQUIS DE SADE

felt completely the important necessity of keeping the
members corrupt, so that their moral dissolution should be
reflected in the dissolution useful to government, and
thereby should result that spirit of insurrection which is
always indispensable to a republican government, which,
since it is completely happy, must necessarily excite the
hatred and jealousy of countries surrounding it. These
wise legislators considered that insurrection was not a
moral state; therefore it would be as absurd as it would be
dangerous to demand that those who must maintain the
perpetual immoral movement of the machine of State
should themselves be very moral^ because the moral state
in man is one of peace and tranquillity, whereas his
immoral state is one of continuous motion, which brings
him near the insurrection always necessary to the govern-
ment of the republic of which he is a member.

44 Let us now examine in further detail and start with
modesty. Modesty is unnatural and local, founded on
the inclemency of the climate and coquetry. "Lycurgus
and Solon, convinced that the results of immodesty keep
the citizen in the state of immorality essential to a republic
forced young girls to appear naked in the theatres. Rome
imitated this example with the games of Flora; most
pagan mysteries were performed in this state ; nudity even
passed for a virtue among some nations. Be that as it
may, from immodesty come lecherous impulses; the
results of these impulses compose the so-called crimes
which we are analysing, of which the first is -prostitution.
Now that we have recovered on this subject from the
crowd of religious errors which held us captive, and that,
nearer to nature on account of the quantity of prejudices
we have annihilated, we only listen to her voice, in the
assurance that if there was a crime in anything it would
be rather in resisting the inclinations that she inspires

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

than in following them ; and since we realise that lechery
is a result of these inclinations it is less a question of
repressing this passion in ourselves than in regulating
the means by which it can be satisfied in peace. Therefore
we should devote ourselves to the task of regulating this
subject and to establish all the necessary safety, so that
the citizen whom need unites with the objects of his lust
can give himself over with these objects to all that his
passions demand, without being inhibited by anything,
because no human passion has more need of the fullest
possible extension of liberty than this one. Various
buildings, healthy, large, properly furnished and com-
pletely safe shall be erected in all towns ; there, every sex,
every age, every creature will be offered to the caprices of
the libertines who will come to take their pleasure, and the
most complete subordination will be the rule for the
people present; the slightest refusal will be punished
arbitrarily by him who has suffered from it. I must again
explain here, and measure this against republican morals;
I have promised to be equally logical everywhere and I
will keep my word.

"If, as has been said, no passion has need of such a
great extension of liberty as this one, no other is so des-
potic; it is then that man wishes to command, to be
obeyed, to surround himself with slaves bound to satisfy
him; well, whenever you deprive man of this secret means
of getting rid of the measure of despotism Nature has
placed at the bottom of his heart, in order to exercise it
he will fall back on the objects which surround him and
disturb the government. If you wish to avoid this danger,
give free play to these tyrannous desires, which despite
himself torment him ceaselessly; contented with the
exercise of his petty sovereignty in the midst of his
harem of ingles and sultanas , ... he will come out

MARQUIS DE SADE

satisfied, and without any wish to disturb the govern-
ment

"See how the Greek legislators, penetrated by these
ideas, treated debauchery in Athens and Sparta; they
drugged the citizen with it, far from forbidding it; no
sort was outlawed, and Socrates, whom the oracle declared
to be the wisest man on earth, passed indifferently from
the arms of Aspasia to those of Alcibiades, and was no less
the glory of Greece. I will go further, and however con-
trary my ideas may be to current customs, since my object
is to prove that we must hurry to change these customs if
we wish to keep the form of government we have adopted,
I will try to prove that the prostitution of women known
as honest is no more dangerous than that of men, and
that not only should they take part in the debaucheries
exercised in the buildings I establish, but that such
buildings should also be erected for them, where their
caprices and the needs of their temperament, far more
ardent than ours, can equally be satisfied in every way.

"First of all by what right do you claim that women
should be excepted from the blind submission, which
Nature proscribed to them, to man's caprices, and
secondly by what other right do you pretend to enforce
on them a continence which is impossible to their con-
stitution and useless to their honour?"
( In nature, women were 'vulguivagues,' that is to say
belonging to all the males, like other female animals;
interest, egoism and love modified this; people thought
they were enriching themselves by taking a woman and the
goods of her family. But "no act of possession can ever
be exercised on a free person; it is as unjust to possess a
woman exclusively as it is to possess slaves; all humans
are born free and with equal rights; let us never forget
that; consequently no sex can have a legitimate right to

186

POLITICS II. SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

the exclusive possession of another, and no sex or class
can possess the other exclusively. Therefore a woman
.... would have no right in refusing .... by saying
she was in love I ... as that would be exclusion

"If, then, it is incontestable that we have the natural
right to express our desires to every woman, we have
equally that of forcing them to submit to our desires, not
exclusively, that would be a contradiction, but momen-
tarily. (I do not contradict myself; I am talking of
enjoyment, not of possession ; I have no right to the posses-
sion of the stream that I come to on my road, but I have
to its enjoyment.) ....

( Modesty, or the attachment to another man, would
be no motive for a woman's refusal. Love, which can
be called madness of the sou! is equally inadmissible because
anti-social. Under the system established any man
could summon any girl or woman to appear in one of the
houses mentioned, and there, under the safeguard of the
matrons, she must satisfy with the most complete humility
and submission all the caprices the man desires, no matter
of what sort. Age limits are fixed by the limits of desire.

Women will have exactly the same rights as men; "it
is absurd to have placed their honour and their virtue in
the anti-natural strength with which they resist their
inclinations which are far stronger than ours ; this moral
injustice is the more scandalous since we consent to make
them weak by seduction and then punish them because
they have yielded to all the efforts we have made to en-
compass their fall. The whole absurdity of our morals, it
seems to me, is founded on this iniquitous atrocity, and
this simple exposition should make us realise the extreme
necessity that we are in to change them for purer ones."

Consequently women will have exactly the same
licence as men. The only possible danger in this is

MARQUIS DE SADE

fatherless children ; but what does that matter to a republic
where every individual should have no other mother than
his country, when all who are born are children of the
fatherland. "How much more will those love it, who
never having known any but it will know from birth that
it is from their country alone that they must expect every-
thing! Do not think that you can make good republicans
as long as you isolate children in their families children
who should belong only to the republic. In the family
they give to a few individuals the love that they should
divide among all their brothers, and adopt the often
dangerous prejudices of these individuals; their opinions
and ideas become isolated and all the virtues of a statesman
become impossible for them. They give all their affection
to those that have borne them and none to those who make
them live, make them known and make them illustrious,
as if these second benefits were not far stronger than the
first"; since therefore family interests are anti-social it is
to the advantage of the republic that the family be des-
troyed and children belong entirely to the fatherland.

Since women will have the same licence as men and will
be encouraged to use it as and when they desire, openly
and without shame, the question of adultery hardly arises.
It is an added barbarity in our ancestors that they regarded
a woman's infidelity as a crime; indissoluble unions are
intolerable for both parties, but particularly for women.
Thomas More, and the habits of the Tartars and the
Peruvians are quoted to show that debauchery in a woman
is neither undesirable nor criminal.

Similarly incest is of no importance and is general in
some parts of the world. Rape would appear to be the
form of lechery which is most harmful, "nevertheless, it
is certain that rape an action which is so rare and so
difficult to prove does less harm than theft, since one

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

deprives a person of property and the other merely
deteriorates it. Anyhow what can you object to the
raper if he replies that he has done very little harm, since
he has merely placed the object which he has abused a
little earlier in the condition which love and marriage
would soon reduce her to ?

"But what of sodomy > that so-called crime, which called
down the fire of heaven on the towns which practised it,
is it not a monstrous act for which the punishment cannot
be strong enough? It is terribly painful for us to have
to reproach our ancestors with the judicial murders they
committed for this subject. Is it possible to be so bar-
barous as to dare to condemn an unfortunate whose crime
consists in not having the same tastes as ourselves ? We
shudder when we think that less than forty years ago the
absurdity of our legislators was still at that point. Con-
sole yourselves, citizens, such absurdities will take place
no longer; the wisdom of your legislators answers for that.
Completely enlightened on this weakness of some men,
we realise to-day that such an error cannot be criminal,
and that Nature does not attach enough importance to
the fluid in our loins to be enraged at the route we make
this fluid take.

"What is the only crime which can exist here? Surely
not placing oneself in such or such a position, unless you
wish to hold that some parts of the body are different from
others, that some are pure and others impure, but as it is
impossible to advance such absurdities the only possible
crime can be in the waste of semen. But I ask you is it
probable that that semen is so precious in the eyes of
Nature that it cannot be wasted without crime ?"
Obviously not. It is completely indifferent how or with
whom pleasure is taken, since all inclinations are natural.
Sodomy is usually caused by organisation, occasionally

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MARQUIS DE SADE

by satiety; in either case it is indifferent. It is more
common in republics, and useful for them, as is proved
by the examples and the writings of the Romans and
Greeks. It is a habit which is found all over the world
and various quotations show that it was encouraged for
the martial and civic virtues it produces. It is therefore
completely indifferent to a republic, as are all other and
obscurer vices.

"Only murder remains to be examined in the second
class of crimes. Of all the wrongs that man can do to his
fellows, murder is undoubtedly the cruellest of all, since
it deprives him of the only gift he has received from
Nature and the only one whose loss is irreparable. Never-
theless several questions present themselves here, apart
from the wrong that murder causes to its victim.

1. Is this action really criminal in the pure laws of
Nature ?

2. Is it politically?

3. Is it harmful to society ?

4. How should it be considered by a republican
government ?

5. Should murder be suppressed by murder?

"We will examine separately each of these questions;
the subject is sufficiently important to warrant prolonged
attention. Maybe our ideas will be considered somewhat
strong; but what of it? Have we not acquired the right
to say everything? Let us develop these great truths in
men's eyes; they expect them from us; it is time for error
to disappear, its bandage must fall with that of the king,

"The first question was: Is murder a crime in the
eyes of Nature ? Doubtless we will humiliate man's pride
in reducing him to the ranks of the other productions of
Nature," but nevertheless he is merely an animal like
any other, and in the eyes of Nature his death is no more

190

POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

important than that of a fly or an ox. And, anyhow,
death is not final, but merely a transmutation to some other
form of life, man into worm. Destruction is Nature's
method of progress, and she prompts the murderer to
destruction, so that his action shall be the same as plague
or famine.

"Is murder a crime politically? Let us confess on the
contrary that it is unfortunately one of the principal
springs of politics. Did not Rome become mistress of
the world by force of murder ? Is it not by force of murder
that France is free to-day ? It is unnecessary to warn the
reader here that we are speaking of murders caused by
war and not the atrocities committed by insurrectionaries
and counter-revolutionaries; these latter, vowed to public
execration, only need to be remembered to excite eternally
the horror and indignation of all. What human science
has more n'eed of support by murder than politics, which
tend ceaselessly to deceit, and whose only aim is the
growth of one nation at the expense of another ? Are the
iniquitous wars, the fruits of these barbarous politics,
other than the means by which the nation is nourished,
fortifies and extends itself? And what is war except the
science of destruction ? The strange folly of man who
teaches publicly the art of murder and honours him who
succeeds the best therein, and then punishes the man who
for a private quarrel gets rid of his enemy 1 Is it not time
to turn back on such barbarous paradoxes ?

"Is murder a crime against society ?" Obviously one
or two members more or less are indifferent to it, otherwise
would it engage in battle ?

"How should murder be considered in a republican
and war-like State? It would assuredly be extremely
dangerous to cast obloquy on this action or to punish it.
Republican pride demands a certain amount of ferocity;

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MARQUIS DE SADE

if it softens there is a loss of energy and subjugation will
quickly follow. A very strange reflection presents itself
here, but as it is true in spite of its strangeness I will say it.
A nation which starts as a republic will only be upheld by
virtues, because to arrive at the greater one must always
start by the less; but a nation which is already old and
corrupt and will have the courage to shake off the
monarchical yoke to adopt the republican will only main-
tain itself by many crimes; for it is already criminal, and
if it tried to pass from crime to virtue, that is to say from
a violent to a calm state, it would fall into inertia with its
inevitable ruin as the result. "

Murder is permitted or encouraged in many States
and at many different times. In the classical republics the
murder of slaves was not taken notice of. Among many
savages murder is considered an act of bravery, and men
are not admitted to full rank before they have committed
one or more murders. There were also human sacrifices
and men running amuck in many nations. A number of
nations to-day tolerate open murder. "What nation was
greater or more cruel than Rome, and what nation pre-
served longer its freedom and its liberty ? The spectacle
of gladiators kept up its courage ; it became war-like by the
habit of turning murder into a sport. Twelve or fifteen
hundred victims filled the arena daily, and there the
women, far more cruel than the men, demanded that the
dying should fall gracefully and that they should be
statuesque even in the convulsions of death

* Everywhere in fact it was rightly believed that a
murderer, that is to say a man who could smother his
sensibility sufficiently to kill his fellow and to brave public
or private vengeance, must be extremely courageous and
consequently precious in a warlike or republican govern-
ment. Let us now examine the nations, even more

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

ferocious, who indulged in infanticide; we shall see such
a course universally adopted and even sometimes enjoined
by law." See for example the American Indians or the
Madagascans. "In the republics of Greece all children
were carefully examined at birth and if they were mal-
formed, so that they could never defend the republic,
they were immediately destroyed; there they did not
think it necessary to erect richly endowed asylums to
preserve that vile scum of the human race. Until the
capital was changed, Romans who could not feed their
children exposed them. The ancient legislators had no
scruple on this account, and none of their codes suppressed
it. Aristotle advised abortion and these old republicans,
full of enthusiasm and love for their country, did not
recognise that individual commiseration one finds in
modern nations; people loved their children less, their
country more. In all the towns of China an enormous
number of abandoned children are found daily in the

streets

"It cannot be denied that it is extremely necessary and
politic to put a limit to the population in a republic; the
exact opposite is the case in a monarchy; there tyrants
measured their wealth by the number of their slaves and
consequently needed men; but an excess of population
is undoubtedly a real vice in a republic; nevertheless one
shouldn't cut throats to lessen it as our modern decemvirs
said ;* it is merely a question of not allowing it to exceed
the limits prescribed by its happiness. Take care not to
multiply too much a people in which each individual is
sovereign ; revolutions are always the effect of too big a
population. If for the glory of the State you allow your
warriors the right to destroy their fellows, for the preserva-

* Robespierre seriously advanced the plan of killing off two-thirds of the
population, thereby giving a model to the project of Saint-Fond which caused
Juliette's revulsion and disgrace.

193 N

MARQUIS DE SADE

tion of the State you should allow everybody to get rid of
children they cannot nourish or which cannot be useful;
and also grant the citizen the right to get rid of, at his

own risks and peril, all enemies who harm him

Let monarchists say that a State is great in relation to its
population ; a State will always be poor if the population
exceeds its supplies necessary for life, and will always be
prosperous if it is kept to the right level and can sell its
excess . . . , . but you should not destroy grown men to
diminish the population. It is unjust to shorten the days
of a properly developed individual ; birth control on the
contrary is not

"It is time to resume. Should murder be punished
by murder. Undoubtedly not. The only punishment
which a murderer should be condemned to is that which
he risks from the friends or the family of the man he has
killed. I pardon you, said Louis XV to Charolais* who
had just killed a man for his amusement, but I also -pardon
him who will kill you. All the bases of the law against
murderers is contained in that sublime sentence. (Salic
law punished murder with a fine.)

"In a word murder is a horror, but a horror often
necessary, never criminal, and essential to tolerate in a
republic/' Above all it should never be punished by
murder.

As far as man's duties towards himself are concerned,
the philosopher will only follow them as far as they affect
his pleasure or his self-preservation; consequently it is
useless to recommend their practice to him, and even

* Charolais, prince of the blood by his birth and by his tastes, is the real
'sadist' of the eighteenth century, and many of the legends which surround de
Sade would be more properly applied to this man who, as Michelet says "n'aimait
le beau sexe qu'a Pe"tat sanglant." The stories concerning him are extremely
unpleasant ana he almost certainly served de Sade as a model in his extant works,
as well as in the lost Journits de Fhrbelle, in which he appeared tinder his own
name.

POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

more so to punish him for not following them. The only
action which has been blamed in this category is suicide
which it is idiotic to call a crime.

"The long-established habit of supporting despotism
had completely enervated our courage; our morals had
been depraved but we are born again; soon people will
see of what sublime actions the genius and character of
the French are capable, now they are free; let us uphold
at the price of our fortunes and our lives that liberty which
has already cost us so many victims ; we will not regret
any of them if we reach our aim ; they sacrificed themselves
voluntarily; do not let their blood be uselessly spilt;
but we must stand united * . . united, or the fruits of
our efforts are lost; let us erect excellent laws on the
victories we have just gained; our first legislators, still
slaves of the tyrant we have finally thrown down, only
gave us laws worthy of the tyrant they still revered; let
us redo their task, let us think that it is for republicans
that we are working; let our laws be as mild as the people
they are to sway.

"In demonstrating as I have done the nullity and
indifference of a multitude of actions which our ancestors,
biased by a false religion, regarded as crimes, I have
reduced our work to very little. Let us have few laws,
but good ones it is not a question of multiplying
restraints, but merely giving to those we do use the quality
of indestructibility and see that the laws that we do
make aim only at the peace and happiness of the citizen
and the glory of the republic; but once you have chased
the enemy from your country, Frenchmen, I would not
wish that the ardour of your principles should carry you
further ; you can only carry them to the ends of the world
with fire and the sword. Before you try to do this,
remember the unhappy success of the Crusades. Once

MARQUIS DE SADE

the enemy is the other side of the Rhine fortify your
frontiers and stay at home; revive your trade, give your
manufactures energy and markets; help the arts to
flourish again, and encourage agriculture which is so
important in a government like yours; your object should
be to be able to furnish all the world without having need
of anybody. Let the thrones of Europe fall down of their
own accord ; your example and your prosperity will soon
overturn them without the necessity of your interference,

"Invincible in the interior and a model to all people
by your police and your good laws, every government in
the world will try to imitate you and will be honoured by
alliance with you; but if for the vain honour of carrying
your principles afar you abandon the care of your own
prosperity, that despotism which is merely asleep will
reawake, internal dissensions will rend you, you will
exhaust your finances and your army; and all that so that
on your return you can kiss the chains that tyrants who
will have conquered you in your absence will load you
with; all that you want can be done without leaving your
homes; let other nations see you happy and they will
hurry to seek prosperity by the route that you have traced
for them/' 6

This pamphlet was reprinted separately and anony-
mously as propaganda for the Commune in 1848.

I have thought it best to present de Sade's constructive
political thought over the fateful years 1788-1795 with-
out comment, in historical order, and as much as was
possible in de Sade's own words, so that readers could
observe for themselves the development through the
thesis of political equality and subordination to the State
(Sections i and ii) and the antithesis of complete individual

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

freedom (Section iii) to the synthesis of the practical
programme of the last Section.

As a revolutionary thinker de Sade was in complete
opposition to all his contemporaries firstly in his complete
and continual denial of a right to property, and secondly
in his view of the struggle as being not between the
Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy,
or sectional interests of any of these against one another
(the view of all his contemporaries) but of all these more
or less united against the proletariat. By holding these
views he cuts himself off entirely from the revolutionary
thinkers of his time to join those of the mid-nineteenth
century. For this reason he can with some justice be
called the first reasoned socialist. In his attempt to con-
ciliate the conflicting demands of the individual with
political fairness for all he still stands alone, despite
Kropotkin and the anarchists.

Writers about de Sade invariably reproach him for the
mild way in which he conducted himself during the
Revolution and call him merely a parlour socialist.
Apparently they expected this man of over fifty to indulge
in the torture and rapine that legend has associated
with his name; they would not understand that a person
who could analyse so clearly the brutality of others
should find such brutality disgusting and abhorrent. As
a matter of fact de Sade did all that was humanly possible
in the way of speaking and writing to persuade his fellow-
citizens to follow him in his well-developed plans; but
he spoke a language which none then, and too few now,
can understand,

It was inevitable that he should be merely a theoretical
and Utopian socialist. It was only his experience and
that of the earlier nineteenth century which allowed
practical socialism to be born. But as a theoretical

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MARQUIS DE SADE

socialist he saw extraordinarily justly, as can be seen by
his prophetic deductions concerning the immediate future
of France, and also his extremely apt criticism of the
League of Nations which another century would realise
with all the inherent faults he detected. There are con-
siderable correspondences between the legislation he sug-
gested and that actually adopted by Russia in 1919.

Ethically de Sade was more revolutionary still in his
attempt to effect a complete cleavage with judeo-Christian
morality and its conception of human nature. Here, too,
we are slowly catching up with him ; of the proposals that
were so paradoxical in 1795 I imagine that only two are
shocking to-day the justification of murder, and the
concept of universal brothels and general promiscuity.

The justification of murder comes from the fact that
de Sade was a logician and not a casuist. Foreign counter-
revolutionaries were on French soil and must be driven
off, if the Republic were to live. But murder is taking life,
no matter what the circumstances or excuse. Therefore
murder must be unfortunately justifiable, for all citizens
are equal on all occasions. His logic of course becomes
paradoxical as logic pushed to extremes always does.
His plan for universal brothels and promiscuity is not
mere paradoxical perversity but is a considered solution for
the problems which arise from his view of sex and allied,
instincts, a view which will be examined in the following
chapters. Meanwhile there is one point I would like to
remark on.

The claim that citizens of a free republic must be
immoral seems to be a non-sequitur. But since I first
noticed this point I have remarked that it is the most
reactionary people and the most reactionary governments
such as Germany and Italy which put the greatest
emphasis on purity and morality. In Hitler's Germany,

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POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

probably the most savage of contemporary countries, a
woman is not allowed in any Nazi meeting if she employs
rouge or powder {Daily Telegraph^ page u, 8/9/33) an d
the continual emphasis on sexual and racial purity from
such sources leads me to believe that de Sade's observation
is justified. It is with regret that I note the growing
puritanism of the communists in Russia since the abandon-
ment of war-time communism.

199

CHAPTER VII
SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime !
W. BLAKE,

Songs of Experience.

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joy's in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.
W. Blake,

Songs of Experience.

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse
unacted desires.

W. BLAKE,
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

IN writing about sexual matters the great difficulty is
vocabulary. There are in English half-a-dozen small
words which are absolutely essential to the matter and
which lie under one of the strongest taboos that we
acknowledge. These three nouns and three verbs are
supposed not to exist, as far as public speech or writing
are concerned, though in conversation generally they
receive a good deal of currency, both in their real meaning
and in their mystical apotropaic significance. One word
indeed is so charged with evil that even the thirteen

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

volumes of the New Oxford Dictionary are not a strong
enough exorcism, although the word in question has at
least three hundred years of literary history.

So strong is the magic contained in these groupings of
letters that we have had within the last few years the
curious spectacle of a book published in two editions,
the only difference as far as I know being the alteration
of one letter in the words 'muck' and ' beggar '; but the
edition in which this alteration was made cost about six
times as much as the vulgar text.

The natives of the Trobriand Islands, who are in so
many respects a model to us all, consider eating as private
as any other bodily function. Should a science of dietetics
arise among these people presumably the expounders of
this new knowledge would speak about ' ingurgitation/
'imbibing/ and 'the buccal orifice/ so that the ears and
eyes of the nice might not be offended by the sight or
sound of the crude monosyllables so full of associations
and magic, which had till then been used only for rude
talk or swearing.

.

When in the middle of the last century a few bold
professors came to the conclusion that sex was neither
an obscene mystery nor a dirty joke on the part of Nature
they invented for its discussion an aseptic polysyllabic
Greco-Latin vocabulary, completely free from associations
of any sort. From that time onwards they were able to
describe and talk about sexual matters in terms which
showed clearly enough that the subject could have no
possible contact either with the writer or his readers.
After the war this licence was seized upon by lay authors
and people now can and do write and talk about 'homo-

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MARQUIS DE SADE

sexuality* until one is driven to wish that this habit was
still only referred to "by that foul word which crowns
the seaman's phrase/' as the Byronic author of Don Leon
so chastely says.

Despite the asepsis of the professors, sex does still
play a part in our lives, and the scientific aura they have
given to these unscientific manifestations of vitality has
produced a complete distortion of human life. They aver
that we are brought into the world by * copulation/ but
surely nobody thinks of themselves as 'copulating/ not
even the most astringent scientists unless maybe Chris-
tian Scientists do.

The late D. H. Lawrence felt this contradiction so
strongly that he risked his established reputation to
employ four out of the six tabooed words. (Incidentally
the two words he did not use will tell the perspicacious
more about this writer than the deluge of volumes since
his death.) Like de Sade, he felt that "'sex' is as impor-
tant as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one
appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false
modesty as the other." 1

De Sade was fully conscious of the choice of vocabu-
laries before him the choice between the poetic circum-
locution, the scientific asepsis, and the crude mono-
syllables and consciously chose the last. ". . . .This
isn't an indecent anecdote .... but a part of human
history which we are going to learn, and the developments
of morals ; if you wish to learn from it you must be exact,
which things swathed in gauze never are. Dirty minds

are offended at everything Obscenity may revolt,

disgust and instruct, but does not excite . . ," 2

I am as convinced as either of these authors of the
desirability of using everyday language for everyday
acts, but I lack their heroic courage. I shall therefore

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

take refuge behind the sanctified terms of the scientists,
making my protest against this falsification by the use
of inverted commas, in the hope that readers will retrans-
late such terms into healthier Anglo-Saxon.

ii

De Sade gives such an extension to the idea of sex that
it becomes practically synonymous with the idea of
pleasure, and sex at times means simply the stimulus of
agreeable sensation; all physical and most mental sen-
sations of a positive nature are grouped under this term.
That all physical sensations should be so qualified is a
fairly obvious notion; the extension to the imagination
and the intellect was a further step which was unheard
of when he made his investigations, but is now also
generally acepted. He considered the pursuit of pleasure
to be the object of human life, and thought that physical
satisfaction was stronger than mental 3 ; consequently
"it is only by enlarging the scope of one's tastes and
one's fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that
that unfortunate individual called man, thrown despite
himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering
a few roses among life's thorns." 4 He was the first
to formulate the now generally accepted conception of
the overwhelming importance of sex. " Sex is to the
other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it sup-
ports them all, lends strength to them all ....
ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on
sex."'

According to de Sade, very young children are shame-
less, sexually inquisitive and endowed with strong sexual
feelings, 6 Children are naturally polymorphous perverts.
" Everyone is born with dispositions more or less great for
perversions and all are more or less differently con-

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MARQUIS DE SADE

stituted; and love, which comes after these first received
impressions bends them to its service, corresponding to
their activity. If the impressions are weak, love, which
is fostered by them, becomes stronger than them and is
sweet and reasonable; if on the contrary they are strong,
passion like a whirlwind .... breaks, tears and
devours all that opposes it; it becomes a fiery flame which
burns all that it meets, and finds only further fuel in all
that is presented to stifle it. All these are the results of
love; the naughty child breaks its toy; he has pleasure in
smashing it to bits and soon weeps bitter tears on the
ruins his temper has made. Such is love and its effects;
such are its incredible extravagances, sometimes impure
and sometimes cruel, but always natural . . . which the
fool doesn't know about, the thick-headed puritan
punishes, and the philosopher respects because he alone
knows the human heart and holds the key. Other people
are always being surprised at the combined effects of the
heart and the instincts; and as it is extremely common
for the one to be good and the other evil, when both are
in action together there are often seen in the same person
a number of virtues and vices mixed; people fall back on
human contradiction without seeing that the results are
not due to inconsequence but simply to the united effects
of two necessarily different principles, with consequently
different effects, Hadrian loved Antinous just as
Aboard loved H^loise; one had bad instincts, the other
a good heart/' 7

De Sade also believed that deep family affections,
especially when the loved member was of the opposite
sex, contained deeply hidden incest desires. 8 These are
his chief points of contact with the Viennese school of
psychoanalysis.

As far as adult sex-life was concerned de Sade divided

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

people into three categories. The first, and much the
largest, consisted of people whose imagination, courage
or desires were weak or repressed and therefore their
lives sexually were without remarkable incident. In this
connexion he says that "continence is far from being the
virtue it is supposed to be; it has many dangers and no
good effects; it is as harmful for men as for women; it
is bad for the health. . . ." 9 The second category
consists of natural perverts, and the third of libertines
who consciously imitate the obsessions of the second
class to enlarge their experience. It is almost exclusively
with these two categories that de Sade deals, though the
first class furnishes the vile bodies with which the
experiments are made. Since the habits of the third
class are the same as the second with the difference
that the perversions are wilful instead of congenital it is
de Sade's investigation of that class which we must now
examine.

He insists strongly that perversions are congenital and
involuntary in most cases. " What man wouldn't change
his tastes at once if he could and wouldn't prefer to be
like the rest of mankind instead of being peculiar if he
had the power? It is the most stupid and barbarous
intolerance to prosecute such a person; he is no more to
blame .... than a man who is born lame or hump-
backed. It is as unjust to make fun of or to punish a man
like that as it is to mock or insult a cripple. A man with
strange tastes is really an invalid " 10

Perversions may be divided into two groups, mental
and physical; and the second group be further divided
into four sub-groups, according as to whether the per-
version lies in the action, the object of affection, the type
of person, or the pantomime ritual performed. To be a
little clearer, a person may get most pleasure from some

205

MARQUIS DE SADE

action other than normal ' copulation/ from some person,
animal or object other than a member of the opposite
sex, from an exclusive type or dress (blondes, ballet
dancers, guardsmen, parlour-maids or people dressed
up to look like any of these, etc., etc.), or from the
re-enacting of some fixed scene, with the partner, how-
ever often varied in fact, always playing the same r6le.
The first two categories obviously overlap.

In Les 1 20 Journees de Sodome de Sade has fixed
permanently almost every variety of perversion in each
of these categories. How he was able to do this seems
quite inexplicable, for though he had led a life of con-
siderable and varied debauchery for at least fifteen years
to my mind he was as a physiologist might say * being
his own rabbit' it is quite impossible for any one
man to have experienced personally the six hundred
often mutually contradictory perversions he lists. Both his
examples and explanations show considerable similarity
with those of Professor Krafft-Ebing, Mr. Havelock
Ellis and other modern anthologists, though his range
is far larger and more inclusive. He describes the per-
versions with the greatest economy and in the simplest
language, so that his * histories' lack the human interest
of Ellis's and the coy latin of Krafft-Ebing's. He tried
fitfully and unsuccessfully to recapture these details in
Justine and Juliette after the loss of the earlier manu-
script, but with indifferent success.

Among intellectual perversions he describes, besides
the more obvious class such as 'voyeurs' and 'exhibi-
tionists/ many with less physical effects, such as the
pleasure of moral seduction, 11 without the enjoyment of
the result, kleptomania, which he explains as a substitute
for rape 12 and fetishes for smells, colours, and stuffs,
of a sort that one had thought known only to the editor

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

of that strangely innocent English paper for perverts.
Some of his cases have very peculiar reactions to money;
one person cannot enjoy pleasure unless combined with
stealing or cheating, 13 another can only enjoy bought
pleasures 14 while yet a third insists on paying those he
believes to be richer than himself and in robbing those
he believes poorer. 16 Students of Dr. Ernest Jones will
realise the accuracy of these observations.

I think de Sade's description of perverse actions is
absolutely complete, ranging from the pleasure of
combing hair to lust-murder, through every possible
gradation from the ridiculous to the revolting, from the
pleasure to be got from snotty little girls to the enjoy-
ment of the greatest ugliness, infirmity and corruption,
from foot fetishism to 'coprophagy.' Beyond calling
attention to the fact that this was by almost exactly a
century the first objective study of sexual phenomena,
I do not think there is any need for further elaboration.

In the class of perverse objects, 'homosexuality' is
by far the most conspicuous. De Sade's observations on
this subject are curious. Firstly he considers natural
homosexuality as opposed to that suggested by satiety
a rare phenomenon ; I do not think there are more than five
male 'homosexuals' in the whole of his thickly peopled
works; of these, two are almost exclusively pathics.
He states categorically that they all vary in their secondary
sexual characteristics from more normal males, as well
as in their voice and character. 16 The attitude of society
has forced them to be somewhat false and treacherous.

There are even fewer exclusive 'female homosexuals';
I can only recollect three ; but then as now it was a disorder
much less marked and exclusive than its male counter-
part. De Sade has a certain admiration for these women,
finding them more intelligent and witty than the average,

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MARQUIS DE SADE

I have an impression on the other hand that he disliked
the males, for he makes them nearly all slightly ridiculous,
with their assumption of being a nation within the
nation; he emphasises, however, their cruel position
in society and stresses their lack of responsibility for
their habits. I am completely at a loss to understand
the reasonings of those critics who suggest that de Sade
was himself * homosexual ' ; for though he and his libertines
have this habit, they also have all others; and the well-
attested presence of mistresses through nearly the whole
of his life in freedom makes it appear that this suggestion
was considered by its authors to be merely another and
gratuitous insult.

If de Sade were to return to life to-day I think that
he would find the greatest change in sexual life, after the
use of drugs, in the great spread of male 'homosexuality,'
especially among the bourgeoisie. This I imagine to be
partly due to the respectability of the new nomenclature,
and the aura of martyred literary merit which Wilde,
Gide and Cocteau have invested it with, but chiefly to a
neurotic fear of life and responsibility. As far as my
observation goes it is commonest, or at least most open,
in those countries in which the War and its sequels the
economical and political crises have had the severest
effect.

De Sade also dealt with the obsession of types one
case only likes red-headed women, another blonde sewing-
hands 17 and the desire for various pantomimes. 18
Among other generalisations he remarks that impotents,
or almost-impotents, are always spiteful and cruel, that
degradation grows with age, and that all sexual activity,
especially when repressed or when carried to excess, can
produce obsession amounting to monomania.

For de Sade, as has already been said, human hap-

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piness depends upon the greatest possible extension of
pleasure. But since our constitution and nature would
most probably keep us to one range of experience, either
normal or perverted, it is only wilfully and by an intel-
lectual effort that we can extend our possibilities for
pleasure. This idea of deliberately cultivating our taste
for sexual pleasures is indescribably shocking to us, to
whom, with very few exceptions judeo-Christian morality
is still a very strong prejudice; and it is because de Sade
did this and sincerely advised others to do it that his
reputation is surrounded by an aura of horror far greater
than that of the most repulsive lust-murderers, from
Gilles de Retz* to Jack the Ripper. But it is only in the
sexual sphere that this is considered reprehensible; in
all other human activities the cultivation of a wider taste
is held to be most praiseworthy. The study and develop-
ment of the arts has no other aim than to enable us to
perceive beauty and harmony in shapes sounds and
colours that were before either meaningless or repulsive.
And an English country parson, who would faint with
horror if it were suggested that he or his wife should try
to extend in any way their sexual pleasures, will have no
hesitation in smearing his child with the bloody tail of a
newly killed fox and encouraging him to enjoy such
activity, or in feeding on such stomach-turning delicacies
as putrescent game or cheese. And not only will he
manage to swallow such naturally revolting food, he will
consider it more enjoyable than more ordinary nourish-
ment, and will refuse fresh game or cheese as flat and
tasteless. "The greatest pleasures are born from con-
quered repugnances." 19

* Or so reputed. There seems reason, however, to believe that dc Retz was
a self-immolated witch, rather than a monster. See Murray God of the Witches >
also Fleuret De Gilles de Rats A Guillaumt Apollinaire.

209 o

MARQUIS DE SADE

I have used this metaphor purposely as being the
most apt ; de Sade himself employs it often : " Do
we not see every day people who have accustomed
their palate to an irritation which pleases them, alongside
people who could not for a moment support such
irritation ?" 20

It follows that the sphere of sexual pleasures can only
be extended by overcoming the reactions of disgust or
pain. These two notions are so intimately linked that
it is difficult to tell where moral fear ends and physical
fear begins. To continue the gastronomic metaphor I
do not know whether I am more repelled by the notion
of eating rotten meat or by the fear that the experience
will be physically unpleasant. It needs both courage and
imagination to overcome these natural reactions; for
encouragement there is the obvious and great pleasure
taken by other people in what seems to be unpleasant or
meaningless activity.

Courage is a temperamental quality and little can be
done to supply its absence, save by demonstration and
argument to show that what is feared is weak or meaning-
less. This de Sade does at enormous length, using every
argument to show that the religious or moral inhibitions
applied to certain acts are unfounded; from the moment
the result is pleasure the proceeding must be natural,
for pleasure is a stimulus of nature exclusively.

But such courage, whether natural or instilled, is
useless without imagination. " Imagination is pleasure's
spur .... directs everything, is the motive of every-
thing; is it not thence that our pleasure comes? Is it
not from that that the sharpest pleasures arise ?" 21 And
again, " Didn't you tell me that the pleasantest moral
sensations come from the imagination ? Well, if we allow
that imagination to wander freely, if we let it cross the

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

last frontiers which religion, decency, humanity, virtue,
in a word all our so-called duties would erect to it, would
not its divagations become prodigious? And wouldn't
their very immensity irritate us the more? In which
case the more we wish to be moved, to feel violently, the
more must we give rein to our imagination in the most
singular routes. . . ," 22

It was de Sade's considered and very sincere opinion
that pleasure, and especially physical and sexual pleasure
is the chief aim of human existence; "We are born to
* copulate '" he says in almost the same words as D. H.
Lawrence (incidentally had these two known of each
other they would have hated and despised each other's
ideas) "We are born to 'copulate,' we accomplish
Nature's laws in * copulating,' and any human law which
goes against Nature's is only worthy of disdain." 23 It is
for that reason that he preaches "your body is yours and
yours alone ; you are the only person in the world who has
a right to take pleasure from it and to permit whoever
you will to get pleasure from it. /Take advantage of the
happiest time of your life ; they are but too short those
happy years of our pleasures ; if we are fortunate enough
to have taken advantage of them pleasant memories con-
sole and divert us in our old age. Do we waste them?
. . , bitter regrets and horrible remorse rend us, and
join with the torments of age to surround us with tears
and thorns on the sad path to the grave |> . ," 24

It is now perhaps easier to understand why de Sade
wished for legally enforced promiscuity. Happiness
depends on the greatest possible extension of sexual
pleasure; but his very strong regards for the rights of
every individual prevents him conceiving the idea of a
caste of slaves or quasi-slaves 25 (wives [and whores) who
will be the objects by which this extension of pleasure is

211

MARQUIS DE SADE

to be obtained ; and therefore his only solution was to give
everybody momentary rights over the body of every
citizen. Logically there is something to be said for the
idea, but I doubt if it is practical.

De Sade suffered from the universal human assumption
that his sexual constitution was the normal type. He was
possibly more justified than most people, owing to the
enormous extension he had adopted. We still know so
extraordinarily little of the workings of this instinct
among 'normal' people, that unless our behaviour is
almost criminally extravagant we cannot conceive that
other people feel very differently to ourselves. Until
'normal' behaviour is statistically investigated and defined
it will be almost impossible for sincere writers not to fall
into this trap. The scientific works so far published
almost inevitably deal with cases which by their peculiarity
have been brought in touch with doctors or the law (Have-
lock Ellis, conscious of this contradiction tried to collect
a few examples of 'normal' behaviour in the appendices
of his Psychology of Sex; the insufficient results are
astonishing) so that sexually humanity appears to be
divided into two camps perverts and the rest. The
falseness of this dichotomy can be seen as soon as a man
tries to put his conclusions sincerely on paper; and we
have the curious spectacle of H. G. Wells claiming that
it is normal to love several women simultaneously, con-
fronting many writers who say passions are mutually
exclusive; and Frank Harris and Bernard Shaw holding
up their hands simultaneously at each other's monstrous
departure from the normal which for the former repre-
sents roughly seducing a new woman each week and for
the latter a mild and barely physical flirtation about once
in ten years.

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

in

So far we have only dealt with physical satisfactions.
De Sade admits that the pleasures which can be got from
the exercise of virtues, such as kindness, pity or charity
are very real, but claims that for that reason they contain
no special merit. 26 Moreover he considers the obliga-
tions of gratitude intolerable; "A man by a gratuitous
kind action puts himself above you, hurts your pride and
causes you thereby to feel an unpardonable mortifica-
tion/' 27 It may be remembered that charity was one of
the undesirable qualities done away with by the con-
stitution of Tamoe. He also fully acknowledges the very
great pleasures which can be gained from the arts; 28
he even points out the great poetry of some parts of the
bible. 29 But he does not consider such joys to be incom-
patible with, or superior to physical pleasure.

There are, however, three emotions very intimately
connected with sex desire, love and jealousy. For de
Sade desire is sometimes as pleasurable as satisfaction
("Happiness is not in the enjoyment but in the desire,
and in destroying the difficulties in the way of its accom-
plishment . . ." 30 ); love is misery and folly, jealousy
a useless insult.

De Sade takes love very seriously indeed; there are* at
least three long passages, one over thirty pages, entirely
devoted to its analysis. In its intensity, however, it is a
rare phenomenon ; I can only think of three characters in
his works who persist in love after enjoyment and know-
ledge, with perhaps the unhappy Justine as a fourth, who
naturally falls in love with a ' homosexual.' The following
definition of love seems to me adequate :

V"We call love that interior sentiment which draws us,
as it were in spite of ourselves, towards some object,
which makes us desire to unite ourselves with it, to be

213

MARQUIS DE SADE

ceaselessly near it, which flatters and intoxicates us when
we succeed in thus uniting ourselves, and which torments
us and drives us to despair when some foreign cause makes
us break this union.) If this extravagance never drew us
to anything except pleasure taken with this ardour and
intoxication it would merely be ridiculous; but since it
leads us to a certain metaphysic which changes us into
the loved object and makes its actions needs and desires
as dear as our own, by that alone it becomes extremely
dangerous by making us neglect our interests for those
of the loved one; by identifying us, so to speak, with this
object it makes us adopt its misfortunes and griefs and
add them to the sum of our own. Besides the fear of
losing this object or of seeing its affections cool disturbs us
ceaselessly; and from the calmest state of mind we pass
insensibly to the cruellest that can be found in the world.
If the recompense and the reward of so much misery
was anything other than ordinary pleasure, perhaps I
would advise risking it; but all the cares, torments and
thorns of love only lead to what one can easily gain
without it; where then is its use?

" When I meet a beautiful woman and fall in love with
her, I haV^n't any different aim from the man who sees
and desires her without any sort of love. We both wish
to go to bed with her; he only wants her body, whereas
I, through a false and dangerous metaphysic, blind myself
on my real motive which is exactly the same as my rival's,
and persuade myself that I merely want her heart, that
all idea of sex is excluded, and I persuade myself so well
that I would willingly agree with that woman to love her
for herself alone, and to gain her heart at the cost of
sacrificing all my physical desires." 31

Madame de Mistival says to the girl she is educating:
" You talk about the bonds of love; may you never know

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SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

them ! For the sake of the happiness I wish for you I
pray that your heart may never know such sentiments 1
What is love ? It can only be considered, I suppose, as
the resulting effects of the qualities of a beautiful object
on us; these effects carry us away and inflame us; if we
possess this object we are happy; if we cannot obtain it
we are in despair. But what is the basis of this sentiment ?
Desire. And what are its results? Madness, Let
us keep to the motive and protect ourselves from the
results. (The motive is to possess the object; very well,
let us try to succeed, but with prudence; let us take our
pleasure when we possess the opportunity and console
ourselves in the opposite case ;^ a thousand other objects
similar and often far better man the one we have lost
will console us; all men and all women are alike. . , .
What a deception that intoxication is which absorbs in
us the results of our senses and puts us into such a state
that we only see, we only live through the adored object!
Is that living ? Isn't it rather depriving ourselves volun-
tarily of all life's charms? Isn't it insisting in staying in a
burning fever which absorbs and devours us without
leaving us other happiness than metaphysical pleasures
so similar to the effects of madness ? If we were certain
always to love the adored object, and never to be separated
from it, love would still be an extravagance doubtless,
but at least it would be excusable. But does that happen ?
Have we many examples of these eternal unions which
never subside ? A few months' enjoyment will soon put
the object in its rightful place and make us blush for the
incense which we have burned on its altars; often we
cannot even conceive what was capable of so seducing
us." 32

De Sade knew what he was writing about. He was
one of those comparatively rare mortals who have the

215

MARQUIS DE SADE

faculty of falling deeply in love, and thwarted love had
made his life miserable for nine years. Not all who
write in praise of this passion can say as much.

The following passage on jealousy, love and desire
will complete the description of de Sade's views on these
subjects. "I have sometimes heard it asked whether
jealousy was a flattering or an insulting mania, as far as
the woman is concerned, and I admit that I have never
doubted that since this emotion was merely selfish,
women have nothing to gain by the action it produces on
the spirit of their lovers. One isn't jealous because one
loves a woman very deeply but because one fears the
humiliation which would result from her changing; and
the proof that this passion is purely egoist is that there is
not a single honest lover who would not agree that he
would rather see his mistress dead than unfaithful. Con-
sequently it is her inconstancy rather than her loss which
afflicts us, and therefore ourselves alone whom we consult
in this event. From which I conclude that after the
unpardonable extravagance of being in love with a
woman the greatest that one can commit is to be jealous
of her. This sentiment is insulting for a woman, since
it proves to her that we do not esteem her; it is painful
for us and always useless, for it is a sure method of sug-
gesting to a woman the desire to deceive us by letting
her see the fear that we have of that happening. Jealousy
and fear of cuckoldry are two things which clamp
prejudice on to our pleasure with women; without this
cursed habit of foolishly desiring to bind moral and
physical things together on this subject we would soon
get rid of our prejudices. Why, can't you go to bed with
a woman without loving her, and can't you love her
without going to bed with her? But what need is there
for the heart to have a r6le in a situation in which only

216

SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE

the body plays a part? It seems to me that there are
there two very different desires and needs. Araminta
has the loveliest body in the world; her voluptuous face
and her dark eyes full of fire .... promise the greatest
pleasure. What need is there that the sentiments of my
heart should accompany the act which gives me the body
of this creature? It seems to me again that love and
pleasure are two very different things; that not only is it
not necessary to love to get pleasure, but even that it is
enough to get pleasure not to love. For feelings of
tenderness arise from similarities of temperament and
taste, and are in no way inspired by lovely breasts or a
well-burned bottom; and these objects which, according
to our tastes, can excite strongly our physical affections
have not, it seems to me, the same right on our moral
ones. To continue my comparison: Jane is ugly, forty
years old, without a single grace in all her person, not
a regular feature, not a single beauty; but she is witty and
has a charming character and millions of traits which
agree with my sentiments and my tastes ; I have no desire
to go to bed with Jane but I shall nevertheless love her
madly; I shall want very strongly to have Araminta, but
I will detest her cordially as soon as the fever of desire
has passed, because I have only found in her a body,
and none of the moral qualities which could gain for her
the affections of my heart," 33

It may be added that de Sade shared the family
reverence for the family "poet, Petrarch, whom he several
times refers to as "the sweet singer of VaucluseJ*

217

CHAPTER VIII
SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine
And Secrecy the human dress.

The human dress is forgdd iron,

The human form a fiery forge,

The human face a furnace seaPd,

The human heart its hungry gorge.
W. BLAKE,

Appendix to the Songs of
Innocence and Experience.

"It is impossible ... for an engineer to wreck his own
machines: it would be like a parent striking a dagger into the heart
of his child."

A. MONKHOUSE,

during his trial in Moscow , April y 1933.

NEARLY a century after de Sade had made his analysis
of the sexual instincts and perversions a German professor
called^ Krafft-Ebing started the work anew, and with a
mixture of impropriety and ignorance took de Sade's
name for one of the perversions he had described and
defined Sadism as 'sexual emotion associated with the
wish to inflict pain and use violence'; with even greater
impertinence he took the name of a living second-rate
novelist, Sacher-Masoch, to give the name Masochism
to 'the desire to be treated harshly, humiliated and ill-
used/ Incidentally the idea of taking the names of
living writers for naming sexual perversions could be

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an amusing game, but one which for fear of libel I shall
not pursue.

Although these definitions were so unsatisfactory that
they have been altered and amended by nearly every
writer on the subject since, the words have passed into
almost universal use and have indeed been so extended
as to become nearly meaningless. Sadism now, at any
rate for lay writers, is practically a synonym for cruelty,
and masochism for unhappiness with a slight suggestion
of pleasure; as such they are useless additions to an
already overloaded vocabulary and merely serve to give
a false impression of objective detachment and an aura
of non-existent science.

Seeing that the connection between sexual pleasure
and pain is a single manifestation without clear dividing
marks between the active and passive attitudes Havelock
Ellis followed Schrenck-Notzing in using the term
Algolagnia for all activities in which sex and external
pain were united. I would like to continue the use of
this term for such manifestations and keep the word
Sadism for the special group of instincts which de Sade
was the first, and almost the only person to describe and
which constitutes by far his most important contribution
to psychology. I am aware of the obvious ambiguity
of using a word which has already so many meanings,
but I cannot see any way out of the dilemma; for it is
de Sade's contribution to analysis and there is no existing
word to cover the points evolved and I have neither the
qualifications nor the desire to invent another hybrid
term.

I should like to recall here the passage already quoted
in Chapter III on cause and effect in which he says,
" Since all things act and react on one another incessantly
they produce and undergo change at the same time."

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MARQUIS DE SADE

For Sadism and sex are two instincts strongly joined and
as strongly separated; they each modify the other con-
siderably but it cannot be said that either causes the
other; they act and react incessantly on one another.

Sadism, as described by its analyst I would define as
the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the
external world produced by the observer. This is a universal
instinct and very strong, only following the instinct for
self-preservation, and the sex instincts, of which it is a
manifestation and which are a manifestation of it. It
might also be defined as * pleasure in the ego's modifica-
tions of the external world/ but I think the first definition
is clearer.

It will be seen that this definition is extremely wide
and covers an enormous range of human activity from
the creation of works of art to the blowing up of bridges,
from making little girls happy by giving them sweets to
making them cry by slapping them. It would be incorrect
however to say that it covers all human activities for there
are two essential clauses; there must be sensible modifi-
cations of the external world, and they must be the willed
production of the agent. That is to say that there can
be Sadistic satisfaction in painting a picture, but not in
painting a house under another person's orders and
following another person's taste; there can be Sadistic
pleasure in killing a person, but not if that killing is
ordered and independent of the killer.

Like all human emotions this is ambivalent, and can
be either constructive or destructive. It can be applied
to people or things, but obviously the greatest and most
marked modifications can be made on other human
beings; and emotional connections with other human
beings are liable to be more or less sexual. In sexual
intercourse itself the modifications are very strong and

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obvious; by your actions exclusively a person like the
rest of the world is changed into a writhing, panting,
often almost speechless animal in an ecstasy of pleasure-
pain.

Which is it ? Pleasure or pain ? Could an uninstructed
observer watching human beings or animals 'copulate'
tell whether the couple were making love or fighting,
whether the spasms were unbearable pleasure or unbear-
able pain ?

To my mind it is a question of degree, not of difference.
All pleasure is bounded by pain in its excess, sometimes
on both sides, sometimes on one side only. The pleasures
of temperature for instance are confined within a very
narrow limit with unnumbered degrees of pain on either
side. Some people can push back the limits of pleasure
a little; they can train themselves to enjoy bathing in
water so cold or so hot that to most others it would be
agony; but the limits of pain are still there. The same
standard is applicable to the pleasures of the other senses :

Pleasure is pain diminished,
Pain is the absolute.

What is certain is that you can produce far greater,
more varied, and more obvious modifications on other
people by pain than by pleasure, and therefore greater
satisfaction for the agent; and it is because de Sade
described also these satisfactions that his name and his
reputation have received their present stigma from people
who can understand the letter, even if they completely
ignore the spirit.

It is because pain and destruction are easier and more
spectacular that de Sade principally described such actions
in his characters, which he described as portraying "not
man as he is or pretends to be, but as he can be, as he is

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MARQUIS DE SADE

influenced by vice and all passions' shocks"; and because
of his pessimistic view of human nature he made destruc-
tive Sadism far more common than constructive. This
is particularly true of La Nouvelle Justine, the work by
which he is most often judged; in a number of his other
works this feature is barely stressed at all. La Nouvelle
Justine is above everything an attempt to explain why the
revolution failed and is throughout coloured by the fact
of de Sade's imprisonment for moderantism. His con-
clusion is that by far the greater number of people desire
to hurt and oppress their fellows; the desire to aid and
assist them is far less common though by no means
absent from this work, as many commentators suggest.
To illustrate this point he allows his characters to do
whatever their imaginations suggest; and it follows from
his view of human nature that they mostly tend to torture,
cruelty and murder. His literary conscience prevents
him presenting this for him almost universal human trait
with too great a monotony in all his works the gradation
and development of his revelations are most cunningly
revealed bit by bit; consequently his imagination and
knowledge lead him to describe an astounding collection
of tortures. Both his personal experience and his his-
torical researches were called into play; many of the
acts described have direct historical parallels in the
Revolutionary butcheries ; a number of others are taken
directly from the amusements of such people as Charolais,
Blaise Ferrage, Count Potocki, Bullion, the Duke de
Richelieu and many others both of his own and former
epochs. It might indeed be claimed that as far as the
scenes of cruelty in Justine and Juliette are concerned
that de Sade was acting less as an imaginative writer than
as an anthologist. Although this description of tortures
and murders is usually supposed to be de Sade's chief

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originality, there is actually very little which could not be
paralleled in Foxe's or Wright's Book of Martyrs; the
horrors described and illustrated in this pious book are
as frightful as those of de Sade; he merely collected
the facts in the form of fiction and arranged them to
create a crescendo ; but if he had only done this he would
have made a work of little use, and one which moreover
would not have been condemned but which might well
have served for the secret gloatings and morbid imagina-
tions of the humanitarian, as Foxe for the pious protestant.
The description of the acts of Bishop Bonner, for example,
by Wright is almost to the vocabulary identical with that
of the clergy by de Sade. It is because he went behind
the religious, political or legal excuses for these acts and
described with accuracy and insight the real motives of
the butchers and persecutors that his work becomes
extraordinarily original and important; and it is for the
same reason that the authorities who still use the same
excuses for the same brutalities have condemned and
pursued his work with a vigour they have never applied
to any other writer. The people who imagine that de
Sade intended Justine and Juliette to be incitements to
cruelty show extraordinarily little insight, unless indeed
they are speaking from personal experience, and find
even the coldest and most objective descriptions exciting.

Even in these works de Sade did not entirely ignore
constructive Sadism, though, except for a couple of
scientists, it is mostly manifested by kindness and
decoration.

A more mental side of this destructive Sadism is the
destruction of barriers, moral or legal, and the pleasure
of knowing that one's actions or words would cause
extreme distress to other people. The search for this
pleasure the reputation of dare-devilry will often

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MARQUIS DE SADE

lead to seemingly paradoxical results the sinking of the
ego in self-sought humiliation. The most obvious expres-
sion of this is the constant confession of the guilt of
notorious crimes by actually innocent people.

The amount of satisfaction this instinct seeks naturally
varies with the individual character and circumstances.
But it is a strong and universal instinct, and if not granted
any direct satisfaction will seek it in devious and usually
socially more harmful ways. Like the sexual instinct
chance may determine for the individual a fixation for
one special form of satisfaction.

The most direct methods of satisfaction are constructive
work of any sort, and domineering, either sexually,
individually, or socially; the most spectacular Motive-
less' crimes of destruction, particularly arson and murder.
For most people sufficient direct satisfaction is impossible
to obtain, and the lack is supplied by imaginative fantasy,
either self-inspired or suggested by entertainment.

It can be argued that mass production by machino-
facture has eliminated a great deal of constructive Sadistic
pleasure to-day. This is in part compensated by the
introduction of mechanical tools for private amusement
cars, wireless, cameras which enable some people to
have the pleasure of * doing things with their hands/ of
constructively modifying their environment. But these
pleasures are too narrowly distributed to make a counter-
balance. Very little direct destructive Sadism is allowed
usually; lovers carve their initials on trees when they've
got trees, and Nazis carve reversed swastikas on the faces
of Jews, when they've got Jews; but on the whole people
have to seek satisfaction either by identifying themselves
with some larger group in the community the party,
the army, the empire or by fantasy.

The amount of Sadistic satisfaction afforded by popular

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entertainment is as astounding as it is historically
unparalleled. The most direct are those entertainments in
which death Sadistic destruction at its most complete
plays a potential, and often an actual part speed-racing
in various dangerous machines, perilous acrobatics and
so on. But the forms which touch the greatest public
are the exteriorised fantasies, the cinema and the popular
novel.

The cinema is becoming more and more Sadistic.
Film after film is engaged in the contemplation of succes-
ful crime and murder, or of beauty and virtue in distress
the themes of Justine and Juliette. What is probably
the best American, and therefore the best film ever made,
/ am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang> was a complete essay
in the various forms of Sadism. It was probably an
accident, but a very significant accident, that the pro-
tagonist was changed from a real estate agent in the
autobiography to a constructive engineer in the film
that his chief desire was not to make money, but to build.
The Russian film, and indeed Russian propaganda
generally, is trying to concentrate the energies of the
spectators on constructive Sadism Dnieperstroy instead
of Al Capone.

But it is in literature that the most spectacular change
has taken place. The elaborate contemplation of murder
and crime and especially gangsters in the Press is I
imagine a fairly new but very popular phenomenon. But
the fantasy of Sadistic crime in recent years has dominated
the novel in unexampled fashion. Before the war the
novel of crime or detection was not much occupied com-
paratively with destruction Sherlock Holmes was far
more engaged with robberies, coining, kidnapping, lost
documents, etc., than he was with murder; and the novels
of Phillips Oppenheim, which are fairly typical of the

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MARQUIS DE SADE

period, are mostly concerned with lost documents. But
to-day a detective story means a story about murder.
I should think the words * death' or 'murder' occur in
the title of a quarter of the books published far more
frequently than any other noun; the novels in question
range from the classical contemplation of evidence
with one corpse in the first chapter to orgies of blood-
letting, with a mechanical triumph of law in the end.
The most popular books of the Sexton Blake variety
reduce detection to a minimum. The happy weakening
of the bonds of Christian * morality' and the spread
of contraceptive knowledge has made the demands for
vicarious sexual satisfaction less strong; the conditions
of modern life have made the demands for vicarious
Sadistic satisfaction far stronger, and so Charles Garvice
and Elinor Glyn have given place to Edgar Wallace and
Agatha Christie as the most popular dream manufacturers.
It is a curious comment on the minds of ministers of the
Church that they should think the contemplation of
murder more moral than the contemplation of love;
for clergymen frequently state in the Press that the
detective story is far healthier than the 'sex' novel.

There is one wide-spread type of Sadist to-day that
de Sade didn't foresee, the only type as far as I know;
and that is the animal lover. To be the master tyrant
and destiny of any animal is already direct Sadistic
satisfaction ; but it is apparently not sufficient. The anti-
vivisectionists protest against the use of animals for the
relief of human suffering; and often they say, with uncon-
scious self-revelation, that if such experiments must be
made, they should be performed on other humans
murderers, communists, huns. And their continuous
charge of Sadism (meaning pleasurable cruelty) against
scientists is equally damning; "I have always remarked

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that people who are very quick to suspect a certain sort
of crime are those who are addicted to it themselves;
it is very easy to conceive what one admits, but not so
easy to understand what is repugnant." 1 This generalisa-
tion of de Sade's is very widely applicable.

There is one other pleasure which is usually classed as
Sadistic, but I think incorrectly the pleasure that comes
from the contemplation of the pain, misery or discomfort
of others which cannot possibly be considered the work
of the contemplator (this must not be confused with
fantasy in which the spectator temporarily identifies
himself with the active Sadist); this is a very real and
general pleasure for which there is no name in English
but which the Germans call Schadenfreude. I do not
think this pleasure is Sadistic but as it were the opposite
face of pity. The one is sorrow for ills that might have
touched us, but did not, the other joy for ills that might
have touched us, but have not. It is therefore to my
mind more closely connected with the instinct for self-
preservation than with that of construction-destruction.
De Sade considered this pleasure the most barbarous of
all: "I learned then that if there are some men who can
get pleasure from the pains of others under the impulsion
of revenge or loathsome lust, there are others so bar-
barously organised that they enjoy these same pleasures
without other motives than the satisfaction of pride or
the most horrible curiosity. Man is then naturally evil,
in the delirium of his passions as much as when they are
calm, and in both cases the ills of his fellow can become
the source of execrable pleasures for him." 2

The criminal Noirceuil, in advising Juliette how to
treat a ward who has been entrusted to her analyses and
distinguishes the two pleasures. "What I should do in
your place," he says, "would be to amuse myself as much

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as I wanted with this girl, and steal her fortune, and then
place her in such an unhappy position that you can at
every moment increase your happiness by the charms of
watching her languish; as far as pleasure is concerned
that will be better than killing her. The happiness I
advise will be far stronger; for you will have both the
physical satisfaction from the pleasures you have had
with her and the intellectual satisfaction of comparing
her lot with yours ; for happiness consists more in those
sorts of comparisons than in actual pleasures. It is a
thousand times sweeter to say when you see miserable
people, ' I am not like them and that is what puts me above
them/ than merely to say, 'I am enjoying myself, but I
am enjoying myself in the midst of people as happy as I
am/ It is the privations of others which make our
pleasures felt; in the midst of equals we could never be
content; that is why it is said so rightly that to be happy
one should always look down, not up. If then it is the
spectacle of others' misery whose comparison must com-
plete our happiness one must obviously not relieve
them. . . . Not only that : we must create unfortunates
whenever the opportunity occurs to multiply that class
and to compose one which, since it is your own work, will
make far sharper the pleasures provided. So ....
you should reduce this girl to asking charity and then
refuse her, and thereby increase your pleasure by a com-
parison the more striking and enjoyable since it will be
your doing." 3

The distinction between accidental misfortune and
that caused by voluntary action is I think valid.
Incidentally this passage will help explain the (probably
unconscious) reactions of people emotionally opposed
to any form of egalitarian socialism. The writer who
seems to excite this sort of opposition more than any

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other is H. G. Wells in his 'prophetic' writings; from
Max Beerbohm to the current reviewers of The Shape of
Things to Come we get the continual complaint that a State
in which everybody could be happy and healthy would be
unpleasant and uninteresting; until I read this passage
of de Sade I was always at a loss to understand why such
comparatively benevolent people should oppose so
passionately the fancied abolition of ignorance, disease,
and poverty, and that reviewers should attack what seemed
to me the unquestionably desirable aims of Wells' work,
rather than the political prejudice in favour of a sort of
liberal fascism and the blind optimism which has to
posit a miraculous comet or a discriminating plague to
achieve these aims; but I now realise that the genteel
intellectual when threatened in his one point of superiority
is to be reckoned with as an anti-social obstructionist. It
should not now be necessary to point out that the pas-
sage quoted above comes from a novel in which de Sade
is describing the thoughts and actions of his characters,
not his own.

ii

In the works of de Sade that are left to us there is no
complete definition of Sadism. Whether it existed in
any of his lost philosophical works can only be a matter of
speculation; it is possible that it did not, for psychology
as a study had still to be invented. But as I will try to
show he got very near to defining it; and in Juliette he
wrote a novel of Sadism in action. I should have thought
the completely non-sexual acts from which the actors of
this novel get satisfaction would have been enough to
show other readers that Sadism wasn't merely a branch
of sex; for though he uses the same physiological terms
for the satisfaction felt, he also does so for gluttony.

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MARQUIS DE SADE

The best possible example will be an extract from the
book. The following is an incident which occurred when
Juliette was about twenty-one; she was at that time at the
height of her prosperity as Saint-Fond's mistress; she
was left alone by him in his country house; after seven
years of decreasingly unpleasant experience she was
enjoying for the first time a little independence. The
story is told by her,

"But in what sort of a moral state had so much wealth
left me ? That, my friends, is what I do not dare to admit
and what I must yet confess to you. The extreme
debauchery in which all my senses were daily drowned
had so dulled the reactions of my heart that I do not
believe I would have given a farthing of my treasures
to save an unhappy life. About that time there was a
famine in the neighbourhood, accompanied with the
greatest distress, . , . My charity was asked for, and
I refused, pointing out the enormous expenses my
gardens were causing me Analysing my sen-
sations, I discovered, as my teachers had told me, that
instead of the unpleasant sentiment of pity, a certain
pleasure produced by the ill I thought I was doing in
refusing these unfortunates, which circulated in my
nerves a feeling like that one gets each time one breaks

a restraint or overcomes a prejudice I felt

pleasure in simply refusing to relieve unhappiness, what
would I not feel if I were myself the real cause of this
unhappiness?

"A quarter of a mile from my house there was a
wretched cottage belonging to a poor peasant called
Martin Des Granges, who had eight children and a wife
whose sense and economy justified her being called a
treasure

"Elvire, my maid, and I brought some Boulogne

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phosphorus with us; I had charged this intelligent girl
to distract the attention of the family while I went and
hid the phosphorus carefully in the straw of an attic
above the poor room. On my return I petted the chil-
dren, chatted with the mother about domestic details;
the father pressed refreshment on me, received me as
best he could . . . Nothing made me hesitate ....
and I left after giving the mother some ribbons and
the children sweets. On my returning home I was in
such a state that I had to ask Elvire for relief. ....
When I got home I was in an indescribable condition;
it seemed as though all disorders and vices had combined
together to come and debauch my heart, I felt as though
I were in a sort of drunkenness, a sort of madness : there
was nothing I wouldn't have done, no sort of vice with
which I would not have soiled myself. I was in despair
that I had affected so small a portion of humanity; I
would have liked the whole of Nature to have felt the
effects of my influence. I threw myself naked on a
sopha in one of my boudoirs and ordered Elvire to bring
all my men to me and to let them do what they liked,
provided they cursed me and treated me like a whore.

And I was happy; the more I wallowed in

filth and infamy, the more my mind was fired and the

more my delirium increased

"Returning to my boudoir we saw the sky lit up.
'Oh, madame,' said Elvire, opening a window, look,
look! There's a fire ... a fire where we were this

morning.' I almost fainted 'Let us go out,'

I said to her, 'I think I hear cries, let us go and enjoy
the delicious spectacle. It is my doing, Elvire, my doing.
I must see everything, hear everything, nothing must
escape me.' We went out with our hair flowing, our
dresses disordered, intoxicated; we seemed like two

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MARQUIS DE SADE

bacchantes. At twenty yards from this scene of horror,
hidden behind a low mound which prevented us being
seen without hiding anything from us, I fell again into
the arms of Elvire who was almost as moved as I was.
Illuminated by the murderous flames which my ferocity
had kindled, hearing the shrill cries of misery and
despair which my lust called forth I was the happiest of
women.

"At last we went to see the details of my crime. I
was sorry to see that two of my victims had escaped; I
recognised the other corpses and turned them over with
my feet. 'All these people were living this morning,'
I said to myself, 'I have destroyed them all in a few
hours for my pleasure . . . and so that is what murder
is: a little matter disorganised, a few combinations
changed, some atoms broken and returned to Nature's
crucible from whence they will return in a few days in
another form; where is the evil in that? Are women or
children more precious to Nature than flies or worms?
If I take life from the one, I give it to the other; where
is the crime in what I do?' This little revolt of my head
against my feelings caused me another strong sen-
sation If I had been alone I don't know where

my madness would have carried me. Like the negroes
I might have devoured my victims. They were all
heaped there . . . only the father and one of the
children had escaped; the mother and the seven others
were under my eyes ; and I said to myself as I looked at
them, touched them even ... 'It is / who have just
committed these murders, it is my work and mine alone?
No traces were left of the house ; one could hardly guess
where it had stood.

"Will you believe me, my friends, that when I told
Clairwil what I had done she told me that I had only

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played at crime and had committed several grave mis-
takes.

"'First of all,' she said .... * you behaved stupidly,
and if anyone had come you would have given yourself

away Secondly you did the thing in a small

way, only setting fire to a cottage when there are big

villages just by and you are left with the

unpleasant remorse of having been able to do more and

not having done it; and even considering what

you did do there is still another big mistake. I would
have had Des Granges prosecuted. He was in the position

to be prosecuted as incendiary When a fire

starts in the house of one of the lower orders on your
land you have a right to have the case looked into by the
local magistrates to be sure that he isn't guilty. How
do you know that that man didn't want to get rid of his
wife and children to go and cadge elsewhere? As soon
as his back was turned you should have had him arrested
as a fugitive and an incendiary and given him up to
justice. With a few pounds you could find witnesses,
Elvire herself would have been of use; she could bear
witness that in the morning she had seen the man wan-
dering in his attic without any purpose; that she had
asked him about it and he hadn't been able to reply;
and in eight days you would have been given the pleasure
of seeing this man burned at your door." 4

This typical passage is interesting for many reasons;
it is even more revolting than most in its very probability;
it is as revolting as the burning of the Reichstag in
Berlin, on February 27th, I933> to which it has such a
striking resemblance. (I must apologise for the constant
references to Nazi Germany, but its history in all its
details is so similar to the conditions de Sade describes
that it almost seems as though one were reading the

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MARQUIS DE SADE

plot of an unknown novel of his, and the apt comparisons
spring spontaneously.)

In this incident can be seen all the typical features of
the destructive Sadism as described by this author and
perpetrated by so many lesser men; its independence of
and interdependence with sex; its continuous emphasis
on the personal nature of the act; the preference given
to the influence of personality on other people rather than
on objects; and the desire for voluntary humiliation. It
also contains the continual dilemma of the Sadistic hero
the impossibility of real crime. "I have rationalised my
fantasies too well," Clairwil complains. "It would have
been a thousand times better if I had never done so; if
I had left them in their envelope of crime they would at
least have excited me, but the indifference my philosophy
gives them prevents them touching me any more/' 5
As Proust and Huysmans have both pointed out this is
the final misery of evil.

Torture, murder and arson are the most satisfying as
they are the most complete acts of destructive Sadism;
de Sade, who had seen the uncontrolled excesses of the
nobles before the Revolution and of the masses during it
knew to what lengths unfettered human nature can go;
and consequently they form the chief diversions of the
vile characters he writes about. But not the only ones;
he also notes the pleasures to be got by frightening people
by banging doors, or from making little girls cry, from
scandal-mongering or from shocking people; "There is a
petty triumph for one's amour propre in shocking people,
which is not to be despised." 6

De Sade considered that this human instinct, especially
when deprived of direct satisfaction was the most dan-
gerous of all anti-social forces ; to prevent its destructive
forces from causing too much havoc he wanted it to be

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SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

canalised into sexual activity. " There is not a single man
who doesn't want to be a despot when he is excited ....

he would like to be alone in the world any sort

of equality would destroy the despotism he enjoys then;
.... if he makes others suffer he tastes all the charms
which a nervous individual feels in the exercise of his forces ;
he dominates then, he is a tyrant; what a pleasure for his
amour propre ! " 7 " I would like women to employ active
flagellation, by which means cruel men get rid of their
ferocity. A few do, I know, but not as many as I should
like. Society would profit by means of this issue given
to female cruelty; for if they cannot be cruel in this way
they are in another and spread their poison in the world
and drive their husbands and children to distraction. . . .
The other means by which they could calm their passions
are dangerous/' 8

It was for this reason as a sort of social insurance
that de Sade wished for the universal brothels and for the
visitors to find therein "the most complete subordination
with the right to punish arbitrarily, under the eyes of the
guardians, any disobedience/' It would be interesting
to find out whether such a policy would have the desired
result.

It was for a similar reason that he proposed the adoption
of cruel spectacles like bullfights, gladiators, boxing and
wrestling. "People would be frightened at first glance
I realise, at the project of such inhuman sports. But
can you doubt that they would soon be as popular as your
balls and comedies ? Can you doubt that your fine ladies
with their nerves and their vapours would not come to
dissipate them at these popular massacres ? The, Porcias
and Cornelias wept at the tragedies of Sophocles and yet
went just as readily to the excitements of the Roman
Circus Such spectacles worthy of a great nation

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MARQUIS DE SADE

would only be revolting for us because our eyes are not
accustomed to them ; perhaps one would shudder at the
former (the tragedies); one would crush one another to
be present at the latter. Aren't our public places crowded
every time a judicial murder takes place? (What is very
strange is that it is mostly women; they have then more
leaning to cruelty than we, and that because their organisa-
tion is more sensitive. That is what fools don't under-
stand.) It would be exactly the same case here. We
would be consistent indeed to take objection to such
things, while we allow so many secret atrocities. And
who knows if, by thus giving issue to human cruelty,
we wouldn't dry up at the source their mysterious crimes ?
The celebrated Marechal de Retz would perhaps not
have murdered four or five hundred children, if there had
been spectacles where his lust could have found satis-
faction. . . ." 9 It was probably with the same intention
that he drew up a plan for a spectacle of gladiators. This
meeting-ground of the catharsis of Aristotle and the
sublimation of Freud is curious.

From the moment when he started his analysis of
human behaviour de Sade stressed this desire for domina-
tion, which if it does not find an outlet sexually will
create one elsewhere; in the 120 Journees he makes his
characters speak of "the importance of despotism in the
pleasures we enjoy," "the unhappy perversion which
makes us take pleasure in the misfortunes we cause others ' ' ;
in the castle where the orgies take place the sight of the
instruments of torture alone was sufficient to maintain
"the subordination so essential in such cases, subordina-
tion from which derives nearly all the pleasures of the
persecutors." 10 And in Justine the murderous innkeeper
asks, "What is crime? It is an action which subordinates
men to us and raises us infallibly above them; it is the

236

SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

action which makes us the master of others' lives and
fortunes. . . ." n

At this point, where the discussion of destructive
Sadism leads into that of algolagnia it may be as well to
remark that though de Sade practised the latter both
actively and passively there is no reason whatsoever to
suppose that he either practised or desired to practise
the former; he described with an accuracy and a verve
which is unequalled the mechanism of criminals, tyrants,
oppressors and persecutors; but he was not therefore a
criminal or a persecutor himself. He deliberately stated
that such objective description was intended to be
scientific; he claims that the portrayal of " Man's charac-
ter, completely naked, furnishes all the necessary tints
for the philosopher who cares to seize them, and after
having seen him thus, one can surely divine the result of
the spasms of his loathsome heart and fearful passions." 12
His work, far from being a justification of crime is a
horrified analysis and indictment of human nature
similar to, but more dispassionate and at the same time
more violent than Swift's.

Algolagnia the intimate connexion of sex and pain
is the meeting-place of the sexual and the constructive-
destructive (Sadistic) instincts. From de Sade's analysis
it would be incorrect to give either instinct the priority,
to say that either was the cause of the other. All direct
sexual manifestations can be considered as Sadistic acts;
all creative and destructive manifestations are considered
by the Viennese psycho-analysts to be of sexual origin.
According to de Sade and to my mind correctly
these two instincts are of potentially equal strength.
The part played by cruelty in * normal ' sexual intercourse
has been sufficiently dealt with by learned people who
have made a study in such subjects, so that it is unneces-

237

MARQUIS DE SADE

sary to recapitulate their findings about love-bites and
similar acts. Of cruelty de Sade says, "Far from being a
vice, it is the first sentiment that Nature impresses on us.
The child breaks his rattle, bites his nurse's breast, kills
his pets long before he reaches the age of reason. Cruelty
is instinctive in animals, in whom the laws of Nature are
far more obvious than in us, and in savages who are nearer
to Nature than civilised people; it would therefore be
absurd to claim that it is a result of depravity. . . .
Cruelty is in Nature; we are all born with a portion of
cruelty that only education modifies; but education is
not natural ; it contravenes Nature as much as cultivation

does trees cruelty is then nothing else than

man's energy, uncorrupted by civilisation " 13

He continues: "We generally distinguish two sorts of
cruelty; that which is born from stupidity, which is
never analysed and never reasoned about and likens the

person with such a constitution to a wild beast

and the other, which is the result of excessive sensitiveness
of the organs, is only known to extremely delicate people,
and the excesses which it carries them to are merely the
refinements of their delicacy, too quickly disturbed by
their excessive sensibility and which, to make their
feelings more acute employs all the resources of cruelty.
How few people conceive these distinctions . . . How
few feel them! But they exist and are unquestionable/' 14

It is possible that de Sade was describing himself in
this last passage. There is no question that his sensibility
was excessive; his extreme devotion to and appreciation
of the arts would alone show that. And it was his
excessive horror for even minor and usually unnoticed
cruelties apart from sexual excitement which drove him
to the sweeping condemnation of humanity in Justine
and Juliette, and to the endless attacks on the Church and

238

SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

the State. The cynicism was a badly fitting protective
mask.

His attempt to analyse algolagnia is for us to a great
extent invalidated by his ideas of physics and anatomy;
it is nevertheless I think of sufficient interest to give in
some detail. Saint-Fond asks Noirceuil to explain how
it is possible to obtain pleasure either by seeing others
suffer or by suffering oneself. He replies as follows:

"According to the definition of logic, 'Pain is merely
a sentiment of aversion which the soul conceives for
some movements contrary to the construction of the body
it animates/ That is what Nicole says; he distinguished
in man an airy substance which he called soul from the
material substance which we call body. Since I do not
admit this edification and only see in man a completely
material animal I will say that pain is the result of the lack
of connexion of foreign bodies with the organic molecules
of which we are composed; so that instead of the atoms
given out by these foreign bodies linking themselves
with those of our nervous fluid, as they do in the com-
motion of pleasure, they only present their rough sides
and prick and repel those of our nervous fluid and
never mingle with them. Yet, although the effects are
repellent, they are always effects, so that whether pleasure
or pain is presented to us there is always a certain com-
motion of the nervous fluid. Well, what will prevent
this commotion of pain, far stronger and more active
than the other, eventually exciting in this fluid the same
warmth which arises from the mingling of the atoms given
off by the objects of pleasure ? And being moved for the
sake of the emotion, what is to prevent me from getting
accustomed by habit to be as satisfied by the emotion
produced by the repellent as by the sympathetic atoms?
Made blas by the effects of those which merely produce

239

MARQUIS DE SADE

a simple sensation, why should I not accustom myself
to receive the same pleasure from those whose effect
is poignant ? Both emotions are received in the same place ;
the only difference is that one is mild and the other violent;
but for blas people isn't the latter far preferable to the
former? Do not we see daily people who have accus-
tomed their palate to an irritation which pleases them,
beside others who could not for a moment support such
irritation? Now is it not true (once my hypothesis is
admitted) that it is the habit of man in his pleasures to
try to move the objects which serve these pleasures in
the same way as he himself is moved, and that these
actions are what is called in the metaphysic of pleasure
'the effects of his delicacy'? Then is it not simple that
a man with an organisation such as we have described,
by the same processes as ordinary people and by the same
principles of delicacy imagines that he will cause emotion
to his partner by the same means which affect him?
He is acting in just the same way as others; I agree that
the results are different but the original motives are the
same .... both use on their partner the same means
they themselves employ to procure pleasure.

"'But,' replies to this the person moved by a brutal
pleasure, 'that doesn't please me.' Very well; it remains
to be seen whether I can compel you or not. If I cannot,
go away and leave me; if on the contrary my money,
my credit or my position give me either some authority
over you or some certainty of quashing your complaints,
endure all that it pleases me to impose upon you without
saying a word, because I must have my pleasure and I
cannot get it without tormenting you and seeing your
tears flow. But in any case do not be astonished or blame
me, because I am following the movement that Nature
has placed in me, and by forcing you to share my hard

240

SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

and cruel pleasures, the only ones which can lift me to
the summit of happiness, I am acting with the same
principle as the effeminate lover who only knows the
roses of a sentiment of which I only admit the thorns ;
for in tormenting you I am doing the only thing which
moves me, just as he does in making sad love to his
mistress

4 * It is not pleasure which you want to make your partner
feel, but impressions you want to produce; that of pain
is far stronger than that of pleasure, and it is incontestable
that it is better that the commotion produced on our
nerves by this foreign spectacle should be produced by

pain rather than by pleasure One wants to give

one's nerves a violent commotion; one realises that that
of pain will be far stronger than that of pleasure; one uses
it and is satisfied.

"'But,' a fool will object, * beauty softens the heart, is
interesting; it is an invitation to mildness, to pardon;
how can you resist the tears of a pretty girl who begs
mercy from her executioner with joined hands?' But
actually ... it is from this condition that the sort of
libertine we are talking about gets his greatest pleasure;
he would be very upset if he was working on an inanimate
object which felt nothing; the objection is as absurd as
if a man were to tell me one should never eat mutton,
because the sheep is a mild animal. VThe passion of lust
wishes to be served; it is exigent, tyrannous, it must be
satisfied with the complete abstraction of any other con-
sideration. Beauty, virtue, innocence, candour, poverty,
none of these can serve as protection to the object we
covet. ) ( On the contrary, beauty excites us more ;
innocence, candour, virtue add further charms; poverty
gives us our victim and makes it pliant; so that all these
qualities only serve to inflame us the more and can only

241 Q

MARQUIS DE SADE

be regarded as further vehicles to our passions. There is
here, moreover, a further barrier to break; there is the
sort of pleasure which is got from sacrilege or the pro-
fanation of objects offered to our worship. That beautiful
girl is an object for the homage of others; by making her
the object of my sharpest and cruellest passions I have
the double pleasure of sacrificing to this passion a beautiful
object and an object worthy of public esteem. Is it
necessary to dally longer over this thought to feel the
delirium it provokes? But one has not such an object
to hand every day; yet one is accustomed to play at being
a tyrant and would like to be always ; very well, one must
learn to compensate oneself by other little pleasures;
hard-heartedness towards unfortunates, the refusal to
relieve them, the action of plunging them oneself into
misfortune are in a way substitutes " 15

This long speech, put into the mouth of a criminal
has several interesting points. The most curious is that
passive is supposed to precede active algolagnia. It is
also interesting to observe the transition, very cunningly
marked and developed, from active algolagnia to destruc-
tive Sadism; when from direct sensual satisfaction Noir-
ceuil passes to the consideration of the effect such an
act would have on other people; until in the last paragraph
he reaches completely sexless Sadistic satisfaction.

I have already said that the conception of constructive-
destructive Sadism is de Sade's most important con-
tribution to psychology. It has also an extremely wide
application. By admitting its existence together with
that of sex we get an understandable explanation of
a great deal of human behaviour and human misery.
It will explain the firebug and the motiveless murderer;
it will explain the nagging harshness and malicious
scandal-mongering of wives and teachers, the cruelty of

242

SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA

fathers, imperialists and revolutionaries. It will explain
the horrible fact that whenever men get unrestrained
power over their fellows whether in revolution or
counter-revolution, in prisons in America, Guiana,
Morocco, Poland, Hungary, Germany, or through their
position among races they are allowed to believe inferior
in the colonies, in Putumayo, in the Belgian Congo, in
Polish Ukraine or among non-Aryans in Germany, or
through position and wealth as in Cuba or the native
Indian States, they will practise on their victims the most
revolting tortures, and tortures which receive a greater
or lesser, and usually greater sexual tinge. And not only
does it explain these horrors, it suggests a possible
solution ; if you can give to all people the education and
opportunity for constructive Sadism, you may perhaps
do away with the unnecessary miseries that human beings
now delight in inflicting on their fellows.

243

ANOTHER JUDGMENT

ANOTHER JUDGMENT

IT is necessary to consider de Sade in three different
aspects to be able to pass any sort of judgment about
him as a man, as a writer, and as a thinker. Of his
life we know too little to be able without presumption
to make any final pronouncement; his chief qualities
seem to have been great charm, courage, a quick temper,
kindness, greed, very strong idealism coupled with a
sensibility that was harrowed by the smallest attempts
against the individuality of anyone, an adventurous and
extremely highly developed erotic temperament and a
passionate love of justice. It was these last two qualities
which got him into trouble, trouble completely out of
proportion with any offence. All the harm that has ever
been recorded against him is that he made a few women
unwell or uncomfortable for a few days; I do not wish
to whitewash him, but twenty-seven years' imprisonment
and a " bitch of a life" as his valet called it are so com-
pletely out of proportion to his offences that it has taken
away for ever from posterity the right to condemn. He
treated his wife, who loved and helped him according
to her lights, very shabbily; but with good reason he
considered her the indirect cause of all his misfortunes.
The phrenologists came nearer the truth than they usually
do when they said that his skull showed the usual mixtures
of vices and virtues, of benevolence and crime but that
the bumps of tenderness and love of children were
developed to an almost unparalleled degree.

As a writer de Sade suffered from three serious faults,
too great a facility, excessive prolixity, and the inability

247

MARQUIS DE SADE

to shorten his work. A person who can write more than
adequately in all styles will write very well in none.
But his prolixity was his chief bane; he would develop,
re-develop and expand the same themes again and again
in his works ; and at every turn he would add to his books
till they swelled to prodigious size. Too rarely he would
cut out an incident. That is the chief reason why,
despite their unparalleled sombre grandeur, his works
are frequently boring, and also perhaps the cause why
his rough sketches are from the literary point of view
the most satisfying of his works.

Of his width of interest and great originality as a
thinker I hope that this book is sufficient evidence. As
much as any man he could adopt the device from
Terence Nihil humani a me alienum puto.

ii

A speculation which has often exercised me is what de
Sade would be and do to-day, were he alive and at the
height of his power. The influence of judeo-Christianity,
though still sufficiently sinister, is now on the defensive;
for an ever-growing number of people and in nearly all
branches of knowledge it has disappeared as a force to be
reckoned with; he would no longer need to expend so
much vitality and energy on this attack. The uncharted
lands of scientific socialism, psychology and the study
of sex which he first explored are now well-developed
and built over; indeed in some parts they resemble slums.
Since his interests were entirely concerned with man as
an individual and as a social being he would probably
still continue the study of these three subjects, no longer
outlawed and taboo. The only living person I can think
of who at all resembles him in his width of interest
and I mean this as a compliment to both people is

248

ANOTHER JUDGMENT

Havelock Ellis; but as far as I know the latter has never
been much occupied with politics.

I cannot decide whether the communism of Lenin and
Stalin would be sympathetic to him. From the political
point of view it is attempting to accomplish nearly a.
his favourite ideas; and it has in many respects made the
life of the Soviet citizen freer from unnecessary trouble
and worry than any other system. I do not know if he
would consider these gains sufficient to compensate the
almost complete sinking of individuality in the State.

What is quite certain is that it would still be his duty
to write Justine and Juliette. The century and a half
which have passed since their first writing have more
than justified his gloomiest prognostications; Fate, who
always treated him with high irony, was never more
pointed than when she marked the centenary of his
death with the outbreak of the European war. It would
no longer be necessary for him to rake classical literature
for examples of gratuitous cruelty and oppression; the
daily Press would furnish him with sufficient examples.
The two following cuttings, taken at hazard from a num-
ber which have occurred while I have been writing this
book, give the outlines of complete plots for further
Sadistic works. The first is from the Week-End Review
of August 1 9th, 1933, the second from Reynold's of an
illegible date later in the same month.

"A great part of German post-war political history has been
darkened by the shadows of these men, who, shrinking from no
crime whatsoever, are almost all pathological cases, sadists, drug-
addicts, homosexuals. One of them is Edmund Heines, leader of
the Silesian S.A., who was sentenced to death for murder in
Stettin. . . Heines organised the sensational bomb outrages in
Silesia in July, 1932, and the bestial murder at Potempa, where a
worker was tortured to death before his wife's eyes. Another is

249

MARQUIS DE SADE

Ober-Leutnant Schultz, leader of the Berlin S.A., former com-
mander of the 'Black Reichswehr,' proved by the German courts
to have been responsible for at least half-a-dozen murders, who was
in prison for a long time. A third is Captain von Killinger, leader
of the S.A., in Saxony, who participated in the murders of Erz-
berger and Rathenau, and is famous for his book Lights and Serious
Sidelights on the Putsch in which he describes in unprintable (sic)
terms how he ordered the whipping of a young girl. To the same
circle belong the S.A. leader, Graf Helldorf, Chief of Staff of the
S. A., in Munich, Roehm (renowned for his homosexual affairs with
children of tender years) and others, including till recently the

Bavarian S.A. leader George Bell Bell later came into

conflict with the remaining accomplices (of the burning of the
Reichstag), fled to Austria, and was murdered there by pursuing
agents sent by Heines."

The second cutting refers to the Maharajah of Patiala.

"This document, on the basis of an ex-parte statement made by
witnesses, alleged that the Maharajah put pressure, tantamount to
kidnapping, on the wives and girls of poor families to induce them
to enter his harem.

Husbands and fathers who protested were imprisoned and in some
cases tortured.

The Maharajah and his European friends hunted over growing
crops and prohibited the destruction of wild animals, so that two-
thirds of the country's agricultural produce was wasted.

Following the publication of the indictment a statement was
issued by the Government of Patiala on April 14, 1930, declaring
that the charges were so serious that they would not be allowed to
pass unchallenged, and that steps would be taken to vindicate the
Maharajah's honour at an early date.

On his visits to London the Maharajah has always spent money
lavishly on luxury, contrasting deeply with the dire poverty of his
dominion, where masses of people say they are "too poor to marry."

Out of curiosity I started making a collection
of pertinent cuttings from the very unsensational one
daily and four weekly papers I receive, but within a very
short time the collection became too unwieldy, even

250

ANOTHER JUDGMENT

though I excluded crimes against which a legal charge
was made. Industrial Sadism alone, particularly, during
this period, in America, reached orgiastic heights. The
chief difference since de Sade's time is firstly the scale
of operations, and secondly that his millionaires excused
the means by which they got their fortunes by employing
their loot for their pleasures, whereas ours accumulate
for the sake of accumulation. It is perhaps significant
that most of our millionaires are Protestant,

More than ever it would to-day be de Sade's duty to
bring his black indictment against man and against
society, and to-day, as earlier, the only answer he would
get would be persecution, and the suppression and
destruction of his works.

251

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES.

I do not propose to give a complete bibliography of the various
editions and unpublished manuscripts of de Sade as that has already
been very adequately done in the three standard reference books
about him:

Eugene Dtihren (Ivan Bloch):

Der Marquis de Sade unde Seine Zeit: Le Marquis
de Sade et son Temps. (Harsdorf, 1901, in French and
German.) Neue Forschungen uber dem Marquis de
Sade. (Harsdorf, 1904, in German only.)

Guillaume Apollinaire:

L'GEuvre du Marquis de Sade. (Bibliothdque des
Curieux, Collection Les Maitres d' Amour, Paris, 1909.)
Besides a very good introduction and bibliography this
volume contains the only available selection of de Sade's
work. Its quality is hampered by the tone of the series
in which it appeared but it contains good examples, and
particularly the very important pamphlet Franfais,
encore un effort si vous voulez etre Republicains! in full.

C. R. Dawes:

The Marquis de Sade. (Holden, London, 1927.)

The numerous other works about him contain little that is true or
relevant which are not contained in these three.

The following list comprises, as far as I know, all of de Sade's
published work. I have given it as far as I can ascertain in the
order in which it was written. The capital letters indicate the
editions I have used, so that references may be checked. It will
be seen that there are a few works I have not been able to trace.
The British Museum contains some of his books, but uncatalogued
and under bond and seals which, I am told, require the presence of
the Archbishop of Canterbury and two other trustees to be loosed.

MARQUIS DE SADE

1. Plot of play Zelonide. Written 1782. Not intended to be
published. The play, under the title Sophie et Desfrancs was
unanimously accepted by the Comedie Fran?aise in 1790 but never
acted. PUBLISHED BY MAURICE HEINE IN MINO-
TJURE,No. i, MARCH, 1933.

2. Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond. Written 1782.
EDITED BY MAURICE HEINE, PUBLISHED BY
STENDHAL ET CIE., 1926.

3. Les 1 20 Journees de Sodome ou UEcole du Libertinage,
written August and September, 1785. First published by Eugene
Duhren, 1904. RE-EDITED BY MAURICE HEINE,
PUBLISHED BY STENDHAL ET CIE., 1931. Vol i only.

4. Les Infortunes de la Vertu the first version of Justine
written in June and July 1787, and not intended for publication.
EDITED BY MAURICE HEINE, PUBLISHED BY
EDITIONS FOURCADE 1930.

5. Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu> written 1788, first
published 1791. Two vols.

6. Contes et Fabliaux d y un Troubadour Provencal du XVIII-
erne Siecle. Fifty stories written before October, 1788. Of these
eleven were published in his lifetime under the title Les Crimes
de I* Amour, a twelfth by Anatole France in 1881, and twenty- five
more were EDITED BY MAURICE HEINE AND PUB-
LISHED BY SIMON KRA under the title HISTORIETTES,
CONTES ET FABLIAUX, 1927. I have also read ERNES-
TINE and La Double Epreuve (CABINET DU LIVRE 1926),
Juliette et Raunai in LES CRIMES DE L'AMOUR,
BRUXELLES, GAY ET DOUCE 1881, and Miss Henriette
Stralson in the work edited by Apollinaire quoted above.

7. Aline et Valcour ou le Roman Philosophique. Written 1788,
first published 1792. PUBLISHED BY J. J. GAY,
BRUXELLES 1883, four vols.

8. Oxtiern ou le Malheur du Libertinage play acted in 1791,
published 1801.

9. Discours prononct d la fete decernte par la Section des Piques
aux manes de Marat et Le Pelletier, 1793. QUOTED BY
DAWES.

256

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I o. Petition de la section des Piques aux representants du peuple
'rangais.

1 1 . Idee sur le mode de la sanction des lois. 1 795 ? QUOTED
JY APOLLINAIRE.

12. Juliette ou les Prosperites du Vice. Written 1790?- 1796?
r irst published 1796, definitive edition 1797. My copy is an
JN DAT ABLE REPRINT, shown by the presence of the
tuthor's name on the frontispiece, but the pagination is the same
LS the definitive edition. Six vols.

13. La Philosophic dans le Boudoir. First edition 1795. My
:opy is an UNDATABLE POOR AND UNPLEASANT
IEPRINT of two vols. in-i6, of 206 and 247 pages. In Vol. I,
[Dialogue I starts p. 9, Dialogue II p. 27, Dialogue III p. 30, and
Dialogue IV p. 188; Vol. II opens with Dialogue V (the pam-
)hlet occupying pp. 83-179), Dialogue VI starts p. 202, and
Dialogue VII p. 209.

14. La Nouvelle Justine. Written and published 1797.
My copy is, if not the first, a VERY EARLY EDITION. The
>agination is the same as the definitive edition. Four vols.

1 5. Idee sur les Romans. Published as preface to Les Crimes de
"Amour. 1 800. This and the following pamphlet are reprinted in
LES CRIMES DE L'AMOUR, GAY ET DOUCE,
8RUXELLES, 1881.

1 6. UAuteur des Crimes de U Amour d Villeterque y folliculaire.
Written and published early in 1801.

17. Zolot et ses Deux Acolytes, ou quelques decades de la Vie de
Trots Jolies Femmes. Written and published autumn 1 800. My
edition is BIBLIOTHEQUE DES CURIEUX (COFFRET
DU BIBLIOPHILE) 1912.

1 8. Couplets chant is A Son Eminence le Cardinal Maury, le
3 octobre 1 8 1 2, <J la maison de Santepres de Charenton. QUOTED
BY DUHREN.

19. La Marquise de Gange. Published 1813. (Except that
this novel concerns a notorious law-case of the beginning of the
seventeenth century, I have been able to find out nothing about it.
I do not know if it is de Sade's work or not.)

257 R

MARQUIS DE SADE

The correspondence of de Sade was collected and edited by Paul
Bourdin in 1929, that of his wife by Paul Ginisty in 1901.

The preponderating place in the references of Juliette and Aline
et Valcour is due partly to the wider scope of these works, and partly
to the fact that they were the first I annotated. De Sade repeats
himself considerably.

258

REFERENCES

PREFACE (pp. 1115)

1. Juliette, III, 97

2. Aline et Valcour, I, xiii

CHAPTER I. LIFE (pp. 2570)

1. Aline et Valcour, I, 25

2. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 187

3. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 180

4. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 166

5. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 183

6. Aline et Valcour, IV, 220-221

7. Aline et Valcour, I, 42

8. Juliette, IV, 297

9. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 213

10. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, II, 105

11. Zoloe et ses deux Acolytes, 123

CHAPTER II. LITERARY WORK (pp. 71101)

1. Les Crimes de F Amour, 114 (see bibliography)

2. Les Crimes de P Amour, 119

3. Les Crimes de P Amour, 123

4. Les Crimes de P Amour, 134

5. Les Crimes de TAmour, 143

6. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 105

7. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 141

8. 120 Journees de Sodome, 75

9. 1 20 Journees de Sodome, first paragraph

10. 1 20 Journees de Sodome, 35

11. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 172

12. 1 20 Journees de Sodome, 196

13. 120 Journees de Sodome, 10

14. 120 Journees de Sodome, 51

259

MARQUIS DE SADE

15. 120 Journees de Sodome, 75

1 6. Juliette, III, 98

17. Les Crimes de 1' Amour, 47

CHAPTER III. PHILOSOPHY (pp. 102117)

1. Facts derived from the preface by Maurice Solovine to

L'Homme Machine in the collection Les Chefs d'OEuvre
Mtconnus.

2. La Nouvelle Justine, II, 28

3. Juliette, I, 55-59

4. Juliette, I, 78-79

5. Juliette, I, 80

6. Juliette, I, 81

7. Juliette, IV, 241

8. Juliette, III, 138-141

9. Aline et Valcour, IV, 109

CHAPTER IV. GOD AND NATURE (pp. 118128)

1. Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond, 47

2. La Nouvelle Justine, I, 174

3. Juliette, IV, 269-271

4. Juliette, II, 1 88

5. Juliette, V, 243

6. Juliette, I, 82

7. Juliette, III, 267 and Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 98

8. Juliette, I, 83

9. Juliette, II, 289-337
10. Aline et Valcour, III, 71

n. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 240

1 2. Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond, sub fin. 1 20 Journees

de Sodome, 75; Aline et Valcour, III, 258; La Nouvelle
Justine, IV, 63

13. Dialogue entre un pretre et un moribond, 56; Juliette, I, 90

14. Juliette, IV, 306-310

15. Aline et Valcour, II, 61

1 6. Juliette, I, 17

17. Philosophie dans le Boudoir, I, 15

1 8. Aline et Valcour, II, 69

260

REFERENCES

19. Juliette, VI, 212

20. Juliette, I, 203

21. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 4-6

CHAPTER V. POLITICS L DIAGNOSIS (pp. 129155)

1. Aline et Valcour, II, 190; Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 123;

Infortunes de la Vertu, 35; Juliette, V, 242

2. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 277-290

3. Aline et Valcour, III, 211

4. Juliette, I, 210

5. Juliette, I, 204-207

6. Juliette, III, 126-131

7. Juliette, II, 199

8. Juliette, IV, 227

9. Juliette, I, 368

10. Aline et Valcour, IV, 226

11. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 226

12. Juliette, II, 190

1 3 . Infortunes de la Vertu, 5 2

14. Aline et Valcour, II, 89

15. Aline et Valcour, II, 126

16. Aline et Valcour, II, 188

17. Juliette, IV, 7

1 8. Crimes de P Amour, 25

19. Aline et Valcour, III, 413

20. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 164

21. La Nouvelle Justine, I, 104

22. Juliette, V, 277

23. Aline et Valcour, II, 84

24. Aline et Valcour, III, 119-124

25. Ernestine, 5

26. Aline et Valcour, II, 202 and 244

27. Juliette, I, 183

28. Juliette, III, 5

29. 120 Journees, 193; see also Juliette, I, 212

30. Juliette, II, 123-125

31. Juliette, II, 130

32. Philosophic dans le boudoir, I, 79

26l

MARQUIS DE SADE

33. Presentiments Juliette, VI, 51, 108; La Nouvelle Justine, II,

351; Clairvoyance Juliette, III, 220; (La Durand is psychic)
dowsing Juliette, VI, 143; Phantasms of the living in the
stories Le Serpent and Le Revenant in Historiettes, Contes et
Fabliaux.

34. La Nouvelle Justine, I, 75, v. Infortunes de la Vertu, 35

35. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 308

36. Juliette, I, 317

37. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 181-184

38. Aline et Valcour, IV, 5

39. Aline et Valcour, II, 255

40. Infortunes de la Vertu, 30; Nouvelle Justine, I, 68

41. Aline et Valcour, II, 249

42. Juliette, IV, 238

43. Juliette, IV, 238

44. Aline et Valcour, II, 8 1

45. Infortunes de la Vertu, 174

46. Aline et Valcour, I, 146

47. Juliette, I, 218

48. Aline et Valcour, IV, 6

49. Juliette, IV, 8

50. Aline et Valcour, III, 412

51. Aline et Valcour, II, 247

52. Aline et Valcour, II, 250

53. Aline et Valcour, II, 238-241

54. Aline et Valcour, II, 234 and Nouvelle Justine, I, 104

55. Aline et Valcour, II, 261

56. Aline et Valcour, II, 262

57. Aline et Valcour, 11,235

58. Aline et Valcour, II, 276

59. Aline et Valcour, II, 276

60. Aline et Valcour, II, 230-280

61. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 174

62. Aline et Valcour, II, 246-259

63. Dialogue entre un prfitre et un moribond, 52

64. Aline et Valcour, II, 205

65. Juliette, V, 119

66. Juliette, V, 115-122

67. Aline et Valcour, II, 220; Juliette, I, 118-120; Philosophic dans

le boudoir, I, 88

262

REFERENCES

68. Juliette, I, 132-133, Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 131

69. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 243

70. Aline et Valcour, II, 88, Juliette, VI, 217

71. Aline et Valcour, II, 49

72. Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux, 282

73. Philosophic dans le boudoir, I, 88; Aline et Valcour, II, 206

74. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 170

75. Aline et Valcour, II, 57-157

CHAPTER VI. POLITICS IL SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS
(pp. 156199)

1. Aline et Valcour, II, 164-320

2. Aline et Valcour, III, 245-250

3. Juliette, IV, 234-242

4. Juliette, VI, 212

5 . Aline et Valcour, IV, 1 1 5

6. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 83-179

CHAPTER VII. SEX, PLEASURE AND LOVE (pp. 200 217)

1. Juliette, I, in

2. Aline et Valcour, II, 56

3. Juliette, IV, 73

4. Philosophic dans le boudoir, I, 7

5. Juliette, II, 178

6. 120 Journees de Sodome, 91, ff

7. Aline et Valcour, III, 139-140

8. La Nouvelle Justine, III, 309

9. Juliette, I, 114

10. La Nouvelle Justine, II, 212

11. 1 20 Journees de Sodome, 102 and 142

12. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 192

13. Juliette, I, 201

14. Juliette, IV, 130

15. La Nouvelle Justine, III, 292

1 6. Philosophic dans le boudoir, II, 34-37

17. 120 Journees de Sodome, 154 and 169

1 8. 120 Journees de Sodome, passim

19. Juliette, VI, 94

20. Juliette, II, 96, see also La Nouvelle Justine, II, 209, 225

21. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 120

263

MARQUIS DE SADE

22. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 126-127

23. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 104

24. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 93

25. Juliette, V, 82

26. Juliette, I, 260

27. Juliette, I, 361

28. Juliette, IV, 18

29. Aline et Valcour, IV, 290

30. 120 Journees de Sodome, 193

31. Juliette, III, 171-172

32. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 54-56

33. Juliette, II, 79-82

CHAPTER VIII. SADISM AND ALGOLAGNIA (pp. 218243)

1. Aline et Valcour, IV, 149

2. Infortunes de la Vertu, 154

3. Juliette, VI, 294-295

4. Juliette, III, 4-16

5. Juliette, IV, 199

6. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 170

7. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, II, 192

8. Philosophic dans le Boudoir, I, 182

9. La Nouvelle Justine, IV, 288-290

10. 120 Journees de Sodome, 5, 14, 58

11. La Nouvelle Justine, III, 172

12. Juliette, VI, 197

13. Philosophic, dans le Boudoir, I, 175-176

14. Philosophic dans le boudoir, I, 178-179

15. Juliette, II, 94-102. See also La Nouvelle Justine, II, 213-220,

264