Reading Marquis de Sade

As my wife Jocelyne and I were  utting the finishing touches on Aline and Valcour (1795), a neglected masterpiece by the Marquis de Sade never before translated into English, we learned of Jeffrey Epstein’s allusive fascination with our infamous author. In the wake of Epstein’s 2019 indictment for sex trafficking, journalist Vicky Ward recalled how, in his mansion on 71st Street in Manhattan, the multi-millionaire, even as he drank nothing stronger than Earl Grey tea, kept on display, among more extravagant possessions, a paperback copy of Sade’s Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791).

At first, we shrugged. A chasm separates the image of Sade as a raging woman-hater and sadomasochist, which abides in the popular imagination, from the more complex and discerning way he’s perceived in the politico-literary and academic worlds. But as the Epstein story evolved before its dramatic full stop with his strange death by hanging in a federal prison cell, we looked again. A hedge fund financier from nowhere, he’d sought clients exclusively among billionaires, counting as friends Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump, not to mention exalted executives at JP Morgan Private Bank. A host of notables glittered in his Little Black Book.
Such associates, with all due respect, placed him squarely in Sade territory. Epstein and his friends were just the sort of people the Marquis de Sade targeted in the famed opening sentence of The 120 Days of Sodom, the most impure tale ever written (penned in 1785, it was not published until 1904). Today’s endless wars, vivid disparities of wealth, banking crises, and soaring stock markets amid overloads of public debt can only lend renewed currency to these words:

The extensive wars wherewith Louis the XIV was burdened during his reign, while draining the State’s treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, nonetheless contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which […] they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously.


Fast forward 200 years, and that’s a pretty good description not only of Epstein and his friends but of the cultural trajectory of the 21st century.

Sade’s new moment has been building in the wake of our counterfeit Enlightenment and Panglossian dreams dashed. Where went the best of all possible worlds? Sex trafficking takes place on a grander scale than ever imagined, enticing the unrelenting libidos of poor immigrants and wealthy owners of football franchises alike. Sade would be gratified and amused, not shocked, to witness clergy scandals of such unprecedented scope as we see today; he both chronicled and mocked them in his novels. Our high-tech media have mounted an electronic stage for the visual display of cruelty in cultures and nation-states throughout the world, including our own. Guerilla and state-sponsored terrorism are joined by widespread nativist discourses and political leaders who target the helpless and impoverished — with the rise of Donald Trump being only the most prominent example of a worldwide phenomenon.

In the daily press, Sade has often been held to reckoning for misogyny, owing to his sexual excesses. There were plenty of them, in both his life and art. But he’s also been frequently described as an avatar of liberty and, moreover, a feminist at heart and before the name. A contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft, he shared her views on the education of women — quite unlike Voltaire, Rousseau, or even Diderot. Long ago, French academic Alice Laborde, who taught for years at UC Irvine, noted how advanced Sade’s views were concerning women’s equality before the law. Although he should not be sugar-coated, Sade was not the vile misogynist of popular fantasy. In his most scandalous novel, Juliette (1797–1801), the Society of the Friends of Crime is dominated (to the chagrin of some monsters) by women (also monsters).

Women, in fact, have been among Sade’s most acute readers and literary theorists ever since the 1950s, when he was unshackled from the censors, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s “Must We Burn Sade?” (1951–’52) and, a generation later, Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman (1978) and Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990). Those are probably the best-known literary studies in English, but there have been a good many others. Annie Le Brun, who edited Sade’s collected works, has created over several decades a poetic-critical body of work around his unique way of thinking. Francine du Plessix Gray, who died last year, published a measured biography, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, in 1998. In academia, Carol Warman and Natania Meeker have sought to clarify Sade and his place in the Enlightenment literary pantheon. There are others.


In France, Sade has become a “classic” author, his novels enshrined in bible-paper Pléiade editions. He’s become “an institution,” writes Catherine Golliau, “a source of interminable commentary and research in the university.” Why Did the 20th Century Take Sade Seriously? is the title of one recent (2011) book, by Éric Marty. Another is Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) by Abnousse Shalmani, an Iranian woman, who states simply: “To read Sade is to grow up.”

We began translating Sade’s epic and beautifully constructed novel Aline and Valcour a long time ago. It started amid other projects, and we weren’t sure it would work out. At a distance of more than a decade, I’m almost surprised we persisted. The enterprise depended on a personal turn of fortune. About 2004 we were priced out of our rambling floor-through apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We put our belongings in storage and, thanks to a friend, went to live in a comfortable summer home overlooking Apple Canyon Lake in the Midwest. Our postal address was Apple River, Illinois.

We arrived in the winter with icicles on the trees. We stayed a couple of years. Cherry blossoms accumulated on our doorstep in the spring. On summer days, speedboats dragging inner tubes would trail-buzz screaming children across the lake. With few neighbors we became the friends of nobody except the woodpecker who pecked on the tin chimney, a swarm of nightly bats (there was a bat house), a family of prairie dogs, and an owl who swooped down on her prey from a tall fir. We were isolated and didn’t see anybody except each other for months at a time. Friends joked: we should lock up the knives. We went out together daily and bought food, wine, and London gin. Sometimes we took an exciting trip to Dubuque, Iowa, to have our hair cut at the Capri College Beauty School. In nearby Galena, Illinois, we found a beautiful old Carnegie Library at which, we were told, we were about the only patrons. We translated for a multi-volume encyclopedia of psychoanalysis and for a grand compendium of 20th-century European history. From Sigmund Freud’s instinct theory and the narcissism of small differences to two World Wars and the Holocaust, this sort of stuff was good preparation for Sade.

That project began in earnest when we returned to New York, ensconced on Staten Island (of all places) in a series of apartments by turns infested and ugly, spacious and ugly, old and ugly, and at last beautiful — all next to the proletarian ferry. Jocelyne had read Aline and Valcour as early as 1995, when she found a beat-up copy at the Brooklyn Public Library. “It’s like Marx before Marx,” she told me. She was taken with Sade. As to misogyny in the novel, she claimed there was none. Rather, owing to Sade’s personal magnetism, in evidence 200 years after his death, Jocelyne said then, and says today, that she’d gladly die in his arms.

Aline and Valcour was surprising and compelling, she added. “C’est un tourneur de pages.” There was talk of injustice and religion, but overall it was an absorbing read, with characters and voyages spanning the globe. I’d known about the novel since the 1980s, when I first began with Sade, but only from a gloss by anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. I hadn’t read a word until Jocelyne started sending me, by email, files of the first letters in translation. Ostensibly an epistolary work, the story consists of 72 letters, beginning with love missives and promises of undying devotion on the part of the title characters. However, by the time you reach the second paragraph of the first letter on page one, you know it’s Sade. Enter the egomaniacal antagonist: a magistrate judge who defends torture and asserts his right to marry off his daughter to his bosom friend while concealing a further agenda that is unspeakably vile.

The rhythm for translating Marquis de Sade must be slow and forgiving, unbeholden to deadline. The pace of Aline and Valcour varies greatly. It’s often quite rapid but at other times philosophical and cerebrally intense. Fifty years ago, Austryn Wainhouse, who put Sade’s most sulfurous texts into English, learned the same thing. He spent 10 years translating Juliette and Justine. “Sometimes it happens that reading becomes something else, something excessive and grave,” he wrote. “[I]t sometimes happens that a book reads its reader through.” With this novel from 1795, the same was about to happen to us.

Though not overtly pornographic, Aline and Valcour nevertheless bristles with sexual themes and is punctuated throughout with blasphemy. Not to give away spoilers but, for example, the two main antagonists are vicious libertines who carry on parallel affairs with two sisters whom they contrive to impregnate simultaneously, in order to raise their offspring in secret until about age 13, whereupon they would be turned into what today would be considered sex slaves — enjoyed, moreover, in an arrangement of reciprocity. Those problematic intentions furnish the novel’s first major plot point for a clutch of interwoven stories that send some of the 60-odd characters scrambling across great swathes of the known world.

But politics writ large underlies the novel as a whole. Although sex is never far from Sade’s mind, his main themes include political and religious domination, crime and punishment, class conflict, and colonial conquest. Resonance with contemporary fracture lines is ever-present, and so too is what Jonathan Israel has called the Radical Enlightenment. In Sade, unlike Voltaire and Diderot, you can’t find antisemitism (in fact, the reverse) or racial denigration, and at one point he even brings up the issue of reparations for racial harms. He describes a utopic South Seas island where all property belongs to the state and there are no prisons and no death penalty. By contrast, there’s also a dystopic society set in an as-yet-unexplored Africa that strikingly prefigures Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).

Sade wrote Aline and Valcour while imprisoned in the Bastille, the medieval fortress turned jail in the middle of Paris. He was held at the king’s pleasure, without formal charges, at the behest of his mother-in-law. Although friendless at the court of Louis XVI — he avoided Versailles with studied disdain — he belonged to the ancient aristocracy, to which he owed his rock-star infamy for sexual excesses and blasphemies. It was one thing in the 18th century to whip a prostitute, another to spit and trample on the cross. He had been constantly in trouble, imprisoned, and was indicted for poisoning and sodomy. Those were capital crimes. Convicted by a regional court in absentia, having skipped the country, he was executed in effigy on September 12, 1772 — that is, ceremonially beheaded and burned, his ashes scattered. That conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, but the symbolic execution resonated in his fiction. Scaffolds, he wrote, were like boudoirs. “Pronouncing the death sentence,” he insulted the judges in Juliette, “your pricks harden; and you discharge when it is carried out.”

Jocelyne and I were not ceremonially strung up or drawn and quartered when we started translating Aline and Valcour. But that could qualify as an aspiration so far as right-wing activist and syndicated columnist L. Brent Bozell was concerned: after the National Endowment for the Arts awarded us a grant, Bozell criticized the organization for using taxpayer dollars to encourage translation of a book by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade. Bozell’s so-called news company, CNSNews, awarded the NEA the Golden Hookah Award for funding the translation. What were we smoking? Gitanes? Gauloises?

Most of Aline and Valcour — not just the best parts, in fact — Jocelyne and I translated together in bed. It was the ideal place to reconcile my edit of her first draft. We were inspired by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the husband-and-wife team that collaborated on celebrated editions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. They work similarly, though perhaps not horizontally. But they would not have faced exactly the same set of issues. Oh, they might have wept together when Anna casts herself beneath the wheels of a train. We were relieved, by contrast, when Léonore escapes death by impalement, after her executioner strips her naked to reveal “the particular part of the body which Nature locates beneath the small of the back.” At this juncture (despite the persistence of capital punishment in the United States), we felt compelled to add an endnote explaining that impalement was indeed “traditionally performed as Sade indicates, with insertion of the pike through the anus and extrusion through the chest cavity.” Sade’s insistence on the centrality of the body in connection with justice is on display throughout Aline and Valcour.

Léonore, who is saved before the axe falls, turns out to be the novel’s greatest surprise. This 17-year-old narrator has been largely ignored in the sparse critical commentary on the book, although Beatrice Fink noted 40 years ago that she “is clearly the focus of the novel and the key to its unity.” Léonore is young, beautiful, and well read. She faces adventure and a host of physical and mental challenges that keep her constantly reflecting on men and the societies they create. After eloping with her lover, she is abducted by a vicious libertine, sped across the ocean trapped in a coffin, enslaved and sold to pirates, almost beheaded by an Egyptian king, and nearly eaten by a cannibal. But her charm, cleverness, and sardonic wit are ever-present. The only reason she faces death by impalement has to do with a bit of lèse-majesté: she and her fellow travelers, reaching Sennar in the Sudan, are inveigled into visiting a forbidden shrine where Muhammad’s organ, preserved across 10 centuries, may be viewed; off they go as if to some out-of-bounds museum exhibit, only to be waylaid and brought before a heartless king. 

But there’s more. Léonore has been traveling in disguise, and the moment of her execution has a crazy but startling contemporary angle. The king who wants to watch her die is a narcissist given to ostentatious displays of wealth. He both revolts his subjects and is afraid of them. As the executioner seizes Léonore and strips her naked, the crowd gathered to watch suddenly realize that she’s not male but female. And she’s white, not black — in fact, two-toned, with her body painted above the waist. When her true gender and skin color are revealed, the crowd erupts and scatters as “some took me to be a god, others, the devil.” Léonore is spared. Naturally the king now wants to fuck her before killing her. But she escapes and continues her trans-African journey — LGBT-certified, as it were.

Of curious note for American readers, the story of Léonore (which takes up a good portion of the novel, about 300 pages) bears uncanny similarities to that of Huckleberry Finn. The basic trajectory is a picaresque road trip, during which she acquires a companion — a Spanish beauty, Clémentine, who is as capable a philosophical interlocutor as Twain’s Jim. Being women, persecution and domination are the constant dangers they face. After escaping a would-be husband in Alexandria, Léonore joins a caravan that takes her through Ethiopia. In uncharted Africa, she contends with a cannibal king, eventually escaping his thrall; trying to return to France via the Iberian Peninsula, she and Clémentine find themselves robbed and penniless in Portugal, and are adopted by a band of Romanian gypsies before they fall afoul of the Spanish Inquisition. She goes on to dupe the Grand Inquisitor himself.

Léonore, the only admitted atheist in the book, is a proto-feminist. Her sardonic wit counters the goodness, godly devotion, and melancholy of the title character, Aline. Unwilling to become a victim, Léonore is the novel’s face of liberty. You don’t always like her, but she’s impressively clever.

There’s much more to Aline and Valcour’s 800-plus pages. Sade wrote his books on the eve of an immense transformation of the world, and the imminence of colonial and imperialist expansion is in evidence throughout. Characters embody various shades of Enlightenment thinking, from counter- to mild to moderate to radical. But they also stand up as three-dimensional figures in ways that cannot be said of most of the characters in Sade’s pornographic texts. The conclusion — the last 100 pages, in fact — enters territory later explored by Stendhal, crossing romanticism with nascent realism. By the novel’s end, Sade has become an author you never imagined. Wrangling his words into English, we were persistently surprised when one of his tragic themes played out with delectable detail, dialogue, and description. When later we learned that Stendhal used Sade to help formulate his long discourse on love, it came as no surprise at all.

At several key moments in modernity’s transit, and now again today, the Marquis de Sade’s writings and thought have been inserted into the wider realms of social and political discourse. After his death in 1814, his works were officially banned, and he cropped up principally in the poetics of mordant souls like Baudelaire and Flaubert. But he made a real return in the wake of the slaughters of World War I by way of the Surrealists, who fomented a revolution in aesthetic politics. After World War II, Sade enjoyed another moment, as his novels were understood to prefigure the even more flagrant atrocities of the Holocaust. He had understood, as so many others did not, that reason would be put to use torturing and murdering people on an industrial scale. A generation later came the multifaceted sexual revolution of the 1960s, and Sade arrived equipped with his erotic manifesto, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). His works, no longer banned, were translated and published internationally, and Sade became a seminal figure in the pantheon of French literature, a philosophe to contend with in Enlightenment studies, and an inspiration to contemporary thinkers, from Lacan and Barthes to Derrida and Foucault.

In the words of Natania Meeker, a professor of French and comparative literature at USC, the world Sade depicts is one we all recognize: “[A] social order that both fetishizes greed and subjects all creatures, humans included and not excepted, to a relentless logic of acquisition and possession.” That logic was visible in the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein, in the way he extracted massages from hebetic beauties while sparing no expense in equipping hedge-funded islands and Fifth Avenue mansions. His urge for acquisition was not limited to sex trafficking or sybaritic self-indulgence. He sought to purchase more than perpetual onanism. He had big ideas that he spelled out in fuzzy letters for any eminent scientist or wealth manager who would listen. He fantasized a bio-social future for himself and his penis, an organ he hoped to have literally frozen in time, to be used to impregnate scores of nubile women at Zorro, his ranch in New Mexico. All in the interest of germline engineering (eugenics by another name), in order to perpetuate himself eternally.

Epstein is a reminder that we (in that highly limited sense in which we are ever a we) are more vulnerable today than ever before to the insanities of wealth. Whether it be his transhumanist fantasies, or the climate change denialism funded by the Koch brothers, or the anti-liberal conspiracies nurtured by Richard Scaife, or the self-serving, diversionary philanthropy of the Sackler family, big money can purchase and promulgate delusion. The Trump presidency has been delusion incarnate. How long it can be sustained is anyone’s guess. That “swarm of bloodsuckers” Sade described 200 years ago is still attached to the flesh of the body politic. The last prisoner of the Bastille had their number, and his scabrously brilliant writings can open your eyes to their poisonous dreams in a way no muckracking journalistic exposé could ever hope to do. Seriously.


The first English translation of Marquis de Sade’s 1795 novel Aline and Valcour, by John Galbraith Simmons and Jocelyne Genevieve Barque, was published in three volumes by Contra Mundum Press in December 2019.


Sade, Too: A New Moment for a Complex Monster. By John Galbraith Simmons. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 1, 2020

The recent publication of two works by the Marquis de Sade enables us to see that sadism is not just “the impulse to cruel and violent treatment of the opposite sex, and the coloring of the idea of such acts with lustful feelings,” as Richard von Krafft-Ebing defined it in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. Sadism, as it is depicted by Sade, is also, and perhaps primarily, the creation of a world in which the powerful and wealthy are able to lure the poor and powerless, hold them captive, and reduce their bodies and selfhoods to nothing.

In this, as some clear-sighted post–World War II writers have noted, Sade’s writing was, inter alia, a harbinger of fascism. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for example, wrote that Sade “prefigures the organization, devoid of any substantial goals, which was to encompass the whole of life” under the totalitarianism that drove them from Germany. Reading Sade in the age of #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein is an uncanny experience, for his novels are also a blueprint for the world of the sexual predators of today.

This winter brings the first complete English translation of Sade’s vast epistolary novel, Aline and Valcour, in a lavish, three-volume edition from Contra Mundum. The translation, by Jocelyne Geneviève Barque and John Galbraith Simmons, is a masterful one, allowing Sade’s prose to flow, neither assuming the language and rhythms of the eighteenth century nor interpolating anachronisms from English today. It is, by all appearances, the work of two people who have studied the writing of Sade deeply and admire it. 

Originally published in 1795, Aline and Valcour was, according to its title page, “Écrit à la Bastille un an avant la Révolution de France”—“Written in the Bastille,” where Sade had been held since 1784, “one year before the French Revolution.” The novel stands out from almost every other novel in Sade’s oeuvre in that it is not a work of pornography, though it does not lack for libertines and salacious events. It’s a grab-bag of a book, filled with tales within tales that take the reader to Africa, Portugal, and Spain. Not only is it not pornographic, but it is also a novel in which many of the ideas expressed run counter to those that were central to Sade’s thought.

Sade explains this in a footnote, writing that Aline and Valcour “offers in each letter the correspondent’s own way of thinking or that of the persons involved and to whom he offers his ideas.” If, unlike the rest of Sade’s work, this novel is not solely in his voice, it is because, as the translators explain in their introduction, the author intended to present the range of views held by Enlightenment thinkers, whether he shared them or not. The result is a book in which religion and motherhood, both of which Sade mocked and detested, are praised, and where nature, which Sade viewed as an amoral force that served to explain and justify his characters’ evil, is presented as beneficent.

The first French dictionary to include the word “sadism,” in the mid-nineteenth century, defined it as “a monstrous and anti-social system revolting to nature.” That being so, nothing could be further from Sade than this novel by Sade.

The 120 Days of Sodom, a new translation of which was published as a Penguin Classic in 2016, is another matter entirely. The manuscript of this, the most notorious of Sade’s books, was thought lost when Sade was transferred from the Bastille to Charenton a few days before the prison was stormed on July 14, 1789, and didn’t receive its first French publication until 1904. The challenges that its translators, Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn, faced were far different from those of Barque and Simmons, for McMorran and Wynn’s task was to translate a book that summarizes the Sadeian worldview in all its fury, in all its madness.

It is a work of brutal pornography interspersed with occasional bursts of Sade’s philosophy, a mélange of borrowings from Montaigne’s cultural relativism, Jean Meslier’s atheism, La Mettrie’s materialism, and d’Holbach’s materialist atheism. These philosophical outbursts are sprinkled among countless pages of coprophagy, flatulence, and vomiting (all for erotic purposes); of sodomy and misogyny. Both the content and the worldview expressed in The 120 Days of Sodom make it as close to a repellently unreadable book as has ever been written.

This new translation also happens to be a clumsy one, full of odd and poor choices, the worst of which is a character’s exclaiming, “Golly, sweetheart.” But the infelicities of the translation are of relatively minor concern. The 120 Days of Sodom most clearly poses the problem of Sade’s survival. How has this body of work continued to be read, let alone enjoyed the status of a classic?

Sade, though admired by Flaubert, among others, was, in fact, a figure of little literary consequence until the early twentieth century, when Guillaume Apollinaire rescued him from oblivion, by publishing in 1910 a collection of his novels. Apollinaire proved himself a seer when he wrote in the introduction to his edition that “this man, who seemed to count for nothing for the entire nineteenth century, could very well dominate the twentieth.”

In the century after Sade’s revival, a shocking number of intellectuals fell under his spell, explicated him, and defended him. Their focus was almost always on the philosophy of Sade, on the “transvaluation of values” he performed that would have made Nietzsche blanch. Sade the stylist hardly figures in the commentaries written by his admirers; indeed, it would be hard to make much of a case for writing that is verbose, repetitive, and, for all its sexual explicitness, impoverished. Added to these faults is the sheer bloat of his books: La Nouvelle Justine is 720 pages in the definitive Pleiade edition; L’Histoire de Juliette, 1081 pages; and the new translation of Aline and Valcour, 819 pages. 

Nevertheless, Apollinaire set the intellectual template for those who would follow, claiming that “above all, [Sade] loved freedom. Everything—his actions, his philosophical system—testified to his passionate taste for the freedom he was so often deprived of.” Roland Barthes in 1971 upped the stakes in his Sade/Fourier/Loyola, calling Sade “the most libertarian of writers”—a declaration that failed to take account of how, in his supposed “love of freedom,” Sade placed severe limits on the liberties of others, both in his books and in his life. “If one of you should suffer the misfortune of succumbing to the intemperance of our passions,” wrote the great “libertarian” in The 120 Days of Sodom, “let her bravely accept her fate—we are not in this world to live forever, and the best thing that can happen to a woman is to die young.”

Like a guard in a concentration camp, the Sadeian hero is allowed absolute freedom to do whatever he likes to his victims, who are in most cases kidnapped or purchased and imprisoned in castles or chambers from which no escape is possible. In one of many instances that appear to foreshadow the fate of those imprisoned in the Nazis’ camps, Sade wrote, in The 120 Days of Sodom, “Here you are far from France in the depths of an uninhabitable forest, beyond steep mountains, the passes through which were cut off as soon as you had traversed them; you are trapped within an impenetrable citadel.” Even more directly, in a passage from Juliette quoted by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment—where they wrote that we find in Sade “a bourgeois existence rationalized even in its breathing spaces”—Sade wrote: “The government itself must control the population. It must possess the means to exterminate the people, should it fear them… and nothing should weigh in the balance of its justice except its own interests or passions.”

Apollinaire was first followed by the Surrealists. In 1926, Paul Éluard praised Sade in the movement’s organ, La Révolution Surrealiste, writing that “for having wanted to infuse civilized man with the power of his primitive instincts, for having wanted to free the romantic imagination, and for having desperately fought for absolute justice and equality, the Marquis de Sade was imprisoned almost his entire life in the Bastille, Vincennes and Charenton.” André Breton went even further, saying in a 1928 discussion of sexuality that, “By definition everything is allowed a man like the Marquis de Sade, for whom the freedom of morality was a matter of life and death.” We get an idea of Sade’s notion of “absolute justice and equality” in The 120 Days of Sodom, where he wrote: “Wherever men shall be equal and where differences shall cease to exist, happiness too shall cease to exist.”

Some of this affection on the part of the Surrealists for the “divine marquis” can be written off as provocation, the avant-garde desire to épater le bourgeois. But Sade’s novels seemed to them a guide in their search for a new mode of being that escaped all and any limits. It was precisely the extent that Sade violated all taboos, social and sexual, that made him a member of their pantheon. But in elevating Sade, the Surrealists had no choice but to read him selectively, to elide the terror that this supposed ethic of personal liberation imposes on others. The freedom of the one existed at the price of the oppression of everyone else, of their reduction, in fact, to mere orifices.

Then, in the aftermath of World War II, there was an extraordinary explosion of analyses of Sade. Pierre Klossowski, in his 1947 Sade, mon prochain, claimed that Sade was a man deeply influenced by Christian mystics. In a 1951 article in Les Temps modernes, Simone de Beauvoir famously asked: “Must We Burn Sade?” Answering in the negative, Beauvoir was not reticent in pointing out the flaws and contradictions of Sadeian thought. Warning against a “too easy sympathy” for him, she wrote, “it is my unhappiness he wants; my subjection and my death.” Still, she concluded by enlisting him in the Existentialist cause, saying that: “He forces us to put in question the essential problem that haunts this time in other forms: the true relationship between man and man.”

Georges Bataille, however, viewed the matter very differently in his 1957 L’Érotisme. For Bataille, Sade’s theme is the isolation of the subject. The sexuality expressed in his books excludes the possibility of any real contact, and the people with which he and his characters engage “cannot be partners, but victims.” Even more, his literature portrays the image of “a man for whom others cease to exist.”

Roland Barthes provided an answer to the question of whether Sade must be burned by sheltering behind “discourse.” The “sole Sadeian universe” is that of “the universe of discourse.” Any offense taken at the acts in Sade’s novels is unjustified because it fails to take account of the “irrealism” of his books. “[W]hat happens in a novel by Sade is strictly fabulous, i.e., impossible.” To condemn Sade’s books is to fall into the trap of “a certain system of literature, and this system is that of realism.”

But the notion that Sade was a purveyor of “irrealism,” that his life had nothing to do with his novels, does not stand up to scrutiny. The difference between the crimes he committed in life and those he depicted in his novels is one of degree and not of kind. In 1768, in the Parisian suburb of Arcueil, Sade induced a beggar, Rose Keller, to accompany him home, promising her a job as a housekeeper. When they arrived at their destination, Sade threw Keller onto a bed, tied her to it, whipped her until she bled, sliced her skin with a penknife, and dripped hot wax on her. Though she filed a complaint and he was briefly imprisoned, family influence resulted in his release.

Four years later, in Marseilles, Sade sent his valet to recruit what a biographer called some “very young” girls for a debauch. In the end, seven people would participate in the event, the young women whipped and at least one of them sodomized, and the victims drugged with Spanish fly. This abducting of young girls with whom he would have sex, and his locking of victims in castles so they could not escape his desires, occurs in all of Sade’s novels, turning them, on the contrary, into realist, even autobiographical, fiction.

Imprisoned for the Marseilles escapade, Sade would escape, and within three years he found himself involved in yet another sexual scandal. He was finally imprisoned in 1777 under a lettre de cachet, a royal order for arrest without trial, obtained by his mother-in-law to protect family honor against any further criminal sexual exploits. Sade would remain imprisoned until the Revolution abolished the lettre de cachet in 1790. Arrested again in 1801, under Napoleon, and held at Sainte-Pélagie prison, Sade was transferred to the asylum at Charenton in 1803 after attempting to seduce fellow inmates at Sainte-Pélagie. It was in Charenton that he organized the theatrical productions immortalized by Peter Weiss in his 1963 play Marat/Sade, and where Sade would die in 1814. While in the asylum, at age seventy-four, in what a biographer called “his least glorious phase,” he regularly sodomized (for payment and with her mother’s consent) a young woman of sixteen, Madeleine Leclerc, noting the frequency of his acts in a journal.

Not all postwar intellectuals fell under the sway of the divine marquis or saw him as simply a philosopher who lived his ideas in a more extreme way than others. Some saw the fascism latent in his novels—and said so explicitly, as Raymond Queneau did in 1945: “all who embraced the marquis’s idea to one degree or another must now envision, without hypocrisy, the reality of the death camps, with their horrors no longer confined within a man’s head but practiced by thousands of fanatics.” Camus noted in The Rebel, published in 1951,  that the “ideal society” constructed by Sade “exalted totalitarian societies in the name of liberty.” And it was the cinematic provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini who presented the connections between Sade and fascism most starkly of all in his final film, the 1975 Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom); there the book’s brutalities are enacted under the flag of Mussolini’s Social Republic.

Sade’s attraction for some has nevertheless persisted—as the most extreme example of counter-Enlightenment thought, the voice of the abolition of reason. It was, after all, the very impotence of reason that was made so starkly and horrifyingly manifest in the two world wars and the period between. Sade’s exclusive concern with the sovereignty of the individual, on an absolute freedom from any constraint, continued to lure a certain class of intellectuals in a period of mass politics. In Weiss’s Marat/Sade, the two historical figures embody the most radical expressions of these dichotomous forms of rebellion: the political and the individual. As Beauvoir wrote of him, “Sade supposed there could exist no other road than that of individual rebellion.”

This was his weakness, but it was also a source of his enduring appeal. And so, Sade survived. But can his oeuvre survive our own time? And should it?

It is impossible not to think of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices when reading Sade. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the age of the girls delivered to the libertines “was fixed between twelve and fifteen and anything above or below was ruthlessly rejected.” And in Aline and Valcour, two libertines “keep a seraglio of twelve young girls… of whom the oldest is not yet fifteen, and is replaced at the rate of one a month.”

Epstein’s plane was flippantly and familiarly known as the Lolita Express; in one reported incident, a twenty-three-year-old woman brought to him was rejected as too old. Like Sade, Epstein had hirelings to procure his victims. The financier’s procuresses lived well, as did those in Sade’s work, who in 120 Days received “thirty thousand francs—all expenses paid—for each subject found to their liking (it is extraordinary how much all this cost).”

The libertines in Sade, to quote Barthes, also “belong to the aristocracy, or more exactly (and more frequently) to the class of financiers, professionals, and prevaricators.” And like the victims of Epstein, those victimized and assaulted by Sade’s characters in his fiction, as by Sade himself in real life, “belong to the industrial and urban sub-proletariat.” The power differential that plays such an important part in the contemporary scandals is limned in the biography and writing of Sade. It was Camus who summed up the Sadeian universe as one of “power and hatred,” a term just as aptly applicable to Epstein’s world.

Epstein’s Caribbean island, to which young women were flown, his ranch, and his townhouse are a contemporary version of the castles in which Sade’s fictional and actual victims were assaulted. Just as in the case of Sade, where the will of the victims was ignored, their lives reduced to obeying the libertines’ orders, Epstein’s girls were at times referred to as his friend Ghislaine Maxwell’s “slave[s].” As the victims in the pages of Sade hear: “no one knows you are here… you’re already dead to the world and it is only for our pleasures that you are breathing now.”

According to court documents, Epstein “required different girls to be scheduled every day of the week,” just as 120 Days records the drawing up of a timetable to detail which victim will perform which act on which day. Epstein’s regimen recalls Sade’s character in Les Infortunes de la virtue who explains that “I make use of women from need, the same way one makes use of a chamber pot for a different need.”

Epstein carried on with virtual impunity until the final reckoning, like the libertine in Sade’s 120 Days who would “commit excesses that would have sent his head to the scaffold a thousand times were it not for his influence and his gold, which saved him from this fate a thousand times.” Sade’s books are a guidebook to, and prophecy of, the Epstein case.

In one important way, though, this looking-glass is reversible: it is Epstein who illuminates Sade and allows us to read the French aristocrat with a different eye. Sade lived his drives, and when imprisoned, he turned them into literature. That literature is still read and is still the subject of serious study. Some recent books, for example, have viewed Sade through the lens of queer theory, examining his vision of sex and death, once again placing him within the framework of Enlightenment thought.

But we might justly ask: Had Jeffrey Epstein lived and become a writer, would his literary output have enthralled us?

There is no indication that Epstein ever committed to paper his ideas and fantasies, as Sade did so obsessively. Sade, after all, viewed himself not just as a libertine, but as a philosopher of libertinism (one of his works was titled Philosophy in the Boudoir). His flights of fancy served to relieve the privations of his confinement, perhaps, but they were also the basis for an encompassing worldview like few others.

Unlike Sade, Epstein did not elevate his tastes into a principle. And that Epstein left no account suggests a consciousness of the legal jeopardy any such record would create. But if Epstein had done so, would anyone have dared write of him, as Breton did of Sade, that he was someone “for whom the freedom of morality was a matter of life and death”? For both men, the freedom of morality was, in actuality, a freedom from morality, a license to inflict pain on others.

There are two nouns Sade uses heavily in his novels that sum up the Sadeian universe: victime and scélérat, victim and villain. This is the only moral division of any significance in his works—and it perfectly summarizes the worlds of both Sade and Epstein. “Laws are null and void as concerns scoundrels,” wrote Sade, “for they do not reach he who is powerful, and he who is happy is not subject to them.” Both men acted and lived in accordance with that dictum.

If Beauvoir was right and Sade forces us to question “the true relationship between man and man,” then Epstein’s predations present us with an unalloyed vision of precisely how money and power twist those relations. To change that requires an utter rejection of Sade’s philosophical system, as succinctly expressed in a line from Justine: “My neighbor is nothing to me; there is not the least little relationship between him and me.”

We need not burn Sade, but neither should we praise him. His spirit still wanders among us, and we must use him to see why we have our Epsteins.

Reading Sade in the Age of Epstein. By Mitchell Abidor.  The New York Review of Books, February 12, 2020

We’ve come a long way. Novels by the Marquis de Sade, which (more than any of his confessed violent crimes) ruined his life, are legal and easy to obtain. (Fanny Hill, which is about as pornographic as an average fifth-grade darefest, wasn’t fully legal until 1966.) At some point in our history, the 9th District Court of Somewhere presided over a landmark court case where innumerable witnesses swore that readers of banned books spend more time pursuing tenure than they do committing unthinkable acts of erotically motivated homicide. Which is true.

By then, of course, de Sade had already become a major inspiration for generations of rebellious Continental types, especially those artists and philosophers who were into decadence, surrealism, and the prolonged, deliberate misuse of Freud. The list of such luminaries is far too long to include here, but I’m sure you get the idea. I’ve stumbled across references to de Sade in all sorts of academic literature, including The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, who is a postmodern semiologist. In other words, he was paid to study what things mean, even though he repeatedly concluded that nothing meant anything. In France, which is more Catholic than you can possibly imagine, reaching such conclusions is considered both difficult and heroic.

Barthes can barely wait to start in on his comrade de Sade. The following passage appears (suddenly, without warning) at the top of page six:

Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; porno­graphic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models. As textual theory has it: the language is redistributed. Now, such redistribu­tion is always achieved by cutting.

This is definitely wrong, as anyone who tries picking up de Sade’s Juliette can tell you. Juliette is approximately 1200 pages long. It’s a damn good thing it stayed illegal for 150 years, because otherwise nobody would finish it. De Sade did not sculpt a work of rigorous, concise, jagged pornography. He produced a frenzied, garrulous, overwhelming torrent of obsessively repeated incidents and themes. Nothing gets cut or boiled down. There’s no evidence of postmodern juxtaposition; instead, de Sade writes with the naive confidence of the fetishist who thinks everyone will understand him, even when his recipes for pleasure become mind-bogglingly personal.

The sentences are not pure, contra Barthes. While some of them could serve (for who, exactly?) as “grammatical models,” others are pretentious and convoluted. Barthes’ own reference to “pompous and ridiculous neologisms” attests to Sade’s uneven, undisciplined prose; where Sade is at his most limpid, stylistically, he’s simply imitating his era’s primers for schoolchildren. Nor is Sade engineering collisions of the noble and the trivial; that had already been done two centuries earlier, to perfection, by William Shakespeare. De Sade never bothers with trivialities at all. Who are Juliette’s parents? What does her nose look like? What’s her favorite color? We don’t know because de Sade doesn’t care. His version of human nature removes every mundane wrinkle; in the words of Tyler Durden, from the David Fincher movie Fight Club, de Sade “let[s] what does not matter truly slide.”

This is the reason why—despite what Barthes claims about Sade, all of which is far truer of Barthes than his subject—he is basically right to put de Sade front and center in a book about the reader’s bliss. De Sade is a towering figure in any literary canon founded upon joy, for reasons at once enlightening and complex. Let’s start with the obvious. De Sade couldn’t stop writing. After he was arrested for publishing Juliette, he began composing The 120 Days of Sodom, in miniature, on a tiny roll of paper he kept squirreled away in the wall of his prison cell. This is the kind of behavior we reserve, in general, for the most important utterances of our lives. That Sade would do this in order to write yet another novel mixing pornography with philosophy is both ridiculous and baffling. He has finished two novels that already overlap; he has nothing substantial left to say; the content isn’t what’s driving him. What’s driving him is his relationship with his ideal reader. He sacrifices everything that’s his by right, including both freedom and libertinage, to that. This is the first exciting thing about de Sade: when you read him, you become (by default) the love of his life.

The Marquis de Sade is also the first person to enjoy the deaths of minor characters. You know how, when a minor character dies in a regular novel, you have to feel some kind of court-appointed guilt? In Juliette, it’s not sad at all. It’s a cause for celebration. It reminds me of one of my favorite psychiatrist jokes. “Doctor,” a man tells his psychiatrist, “people all think I’m nuts.” The psychiatrist replies: “So why don’t you kill them?” Now in real life, you can’t go around killing people indiscriminately, because it’s exhausting. It’s hard, thankless work. But Juliette is not real life. I can’t emphasize this enough. Juliette can do whatever the fuck she wants. She loves killing people, and I don’t blame her—other people are annoying as hell. Reading de Sade is an experience in freeing your imagination. If doing that seems immoral to you, then you’ll never dream up anything of consequence, because you’ll never discover what it is you like.

Juliette is also exactly as long as you want it to be. You can read it for 100 pages and stop; you can read the whole thing; you can read five pages and give up. It’s a fractal. Every experience of Juliette is absolutely identical to every other experience of it, no matter how long or short. This is not only extremely convenient; it’s intimately related to how perfectly fictitious everything in Sade’s universe is designed to be. Nobody waits for gratification in Juliette, and no endeavor encounters a serious obstacle. Juliette has no other content besides pleasure. This isn’t true of other pornography. Other pornography has tons of unnecessary content: “the plot is ludicrous,” as Maude Lebowski once observed. People don’t strip off their clothing in Juliette; they walk around naked. People don’t work their way to opulence; they’re bathed in it from birth. If de Sade includes something, you better believe he thinks it’s delicious. Perhaps you disagree; that’s well and good. It’s much more fun to read about something in Sade, and find it disgusting or dull, than it is to read about something disgusting or dull in another “erotic” novel and realize it’s there because the author thought you’d like it. That’s both unpleasant and insulting.

I’ll conclude by touching, briefly, on the matter of de Sade’s excursions into philosophy. These are famous for being “incongruous,” since they’re bookended with orgies, and we don’t associate philosophy with orgies. (Centuries later, Hugh Hefner would be hailed as a marketing genius for juxtaposing smut with Norman Mailer interviews.) But just consider the double game that Sade is playing when he puts such a text together. If you skip over the philosophical digressions, you’re a shallow pervert who obviously loves a good orgy; if you don’t, and willingly put off the orgy just to read about the nature of the mind, then you’re even sicker, and there’s probably no help for you. In other words, sex always means something in de Sade; there is no such thing as “casual” sex in his writings.

Having sex with a stranger, in de Sade, is (among other things) a declaration of war on marriage. It’s a statement about what it means to be human. It’s a statement about incomprehensible divine justice. It contains multitudes. Of course, Sade also makes people scream out loud, “There’s more to life than sex!” Then they go on to explain, to anyone within earshot, how important certain non-sexual things are. In their frustration and their shock, they go into incredible detail about how wrong Sade gets life, often reaching for a pen just so they can get all their thoughts down on paper. Whatever happens next is their art, their chosen antidote to reality.

Somebody once said, speaking of The Velvet Underground & Nico, that almost nobody bought it, but everyone who did started a band. Juliette’s pretty much the same way. Because there’s more to writing, and to life in general, than Juliette, no other book makes me quite as hungry to get out there, and write, and live, just so I can prove that old lecher wrong. This would undoubtedly fill him with delight.

Reading Juliette, By the Marquis de Sade. By Joseph Kugelmass.  Splice Today , November 11, 2019.

On 2 July​ 1789, a man whose official designation in the prison fortress of the Bastille was ‘Monsieur Six’ addressed the people of Paris. He spoke – or shouted – from his cell in the Tour de la Liberté, and in no uncertain terms. The officials holding him, and the regime they served, were villains, devils, criminals and worse. What’s more, they had already begun to slit the prisoners’ throats. There was no time to lose. That evening, the governor of the Bastille, who had slit no throats, informed his superior that if Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, whom 13 years of imprisonment without trial had done nothing to mellow, were not removed from his prison that very night he could no longer guarantee its security. His wish was granted and Monsieur Six was taken in the night to a madhouse, where his screams would go unheeded. In the event, 11 days later, the security of the Bastille ceased to be guaranteed when it was stormed by a revolutionary mob.

The men and women who had been massing outside the building for the preceding weeks at last found themselves running through its halls (the governor’s severed head had already been placed on a pike), unlocking door after door as they went. Number six, untouched since its last occupant’s departure, was awash with paper. There was a library of more than six hundred books, many of them rare, and dozens on dozens of manuscripts in a Voltairean variety of genres (Voltaire himself – a friend of Sade’s father – had twice been a prisoner in the Bastille). There were so many manuscripts that their author had prepared a catalogue raisonné to keep track of them: two volumes of essays, eight of fiction, 16 historical novellas, twenty-odd plays, and much more work in progress. Reading conditions were not favourable that night and by morning virtually the whole oeuvre had been destroyed. For the remaining 25 years of Sade’s life there was one loss that he mourned more bitterly than the rest. This manuscript – which he had been careful to leave out of the catalogue – was written in a small clear hand on both sides of a forty-foot-long roll of paper hidden in a crevice of the cell’s 14th-century wall. When the fifty-year-old Sade emerged from his madhouse on Good Friday the following year, the Bastille had not only been stormed, it had been destroyed – burned down and carried away, brick by brick. And so Sade naturally abandoned all hope for the manuscript over which years later he still claimed to shed ‘tears of blood’.

Although Sade was never to know it, his manuscript had survived that night, and every night since: having been smuggled out of the Bastille it was handed down through three generations of one French family before appearing at auction and then being bought by a German sexologist, who published it in Berlin in 1904 as The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. Publication made the manuscript’s subsequent movements, if anything, still more mysterious. It has since been stolen at least once, and been the subject of a great deal of litigation. For decades it couldn’t travel outside Switzerland because of fears it might be seized by the French authorities. Last year it sold at auction for €7 million; Lloyd’s insured it for €12 million.

And this was just the informal beginning of the celebrations commemorating the 200th anniversary of Sade’s death. In October the manuscript, whose new owners are seeking to have it declared a national treasure, was presented to the public in a fifty-foot-long display case in Paris’s Institut des lettres et manuscrits as part of an exhibition entitled Sade: Marquis de l’ombre, prince des Lumières (the last word of the punning title might be translated as either ‘light’ or ‘enlightenment’). The Musée d’Orsay, too, mounted a lavish exhibition inspired by Sade’s visions with a title – Attaquer le soleil – taken from The 120 Days. It aimed to show, in the words of its organisers – one of whom was the writer and Sade scholar Annie Le Brun – ‘themes of the ferocity and singularity of desire ... of the bizarre and the monstrous’ in artists ranging from Goya to Picasso, Ingres to Géricault, Cézanne to Rodin. In conjunction with the exhibition the museum organised conferences, lectures, round tables and a film series presenting adaptations of Sade’s works by Buñuel, von Stroheim, Pasolini, Guy Debord, Peter Brook and Nagisa Oshima. Meanwhile, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade has published its fourth volume of Sade, a lavish 1150-page edition of the great erotic writings: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Justine. The works span the decade between the end of one 13-year period of confinement in 1790 and the beginning of a final 13-year period in 1801. The hundreds of pages of critical and philological materials in the new volume situate Sade in his violent and Enlightened times. They also bear witness to the truly exceptional quantity of critical writing on him, from Beauvoir to Foucault, to Blanchot, to Lacan, to Bataille, to Barthes, to Deleuze, to Philippe Sollers.

These national celebrations have been surprising for several reasons. Sade was jailed by all three French governments under which he lived and each of his erotic works was banned by the authorities on publication: an interdiction so serious and durable that when a young publisher began issuing an edition of Sade in 1947 he was promptly arrested and only after more than a decade of appeals, calling on expert testimony from Bataille, Breton, Cocteau and others, was there an acquittal and a lifting of the ban. This radical reversal of official esteem is, however, far less surprising than that such an about-face was possible at all, given whom we’re talking about.

‘Now, dear reader,’ we are told in The 120 Days, ‘you must prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure story told since the beginning of the world.’ For perhaps the first time in the history of the world such hyperbole is at risk of being true. Four powerful members of the Ancien Régime – a judge, a bishop, a banker and a duke – withdraw to a remote castle in the Black Forest, where they are beyond the reach of all restraint. Everything protects them: the remoteness of the location with its deep snow and impassable bridge, their wealth, their influence, their ruthlessness. Extensive arrangements are made to link the four of them together. To begin with, each of them has to marry – and debauch – the daughter of one of the others. They then bind themselves further by signing a contract stipulating that any member of the ‘quatriumvirat’ who misses a session, shies away from a criminal act of any sort or degree, or goes to bed in a state approaching sobriety during any one of the 120 nights planned is to be fined ten thousand francs. A troop of 24 innocents, male and female, is next recruited, as are four women who are masters in the art of libertine storytelling. Every evening now begins with a story, which is followed by performances of the acts it describes. (A curious feature of this much banned book – as recently as 2012 South Korea banned a new translation – is that no one ever commits a crime without first listening to a story designed to encourage it. It’s almost as if the book were taunting the censors: all these horrors, it keeps reminding us, were inspired by listening to licentious stories.)

The 120 Days is a crescendo of crime. Over the course of four months four categories of perversion – single, double, criminal and murderous – are both narrated and practised. Each category contains 150 perversions. ‘Here is the story,’ we are told, ‘of a great banquet where six hundred different dishes are offered to you. Will you eat all of them? Of course not, but their prodigious number extends the limits of your choice and, delighted by this increase of your faculties, you will not think of chastising the Amphitryon who offers them to you.’ This image becomes a good deal less appetising when we learn of some of the things served – both literally (coprophagy is common) and metaphorically (so is torture). The orgies that follow are complicated and often gymnastic. Blasphemy proves a great source of inspiration. For example, a libertine ‘puts a naked young woman astride a large crucifix; he fucks her in the vagina, from behind, in such a way that the whore’s clitoris is stimulated by Christ’s head.’ And just as there are physical gymnastics there are also mental ones. When the time comes to break the incest taboo we learn of a ‘man who fucked the three children he had had with his mother, from which resulted a daughter whom he married to his son, so that in fucking her he was at once fucking sister, daughter and daughter-in-law, and obliging his son at once to fuck sister and mother-in-law’.

The tortures are no less baroque, and far more disturbing. We learn of a woman who is sewn inside the skin of a freshly killed ass so that, as the skin shrinks, she is slowly suffocated. Another woman is placed on a special pivot and spun to death. Hearts are removed, violated and replaced. The animal kingdom isn’t spared either, as a libertine takes the emblematic bird of beauty, the swan, places a Eucharist in its anus, sodomises it, and strangles it as he ejaculates. The insatiable thirst for novelty leads one libertine to ‘place himself in a specially constructed basket with a single opening, for his anus, which is then coated with the sexual fluids of a mare, after which the basket is covered in the skin of the animal. A stallion, specially trained for the purpose, sodomises him while, inside his basket, he fucks a beautiful white dog.’ (‘Sade,’ Breton wrote, ‘is a surrealist of sadism’).

It isn’t all rape and torture, however. There is also philosophical discussion condoning and encouraging rape, torture and more. As he was preparing to translate The 120 Days into English in 1938, Beckett wrote to a friend of his fear he might be ‘banned & muzzled’ for his part in the project, as ‘the surface is of an unheard of obscenity & not 1 in 100 will find literature in the pornography, or beneath the pornography, let alone one of the capital works of the 18th century, which it is for me.’

The individual​ most responsible for this celebration of Sade is Guillaume Apollinaire, who not only predicted that Sade would ‘dominate the 20th century’ but also deemed him ‘the freest spirit there has ever been’. A number of things in Apollinaire’s encomium of Sade are debatable, though the same could be said of the accounts of those from Balzac to Stendhal, Flaubert to Baudelaire, Swinburne to Huysmans who had praised Sade before him. But Apollinaire was unquestionably right about Sade’s spirit being preternaturally resistant to intimidation. The first real report we have of the character of the young marquis, born in Paris in 1740, concerns his interactions, at the age of four, with the eight-year-old prince de Condé, who history suggests was something of a bully: unsurprising given the fact that respect for the boy’s exceptionally high rank prevented all but a very few individuals in France from reproving him for anything (and given the fact that his tutor, the comte de Charolais, was by all accounts a murderous psychopath). Sade was raised for a time alongside the prince and although Sade’s illustrious family traced its origins to the 13th century – and counted among its members the Laura for whom Petrarch invented modern love poetry – there could be no question of parity. This was no deterrent for the four-year-old Donatien, and when he was sent to stay in the vast and beautiful Condé palace in the centre of Paris while his father was away on diplomatic business, he trounced the boy twice his age, took away his toys and so verbally dominated the young prince that whenever he entered the room Sade would imperiously order him out.

Sade’s father, much amused by his son’s ways, was a charming and well-liked courtier, diplomat, libertine and man of letters. He saw to it that his spirited son had an excellent education from private tutors in the vast libraries of the family’s estates in Provence and at the celebrated Jesuit Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. While still a teenager Sade became a cavalry officer and, notwithstanding Beauvoir’s speculation in ‘Must We Burn Sade?’ (1955) that he was bound to have been a coward, he fought with distinction against the Prussians in the Seven Years War. His superior officer’s laconic report reads: ‘Totally deranged, very brave.’ Once back home Sade was married off to an intelligent and agreeable woman whose family appealed to Sade’s father because they were wealthy and well connected to the judiciary – a disastrous miscalculation. When accusations of gross libertinage – blasphemy, whipping prostitutes and forcing them to whip him, sodomy (a capital offence under the monarchy), liberal distribution of high-grade chocolate laced with cantharides (also known as Spanish fly) – began to circulate in Marseille, Versailles and Paris, Sade showed as little restraint or respect as he had with the prince de Condé. He didn’t go to beg clemency from the crown, as so many libertines of his day did after committing far greater trespasses (such as murder). Nor did he apologise to his judicially connected mother-in-law. Instead, he left Provence with his wife’s beautiful younger sister (then resident in a Benedictine convent), whom he got to write a letter which begins, ‘I swear to the Marquis de Sade, my lover, to give myself to no other than him, to never marry, to remain faithfully bound to him so long as the blood I use to seal this oath flows in my veins,’ followed by a signature written in her own blood. When Sade was sentenced to death, in absentia, for the crimes of poisoning and sodomy, with his life-sized effigy ceremoniously carried to the main square in Aix-en-Provence, where it was then beheaded and burned, the man himself was acquiring antiques in Italy with his sister-in-law and to all appearances unperturbed.

For most people imprisonment – the king of Sardinia soon put an end to Sade’s Italian idyll – would quickly cure them of this sort of criminality. But not for Sade. When, twenty years later, after more than one escape from prison, ‘Citizen Louis Sade’ found himself president of the Section des Piques, one of the most famous revolutionary sections, he pushed ahead with his radical programme of de-Christianisation, knowing full well that this was prompting a fit of murderous rage in the devout Robespierre (another member of the Section des Piques). The Terror saw Sade sentenced (again) to death, a fate he was spared not by any act of leniency, but because the bureaucracy had lost track of which prison he was lodged in, and he happened to stay alive long enough for Robespierre to find his own way to the guillotine. Free once again, Sade continued to do very much as he pleased until he angered Napoleon Bonaparte and was returned behind bars for the remainder of his life. There, he persuaded the warders that his young mistress was his daughter (she wasn’t) and between her visits he put on plays with casts of madmen and continued to write what he pleased.

The book​ for which Sade is best known, the one Napoleon called ‘the most abominable book which that most depraved imagination wrote’ and whose three versions span the revolutionary decade covered in this Pléiade volume, is Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1791). The first version of this tale of two sisters – one who loves virtue, the other who loves vice – was written in the Bastille; it was barely a hundred pages long, and contained no obscenity. Phrases such as ‘the ensuing scene was as long as it was scandalous’ serve to fire, or quench, the reader’s imagination at key junctures. But no such restraint was employed in the succeeding versions as, by the end of the decade, the work – now called The New Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, followed by the Story of Juliette, Her Sister (1799) – had grown to ten volumes covering 3700 pages. Sade’s claim on the book’s opening page that the story had been ‘softened as much as possible’ presents, in view of what follows, a frightening sense of the possible.

At the beginning of her story Justine is 12 (the same age as Lolita when hers begins). She is blonde, beautiful, blue-eyed and improbably virtuous. Her older sister, Juliette, has a very different moral make-up, one ‘sensitive only to the pleasure of being free’. Juliette’s equally schematic beauty is dark, as is her every design. Like Isabelle in Sade’s last work, The Secret History of Isabelle of Bavaria, Queen of France, Juliette is made for the libertine world. No tie but crime binds her, and none excites her more. When she encounters the man who brought about her parents’ deaths, for instance, she exclaims: ‘Yes, fuck me, Noirceuil! I love the idea of becoming the whore of my family’s executioner, make me wet with semen rather than tears.’ Whether in the murderer’s bedroom, in the convent of her youth, at the court of Catherine the Great, on the edge of Vesuvius – everywhere, in fact, from Paris to Siberia – the same story is told, and the same rules apply. We are introduced to commoners and kings, we meet a man whose erect penis is so hard he can crack a walnut with it and a giant who has ‘human furniture’. Thanks to her boundless love of vice, Juliette finds all this thoroughly gratifying, and amasses great wealth and influence in the process. Meanwhile, her little sister fares less well. Justine is made to learn, in countless terrible ways, that no good deed goes unpunished. She is raped and tortured with regularity.

Every change Sade made in the successive versions was – morally speaking – for the worse. After many years the sisters cross paths and compare notes. Justine is penniless, battered, in rags, and under arrest for crimes she didn’t commit. Juliette, countless crimes to her credit, is thriving. After freeing Justine from the authorities, and delighting in the long tale of her woes, Juliette and her libertine friends decide to turn her out in an advancing storm so as to have Nature decide her fate. She is promptly struck by lightning which, in defiance of fulminology, leaves her body not through her feet, but through her vagina. (In earlier versions the lightning – acting in a fashion that was no more physically possible but perhaps more seemly – left through her heart.) The libertines rush to the scene of Nature’s crime, reflect on the lesson, and praise Nature not only for confirming their beliefs but for sparing Justine’s beautiful buttocks; there is then a last round of violations.

When Sade was arrested at his printer’s in 1801 for the crime of having written this book, he had with him extensive notes for still further amplification of the story. This raises the question: do we really need to move our way through every committable crime to understand that virtue brings only misfortune? Would the beautifully written novella not have been enough?

In   Literature and Evil (1957), Bataille wrote that ‘nothing would be more pointless than to take Sade at his word, to take him seriously.’ But how then are we to take him? The Goncourt brothers note that Flaubert, while reading Sade, would merrily exclaim: ‘It’s the most amusing stupidity I’ve ever encountered!’ In a more reverent vein Swinburne spoke of ‘a thrill of the infinite in the accursed pages’. For many people in the century Apollinaire predicted he would dominate, Sade’s supreme message was the same violent one as the Revolution’s: freedom. Such a note of ecstatic anarchy has been struck often, from The Surrealist Manifesto (1924) to Debord’s Screams in Favour of Sade (1952), to the slogan that spread around the walls of Paris during May 1968: ‘Sadists of all nations, popularise the struggle of the divine Marquis!’ But this has not been the only note sounded. As news of Nazi atrocities began to filter through to them in their Californian exile, Adorno and Horkheimer dedicated the second chapter of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) to ‘Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality’. In Sade they saw a dark energy being released once Enlightenment rationality was freed from all consensual restraints. The independence of mind which was the defining trait and central credo of that rationality – Kant’s ‘Verstand ohne Leitung eines anderen’, ‘understanding without the direction of another’ – was at the same time the greatest threat to individual liberty. ‘The architectonic structure of the Kantian system,’ they wrote, ‘like the gymnastic pyramids of the Sadean orgy, announce an organisation of all aspects of life divorced from any inherent goal.’ The Enlightenment which their dialectic sought to reveal, and reorient, had as heritage not revolution, solipsism and anarchy but the globalising society of surveillance and punishment in which the authors found themselves living – and which seemed to be going up in flames.

These were far from the last doubts voiced on this count. While reading Twenty Months at Auschwitz by Pelagia Lewińska in 1945, Raymond Queneau noted that ‘the real meaning’ of the camps was to ‘dehumanise human beings (which was the goal proposed by Sade’s heroes)’, and found, in Sade, ‘a hallucinatory precursor of the world ruled by the Gestapo’. Later that same year Queneau wrote that the fact ‘that Sade was not personally a terrorist ... does not exempt those who found themselves sharing to a greater or lesser extent the Marquis’s theses from having to envisage, without hypocrisy, the reality of the concentration camps’, where horrors were ‘no longer locked in the mind of a man, but carried out by thousands of fanatics’. In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt found that for an avant-garde of French intellectuals between the wars it was ‘not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade’ whom they read, and that ‘to them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world.’ Neither these commentators nor later ones such as Foucault – who was to remark on ‘the unlimited right of an all-powerful monstrosity’ shared by Sade and the Nazi death camps – suggest anything like inspiration. Which leaves open the question of what it means to celebrate works that seem to have provided the script for the most monstrous turns modern history has taken.

Understanding Sade means understanding his libertines. Justine grew through ever more attention being given to them, with each successive version casting more light on what these supremely ruthless men and women are doing. What is made immediately clear is that they are not hedonists, and are not simply following their desires. Their pleasure principle is rigorous and reasoned, and their ultimate goal isn’t even pleasure in any easily recognisable form. This is not so much because it contains pain – it’s a common enough idea, from ancient Greece to recent studies in neuroscience, that pain and pleasure are wedded in mysterious ways – but because their goal is to feel nothing at all, precisely as they perform the most criminal acts imaginable. Sade’s libertines cede to every criminal, harmful, violent impulse that occurs to them; they find that reason not only encourages but obliges them to do so. But the same does not apply to generous or loving desires. They strive to reason away any kind or caring impulse that might come to mind. A libertine in Juliette speaks for all her fellows when she describes ‘a tranquillity, a repose in the passions, a stoicism that allows me to do everything and suffer everything without emotion’. (The true Sadean libertine is never a sadist in the modern or medical sense of the term: although they freely cause pain to the bodies around them, they are ideally indifferent to anything those bodies experience.) This is why the scenes of debauch are so theatrical, so architectural, so excessive, as well as being the reason they are largely unsensual (in that they make few appeals to any sense but sight). We are told in precise detail who is whipping whom while perched on what, we are given the exact position of gardener, turkey-cock, cleric and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but there is almost no sensual detail, no tingling of excitement, no tiny modulation of voice, no warmth of touch, no odour. What Sade presents is a scenography, and he makes no secret of the fact: he routinely employs terms from the theatre such as ‘scene’, ‘act’, ‘posture’, ‘position’ and ‘tableau’. You aren’t meant to imagine that you’re there and participating: you’re meant to imagine that you’re watching. But the most important thing that Sade’s idea of an exalted apathy explains is why the books can never end and why their libertines are so enraged.

 Sade’s philosophy describes a circle of fire in which the libertines are trapped. The first stage of their dialectic of Enlightenment involves doing away with God in favour of Nature. Nature burns away religious belief through the heat of its passions – or so it seems to the apprentice libertine. But things can’t end so harmoniously. For what is Nature, when capitalised in that way? ‘Whore!’ says Juliette, as it dawns on her that Nature is just one more imposition of order on chaos – less obviously erroneous than a Christian God, but of the same immaterial substance. If you are a libertine in Sade’s world you are seeking to break something you fear is unbreakable: belief in order and care for others. This is where real libertine rage sets in. In the speech that gave the Musée d’Orsay their exhibition title, a libertine cries out that he wants ‘to attack the sun so as to deprive the universe of it, or use it to set the world aflame’. The same rage makes a libertine elsewhere in Sade cry out: ‘Oh, if I could set the universe on fire, I should still curse Nature for offering only one world to my fiery desires!’ With the loss of a coherent idea of Nature the libertine loses, as Juliette loses, a coherent idea of crime: Juliette is forced to conclude that ‘crime has no reality: that is, the possibility of crime does not exist because there is no way to outrage nature.’ Sade’s libertines dream of apathy, but for them apathy is like the grail – they can never quite reach it.

‘Far from placing desire above all,’ Blanchot observed, ‘Sade judged it suspect and subordinated it.’ Desire fully felt moves you towards someone, and the very point of the libertine exercise was to move away from them, to ascend ever higher into the empyrean of one’s own autonomy. So much of our energy, Sade observes, flows towards others. Were we able to reverse that flow, to feel all our energy flood back into ourselves, we would be truly free. This is the libertines’ end. That is why they do all they do: why every ounce of fellow feeling has to be systematically stamped out. ‘It is no accident that sadism, as an individual phenomenon bearing the name of a man,’ Foucault remarked in his (unpublished) lectures on Sade, ‘was born of confinement and, within confinement, that Sade’s entire work is dominated by the images of the Fortress, the Cell, the Cellar, the Convent, the inaccessible island, which thus form, as it were, the natural habitat of unreason.’

Who Whips Whom. By Leland de la Durantaye. London Review of Books , February 19, 2015.