Writer, born in Paris, France. He studied at Paris, served in the army, and was in 1772 condemned to death at Aix for his cruelty and sexual perversions. He escaped, but was later imprisoned at Vincennes (1777) and in the Bastille (1784), where he wrote Les 120 Journées de Sodome (c.1784, The 120 Days of Sodom). After his release (1790), he wrote the licentious novels Justine (1791), La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795, Philosophy in the Bedroom), and Juliette (1797). He died insane, his name providing the language with the word sadism.
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (June 2, 1740 – December 2, 1814) (pronounced IPA: [maʁ.ki.də.sad]) was a French aristocrat and writer of philosophy-laden and often violent pornography. Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and an insane asylum for 29 years of his life, though he was never convicted of any crime;
Life
Early life and education
Sade was born in the Condé palace in Paris. His father was comte Jean-Bastiste François Joseph de Sade and his mother was Marie-Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, a distant cousin and lady-in-waiting of the princess of Condé. Sade then attended a Jesuit lycée and went on to follow a military career.
Title
The generations of this family alternated use of the titles marquis and comte. His grandfather, Gaspard François de Sade, was the first of this family to bear the title of marquis. He was occasionally referred to as the marquis de Sade, but more often documents refer to him as the marquis de Mazan. But no reference has been found of Donatien de Sade's lands being erected into a marquisate for him or his ancestors, nor any act of registration of the title of marquis (or comte) by the parlement of Provence where he was domiciled. But the Sade family were noblesse de race, that is, members of France's oldest nobility (who claimed descent from the ancient Franks). Correspondence exists in which Sade is referred to as marquis prior to his marriage by his own father.
Scandals and imprisonment
Shortly after his wedding, he began living a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly abused young prostitutes and employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste, a practice he would continue later with the help of his wife.
Beginning in 1763, Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Several prostitutes there complained about mistreatment by Sade, and he was put under surveillance by a police inspector, who provided detailed reports on his escapades.
After an episode in Marseille in 1772 that involved the non-lethal poisoning of prostitutes with the supposed aphrodisiac spanish fly and sodomy with his male servant Latour, the two were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy and said poisoning in the same year. They were able to flee to Italy, and Sade took the sister of his wife with him, with whom he had an affair. Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in late 1772 but managed to flee four months later. Sade had to flee to Italy again.
Later that year, Sade was tricked into visiting his supposedly sick mother (who had recently died) in Paris.
In 1784, Vincennes was closed and Sade was transferred to the Bastille in Paris. (The storming of the Bastille, marking the beginning of the French Revolution, occurred on July 14.) He had been working on his magnum opus, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom), despairing when the manuscript was lost during his transferral;
He was released from Charenton in 1790, after the new Constituent Assembly had abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet.
Return to freedom, and imprisoned for "moderatism"
During his time of freedom (beginning 1790), he published several of his books anonymously. Constance and Sade would stay together for the rest of his life. Sade was by now extremely obese.
He initially arranged himself with the new political situation after the revolution, called himself "Citizen Sade", and managed to obtain several official positions despite his aristocratic background. (The ruins were acquired in the 1990s by fashion designer Pierre Cardin who now holds regular theatre festivals there.)
Imprisoned for his writings, return to Charenton, and death
In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine and Juliette. Sade was arrested at his publisher's office and imprisoned without trial, first in the Sainte-Pélagie prison and then, following allegations that he had tried to seduce young fellow prisoners there, in the harsh fortress of Bicêtre.
Sade began an affair with thirteen-year-old Madeleine Leclerc, an employee at Charenton. This affair lasted some 4 years, until Sade's death in 1814. One year earlier, a new director had taken over the asylum, and Sade had lost some of his privileges.
"To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable, but to have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honourably discharged is incomprehensible" - on the death penalty.
Literary works
Many of Sade's works contain explicit and often repetitive descriptions of rape and countless sexual perversions, often involving violence and transcending the boundaries of the possible. Sade's libertines founded their philosophy on a purposeful flouting of moral norms and a hatred of religious ethics.
In 1782, while in prison, he completed the short Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life.
The novel The 120 Days of Sodom, written in 1785 but not completed, catalogs a wide variety of sexual perversions performed on a group of enslaved teenagers and is Sade's most graphic work.
In 1787 he wrote Les infortunes de la vertu, an early version of Justine which was published in 1791.
The novel Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) accounts the lascivious education of a privileged young lady at the dawn of womanhood, culminating in the rape and mutilation of the girl's mother. One More Effort If You Wish To Be Republicans! in which Sade advocates for a utopian form of socialism.
In 1800 he published a four-volume collection of short stories titled Crimes of Love.
While incarcerated again at Charenton, he completed three historical novels: Adelaide of Brunswick, Isabelle of Bavaria and The Marquise de Gange.
He also wrote several plays, most of them unpublished.
Several letters written from prison to his wife have been preserved and were published in 1998 as Letters from Prison.
Appraisal and criticism
Numerous writers and artists, especially those concerned with sexuality, have been both repelled and fascinated by de Sade.
Simone de Beauvoir (in her essay Must we burn Sade?, published in Les Temps modernes, December 1951 and January 1952) and other writers have attempted to locate traces of a radical philosophy of freedom in Sade's writings, preceding that of existentialism by some 150 years.
Pierre Klossowski, in his 1947 book Sade Mon Prochain ("Sade My Neighbor"), analyzes Sade's philosophy as a precursor of Nietzsche, negating both Christian values and the materialism of the Enlightenment.
One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and interprets the ruthless and calculating behavior of Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of enlightenment. Similarly, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited in his 1966 essay "Kant avec Sade" that de Sade's ethic was the complementary completion of the categorical imperative originally formulated by Immanuel Kant.
In The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography (1979), Angela Carter provides a feminist reading of Sade, seeing him as a "moral pornographer" who creates spaces for women. Similarly, Susan Sontag defended both De Sade and Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye) within her essay, "The Pornographic Imagination" (1967) on the basis their works were transgressive texts, and argued that neither should be censored.
By contrast, Andrea Dworkin saw Sade as the exemplary woman-hating pornographer, supporting her theory that pornography inevitably leads to violence against women. One chapter of her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1979) is devoted to an analysis of Sade. Susie Bright claims that Dworkin's first novel Ice and Fire, which is rife with violence and abuse, can be seen as a modern re-telling of Sade's Juliette.
Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem has also written an essay analyzing game-theoretical arguments that appear in Sade's novel Justine.
Works about Sade or his books
Nonfiction books
Marquis de Sade: his life and works. (1899) by Iwan Bloch (download) The Marquis de Sade, a biography. (1961) by Gilbert Lély The life and ideas of the Marquis de Sade. (1963) by Geoffrey Gorer Sade, Fourier, Loyola. (1971) by Roland Barthes (life of Sade download) The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History. (1979) by Angela Carter "Writing and the Experience of Limits" (1982) by Philippe Sollers The Marquis de Sade: the man, his works, and his critics: an annotated bibliography. (1986) by Colette Verger Michael The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988) by Colin Wilson Sade, his ethics and rhetoric. (1989) by Colette Verger Michael Marquis de Sade: A Biography (1991) by Maurice Lever Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (1995) by Thomas Moore The philosophy of the Marquis de Sade. (1995) by Timo Airaksinen Sade contre l'Être suprême (1996) by Philippe Sollers An Erotic Beyond: Sade. (1998) by Octavio Paz (review) Sade: A Biographical Essay. (1998) by Laurence L. Bongie (review) The Marquis de Sade: a life. (1999) by Neil Schaeffer At Home With the Marquis de Sade: A Life. (1999) by Francine du Plessix Gray Marquis de Sade: the genius of passion. (2003) by Ronald Hayman Sade: from materialism to pornography. (2002) by Caroline WarmanPlays
The play by Peter Weiss titled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, or Marat/Sade for short, is a fictional account of Sade directing a play in Charenton. La Fura Del Baus have toured worldwide their production, XXX, which is said to be based upon Sade's work and thoughts.Films
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sade's life and writings have proved irresistible to filmmakers. The final segment of the film provides a coda to Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, with the four debauched noblemen emerging from their mountain retreat. The Skull (1966), British horror film based on Robert Bloch's short story "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade." Peter Cushing plays a collector who becomes possessed by the evil spirit of the Marquis when he adds Sade's stolen skull to his collection. In another scene, a character gives a brief, fictionalized account of Sade's life, emphasizing his "boogeyman" reputation. Marat/Sade, a film of the Peter Weiss play (1966) (The full title being The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade). Marquis de Sade: Justine, directed by Jesus Franco (1968). Klaus Kinski appears as Sade, writing the tale in his prison cell. The film more or less presents the major incidents of Sade's life as we know them, though in a very hallucinatory fashion. Sade's novel updated to Fascist Italy. Cruel Passion (1977), a toned-down re-release of De Sade's Justine, starring Koo Stark as the long-suffering heroine. Two of the characters are transported to the world of the Marquis, where they are tormented by Sade (J. Night Terrors (1994), another horror film playing on Sade's boogeyman image. Daniel Auteuil plays Sade, here imprisoned at Picpus, sexually educating a young girl in the shadow of the guillotine. A romanticized version of Sade's final days which raises questions of pornography and societal responsibility. Geoffrey Rush plays Sade in a cast that also includes Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, and Michael Caine. Loosely based on E.A.Poe's short stories and inspired by the works of the Marquis de Sade.
NOTE: The Marquis de Sade also featured in episodes of two TV series. The original Fantasy Island featured Lloyd Bochner as Sade, anachronistically threatening a guest of Mr. Roarke in the 17th century. Friday the 13th: The Series had an episode in which a haunted painting transported people to the time of Sade (Neil Munro), who is seen improbably conducting lavish parties and orgies at the height of the French Revolution.
Other fiction
In Harlan Ellison's science fiction anthology, Dangerous Visions (1967), Robert Bloch wrote a story entitled "A Toy For Juliette" whose title character was both named for and used techniques based on Sade's works. Bloch also wrote a short story called "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade", in which a collector becomes possessed by the violent spirit of the Marquis after stealing the titular item. In the comic book series The Invisibles, Sade is recruited by the anarchistic group the Invisibles, as part of the revolution. The DC Comics character Desaad, created by Jack Kirby in New Gods #2 (1971), is a play on "De Sade".About his life and work
Sade, Marquis de. Retrieved August 9, 2006, from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9064686 Marquis de Sade at the Internet Movie Database Marquis de Sade, extensive assessment of his work, from the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature Marquis de Sade, from "books and writers" Site about Neil Schaeffer's biography of Sade, includes some letters written by Sade while in prison, a timeline, and a bibliography Timeline of his life Biography of Sade from Channel 4. A Brief Account of the Life of the Marquis de Sade, by Anthony Walker Detailed description of one of de Sade's escapes Extensive annotated bibliography, by Marina Pianu Sade y el Poder; (Spanish) ArmsHis works online
French
French Wikisource, many public domain works by Sade desade.free.fr, many works by or about Sade, in several languages.English
Marquis de Sade elibrary -- Electronic library featuring PDFs of 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom, a short story, as well as biographical materials The 120 Days of Sodom (online e-book) Justine Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man Florville and Courval Works by Marquis de Sade at Project Gutenberg| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | de Sade, Marquis |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | de Sade, Donatien Alphonse François |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | French writer of pornography and philosophy |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 2, 1740 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris, France |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 2, 1814 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Charenton-Saint-Maurice |
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