A Very Short Introduction - The Marquis de Sade

Hailed by the early 20th-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire
as ‘the freest spirit who ever lived’, but demonized throughout the last
two hundred years as a misogynistic pornographer, and as the original
proponent of sexual sadism and lustmurder, the Marquis de Sade is a
creature of myth. The popular assumption that Sade was as sadistic as
his monstrous fictional villains is still current today among the majority
of the population who have never read a line of his work. In fact,
Sade’s thought, which is expressed at great length in novels, short
stories, plays, critical essays, and personal correspondence, is
considerably more complex than allowed by any of the simplistic
labels, positive or negative, associated with this mythical reputation.
Best known as the author of four sexually violent novels that were
destined to shock readers for centuries to come, Sade was, certainly,
a subversive iconoclast and life-long rebel. Yet, most of his writings
contained neither obscenity nor extreme violence, and many of his
works of fiction are considered masterpieces of their genre. The
sheer breadth and intellectual complexity of Sade’s creative output
encompasses the whole range of human experience, from sexuality to
morality, from politics to religion, from metaphysics to aesthetics, from
literature to life and death. Standing at the end of the classical era
and the beginning of the modern age, Sade is, for Michel Foucault, a
pivotal figure in the history of philosophy. Spanning two centuries and
successive political regimes, from monarchy to empire, he is also the
only French philosopher of importance to live through the French
Revolution and to comment on its events as they happened. Sade was a
writer of astonishing energy and remarkable courage. He was unafraid
to speak his mind, and paid for this temerity with his freedom. What
makes him unique, however, is a dogged determination to tell the truth
about the human condition, a truth that he located, not in a soul or
spirit, as most previous philosophers had done, but simply, scandalously,
in the sexual body, which for him was the only reality. Were it not for
his explicit use of language and complete disregard for the artificially
constructed taboos of a religious morality he despised, the novelty and
profundity of Sade’s thought, and, above all, its fundamental modernity,
would have long since secured him a place alongside the greatest
authors and thinkers of the European Enlightenment.

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
List of illustrations xiii
1 Beyond the myth: the real Marquis de Sade 1
2 Man of letters 12
3 Martyr of atheism 32
4 Sade and the French Revolution 44
5 Theatres of the body 60
6 Representations of the feminine 84
7 Apostle of freedom 112
Further reading 125
References 131
Index 135