Introduction number, author's name* this text should be returned no later than the date last marked b revolutionary ideas of the marquis de sade revolutionary ideas of the marquis de sade h geoffrey gorer with a preface professor j. B. S. Haldane, escort girls moscow f.R.S. 1934 wishart & co 9 john street adelphi london printed in great britain by bt western printing services ltd. Bristol contents preface by professor j. B. S. Haldane, f.R.S. - Preface to some preliminary judgments chapter i. Chapter ii. Chapter iii. Chapter iv. Chapter v. Life 1740-1814 literary work - i. Literary principles, ii. Miscellaneous works, iii. Alina and valcour. Iv. Les 1 20 journees, justine and juliette. V. Literary influence. Philosophy - i. La metric. Ii. General principles. God and nature - politics i. Diagnosis - i. Class differences, ii. The nature of property. Iii. The ruling classes, their politics and mechanism. Iv. Their attitude towards the poor. Poor. V. Law and justice. Prisons. Death penalty. Vi. Other considerations. Vii. Butua and the parable of civilization. 5 page 7 ii '9 25 7* io2 118 129 contents chapter vi. Page 156 policy ii. Proposed solutions- - - - i. Utopia. 1788 ii. The plan for the creation of a european federation. 1788 year iii. Anarchy. 1 794 ? Iv. A legislative plan for the new republic. 1795 chapter vii. Sex, pleasure and love 200 chapter viii. Sadism and algolagnia 218 other judgment 247 bibliography and references - - 255 preface either of the two courses is open to self-esteem. He can dismiss this unread book as an attempt by an arrogant person to whitewash mongter or kelmai.J:eaa lt". He will then discover that if de sade indulged in abnormal pleasures several times, he also risked his life to save the life of the woman for whom he was imprisoned for thirteen years; that if a psychologist linked his name to a form of cruelty, then in fact he was an inveterate opponent of the death penalty. When the legend of the monster dissipates, it becomes clear that de sade was a very remarkable and original thinker. Today we find the philosophical fathers of the french revolution a bit ridiculous, because they usually assumed that with the abolition of a certain set of abuses, the golden age would return. De sade saw much more. He had no illusions about the natural goodness of man, but he believed that with full economic and sexual equality, people's living conditions could be significantly improved. Thus, he anticipated mai's views on the population and tolerance of the danish criminal code regarding sexual behavior. In some other respects, he has gone far beyond even the most "advanced" social thinkers of our time. It is doubtful whether an attempt will ever be made to put his ideas about sexual morality into practice. Nevertheless, they are interesting because they logically compromise less with our existing morality than plato's, or even more. If de sade had not spent twelve years almost in solitary confinement in the bastille, his system of political prefaces might have been more practical and had a better chance of acceptance. But it would be less intellectually consistent and therefore less interesting for students of political ideas. It is unlikely that the original documents on which mr. Gorer's work is based will be available to the public during our time. For this reason, his book will be absolutely indispensable for the student of political thought who wants to trace the genesis of many ideas that are now accepted, and others that still cause fierce debate. This will give intellectual ammunition to both sides. Conservatives will be able to say that sexual and economic equality are part of the same system of ideas as tolerance of murder and rape. The radicals will find in de sade a political thinker who foresaw with considerable accuracy the failure of the french revolution in achieving freedom, equality and fraternity and pointed out the reasons for this failure. Mr. Gorer did not try to hide his sympathies, and it is likely that his book would have been less valuable if he had done so. It would be beyond the power of someone who did not share many of de sade's opinions to reconstruct them, as he did, from the fragmentary remains of his works. His bias, at least, is undisguised, and therefore * can be admitted without difficulty. As a biologist, i can't finish without saying a few words about de sade's views on sex. It was based on actual observations and represents a contribution to the natural history of man. Unfortunately, our knowledge of human biology is still so fragmentary that a comprehensive study of human eroticism does not have an adequate background and stands out as obscenity. A man or woman who has studied the anatomy of the rest of the body can approach the anatomy of the reproductive system without undue excitement, and similarly, when human physiology becomes part of general knowledge, the physiology of sex will find its natural place in our intellectual equipment. And the study of his anomalies will shed considerable light on the normal process, as it was already done in the hands of freud. Then the time will come when de sade's novels will be appropriate for an educated public, and it is quite possible that they will look at him not as a supplier of dirt, but as a person who is significantly ahead of his age in the circle of his interests. It can be noted that 140 years ago, his observations on human behavior could not be published in any other form than fiction. Meanwhile, mr. Gorer did the psychology students a favor by pointing out that de sade should be considered a pioneer in their study, although his work could have been of great value if he had been born a century later. I do not want to say that de sade was a man of perfectly balanced mind, whose works should be taken as a guide either to thinking or to morality. Perhaps he would have been unhappy at any age. But he was doubly lucky: not only was he imprisoned under the old regime, but he also survived the french revolution, during which at least some of his ideas were put into practice. If mr. Gorer's book had no other justification, it would deserve an audience, because it pays posthumous justice to a very remarkable writer who was a victim of both himself and his fellow j.B. S. Haldane. Preface for a book about the marquis de sade, two excuses are usually required; firstly, the justification for writing about such a monster at all, and, alternatively, the reason for adding another book to the existing number concerning it. My justification for both actions is that i found the development of his ideas extremely interesting, and i hope others will do the same.; And that all the books already published, without exception, are devoted exclusively to his life and legend, as well as the mechanics of the plots of his novels, sometimes with a weak and distorted presentation of his ideas about sex, but never with any development of his theories on this or any other topic. Therefore, i claim that this is the only book in any language in which the ideas of this unusual person are presented in any way; and the only one that allows the general public to judge him from his own words. As far as possible, i have quoted it verbatim: and to avoid creating a bilingual book, i translated it into english, paying more attention to accuracy than elegance of translation. The quotes involved me in a clumsy set of points; de sade himself often uses... Three dots for my own effects; so i was forced to use four dots... To indicate the omission of some words in a sentence and five dots to indicate the omission of complete sentences. I believe that the main reason why not a single book on de sade's ideas has been published in the one hundred and twenty years since his death is due to the difficulties of obtaining copies of his works with prefaces and the amazing obscenity of many of these works that were once received. (Throughout this book, i distinguish between "obscenity" and "pornography" in the same way that d.H. Lawrence distinguished obscenities related to the topics discussed and the language used, pornography - to the author's tickling intentions.) For most booksellers, the demand for his works will cause an ignorant look, violent indignation or a mocking offer of pornographic works, about which de sade said: "these pathetic volumes, written in cafes or brothels, demonstrate two voids in their authors at the same time: their heads and their stomachs are equally empty." 1 * by chance i found copies of "alina and vakura" and "juliet" on the open shelves of booksellers in cambridge and london, respectively, and bought them out of curiosity. Since these were respectable shops, the books were not outrageously expensive. When i first read juliette, i found only the boring and nauseating perversity that i expected, but alina and vakur, which, due to the lack of obscenity, was almost completely ignored by people writing about de sade, seemed to me so full of ideas that i returned to juliette with new eyes. Then i discovered that if obscenity could be taken for granted, if not ignored, then a worldview of curious originality and power was presented here. After that, i set about trying to collect the rest of his work with indifferent success ; and if it wasn't for the energy of one person and the tremendous kindness of another, i would probably still be searching. Monsieur maurice heine, after the war, collected and edited de sade's books and manuscripts in limited editions and in various journals, which provided us with a lot of hitherto unknown materials; and mr. K. R. Dawes, whose book about de sade is within his * for convenience, i have added placed all references to sources at the end of the book. 12 preface self-imposed limitations the best thing that has ever been written on this topic has responded to a request for help from a complete stranger with kindness, for which i cannot find adequate gratitude. This summer, discouraged by the rest from futile attempts to gain recognition as a playwright, i decided to try to systematize de sade's ideas with a double purpose: to try to clear my own head by comparing my own ideas with the ideas of an original and extreme thinker, and to get some idea of the events around us, both at home and abroad, which seemed to correspond so closely to the circumstances described by de sade. This book is the result, i found that it gave me pretty good results that i wanted; if it succeeds in this for someone else, i would appreciate it. Before discussing de sade's ideas, i put a brief biography and an attempt to criticize his works. The biography was necessary to place him in a historical position, since the development of his thought is connected with the history of his time, and to try to dispel the legend of bluebeard surrounding him. As far as i could, i gave the main reliable facts about him and nothing more; i have not preserved a single legend, and only in one case did i go into any details. This is the story of the marseille scandal, the true facts of which were first made public by m. Maurice heine this summer.; And i thought it would be advisable to try to dispel the false versions that have now been willy-nilly given about this incident. I have not mentioned the other details of his sexual life that are now known, because they seem to me to have no meaning or interest other than an audacious and rather morbid curiosity. The main originality of this chapter lies in the autobiographical quotations, which, with one exception, were not (as far as i know) collected together or noted earlier. Trying to give an account of de sade's intentions and their result in his works, i did something that, as far as i know, has never been attempted before. The plots of the main works have been cited several times, but, as my analysis of "gentlemen prefer blondes" shows, this may be better than any other way to disguise the spirit and content of the book. The rest of the book is just a summary. Many of his ideas are still so new and revolutionary that they must inevitably offend some people. I have done everything possible to minimize this crime without distorting his true thoughts. I can make a reservation that i am presenting de sade's ideas, not my own; i was as objective as i could and cannot accept responsibility for his theories, some of which shock my feelings as much as they can shock any reader. The main trap i was aware of was the danger of choosing phrases and sentences that fit my purpose and distorting them out of context. To protect myself from this or the suspicion that i did it, i have given several long and continuous quotes, of which, perhaps, everything does not fit the issue under discussion, but which illustrate the trends of this passage. When i wanted to express my own opinion, i did it in the first person, considering it unworthy to hide behind an impersonal or editorial attitude and writhe behind the chinese fan of the "current unfortunate author"."When i first conceived this book, i thought that because of my ignorance of history, one could definitely say whether de sade was original or not in promoting his ideas, such as the theory of optimal population or equal rights for men and women; but i soon gave up on this attempt and contented myself with presenting my ideas and leaving the issue of priority to those who are more knowledgeable in such matters than i am. The priority of presenting some political ideas, which i claim for him, is justified by the history of guido de ruggiero and the preface to european liberalism. His originality in matters of psychology and sex is beyond doubt, since such topics were discussed only a century after his death. This book is open to attacks from two different sources: from those who believe that such a monster is better to be forgotten, and who will find in the ideas i have tried to collect only additional evidence of its monstrosity; and from that small group, the core of which are the surrealists, who will consider that any attempt to rationalize and explain the arch-criminal and arch-rebel is blasphemy. To both of these possible detractors, i will respond with the words of de sade, used in the preface to "aline and valcour": "nevertheless, we will undoubtedly have critics, contradictors and enemies: it is dangerous to love people, it is a crime to educate them. So much the worse for those who condemn this work and do not feel in what spirit it was done: slaves of prejudice and habits, they show that they are driven solely by opinion, and the torch of philosophy will never shine for them." August 2, october', 1933. Some preliminary judgments some preliminary judgments. . . . The author is a monster. . . Breton restif. 1,797. Readers familiar with the marquis de sade's justine and juliet will understand my horror and indignation at the style of entertainment provided by these dens. The volumes mentioned (the most blasphemous and obscene ever written and released from hell shortly after the date of writing this letter) are filled with records of experiments that were conducted with the aim of inciting all kinds of tortures of the most unheard-of debauchery. W. Beckford. A note added to a letter written in 1784. (// It can be noted that de sade did not publish anything on this date.) Get pleasure from blasphemy, from an obscene story, from terrible dreams, from the fact that you are worried about the lives of daimons and marquis de sade croy, from being with me, from touching life, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do you do, from what you do, from what you do, from, what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do, from what you do.. . . Janin, 1834. Criticism and a disgusting collection of crimes and fraudsters. F. Soulier. 1837. De sade, the hero of france, the martyr. P. Borel. 1839. You are self-asserting, not prone to striving for change, byron and de sade (i demand forgiveness for the rapprochement), people who are doubles and great inspirers of modernity, the only ones who manifest themselves secretly in the path of secrets. St. Beuve. 1 843. 19 some preliminary judgments about this illustrious and undeserved benefactor of mankind. Usually work is either a stimulant for an old beast or an emetic for a young man> instead of a valuable study of rational curiosity. I only regret that, by rightly attacking my charenton, i deliberately distorted the source. I would bow to the opinion of the judge if instead of "byron with honors" you said "de sade with honors." The poet, thinker and man of the world, from whom the theology of my poem emanates, was greater than byron. He really is a fatalist or not, he has seen gods and people to the end. Had he lied? Was he laughing? Does he know about it? Now he lies out of reach, out of breath, your prophet, your preacher, your poet? ..A. K. Swinburne (between 1860 and 1880). Ilfaut toujours en revenir y de sade, c'est-a-dire in human nature /, to explain evil. K. Baudelaire. Your intimate relationship. Flaubert, "the mind-blowing hunt for de sade", "the story of de sade", "return to life". Goncourt magazine. The marquis de sade is perhaps one of the most extraordinary people who have ever lived, a very interesting object for psychological research; nature has produced some strange abortions, both physical and mental, but there has probably never been a greater mental monster than de sade. Pisanus fraxi (h. S. Ashby). 1880. The marquis de sade believes that an indian engaged in synthesis and pusser simply limits the possibilities of spermocracy, abnormal and monstrous. 11 depassa dances in the genre of antiques advertising, ifixa dances in the world of horrors, in the columns of hercule priapus. Jamais evreusement on n*ire d'orme, australian loin, aura de sade, born on the horizon on the trotic field. Octave uzanne. 1901. C'est le 2 juin y 1 740 qui vit naitre un des hommes les plus remar* quables du dixuitieme siecle, disons m de humanitit en gtntral. . . . Les (works of the marquis de sade), constituting object 20 some preliminary judgments about history and civilization related to science mfdicale . . . . 11 and encore the author's point of view on the accomplished deeds of the marquis de sade, on the history that occupies civilization, on the solution, jurisprudence, economics and morality, on the genuine achievements of science and new concepts. Eugene dilhren (ivan bloch.Igor, 1904. To get a man who will not be a companion for rien durand, for dictating the rules, for dominating the game... The marquis de sade, because he loves freedom, because he exists for an encore.... . The lecturer, who talks about roman abortion in a non-remark way, talks about literature, what is happening, and analyzes what happens when people do not use life and spirit enough. G. Apollinaire. 1909. Sad, d. A. F. French licentious writer... The encyclopedia britannica. 1 3rd edition. De sade wrote according to his ideas, and although his ideas were extravagant, he was at least sincere. Perhaps that's what makes him such a sinister figure. Simple obscenity is always disgusting and almost always boring; but there was much more to it than that, and he was cruelly serious. K.R. Dawes. J 9 2 7- you will not come to visit a friend. P. Bourdain. !9 2 9- un ecrivaine quilfout placer without inflated parmi le plus grand. J. Paulhan. *93 o - ii y a done instead of avoiding responsibility for the garden> apres avoir inquittt tout un siecle qui ne pouvait le lire, sera de plus en plus lu to restore calm in life. M. Heine. J 93- del/o scritore non diciamo poi dello scritore di genio mancano al sade le qualita piu elementari. Polygrafo i pornografo maggiore titolo d'un aretino, tutto il suo merito sta nell 9. Affectionately documents a presentation on the phase of child mitology / psychopathology: informafiabesca egli da laprima sistematologia delle perversioni. M. Praz. J 93- 21 some preliminary judgments, as well as venn irgendvo, 1st garden abnormal, defect. Regulations on spannung-liegt, spaltung-for and zwar, spaltung-nicht-mit-dammersustanden and stdrungen-de-bevusseins verbunden ist. Er weicht dem conflicts with us, verandworthet that he is not to blame for anything, that he will not die wendigkeit, that he orders a man, dieter doppelter, to lead a man of genius, vird% eigt kierkegaard: negative von armer nutzloser tragedian: sad. O. Flake. 1930. Rien en saurait plus ten years to understand what is happening in a world where people are able to understand the meaning and not come into contact with the feelings of profon sa revelation. M. Heine. I am 93 1' that rabid pornographer.... Sade was born in paris in 1740 and in 1772 was sentenced to death for sexual practices to which he left his name. He managed to escape, and was subsequently imprisoned in vincennes and in the bastille, where he wrote several fantastic novels in which his imagination dwelt on those objects and scenes that excited and satisfied his peculiar sexual mania. He died insane in 1884. Desmond mcarthy. 1933-22 i don't care if a person is kind or evil? All that matters is whether he is a wise man or a fool. W. Blake, jerusalem. Chapter i life, 1740-1814 si les hommes, entering into life, saving people and accompanying: i do not depend on who hires me to work in the seraglio - i do not know what to do with the carridre! De sade, alina and valcour. The bastille is shaking... And the lair named horror held a man chained hand and foot: around his neck was an iron hoop chained to an impregnable wall; in his soul was a snake wrapped around his heart, hidden from the light, as in a rock crevice, and the man was imprisoned for a prophetic letter. W. Blake, the french revolution. "My mother was connected with the highest in the country; my father with everything that was the most outstanding in languedoc; born in paris amid luxury and abundance, i immediately believed as soon as i could think that nature and fortune combined to shower me with gifts. I believed it because people were stupid enough to tell me that, and this ridiculous prejudice made me arrogant, domineering and short-tempered; it seemed to me that the whole world had to give in to my whims and that it only needed to shape them so that they would be satisfied. I will give you one example from my childhood to convince you of the dangerous principles that were so idiotically allowed to grow in me. "I was born and raised in the palace of the illustrious prince marquis de sade (a relative of my mothers), almost my age, and i was encouraged to be with him as much as possible so that my childhood friend would be useful to me all my life.; But my vanity at that time, which did not understand any of this calculation, was once offended in our children's games because he wanted to take something away from me, and especially because, undoubtedly with great reason, he thought that his rank gave him the right to do so; i took my revenge, many repeated blows, without any considerations stopping me; only strength and cruelty could separate me from my opponent. "Around that time, my father was busy with diplomatic negotiations ; my mother went with him, and i was sent to my grandmother in languedoc, whose too blind kindness encouraged in me all the shortcomings i mentioned. "I returned to paris to go to school under the guidance of a firm and intelligent man, undoubtedly the most suitable for the formation of my youth, but with whom, unfortunately, i did not stay long. The war began. My men, who were in a hurry for me to serve, did not finish my education, and i joined my regiment at an age when i naturally had to go to school. ". . . . The campaigns began, and i dare say i succeeded. The natural impetuosity of my character, the fiery soul that i received from nature, only added even more strength and activity to that ferocious virtue called courage, which, undoubtedly, was mistakenly considered the only necessary thing for a soldier. "When our regiment was defeated in the penultimate campaign of that war, we were sent to the barracks in normandy; from there my misfortunes began. ~ "I was only twenty-one years old; until then, completely occupied with military work, i did not know my heart and did not realize that it was sensitive (he describes the 26th life of 1740-1814, seduction and abandonment of a young girl from a good family, a common custom in the dining room.) "My father called me to paris that winter, and i hurried to him: his health was failing, and he wanted me to settle down before he died; this project and the pleasures of the city distracted me, i spent two years in different pleasures. , . ."* This is the story of valcour, the hero, about himself at the beginning of the novel "alina and valcour" \ the details have nothing to do with the plot and so completely correspond to what we know about de sade that they can be considered autobiographical. Louis-donatien-francois-alphonse (or aldonze) there is considerable ambiguity regarding de sade's christian names: an ambiguity that later caused him considerable inconvenience and danger in the last years of the republic, when one version of his name was included in the list of emigrants.) Vlarkis, and later count de sade, was born on the second of june 1740 in the house of the grand prince of conde, who was a relative of his mother. He was the first and, apparently, the only child of the comte de sade, chevalier-comte de la coste and de mazan, seigneur de soman, lieutenant-general of the royal blood in upper and lower bresse, bugey, valrom and hex. The family, whose noble title dated back to the first years of the fourteenth century, was one of the most influential in provence. One of de sade's direct ancestors was hugo de sade, the husband of laura, who inspired petrarch's gentle and platonic son, nets. It is more than usually a pointed irony that representatives of the two extremes of sexual imagination should be so directly connected. Father de sade was a typical grand seigneur, cold, reserved and formal in the highest degree. He was also a 27-year-old marquis de sade, extremely extravagant, and when he died, he left little behind except inalienable land and debts. He served as ambassador first to russia and then to london. His numerous brothers and sisters, with one exception, were clergymen. At the age of four, de sade went to his grandmother in avignon; some time later he was placed in the care of his uncle, the abbot francois de sade, who by that time had retired from social life in paris to devote himself to studying petrarch at vaucluse. It is said that abba's research on the family poet is still useful for students. In 1750 he entered the college of louis-le-grand, then the most famous in paris, and stayed there for four years. There is a tradition, untested as far as i can tell, but not incredible, that he has already developed his senses, became a good musician, dancer and swordsman and spent a lot of time in the art galleries of the louvre. In later life, his love of art continued; i could not find out in which direction his musical taste lay, but in painting he preferred classical italian masters, especially titian, tintoretto and veronese. In 1754, the seven years' war with germany began, and he was sent to his regiment. He served with distinction, rising from second lieutenant of the royal regiment to captain of a cavalry regiment. He spent most of his time in germany, where he learned the language, and it is possible that he traveled further north. In 1761 he returned to france. Nothing is known about the next two years. Perhaps the above story of seduction and desertion of a young girl is true. His return to paris and his enjoyment of the pleasures of the capital are certainly such. 28 life 1740-1814 in 1763, de sade's father decided that his son, who was now almost twenty-three, should settle down, and arranged a marriage for him there. The bride he chose was aras renee, the twenty-year-old eldest daughter of monsieur de montreuil, president of the court of assistants, which roughly corresponded to the position of a judge of the high court. The montreuils were extremely wealthy, although correspondingly stingy, and the rene family was distinguished by generosity. They were vivid examples of the heyday of "robinocracy", the predominance of lawyers, which marked the end of the old regime. The president was almost completely subordinate to his wife, who managed the affairs of her family and everyone she came in contact with with an energy, unscrupulousness and zeal that require a certain admiration. She was extremely influential at court and possessed a charm that, according to ye sade, she inherited from the devil. She had a very strong family pride, and she justified her most unforgivable actions by pointing out family interests. The first time de sade went to visit his prospective bride, it happened that rene was unwell, and one of her younger sisters, thirteen-year-old louise, left him to entertain. Louise was blonde and lively, well developed in every way; she entertained the young marquis by singing and playing the harp in a touching and skillful manner; by the end of the interview, the two young men were deeply in love with each other, and de sade disliked his prospective bride even before he met her. His pleas to be allowed to marry louise were rejected by both his parents and hers. Louise was undoubtedly her mother's favorite child, and madame de montreuil had the most jealous affection for this daughter. Perhaps it was this jealousy that first aroused a deep dislike for her son-in-law, which led her to attack the marquis de sade and ruin him to the best of her abilities over the next thirty years. She is, by the way, one of the two women about whom we have any information who resisted the great charm of de sade. The other was the dancer mademoiselle riviere from the opera, whom in the autumn of 1767 de sade could not convince to spend with him at his house in arqueil those evenings when she did not appear. Yielding to the pressure of the family, de sade married rene on the seventeenth of may 1763 in an atmosphere of the greatest pomp, in the presence of the king and queen and most of the members of the court. Presumably, the marriage was followed by a short honeymoon, as a son was born the following year, but almost immediately he turned to debauchery, and in september of the same year he was arrested for the first time and imprisoned in vincennes. Apart from the fact that de sade was involved in some kind of orgy, which caused a significant scandal at that time, nothing is known about this first contact with the law and, as far as i know, does not even guess. Apparently, he spent about two months in prison, after which he was released, perhaps thanks to the intercession of his wife, but exiled to aigle, in normandy, for almost a year. It is to this period that the first letter we have about de sade belongs. This is a letter to the warden, and in view of future events, it is worth quoting in more detail. I don't think it's hypocrisy. "As unhappy as i am here, sir," the letter says, "i'm not complaining. I have earned god's vengeance and i feel it: mourning my sins and lamenting my mistakes is my only occupation. Alas, god could have destroyed me without giving me time to repent: what gratitude should i give him for allowing me to return to the bosom of the church. Sir, i implore you to provide me with the means to achieve this goal by allowing me to meet with the priest. Thanks to his kind services and my own sincere repentance over the 30 years of my life (1740-1814), i hope to soon be able to approach the holy mysteries, the complete neglect of which was the first reason for my fall. " I also hope that you will be kind enough to refrain from telling my family about the true reason for my conclusion: i would be completely destroyed in their assessment. - I dare also say that i got married on the seventeenth of may and i can assure you that i crossed the threshold of this house only in june. Then i went to the village for three months.... No matter how short the period of my sins was, i am nevertheless guilty: enough time has passed to anger the supreme being whose just anger i am now experiencing." The governor noted in the letter that a priest had been sent to him. In september 1764, de sade returned to paris. It is likely that at that time he was already conducting those ingenious experiments in sensuality, which have since brought him into disrepute, since in the same year the police inspector marais reports that he strictly advised la brisseau, without further explanation, not to provide him with girls to go with him to his a small house. It is most likely that for the next three years he took part in the social life of paris, and then received the nickname "divine marquis", in imitation of the divine aretino, since his father died in 1767, and then he inherited the title of count. Nominally, he was still serving in the army; he retired only at the age of thirty-one, in 1771, when he received the rank of mestre de camp, the equivalent of a colonel in a cavalry regiment. In october 1767, his reputation was already bad, because on that day the police inspector notes: "soon we will hear again about the horrors of the comte de sade." At the marquis de sade's easter the following year, the keller affair took place, and his reputation was cemented forever. So much has been written about this case that there is no need to describe it in detail again. Those who are interested in learning all the details should read the books mentioned at the end of the chapter, or, even better, the relevant letters of the marquise du deffand to horace walpole, which are the only modern description of this case. Apparently, de sade was molested by a thirty-year-old widow in paris, took her to his house near arqueil, forced her to undress, whipped her, anointed her with some ointment and comfortably put her to bed. The woman was afraid that she jumped out of the window with the help of knotted sheets, and contacted the police. She said that he also cut her abu with a small knife, but after two days could not show any scars, which makes this fact incredible. Foi although bruises may not leave surface marks after being treated with any ointment, there is no known ointment that will make the cuts disappear. De sade was probably being ridiculous when he told the police that not only had he not received a reprimand, but he also deserved public gratitude for paying attention to the ointment, which miraculously healed all wounds. In any case, this case caused a huge scandal. The magistrates gladly pounced on such a piquant case; the chief judge was the prince de maupoux, the sworn enemy of de sade's father-in-law in a humorous story that de sade wrote about this enemy character later; 2 he makes a remark to one of de maupoux's enemies: "remember the judges of paris.... That famous adventure of 1769 (so in the original), when their hearts were much more touched by pity for the beaten ass of a street woman than for the people whose fathers they consider themselves and who, nevertheless, were allowed to starve to death, forced them to accuse a young officer who in 1740-1814 returned from sacrificing the best during the years of his life in the service of his king, he found his only laurels in the humiliation prepared for him by the worst enemies of the country he defended."It is also possible that sartin, the infamous sartin who made a fortune from his corruption and then resigned on the grounds that he had gone bankrupt, sartin, whom de sade never tired of attacking, is already on his trail. However, the results of this case were not very serious for de sade. He was sentenced to pay rosa keller a hundred louis (with this dowry she remarried a month later) and was imprisoned for six weeks, first in saumur and then in lyon. He was then released thanks to the good offices of his wife and mother-in-law on the condition that he should not return to paris, but should live in the family estate of la coste, near marseille. For the next three years he lived there luxuriously but discreetly. His wife spent some time with him either in la costa or in soman, his estate next door. Two more of his children were born during this period. However, a dancer named la beauvoisin lived with him part of the time, and he is said to have introduced her as his wife while his real wife was in paris. He had a private troupe of actors who staged plays written by him. There is still an invitation to monsieur girard, dated january 1772, with a request to come to the second performance of his comedy and a request to openly criticize his work. This is the first indication we have of de sade's work. For the rest of his life, he was associated with the theater as an author, actor and producer, finding rest, friendship, love and even livelihood in it for various reasons. At some point, towards the end of this period, his wife brought with her her younger sister louise, now a 33-year-old woman, the marquis de sade, twenty-one years old, released from her convent. She probably thought that eight years should have been enough to stifle their mutual love, but she was wrong, in june 1772 there was a second important scandal in de sade's life, the scandal with poisoned sweets. Until last year, the truth about this case was completely unknown, and all reports about it were far from the facts ; but maurice heine, an indefatigable exposer of de sade's life and work, discovered copies of the original indictment and published them in the hippocrates review (number one, march 1933) along with witness statements. This article should be read for more information. De sade went to marseilles on some business, accompanied by his valet la tour, a tall, pockmarked man dressed in sailor clothes. Wanting to entertain himself without too much publicity, he sent his servant to make all the preparations for him for two consecutive evenings; however, due to the subsequent organization of the dinner, the events for two evenings were reduced to one. He visited a woman named marguerite coste with his servant, whom by some whim he called monsieur the marquis, while he himself was addressed as la fleur. He gave the woman some sweets flavored with anise and containing cantharides, treated her in a simple way, since she refused more complex sweets, and left. Some time later, the woman became very ill with severe vomiting, and she was in critical condition for several days before she recovered. On the same day, perhaps a little earlier, another orgy took place, also arranged by the valet. Three girls were engaged to a prostitute, but they were taken to a newer and more inconspicuous part of the city, as the brothel was too public. There they were received one after another by the 34-year-old marquis of 1740-1814 and his valet and slightly beaten by him. Then they were asked to beat him in turn, and he took out of his pocket a whip made of parchment studded with large and small nails and covered with blood stains. It was more than the girls, soft-hearted and simple-minded, like most whores, could bear, so he sent for a broom and received at least eight hundred blows from three girls and his valet, if the account he kept on the wall is not an exaggeration. He also slept with the girls and his valet, treating the girls the way his valet treated him, which so "choked" the audience that they burst into tears. He also gave these girls some sweets; one ate them, the others threw them away. The girl who ate them was also sick, although much less so than margarita cost. I have given this case in some detail (although very modified and abbreviated, as a comparison with the article already cited will show), because it is of great interest for the study of de sade. This is the only known account of his sexual habits, and it is as far as possible from what is usually considered "sadistic" behavior. However, i don't think any generalizations can be made from the behavior of this one day; de sade almost certainly conscientiously and practically explored all possible extensions of sensual pleasure, from which he was to draw his theory and criticism a few years later. Both his physical and mental courage were adequate to this task. Within a week, an order was issued to arrest him and the valet; but they both left the country, and de sade finally accompanied his beloved louise. A few weeks later, he and his valet were sentenced to death for poisoning (which was absurd: all the disabled were fully recovered) and sodomy, for which the 35-year-old marquis de sade was no longer sentenced to death; de sade was to be beheaded and the valet hanged after public penance. In their absence, they were convicted as defaulters and disobedient, and de sade's property was confiscated. The total disparity between the severity of the sentence and the alleged crime (it should be remembered that we only have the testimony of hostile witnesses) is so great that additional explanations are required. A great variety is expected. Firstly, by an unfortunate coincidence, the parliament in aix, where the trial took place, was influenced by the same de maupoux who condemned de sade in paris four years ago. This man, apparently, was a puritan, with an obscene mind and bitter cruelty, which are associated with puritanism. In addition, as explained earlier, he was a personal enemy of de mont-trey, sade's father-in-law, and anything that could disgrace his family would benefit him. This partly explains the continuation of the case even after the "poisoned" girls withdrew their complaints. This also explains the accusation, if true, that de sade makes against him 3 of making false evidence; he makes de maupeu say in the story already mentioned: "well, wasn't it a scandalous case? Didn't the thirteen-year-old valet we bribed come and tell us because we wanted him to tell us that this man was killing whores in his castle, didn't he tell us a story about a bluebeard that modern nannies wouldn't deign to use to put their children to sleep?"In the same story, he says: "colic is a serious disease in marseille and aix, because we saw how a group of idiots, comrades of this judge, decided that some prostitutes who had colic were poisoned by bztn" and further: 5 "in 1772, a young nobleman - 36 years old, 1740-1814, a provincial, wanted to whip a courtesan who gave him a bad gift in mock revenge; this joke was treated as a criminal case, as murder and poisoning, and this judge inclined all his colleagues to this ridiculous opinion, destroyed the young man and sentenced him to death because of disobedience, because they could not take possession of his identity." These judgments of de sade about his own condemnation, written in 1787, are interesting and, as far as i know, have not been mentioned before. But there is another possibility, also mentioned by de sade and also still ignored; it lies in the fact that the actual accusation was just an excuse, and the real reason for his conviction was political activity. The passage in question 6 discusses de sade's later capture in paris in 1777 and will be quoted at the appropriate time; when the judge (as always de sade's favorite villain, which is understandable) brags about how the accused was caught six years after the crime, his interlocutor says: "sir, your story terrifies me: i believe that the person in question should have been guilty of high treason / "not at all, the writings are against us magistrates... Against kings; some other youthful adventures"" and, so that no reader can recognize the theme of this passage, he adds a footnote: "monsters capable of this horror, you turn pale when you recognize your victim . . . ."The probability of such an interpretation is confirmed by the fact that in march of the following year, when he was in prison in chambry, ambassador de la marmora wrote to the governor "to keep the prisoner as close as possible so that he would not flood the public with his terrible writings and memoirs." Of course, the word "memoirs" is ambiguous, but, undoubtedly, even at that time, the ambassador would have been more concerned with political than immoral pamphlets. 37 marquis de sade another reason that makes me think that this is likely is a letter from mademoiselle de rousset, a friend of his wife, who in 1780 managed, after a great risk, to see an indictment against him. She writes: "thanks to this bold stroke, we discovered that the president is not as guilty as we thought. He deservedly has even more powerful enemies. Before he can hope for anything, some people have to die and others forget."This is, of course, quite vague; but since in his debauchery he seems to have been associated exclusively with whores, servants and peasants, his more powerful enemies must have been guided by some other motives. Before this new arrest in december of the same year, de sade and his daughter-in-law were enjoying their nine-year failed love in italy. But not for long. A few weeks later, de sade was left alone again. It's not entirely clear what happened. The generally accepted version is that louise fell ill and died suddenly at the age of twenty-two. However, there is a possibility that they broke up and louise returned home. Undoubtedly, mademoiselle de launay, by whom louise was known, lived until 1780, when she died of smallpox. However, if louise had died, it is quite possible that her title would have passed to her younger sister. The whole incident remains unclear. In any case, this flight so enraged madame de montreuil that she used all her influence at court and in embassies to arrest de sade; and thanks to her machinations, he was eventually captured at chambray in savoy, then part of the kingdom of sardinia. She revealed his whereabouts by intercepting his letters. It is likely that before this new imprisonment, de sade passed through geneva, and then he may, as he claims, visited rousseau and was inspired by him in his life 1740-1814 by his intention to devote himself to literature. This passage is of interest. "Rousseau was alive then," says valcourt, who, as we have seen, is partly a self-portrait of de sade, "and i went to him; he knew my family and received me with great kindness; he praised and supported the project that he saw me form to renounce total and fully devote yourself to the study of literature and philosophy; he gave me good advice and taught me to separate true virtue from the disgusting systems in which it is suppressed. . "My friend," he once told me, "as soon as the rays of virtue illuminated people, they, too blinded by their radiance, blocked the path of these waves of light with prejudices and superstitions, and the only refuge that remained for virtue was the bottom of the heart of honest people. Hate vice, be just, love your neighbors, ease them; then you will feel how virtue sweetly rests in your soul, and you will be daily comforted by the pride of the rich and the stupidity of despots.*"If this passage is not autobiographical, it is difficult to understand its existence, because in the whole book there is no other example of a famous person being mentioned by name; moreover, valcourt in this story is not a writer, but an exceptionally unhappy lover. And, of course, there is nothing incredible in the fact that de sade, who had recently experienced a bereavement and was almost financially ruined, had to make a decision at that time to completely change his life. It is pleasant to think that these two great revolutionaries, one a romantic, the other a realist, were to meet, although it is sad that the influence of the romantic so completely dominated both in his century and in the next. De sade was a prisoner in chambord for five months. It seems that he was quite comfortable there, he spent a lot on the maintenance of the marquis de sade and gambled with his fellow prisoners. On may 1, 1773, he violated his parole and escaped through the toilet window, leaving behind an ironic note of condolences and advice to the governor. Details of the escape: a mannequin in bed, a light left on, a ladder made of sheets - in the best traditions of an adventure novel. Traveling under an assumed name, he returned home at night, to la coste castle, to his wife. Of the many mysteries that make it so difficult to interpret de sade's life, none is darker than the character of madame de sade. She was called the saint of married life-a convenient but misleading label. She not only obeyed her husband, but also actively helped him; moreover, some of her actions seem to indicate that she was also his procuress. One of the young girls whom she took into her service and who was later taken away by her parents gave the most sinister testimony about de sade's behavior towards her; of his wife, however, she received only praise, adding that she was usually the first victim of rage close to insanity. (There is no certainty that this girl's story is true; de sade's reputation at that time was so bad that anything could be believed against him, and this story was pulled by his enemies.) But he undoubtedly made the maid pregnant, and in order to prevent this girl from telling uncomfortable stories, she arrested her and placed her in a monastery on a completely false accusation of theft. It seems that she meekly left her children in the care of their grandmother; she fought for her husband against his family and her own; she humiliated herself beyond measure; and yet she maintained almost absolute innocence to the end. 40 her life 1740-1814 cannot be considered simple-minded in any way; she was not particularly religious; passionate love is not quite an adequate explanation, because love requires some return, and although de sade usually treated her kindly and tenderly, he could never give the impression that he was in love with her. I think if we had her portrait, her behavior would be more understandable. I imagine that she was very ugly, we know that she was tall, awkward, ungracious and very shabby in her dress, wore clothes from ten years ago, and her love for de sade was the endless gratitude of a passionate woman without any sexual attraction to the only man who satisfied her. It cannot be said that she was restricted in any way; on the contrary, all sorts of tricks and bribes were used to separate her from her husband; in 1778, threats were used to prevent her from reuniting with him; her mother, who worked for what she considered her daughter's interests, became her daughter's worst enemy for fifteen years. Madame de montreuil is easier to understand. She was a very rich and very intelligent woman who had too little to do, so all her energy was spent on intrigue. After de sade's escape with her beloved daughter, her only goal was to destroy de sade. He should be imprisoned for life. At the same time, the verdict against him should be overturned, and the whole scandal associated with him should be hushed up.; For otherwise her daughter and grandchildren would have been dishonored, and her numerous other children would have lost all chances of successfully marrying. Pursuing this dual goal, she used her very significant influence on the judges and the court to obtain a review of the sentence; at the same time, she used all methods to ensure that after a formal acquittal, de sade would have no chance of freedom, more or less openly bribing the marquis de sade's relatives and servants; she even bought his lawyer so that de sade could not take a single step that she would not immediately find out about. During his enforced absences, de sade left his keys with this managing lawyer; madame de montreuil took advantage of this fact to force the lawyer to break into his desk and steal some of his notes that could be used against him. Although de sade apparently suspected this deception on the part of his lawyer, he was never completely convinced of it; moreover, this man gofridi was on the spot and could take his money during his many absences; so, despite his suspicions, he never broke up with him. Upon de sade's return to la coste, his wife used the money they had left to turn the castle into a real fortified place with high walls and a drawbridge; and for most of the next four years, the couple lived there under siege, seeing no one but servants and a lawyer; the bridge was closed for only a few hours in the middle of the day. It is quite possible that secret rooms were built, since at the beginning of 1774 a detachment of soldiers came in search of de sade; but although they turned everything upside down, they did not find him. In 1774, louis xv died, and the letter against de sade under his name became invalid; moreover, de maupassant was finally disgraced, and there was considerable hope for de sade's rehabilitation, madame de sade sued her mother for harassment, and later went to paris to try to interview the necessary people to get the verdict overturned. She received a lot of support, but nothing concrete; in the fall, her funds were completely exhausted, and she had to return to la costa.; By turning her back on her, the mother was able to destroy everything her daughter had achieved. The trial against madame de montreuil apparently lasted 42 years, 1740-1814, and ended in vain. On her return, she brought with her two young girls from lyon and vienna, as well as her husband's young secretary. In november, the castle was closed for the winter. Whether there were any orgies in the castle this winter, and if so, of what nature and who took part in them, one can only guess. Of course, in the spring, the parents of the three young men whom madame de sade had brought with her all came to demand the return of their children; but madame de montreuil was so deeply involved in the whole affair that it is difficult to say whether she was really trying to cover her tracks, as she claimed, or to manufacture new evidence. Given the nature of de sade, there is reason to assume that there were serious grounds for complaints; in this case, the role played by his wife becomes even more peculiar. This winter she imagined that she was pregnant again, but inaccurately; on the contrary, her maid was in this interesting state; to silence her, madame de sade arrested her on false charges and kept her on her own recognizance until her father also appeared. Either this winter or two winters later, de sade began a systematic study of sexual psychopathology. He wrote two volumes before his arrest in 1778, and also made numerous notes. There seems to be no doubt that the famous papers that madame de mont-trey stole from de sade's desk were notes for this work; in all likelihood, each of them was an analytical description of the behavior of all the people he had to deal with, as well as, possibly, second-hand reports. All this early work was destroyed on the orders of his mother-in-law, much to his chagrin; thirteen years later, he was still trying to recover those papers. 43 marquis de sade the complaints of little girls in the spring made de sade's stay in la costa unsafe; then he went to italy and spent a year visiting florence, rome and naples. In the latter place, he was presented to the court, and it is possible that he had a conversation with the pope. It is unknown if he traveled alone; in a note to "juliet"*, he declares the complete accuracy of the description of various historical characters on the grounds that he visited italy with a very beautiful woman, whom "solely on the principle of sexual philosophy, i presented to the grand duke of tuscany, to the pope, the princess borghese and the king and the queen of naples."This is obviously not verifiable. In 1776, the president of the parliament at aix sent a memorial to the guard of sceaux, protesting against the excessive condemnation of de sade; so, probably with a sense of some hope, he returned to la coste. He did not realize that his mother-in-law had bribed his lawyer in his absence. Moreover, both he and his wife were so short of money that they barely had enough for food. At the end of the year, another parent of another maid appeared to claim his daughter; he shot at de sade, but missed. This maid's name was justine. She was a very ugly girl at the beginning of 1777, de sade and his wife went to paris separately, he in the company of a valet, she with the maid justine. He barely managed to arrive when his mother-in-law arrested him on february 1-3. It was always assumed that the reason for this visit was some kind of debauchery, neither his detractors nor, with rare exceptions, his defenders do not want to find anything else either in his life or in his work, but he again gave an explanation 9: "a gentleman who had a case against him in 1740-1814 in parliament ex... And which parliament... He was ready to discuss with his wife's family only on condition of prolonged detention, this gentleman, i say, who had been hiding for several years, carried away by idiotic delicacy, wanting to take care of his dying mother, came to paris despite the dangers. As soon as he was in the dead woman's room, his wife's family arrested him. He complained about this procedure... They laughed in his face and threw him into the dungeon of the bastille, where, funnily enough, he could simultaneously cry about the loss of freedom, the death of his mother and the barbaric stupidity of his relatives." This is the passage to which de sade draws attention, naming himself in a footnote. The old countess de sade really died in january of this year. Since the autobiographical facts have recently been confirmed, there seems to be no reason to doubt his explanation of the true reason for his persecution. He was kept in vincennes for a little over a year. He obtained permission to communicate with his wife, and their joint efforts, accompanied by his protests of repentance for his stubbornness, led to a retrial of his case in aix in june 1778. The previous conviction was overturned as an "error and defect of form", and the punishment was replaced by a fine of fifty francs, a warning from the judge and an order to stay away from marseille for three years. From that date until the end of his life (with the exception of a few months in 1793), no charges were ever brought against him, nevertheless, he spent all but ten of the thirty-seven years that remained to him in close confinement. The means by which he was kept in prison until the revolution was a power of attorney issued to his mother-in-law. This monstrous pattern of tyranny, by which a person is kept in preventive detention, was a feature of the ancient regime well known to the marquis de sade. It has become doubly unbearable due to the fact that it was granted to certain individuals for reasons of family interests or personal revenge. Currently, of course, it is used only by the state. (Cf. The almost universal preventive arrest of communists before declared demonstrations, or the imprisonment of tom mann under the edward iii act; in the latter case, the magistrate was kind enough to tell the prisoner that he did not have to be charged with any crime.) It is quite possible that de sade was forced to agree with this letter. In the story of de maupoux already mentioned , he says:9 "the idea of a letter about porridge disgusts you, but didn't you complete the destruction of this gentleman with barbaric advice? Have you not dared, by an evasion as dangerous as it is punishable, to place this unfortunate soldier between prison and disgrace, and suspended your powers only on condition that he would be crushed by the forces of the king?" Here de sade again encountered one of his irreconcilable legal enemies. The police inspector marais, who had worked against him fourteen years earlier, was again in his care; and it was from him that he escaped for the last time in lambesque on the way from aix to paris. The details of this escape are given in several different versions, more or less contradictory. He managed to get by boat to avignon and return to la coste for the last time. His wife was in paris, unaware of what had happened; when she learned of her husband's freedom, she tried to reunite with him, but was restrained by force by her mother. De sade was visited by a friend of his wife, who may also have been his relative, mademoiselle de rousset, indefatigable, cheerful, 1740-1814 provincial blue stocking, well-meaning, stupid and consumptive, incurably crafty and impudent in her conversations and letters. She wholeheartedly supported the cause of de sade, lived with madame de sade in paris for several years and helped her in her attempts to regain her husband's freedom; for some time she conducted a flirtatious correspondence with the prisoner, in which they exchanged poems in provencal, which somewhat alarmed madame de sade, although completely unjustifiably; in the end, when there was no hope of de sade's release, she returned to la coast with the intention of restoring order, made a fantastic mess of everything and died there. De sade had only been in la costa for a couple of months, but it seems he had the illusion that he would now be left free, that his mother-in-law's anger would be satisfied; his wife also tried to calm madame de montreuil, but her mother refused to see her and returned her letters unopened. In september, marais managed to track him down and he was taken to vincennes without further incident. The inspector, however, went too far. When he arrested de sade, he said: "now, little man, speak up. You'll be locked up for the rest of your life for doing this and that in the black room upstairs where there are dead bodies!" This complete embodiment of the legend of bluebeard in all its details seems simply ridiculous; but police inspectors must learn that even if a lady sends them to arrest her son-in-law, they must treat their prisoner with the respect due to one of her relatives 1. The unfortunate marais was dismissed and ruined. In vincennes, de sade experienced for the first time all the bitterness of imprisonment. He was kept in the cold and damp dungeon of the marquis de sade, furnished only with a bed, which he had to make himself. He was fed like a ferocious animal in a menagerie, food was pushed through a hole in the door. He was denied both writing materials and books, with the exception of one letter, which he was allowed to send and receive every week. A couple of pathetic notes from that period have been preserved. One complains that he is "without air, without paper, without ink, without anything in the world," the other probably represents a request for "an hour's exercise and permission to write once a week." A regime of this kind for any person should be murderous ; for a man like de sade, who valued freedom above all else and at the age of thirty-seven was deprived of the greatest sexual freedom to complete abstinence, physical and mental torture must have been unbearable. We know very little about the psychosexual consequences of incarceration for adults; the only book i know of on this topic is eros in the zuchthaus by karl plattner, which is mostly autobiographical and unscientific, but nevertheless quite revealing. This explains a lot about de sade's behavior, especially the way he behaved towards his wife. It is not surprising that de sade almost went mad from such treatment; rather, there is reason to be surprised that he did not go completely mad. The fact that at that time he was not far from insanity is evidenced by his notes to his wife's letters, which have since been restored and published. The forms that his obsessions took were the idea (not unfounded) of persecution by his wife's family and her connivance with them (which was not true), as well as the infidelity of his wife. He was also crazy about numbers. Numbers have always attracted him; in "juliet", for example, he constantly finds out the exact state of his heroine's finances and deducts her income for life in 1740-1814 from her current capital; he also insisted on numerical values of the excesses of his various characters. In marseille, as we saw earlier, he kept a record of the blows received and informed the last of the girls that he had twenty-five more blows left to strike. In the current circumstances, he associated mystical ideas with numbers that he could find in his wife's letters; for example, "the connection you draw between the number thirteen and betrayal proves that you deceived me on october thirteenth, 1777," and again on a note from his daughter, which was added to the letter: "in this letter there are seventy-two syllables corresponding to the seventy-two weeks of my imprisonment; it contains seven lines and seven syllables, which correspond exactly to the seven months and seven days from april seventeenth to january twenty-second, 1780."He also covered his wife's letters with obscenities and suspicions. His wife, however, understood or did not notice his behavior and continued to work for him and provide him with all the luxuries she could. The restrictions of his imprisonment must have been relaxed by the end of the year, as we see his wife sending him clothes, books, perfumes, writing materials and homemade food. Her letters, as always, are full of care and submission; after some time it seems to him that he lives in a little comfort. Moreover, he had an external entertainment: he began a literary flirtation with mademoiselle de rousset. In 1779, de sade still had some hopes of liberation. The main inhabitants of la coste sent a petition for his release, and his wife and mademoiselle de rousset worked in paris. Madame de montreuil, however, was able to resist every step, and at the end of the year de sade resigned himself to what seemed like a life sentence and turned his back on the world. His wife 49 year old marquise de sade was supposed to look after his estates; and with the exception of occasional interviews with her, which were often banned by the governor because of de sade's cruelty (plattner's book provides several examples of equally cruel behavior between husband and wife, even when they were deeply in love with each other. This behavior should not be taken at face value), he had no contact with the outside world. He calls this period of his life "pressure", borrowing a metaphor from the wine press. For a number of years madame de sade devoted herself to her husband's interests, despite her uncle's warning that by doing so she was destroying the matrimonial prospects of her brothers and sisters; but gradually she became older and lazier; she became disabled, and money became harder and harder to find; madame de montreuil changed her tactics and became kind; her children grew up and replaced her husband in her affections; finally, in 1787, she handed over the management of her husband's property to the trustees; she retired to a monastery and left her husband to himself. Madame de montreuil won. It was during this period that de sade took his writing vocation seriously. He read omnivorously, i don't think there is at least one major writer in any european language to whom he does not refer either directly or indirectly, and does not study the technique of writing. Of his work at vincennes, only two small fragments were published - a short dialogue about religion and a plan of comedy, and i do not know if anything else has been preserved. Throughout his incarceration, he kept a diary partially written in cipher, but it was either destroyed or is still in the possession of his descendants. It is likely, however, that he developed his writing technique, which he subsequently adhered to, during his life 1740-1814. It was his custom, first of all, to draw up an approximate work plan for a project in just a few pages, noting the characteristic features of his characters and developing a time schedule and similar mechanical details. When the main outlines of the work became clear in his head, he wrote the first draft very quickly, shortening and not making changes. He spoke about four thousand words a day. His handwriting was neat, even, and very neat. He left large fields on which he inserted all the necessary additions and corrections at the first edit. He wrote down longer additions in a separate notebook. When the original draft was improved and modified to his complete satisfaction, he made an exact copy of the entire text. The only exceptions were made when he lacked paper, as in the case of "120 magazines", the first draft of which (all that has survived), written in almost microscopic handwriting, occupies both sides of a thirteen-yard roll of paper. He also kept notebooks filled with quotes and strange sentences. His writing technique has been compared with balzac and proust with some justice. In february 1784, de sade was transferred to the bastille and settled in the ironically named tour de la liberte. But although he was denied physical freedom, he achieved with his pen such spiritual freedom as few people knew either before or after him. Every variety of human behavior was carefully studied and criticized by him with extraordinary individual independence. During twelve years of isolation, he developed a holistic philosophy. The only breaks in his loneliness were occasional visits from his wife, but after a while they stopped. Of course, most of the works of de sade that we have were written during this period. However, much has been lost or destroyed, and we know only 5.1% of the works of the marquis de sade. He wrote in all imaginable styles plays in verse and prose, short stories of a comic and dramatic nature, novels, essays and collections. From the notes and fragments we know the names of some of the works that have been lost. It contains thirty-five acts of plays whose titles we barely know. It was planned to publish a large collection of short stories entitled "adventures and tales of the provencal troubadour", in which a dramatic and even tragic story was to be followed by a comic in the style of "decameron", up to fifty in number. There was a four-volume literary almanac "curtains for a man of literature", from which all but a few traces disappeared. The four-volume novel "alina and valcour" was written in 1788. The draft of the 120 diaries of the constellation is dated 1785, the first version of justine was written in 1787, the second probably the following year; and, in my opinion, almost certainly the first three volumes of juliet were also written before 1790. Catalogued in this way, de sade's work seems enormous; but it should be remembered that for at least six years he had no other occupation than reading and writing; all his works were carefully planned, written and deliberate ^ he did not use his power of imagination, as others did, including mirabeau, who, having been his fellow prisoner for some time, as a sedative, de sade clearly foresaw the approaching revolution, even predicting it in some of his works. It's even tempting to say that he was the reason for it. In june 1789, he tried to escape by breaking through the sentries, but was prevented. Following this, he had the idea to incite the people against the bastille, which he did by scattering notes from his windows describing the mistreatment of prisoners; on july 2, 1740-1814, he made a loudspeaker out of a tube and a funnel and called on the population to save prisoners whose throats had been cut. Removed. This device gathered a crowd, and the warden thought seriously enough about the danger to write: "if monsieur de sade is not removed from the bastille tonight, i cannot answer to the king for the safety of the building." Therefore, on july 3, he was transferred to the charenton hospital. Eleven days later, the ancient and almost empty fortress of the bastille was stormed by a mob whose anger against it was so inexplicably excited. Three-quarters of de sade's manuscripts, "for the loss of which he mourned with tears of blood," were lost on this occasion, thanks to the slowness of his wife, who postponed their receipt from day to day. She also destroyed some of his other manuscripts that he had entrusted to her, on the grounds that they might be politically dangerous. In march 1790, the constituent assembly released all prisoners held by lettre de cachet, and on good friday 1790, de sade returned to the world as a free man at the age of fifty after thirteen years of almost continuous imprisonment, mostly in virtual solitary confinement. It is possible that his sons met him at the liberation; but the elder emigrated to germany soon after, thereby exposing his father to considerable danger; the younger was a knight of malta and remained at his post abroad for most of the revolution. His wife got a divorce and refused to see him, and they never met again; their only contact was through their lawyer in quarrels over money, madame de sade kept their daughter laura, who seems to have been almost mentally disabled, with her. It seems that two women emigrated during the terror. When de sade first came out of prison, he was homeless, like the marquis de sade, and penniless, and it was very difficult for him to return to the world, as is usually the case with released prisoners. In a letter to his lawyer , he describes his condition as follows: "in prison, my eyesight and lungs have deteriorated (he seems to have been practically blind in one eye since 1784); deprived of any physical exercise, i have grown so fat that i can barely move; all my senses have faded; i no longer have a taste for anything, i like nothing more; the world i stupidly regretted so wildly seems so boring to me... And so boring that i have never been as misanthropic as i am now, when i have returned to people, and if i seem strange to others, they can be sure that they have the same effect on me.. I was very busy during my incarceration and prepared fifteen volumes for publication; after my release, i only had about a quarter left, thanks to the criminal negligence of madame de sade. ..."For the next ten years, he constantly communicates with his lawyer, always demanding money, money, money. He never has enough, because with inflation the value of money always decreases; in addition, he had great difficulties with collecting, first as the father of migrants, and later as an emigrant himself, mistakenly inscribed in christian names. These letters show the worst side of his character, short-tempered and flattering by turns, insincere to the point of insincerity, disproportionately stingy. Where money is concerned, de sade shows all the vices of his family and many of his compatriots. His only excuse is his age and infirmity, as well as the fact that most of the time he was really in need. In addition, his behavior largely coincides with the behavior of the rest of his relatives and in-laws with whom the lawyer had to deal. There are few people who, in the life of 1740-1814, would have seemed to benefit from their relationship with their lawyer and manager; de sade, who had a frenchman's reverence for centime, definitely does not. Almost immediately after his release, de sade restored the management of his property and adopted an act of separation from his wife, according to which he agreed, but did not pay her alimony. His sons were with him for a while. In june he moved to live with the forty-year-old widow la sidente de fleurieu, through whom he made several useful acquaintances; but the arrangement was not successful, and in the autumn he settled with a woman named constance renel, the wife of monsieur kenet. Madame kenet was probably an actress (according to other sources, she was the wife of an emigrant); but she was a cultured and intelligent woman with a large and useful circle of acquaintances; according to de sade, she was a model of all virtues. They were very devoted to each other and shared happiness and failure together; their mutual affection ended only with the death of de sade. In the winter of 1790, as soon as he settled with kenet, he called her "reasonable", and she called him "moise" in response. He sent for his books and furniture from la costa and took up the business of a professional writer. His plays enjoyed considerable success. One of them was unanimously adopted by the comedie francaise, but for some reason it was never executed. "Count oxtierne" was staged with some success at the moliere theater in 1791. Several others were accepted by different theaters. It seems that at this time he talked a lot with the actors ; a certain monvel, a revolutionary, was one of his main friends, and he took acting lessons from another named mol. As far as we can judge from the signs of the disappearance of all the manuscripts, he apparently has special ones - 55 marquis de sade is depicted in a dramatic comedy in verse, in the classical tradition. Considering himself a professional playwright, he was ready to write plays to order; and it was his recognition of this fact in a letter to his lawyer that led some people to assume that his pen was always corrupt, despite the consistency of all his published works. In 1791, the first version of justine also appeared; it was a significant success and went through five editions over the next ten years. The novel "alina and valcour" was also accepted, but for various reasons related to publications, it appeared only two years later. During this period he was almost ruined, as his name was included in the list of former nobles published in 1791. In addition, his health was poor. Nevertheless, he worked for the revolution to the best of his abilities; he became secretary and speaker of the pic section (formerly venddme), the section to which robespierre belonged. It was in the latter case that he was chosen to deliver a eulogy in favor of marat and le pelletier, which was so successful that it was printed and distributed throughout france at public expense. I do not know if it was pure chance that put these three names together, but it is a happy accident. De sade has a lot in common with both subjects of his eulogy. Marat was a scientist before he became a revolutionary; his work on light diffraction, although considered incorrect today, was much closer to what is considered true today than the work of his contemporaries; but because of its very novelty, he had enough heresy to try to criticize newton, and he was excommunicated by the learned bodies of that time. His revolutionary activity was mainly journalistic, began under the old regime and continued, despite persecution and illness, until the day of his murder. He was constantly criticizing; 56 life 1740-1814 neither success nor reputation were protected from it. Only in his savagery, de sade, the sworn enemy of the death penalty, could not follow him. Le pelletier was also a strict egalitarian who achieved a certain amount of power. He, like de sade, believed in the enormous possibilities of education for changing human habits and, until he was also killed, devoted all his energy to this. De sade diligently fulfilled his duties in society and wrote another petition on their behalf to the people of france. He also filed a petition about religion, which he claims was the source of the entire anti-religious movement; this, however, has not survived, unless the first part of the pamphlet quoted in chapter vi is a development of it. He was also involved in the inspection of hospitals. But when the senseless massacre of terror took place, de sade could no longer follow the revolutionaries. Those people who are surprised by his gentleness and moderation at this time demonstrate a very superficial understanding of both his character and his work. Among the countless other victims of the mob's fury were the president and madame de montreuil, his wife's parents, who had been the direct cause of his suffering for the past twenty years. By a curious coincidence, de sade was the chairman of the board before which they appeared in court. With a magnanimity worthy of his heroine justine, he voted against their execution; and, like justine, he found that virtue is always punished; he was imprisoned for moderation. I don't think there is a need to look for detailed explanations of de sade's behavior in this case. Now, as throughout his life, he had the courage to act in accordance with his theories. He has already expressed his complete disbelief in the death penalty of the marquis de sade. And his own account of his actions explains his motives. "I am broken, exhausted, spitting blood," he wrote. - I told you that i was the president of my section; my tenure in this post was so stormy that i am exhausted. Yesterday, for example, after i was forced to draw twice, i was forced to give up my seat to the vice president. They wanted me to put a terrible, inhumane project to the vote. I definitely declined. Thank god, that was the end of it during my presidency, when i put montreuil on the list for clemency. If i had said a word, they would have been lost. I kept calm. I got my revenge." Over the next ten months, he went through four different prisons, one worse than the other, expecting to die at any moment. His last prison in picpus was the worst of all. It was a beautiful place with a beautiful garden. There was a guillotine in the center of the garden. More than a thousand people were executed under his window and buried in the garden during the month of his imprisonment there, many of them were his cellmates. It is quite possible that he was supposed to help with the burial. The date of his own execution was set, but the reaction came just in time. Unsurprisingly, a year later, he was still haunted by this nightmare. It is necessary to keep this experience in mind when considering his work. Finally, in october, he was released by the efforts of madame kenet. It is quite possible that the deputy mayor, although unknown to him personally, could be responsible for this. He later sold him his estate in la costa; the estate was looted and destroyed by peasants. In the winter of 1794, life in paris turned into torture. Paper money was practically worthless, food was almost unavailable, 58 years of life in 1740-1814, and the weather was the coldest in a century. (It's a curious coincidence that excessive cold and excessive suffering often seem to go hand in hand.) Under these circumstances, de sade made an attempt to earn a living. There is still his letter to the conventionalist bernard from february 1795 demanding employment in any form, be it an ambassador, a writer, a curator of a library or museum, or in general any position in which he could earn a living. His application apparently failed, and he had to rely on his written works. The novel "alina and valcourt" was published by another publishing house with some success; and in the same period he wrote and published "philosophical dance in the boudoir". This is not only the shortest of his works, but also the most almost pornographic; it was probably written for the direct purpose of making money. The ideas contained in it almost completely repeat his main works, and if it had not included a very important political pamphlet, which will be discussed in detail later, it would not have been of great interest. It is also possible that a brochure entitled "the idea of a sanctions regime against louis" should be dated this year, in which he suggests that laws should be put forward by deputies, but voted directly by the people, because "it should be recognized that the sanctioning of laws is part of the people who are most unhappy, and since it is their law that strikes most often, they should be allowed to choose the law by which they agree to be struck." * De sade's vision of a real revolution has disappeared. Socialism has disappeared, and nationalism has triumphed. Private property was still respected, blatant inequality still existed, job seekers and fraudsters were still in power. Babeuf's egalitarian revolt, with which de sade * m. Heine dates this pamphlet to 1792. 59 the marquis de sade certainly sympathized with him, if he was not involved in it, was bloodily suppressed by the authorities; things went on as usual; the revolution, at least as he imagined it, failed. In his pessimism, disgust and rage against humanity, he threw these poisoned bombs on the shelves of booksellers - ten volumes of "the new justine" and "villains from the story of juliette sa scer". With amazing irony, he handed each of the five directors a copy bound in white parchment paper. These volumes were published, if not written, during the only five years in the history of the christian world during which they could be openly sold. Despite the engravings that adorned the first edition and emphasized exclusively, albeit rather naively, the obscenity of the work, these books were openly displayed in the windows of booksellers. In 1801, napoleon ordered the destruction of all copies he could find, and since then his works have been persecuted and burned. The organized government declared an irreconcilable war on his creativity and his ideas; only recently have a few people dared to start republishing his books in small, expensive, limited editions; and although he is now being praised in some circles as recklessly as he was accused before (mainly out of a desire to shock), he still remains almost completely unread. But although the publication of this work may have helped de sade's reputation (although he officially denied authorship with considerable energy all his life), it did not help him financially, and in 1797, the same year these volumes appeared, we find another letter from him asking him to pay as soon as possible as far as possible for some kind of work that he did. In the summer of the following year, he returned to provence for the last time, accompanied by kenet, trying to get some money from there. The journey was disastrous in every way. Not only did he not receive the money 60 life 1740-1814, but he also discovered that his name was mistakenly included in the list of migrants, from which, due to confusion in christian names, he could not remove it; he was also involved in a lawsuit for libel. From that date until about 1804, when his family paid him an annuity in exchange for all his possessions (with the exception of a small part that he left on kenet), he lived in the greatest suffering and poverty imaginable. In 1799, he was glad to get a job at the theater in versailles for forty sols a day, for this amount he had to support both him and her son kenet from her husband, while the faithful reasonable "made every effort in paris to get a job or help. His play "oxtiern" was revived there with some success; he himself played the role of fabrice, a young lover. His letter with two copies of this play has been preserved; he begs the addressee to try to stage the same play in chartres; he would be ready to play in it again and in any case would come to direct the rehearsals. His already undermined health was shaken by this regime; his eyesight became so bad that he could no longer see to write; he was forced to spend three months of the winter of 1799-1800 in a state hospital in versailles, absolutely penniless, with only food and clothes from charity. Even from this shelter he was eventually kicked out, "dying of hunger and cold," and he was in danger of going to prison for debts. In the spring, his situation must have improved; either his sons, who have now returned, or kenet, or his terminally slow manager, must have come to his aid. Already in july last year, he contacted the french theater (not for the first time), persuading them to stage his patriotic play called "jeanne lazne, or the siege of beauvais." The topic is historical, and he explains in some detail how he became 61 marquis de sade to the original records to verify the heroine's name and other details. The theater, however, did not accept him, because louis xi appeared on the stage, and a year later he turned over their heads directly to the conventional goupillo de montague. This letter, coming from a once proud man, now almost sixty years old and destitute, has a rather tragic interest. This is too long to quote more than part of it. After a few rather stormy compliments , he writes: "you all agree, citizen representatives, like all good republicans, that it is extremely important to raise public morale with good examples and good writing. They say that my pen has some energy, my philosophical novel "alina and vakur" proved it; then i offer my talents to the service of the republic, and i offer them willingly. I was unhappy under the old regime, so you can understand that i have to fear a return to order, one of the first victims of which i will inevitably become. The talents that i offer to the republic are selfless; if a work plan is drawn up for me, i will fulfill it, and i dare say that it will be satisfactory. But i pray you, citizen, to put an end to this terrible injustice, which cools the feelings towards me with which i am warmed; why do they want to give me a reason to complain about the government, for which i would give a thousand lives if i had them? Why has everything i have been confiscated in the last two years, and why during this period have i been forced to do charity work, not in the least deserving of such terrible treatment? Aren't people convinced that instead of emigrating, i was busy with all kinds of jobs during the most terrible revolutionary years? Don't i have the most reliable certificates of all possible? Then if they are convinced that i am innocent, why am i being treated as guilty? Why are they trying to draw into the ranks of the enemies of the republic one of its most ardent and zealous supporters - 62 tisana born in 1740-1814? It seems to me that such behavior is as unfair as it is impolite. "In any case, citizen representative, i offer my pen and my talents to the government, but don't let injustice, poverty and adversity weigh me down any more, and cross me off the list (of former nobles). I beg you, whether you are an aristocrat or not, what difference does it make: have i ever behaved like an aristocrat? Has it ever been known that i share their behavior and their feelings? My actions have destroyed the errors of my origin, and it is for this reason that i am indebted to all the attacks that the royalists have made on me, especially poultier in his article on the 2nd fructidore last year. But i challenge them because i hate them.... "In a word, citizen, as the first sample of what i can offer, i offer you a tragedy in five acts, a work most suitable to awaken in every heart the love of his country...." Then he further describes the plot of his tragedy. Goupillot apparently answered politely and kept him on his toes; the play, as far as is known, was not staged. It will be seen that de sade is protesting against the almost excessive admiration for the republic, which, as i pointed out earlier, so far did not correspond to his ideals. But no matter how bad the republic was, it was better than the danger that de sade, with his acute political foresight, foresaw, the danger of a new tyranny, empire, napoleon. With quixotic recklessness, this old man tried to warn his sluggish fellow citizens; in the summer of 1800, he printed and published at his own expense the novel "gold and two servants", in which napoleon, josephine and their main friends, monsieur and madame tallien, barras, madame visconti and others could easily be recognized either by the anagrammatic names of the characters, or by detailed physical descriptions. In this work, de sade applied his own principles of attacking the marquis de sade with ridicule rather than resentment and force. 10 he made a mockery of napoleon and josephine. Today it is difficult to understand how this book caused such a storm and scandal; it is almost incomprehensible. We can only assume that his statement that it represents history is true; that he exposed in the most ridiculous light the anecdotes that were then circulating about these people, and that they were accepted by his readers as truthful. The only passage of any interest to us is his analysis of the reasons for napoleon's future success, reasons that are equally relevant today for the rise of dictators. He says that 11: "all parties in france overlap and shock each other, there is no point of contact. The so-called aristocrat hates the rule of people covered in blood and crimes. A mad demagogue is furious that people dare to muzzle him and that those in power leave him in indignation. The nervous and indifferent, of whom the most, pray for one master who will combine courage with foresight, virtue with talent, and they find him in d'orseca (napoleon). His marriage to zolo (josephine) wins him the sympathy of the forbidden class. "Elsewhere, he pays tribute to napoleon's military abilities. He paid the price for his rashness. He should have remembered distichus, which he placed at the head of "alina and valcour." "It is dangerous to love people, it is a crime to educate them." In march 1801, he was arrested together with his publisher bertrand under the plausible pretext that he intended to publish "juliet" (which had actually been on sale for five years), "an immoral and revolutionary work." Soon after, the charges against the publisher were dropped. He was imprisoned first in saint-piergie prison, then in life imprisonment in 1740-1814. His case was not brought to a hearing. In a letter dated june 1, 802, he demands to be tried: he was imprisoned for fifteen months, although by law he should have been tried within ten days. In response, the minister of justice gave an order to forget about him for a while. In april 1803, he was declared insane and transferred to an orphanage in charenton, officially at the request of his family. It was napoleon's favorite trick to declare any enemy of his that he could not catch on criminal charges crazy. The poet d'orgues, m. De laage, the abbot fournier, and these are just some of the most famous, were the same victims of odious despotism. There is no doubt that de sade was really crazy; even the doctors who treated him denied it. Perhaps it would be more merciful for him if he was like that. Now he was denied even the consolation of writing; periodically the police came to hunt for his manuscripts, wherever he hid them, and confiscated them. Some of them were preserved, some were seized in his house before his arrest, others after his death; most of them were burned by the police at the request of his son. Lear's old age was no more tragic than that of this man who lives too sensibly among the insane. By a lucky chance, the orphanage was run by an exceptionally reasonable man, the former abbot culmier, who understood de sade and sympathized with him. Under his patronage, de sade developed a project that saved him from death from boredom: he founded a theater for the insane. Sometimes he invited actors and actresses from the outside; most often he taught less violent madmen to play themselves, training them and staging performances; they played both the usual repertoire and plays specially written for them by the marquis de sade himself. We cannot know to what extent he did this consciously as a therapeutic measure; in any case, this is a line of approach that can be usefully developed by modern psychiatrists. As a method of re-education, acting opens up huge opportunities. Perhaps also thanks to the favor of kulmier, the novel "journey to florbel", a work in which among the characters were louis xv, fleury and the comte de charolais, was so close to publication before it was also seized by the police in 1807, and that the marquise de ganges, if it is according to him, was published in in 1813. Also, thanks to kulmye, he could enjoy a certain freedom of communication and receive visits. Kenet, whom he pretended to call his own daughter (there is no truth in this statement, of course), visited him freely; it is even possible that she lived in an orphanage for some time. One of the only two letters that have survived from this era bears their names; it concerns an agreement that de sade concluded with her. Another letter deals with a variety of topics, ending with the words: "i am unhappy, but i have good health. That's all i can say/"performances at the shelter have become a real social event. The guests came from outside, although the issuance of invitations completely depended on the director. We have an invitation list for may 23, 1810, which includes local mayors and vicars, doctors, a lady-in-waiting to the queen of holland and various other people, as well as thirty-six employees of the building and sixty patients. In these cases, de sade acted as producer and master of ceremonies. On special occasions, such as a director's birthday or a visit to the orphanage of such a celebrity as cardinal mori, de sade composed special allegorical plays from the life of 1740-1814 or wrote a poem that was read or performed on this occasion. Poems written for the cardinal's visit in 1812 still exist; they are as one would expect, as competent as a poet laureate could write on a similar occasion, and equally untouched by poetry. But even now de sade was not free from persecution. In 1808, the chief doctor wrote to the chief of police (by the way, it would be interesting to know what the police have to do with the shelter) about a brutal attack on de sade, denying him comparative freedom of movement and communication and demanding his expulsion to some fortress. He criticizes the game of madmen as unorthodox and subject to bad consequences (although it lasted for several years, he could not show them) and officially declares that de sade was in no way crazy, "his only delusion was vice." Coulmier, however, was able to resist this audacity, and de sade remained in charenton, where the play continued until 1813. Then the same doctor got his way, and the plays were banned; they were replaced by concerts and balls. In 1808, de sade vainly appealed to napoleon for his release. In his letter, he said that he had spent more than twenty years in prison, the most miserable life in the world, that he was now almost seventy, almost blind and suffering from gout and rheumatism in his chest and stomach. There are several stories about him in his old age. They show that he is, as always, hot-tempered, extremely polite, graceful in his movements, rather fat and gray-haired; we can imagine him to some extent. There is no known portrait of him at any period of his life, and the only description of him in his youth that i can find is a rather brief description of one of the witnesses in marseille, where he is described as shorter than his servant, the fair-haired and rather stout marquis de sade. At that time, he was elegantly dressed and carried a sword. We don't know anything about the last years of his life. He died on december 2, 1814, at the age of seventy-four. The cause of his death was called "pulmonary hyperemia". Nine years earlier, in a fit of intense bitterness, he made his will, which was found after his death. The last paragraph read: "i categorically forbid opening my body under any circumstances. I strongly request that my body be kept for forty-eight hours in the room in which i will die, and be placed in a wooden coffin, which will be boarded up only after the specified time ; during this period of time, an urgent messenger will be sent to sieur lenormand, a wood merchant, in versailles with a request that he himself come accompanied by a van for my body, which will be transported under his escort to the forest on my territory in malmaison in the commune of mance near epernon, where i want it to be buried. To be placed without any ceremony in the first thicket on the right in the specified forest, entering from the side of the old castle along the high road that divides the forest. My grave will be dug in the thicket by a malmaison farmer under the supervision of m. Lenormand, who will leave my body only after it has been placed in the specified grave; if he wishes, he can be accompanied in this ceremony by those of my relatives and friends who, without any mourning, will be kind enough to show me this last sign of affection. Grave grave should be sown with acorns after it is filled, so that the specified grave will be replanted later, and the thicket is tangled, as it was before, the traces of my grave could disappear from the face of the earth, because i flatter myself that my memory will be erased from the face of the earth. People's minds. 68 life 1740-1814 1", made in charenton-saint-maurice, in his right mind and body, january 3, 1806. (Signed) d.A. F. Sad. "Even after his death, he was prevented. A passionate atheist was buried in a christian way and a stone cross was placed over him. But it wasn't enough to humiliate. As soon as the earth settled over his coffin, the disciples of gallus, the phrenologist, who had stolen the body, dug up and stole his skull as an object for their "science/ they stated that this skull "resembled the skull of all old people; it was a curious mixture of vices and virtues, benevolence and crime. She was small and well-shaped; at first glance she could be mistaken for a woman's head, especially since the bumps of tenderness and love for children are as noticeable as on the head of heloise, this model of tenderness and love." They apparently found these conclusions paradoxical. In fact, this is not a bad epitaph. A note. The facts in this chapter are mainly taken from previous books about de sade, in particular "eugene duren", "marquis de sade and time" and guillaume apollinaire, the preface to "the works of the marquis de sade and dawes", "marquis de sade", as well as numerous articles and prefaces by maurice heine. A collection of letters written to lawyer gofridi and published by paul bourdin in 1929 under the title "gorrespondance in honor of the marquis de sade" contains a lot of information, especially about 1774-1777 and 1790-1800. About half of the letters are from de sade, the rest are from his relatives, wife, mother-in-law, mademoiselle de rousset and various people with whom he had business. Nobody's character is particularly well revealed from this correspondence; they mainly concern money, speculation about wills, methods of income fraud, etc. However, they clarify a number of mysteries in de sade's life. Unfortunately, the letters are just a selection, and m, the marquis de sade bourdain has such a prejudice against de sade that it is impossible to say to what extent such a selection is representative. Everything that speaks against de sade is true, everything that speaks in his favor is an exaggeration or a lie. He cannot even mention a list of de sade's books without assuming that he has bought but not read them. Mr. Bourdain is a very exalted man, but despite his prejudices, the book is informative, although not interesting. Chapter ii literary work the letter kills, and the spirit gives life. St. Paul. The second epistle to the people of corinth. I have to create a system or be enslaved by another person, i will not reason and compare; my business is to create. W. Blake, jerusalem. I. Literary principles almost the last work from de sade's pen that has come down to us is an essay about a novel that he wrote as a preface to crimes of love, a collection of eleven tragic and dramatic stories (their length almost allows them to be called short novels) from his alleged "contests and tales of an outlandish game", which he wrote in 1787. This essay, written and published in 1800, when all his major works were written, is of considerable interest because it not only expounds his ideas about the function and art of the novel and fiction in general, but is also a tacit criticism and justification of his own work. The fact that he formally denies justine's authorship in it does not matter; at the time of writing, this was the only policy. He begins by sketching the origin of the novel. Ridiculing those people who seek origins in one country or one nation, he attributes the origin of fiction to two ingrained human weaknesses - prayer and love. The first invention arose when the first religion was invented. The mythopoetic abilities of man were first occupied by the gods, the marquis de sade, then by demigods and finally by heroes. A little later, ideal and lyrical love stories were written. He looks through the novels of the romans and greeks, simultaneously stating that petronius' "satyricon" should not be considered a novel; he shared with his contemporaries the idea that it was a personal satire on nero in order to examine in more detail the works of christian europe, and especially france. Neither "chanson de geste" nor "fablio" can be considered real novels, although the latter are closer to this; the novel was born only when gallantry was added to observation. Almost immediately the novel reached its climax, "don quixote" became for him the best novel ever written. He also highly appreciates the princess of cleves, madame de lafayette, casually mentioning the absurd assumption that, as a woman, she had to get help from men to create a masterpiece; women, according to him, are more adapted to writing novels than men, because of their greater delicacy. His judgments about the french novels of the xviii century are so fair and so consistent with the generally accepted taste of modernity that they do not need to be repeated; he pays voltaire and rousseau their just praise and questions crebillon, tanzai and their followers, writers who are considered typically "eighteenth century" for their immorality. Of these, he excludes the provost, whom he greatly admires. Then he turns to the english novel. "Richardson and fielding," he says, "taught us that only a deep study of the human heart, the labyrinth of nature, and only this can inspire a novelist whose works show us not only a person as he is or pretends that this is the task of a historian, but also what he can be, because he is under the influence of vice and all the shocks of passion; so you need to know and use them all to use this style; they also taught us that the 72 literary works of virtue "continuous triumph" are not always interesting. ..." He adds that virtue is only one of the phases of the heart. Then he turns to the novel "gothic 1". 2 "then there are new novels, almost all the merit of which lies in magic and phantasmagoria, with a monk at the head, which are not completely devoid of merit; they are the fruit of the revolution, the shock of which has experienced the whole of europe. For someone who knows what suffering the wicked can inflict on humanity, the novel became as difficult to write as it was boring to read; there was no one who would not have suffered more misfortunes in five years than the best novelist could describe in a century; therefore, hell had to be called to help. And the interest to find in a nightmare is only what is usually known, just by looking at the history of a person in this iron age. But how many inconveniences this style offers; the author of "monk" has avoided them no more than radcliffe (j/v); there is an alternative: explain the magical deception, and then the interest will disappear, or never raise the curtain, which leads to a complete lack of credibility. If a successful work appeared without crashing on any of the points, we would not blame the funds used, but would offer it as a sample." There can be little doubt that in this paragraph he explains his own intentions in his main works, in particular, in "justine". After this historical review, he makes some general remarks on the novel. He defines it as "a picture of modern mores", "/we know how to create" even such a harmless work as this was not without detractors. An unknown journalist, the author of the literary work villeterk, wrote a column in which he criticized de sade as a propagandist of crime and immorality; in an extremely witty and energetic response, de sade justifies himself by analyzing his essays and stories; he applies the aristotelian canon of purification by pity and horror and asks: "from what can spring be terror, saving from pictures of triumphant crime, or pity, saving from virtue in trouble?" 6 ii. It is convenient to divide different works of de sade's work into three groups, depending on his attitude to his readers; the first group, which is addressed directly to all readers, the third - works written mainly for himself and about which he himself speaks: "i speak only to those who are able to understand me; such people can read me without danger." "The second group is halfway between them and is represented only by alina and valcour. This very curious novel is extremely personal and demonstrates the various facets of de sade's mind as clearly as any of his works; but the "veil", in his own words, with which the parts are shrouded, demonstrates sensitivity to the reader's prejudices, which prevent his inclusion in the third category. If de sade's works had come down to us in their entirety, it is almost certain that the first, or "public", group would have had the predominant volume; but by a curious irony of fate, this particular part of his work has been destroyed or lost more than any other; so our judgment of his contribution to traditional literature is purely preliminary. All his theatrical works obviously fall into this category, since a play is considered stillborn only until it is played before an audience; but of his twenty or more comedies and dramas in verse and prose, we know nothing except the plots of three of them and the names of several more. In the above 75 plots of the marquis de sade, he uses techniques that he also uses in his novels "babies who are changed in the cradle" and "anagnorisis of aristotle", or the recognition of characters by each other, either in time or too late (the main difference between melodrama and tragedy).; We cannot know how he developed these very general devices. He seems to have shown some originality in form, if not in content, since we have an entertainment plan consisting of five different plays - tragedy, comedy, opera, pantomime and ballet, respectively, each of which is complete in itself, but each adds to the main plot or frame that held together plays together. Personally, i am very sympathetic to this idea, because for me, visiting a modern theater is almost always an agony of boredom; after the first quarter of an hour, the style is established and does not deviate from it until the final curtain. He has also written three full - length historical novels; we know about them again only by their names. By the way, in his reconstruction of the historical novel, he also seems to have been a precursor; i do not know of any other eighteenth-century novelist who would use history as the basis for a novel and turn to primary sources and documents for verisimilitude. Waverki was published a few years after his death. His four-volume "portefeuille d'un homme de lettres" came out a little better; we know only a very rough outline of the work and a few individual fragments. It was supposed to be in the form of correspondence between a man in paris and two young ladies in the village and was supposed to cover a very wide range of topics, from the art of writing comedy to the etymology of words; there should have been a dissertation on the death penalty, a plan to hire criminals in such a way that they would be useful to the state, a letter about luxury, and another about education, dealing with forty-four points of morality. A letter about writing plays had to contain 76 literary works and fifty rules that would give all the necessary instructions for such art. The more serious topics had to be varied with anecdotes; a dozen of them have reached us. They are funny and well told. Some of them are decidedly indecent in the humorous "gaulois" style, which was least to be expected from de sade; the pair deal with well-attested local ghost stories. After his diary from 1 777-1790, this is the work i regret the most about the disappearance of. The diary, if it could be found, would almost certainly become the most unusual document that mankind has ever known. The rest of the works that have disappeared, but whose existence we know, can be mentioned here. They include four novels, one of them humorous; memoirs and confessions; plans for a public brothel and a spectacle similar to roman gladiators (his intention in this sentence will be found in chapter viii); and the already mentioned strange historical novel "journey to florbel", in which the public characters of which he may have known well. Most of his correspondence was published, mostly concerning business or family matters. His political pamphlets were mentioned in the first chapter. He probably wrote something else that has not been identified. In short, all that we have left of his usual literary work, besides the essay already mentioned, are thirty-seven short stories. Of these, eleven were published during his lifetime, the twelfth edited by anatole france in 1881, and the rest in 1927 edited by maurice heine, who copied them from manuscripts in the french national library. In general, they are very competent, written in a sober and economical style (although, like almost all of his works, they abound in fixed epithets and mechanical comparisons such as "the marquis de sade is as beautiful as a rose"); the denouement is well worked out and dramatically emphasized; les crimes against love are almost all based on the thesis of a struggle between virtue and vice, usually with disastrous results for the actors on both sides; they are mostly notable for the scrupulous accuracy of local and historical details. Humorous stories are much weaker; they are surprising mainly because they demonstrate in de sade a sense of humor and gaiety that could never be suspected in his other works; they have an epigrammatic accuracy that would ensure the author an honorable place among his brighter contemporaries. I give two short quotes as examples of this style: "there is a kind of pleasure for someone's pride to make fun of shortcomings that you yourself do not possess, and such pleasures are so sweet for all people, and especially for fools, that it is extremely rare to see them give up on them... It also provides an opportunity for sarcastic remarks, pale jokes and flat puns; and for society, that is, for an assembly of people who are united by boredom and change stupidity, it is so pleasant to talk for two or three hours without saying anything, it is so delightful to shine at someone else's expense and mention and blame for this vices that a person is far from having... This is a kind of silent self-praise; for the sake of this, people even agree to unite in order to crush a man whose great crime is that he does not think like the others; then they go home, very pleased with the wit shown, although, obviously, by doing so they simply proved their stupidity and pedantry." 6 the second quote is taken from the already mentioned story "the puzzled judge", in which de sade ridicules his judges. This is by far the longest of his humorous stories and very energetic; the basis on which 78 literary works "various incidents" are based is the good old tradition of the french farce "prevention of marriage". The magistrate got drunk and declares his faith in his position; unfortunately, the pun is untranslatable. "Lady, voyez-vous," he says, "i love people, i love abstinence and sobriety, so don't worry that you will call me off and i'm hanging; il faut tre serious, la sverit anactoria and especially dolores are practically transcriptions (see lafourcade, jetmess de swinburne, volume ii.). 99 marquis de sade with sidelong glances elsewhere at other politically suspicious countries and individuals, with the appalling title "death and the devil in romantic literature." The main originality of this work lies in the study of the influence of de sade ; there is no doubt that de sade has the largest number of mentions in the index, only the "sadistic" poets swinburne and baudelaire approach him. With his characteristic spontaneity, he begins by denying any merit of de sade: "dello scritore non diciamo poi dello scritore di genio mancano al sade le qualit piu elementari. Polygrafo and pornografo, chief titolo d'un aretino, tutto il suo merito sta nell' aver lasciato dei document! What is presented about the phase of mitology, child psychopathology."* After this frank statement, he continues to demonstrate his influence on the list of authors, which, at first glance, seems to contain most of the main names of french literature of the century, as well as some quite respected outside it; of course, all these authors may have been devoid of any sensitivity or discrimination. Among the listed are the following: baudelaire, shelley (in cenci swinburne, maturin, j. Janin, souly, petrus borel, de musset, sue, victor hugo, theophile gautier, george sand, the artist delacroix, flaubert, lautremont, fr. Mirbeau, d'annunzio, stendhal, huysmans, barbie d'orevilly, peladan, barrs, rachilda, villiers de tlsle adam, remy de gourmont and dostoevsky. This list is not exclusive, and perhaps one or two names are mistakenly included as having been directly influenced; but in any case, the catalog is quite remarkable, considering that all these authors were influenced by the works of a man who lacked the most elementary qualities of a writer. It is interesting to note that the correct attitude to de sade's work today is no longer outraged disgust, but boredom and refusal to take it seriously. My literary works suggest that any of the judgments of signor praza* pontifex may be erroneous, especially since he actually read justine and juliet (i am not sure about this: between his quotes and those made by g. Lafourcade in his treatise on swinburne, there is an amazing identity), and gives quite long, if slightly ridiculous quotes from them; some of these quotations are taken from the manichaean theology of the "statesman" saint-fond, a subject introduced only to add superstition to the other cowardice and vices of this monster, and which is subsequently very carefully refuted; it is obvious that such ideas are ridiculous; they were meant to be. However, i am primarily interested in de sade not as a writer, but as a thinker and predecessor; and the rest of the book will be devoted to him in this capacity. A note. For more information about the plots of de sade's works, you should refer to any of the books mentioned at the end of the first chapter. Guillaume apollinaire gives the best account of the "120 journeys" of justine and juliet. Dieren's account is fragmentary, with a great emphasis on details that are chastily given in latin. A german named otto flake also wrote a book about the garden, mostly based on diehren; he gives some idea of the plots, but the book is so full of moral indignation that it is interesting mainly as a proclamation of the pure mind of herr flake. Addition. After writing this chapter, i saw an article by maurice heine, the marquis de sade and the novel noir (new french review, august 1933), in which he states the priority of de sade in the use of gothic attributes in an adventure novel on the historical basis of the dates of his books, compared with mrs. Radcliffe and the monk lewis. It seems to me that this is difficult to justify, if we take into account the work of clara reeve and the widespread distribution of such german books as boden's "the children of dbbey". From a purely literary point of view, it still seems to me that de sade's main originality lies in the fact that he used history for romance. 101 chapter iii the philosophy of the dispute about the law and the author who did not accept the law, ma putto la memory. Leonardo da vinci, notes. All bibles or sacred codes were the causes of the following errors: 1. That a person has two really existing principles, namely the soul and the body. 2. This energy, called evil, is separated only from the body; and that reason, which is called good, is separated only from the soul. 3. That god will torment man in eternity for following his energies. But the following opposites are true: 1. Man has no body other than his soul; for this so-called body is a part of the soul, distinguished by the five senses, the main entrances of the soul in this age. 2. Energy is the only life, and it comes from the body; and the mind is the boundary or outer circle of energy. 3. Energy is eternal delight. W. Blake, "the marriage of heaven and hell". I. Lametri when dealing with such a well-read, eclectic and at the same time original thinker as de sade, it is difficult to talk about masters or predecessors. The number of authors he cites is huge, ranging from all classical and modern literature, from rousseau and hobbes to the bible, from herodotus and the church fathers to the travels of captain cook, thomas more and 102 encyclopedic philosophers. But there is one author whom he quotes more often than anyone else, and who obviously had a predominant influence on the formation of many of his ideas; this author is la metricus, a philosopher now so completely forgotten that i may be forgiven for giving a brief account of his life and the main ideas. Julien offrey de la metric was born in 1,709 in the family of a merchant. He was trained for the church as a jansenist, but after a precocious attack of piety, he wrote an apology, at the age of fifteen he became disgusted with theology, and he began to study medicine. He qualified in reims at the age of nineteen and practiced for five years; then he went to leiden and studied under the famous boerhave. He translated his master's work on venereal diseases and added his own work on the same topic, which was subjected to significant abuse. Over the next few years, he published several more medical books. In 1742 he returned to paris and was appointed physician to the duc de grammont's army corps, in which capacity he took part in the siege of fribourg. During these operations, he caught a fever and was so struck by the changes in his personality as a result of delirium that he wrote a book on the subject called the natural history of the soul, which was published in the hague in 1745, presumably translated from english. He was immediately attacked by the church authorities and was forced to resign. As compensation, he was appointed an inspector of hospitals, but in his spare time he wrote a couple of plays in which he ridiculed doctors and medicine of his time. This did not lessen the hostility felt towards him, and in 1746 his books were burned by a public executioner, and he was forced to flee for his life. At first he went to saz near ghent, but he was accused of spying on the marquis de sade, and he had to flee to leiden. There he wrote "the machine man," a work which he dedicated with characteristically audacious wit to the extremely pious haller as a sign of his love of truth. The resonance caused by this work was huge, and his life was in constant danger. By a lucky chance, he managed to cross the border with prussia, where he received refuge from frederick the great, "solomon of the north," as he constantly calls him. Frederick established for him the nominal position of reader to the king and appointed him a pension. They quickly became friends, to some annoyance and jealousy of voltaire. In the next three years he wrote a number of essays, the most important of which were "the system of epicurus" and "anti-seneca", or "reflections on happiness". Minor works include "homme plante", "les animaux plus que machines", "la volupte" and "l? Art de jouir, the last two are elegant arguments of the "eighteenth century" about love and gallantry. He presented frederick with a collection of his works in 1751 and died in november of the same year from eating poisoned food. Friedrich delivered a eulogy in his honor before the berlin academy in i752. 1 now we must consider the ideas that caused him to attack not only representatives of orthodoxy, but even such comparative freethinkers as voltaire, maupertuis, diderot, holbach, grimm and many others. Even goethe, many years later, praised him extremely reluctantly. His main heresy was the assertion that the purpose of science is to discover the truth and that this can only be obtained through evidence and experiment. In short, he laid the foundation on which all modern scientific work rests. He followed this equally shocking statement that man should be regarded as an animal, that if, as descartes said in philosophy, animals were machines, then so was man; if man was more than a machine, then so were animals. In short, he laid the foundation on which all modern medicine and biology rests. Finally, he argued that the idea of a "soul" devoid of feelings was unthinkable, and that the soul developed and decomposed along with the body and underwent the same changes as the body, for example, various intoxications, delirium, neurosis and insanity. The dualism of descartes, malebranche or leibniz was untenable because it could not be verified. In short, he laid the foundation on which almost all modern psychology rests. For all modern science is materialistic in its assumptions, whatever they may be in its popularization; it is a pity that she forgot this predecessor and almost a martyr in the name of objectivity. Today it is difficult to realize what a suffocating influence religion had on all spheres of thought until the middle of the last century. In most countries today, religion is so protected, so "broad-minded", complaisant and unassuming that we can hardly think back to the time when darwin was preached against from every pulpit, and hegel was declared a heretic. Such behavior today in the bible belt of the united states causes a smile and regret even among the most pious churchmen. In the middle of the eighteenth century, things were very different; not only the central ideas, but even the secondary dogmas of the catholic church should not be questioned. For la metricus never called himself an atheist, but an agnostic; he considered the existence of god and a kind of survival after death probable, but unverifiable and therefore subject to exclusion from philosophy; he adds that we have no means of knowing which cult god likes the most; and all cults are reprehensible because of the wars they generate. 105 the marquis de sade, in the preface to his collected works, rather insincerely apologizes to himself. He admits that philosophy contradicts both morality and religion, but denies that it can destroy or harm them. Philosophy, which is entirely concerned with proofs, is in the same relation to nature as morality is to religion. But it will never be able to influence the masses, because its appeal is based on reason, to which the masses are blind, whereas religion is based on emotions and therefore powerful. Although it never concerns politics, it is useful for rulers because it allows them to see through rhetoric and similar emotional appeals. Legislators will control people better as philosophers than as speakers, as rational, not reasoning beings. Philosophy for him is materialistic, pragmatic, atheistic. ("Atheists are virtuous by conviction, theists - if at all virtuous by superstition" / 1 ) this can only be based on physical science derived from sensory observations, and must be completely unbiased with respect to premeditated ideas of any kind. Then he gives a personal justification, arguing that there should be no correspondence between the author and his work, since he writes for the truth, but speaks and acts for convenience. Finally, he ends up with an exordium, which must have affected de sade very much. He demands "republican" freedom of thought and writing and extols spiritual freedom over physical freedom. And he advises the future philosopher to write anonymously and "as if you were alone in the universe, or as if you had nothing to fear from human jealousy and prejudice." The treatise on the soul is an exposition of his mechanistic view of man. Much of his theory is refuted for us by the central position he assigns to the theory of animal spirits or the electric fluid in the nerves, through which all perceptions are transmitted to the brain. This idea, originated in malbanche, was widespread until the beginning of the nineteenth century; de sade accepts it without any doubt; he gave a satisfactory, but overly simplified description of sensations. He denies the metaphysical concept of the soul, claiming that it exists only through sensations; he defines it as the driving principle of passive matter. Later he makes the assumption, which de sade occupies a central place in his metaphysics, that motion, at least potential motion, is a property of matter. Then he considers the various abilities from this point of view. Judgment is a comparison of ideas based on memory and association. Too good a memory is bad for judgment. Imagination is an arbitrary reproduction of sensory impressions. In a sane mind it is weaker than external impressions, but in delirium or under the influence of drugs it can be stronger and in no case should it necessarily be true. Hysteria is voluntary, there is no desire to be cured. Love is the so-called madness^. Passions are based on the pleasure-pain principle. Instincts are mechanical reactions that are equally valid for both humans and animals, as can be seen from the pantomime of the latter. The sensations of the soul are conditioned by knowledge, and pleasure and pain are caused by modifications of the "i". Happiness is an involuntary way of thinking and feeling; people are happy by chance, but philosophy teaches humility. Will is the result of stimuli of pleasure and pain. Good taste is the taste of the majority. Genius is a general perfection. It's easy to be a good mathematician because the subject is so limited. Free will is probably the true concept. Faith is necessary to explain the origin of evil, the nature of the soul and life after death. Man-machine is a development of the same thesis; it is primarily a refutation of descartes. The human body is defined as a self-winding machine, and courage is defined as the marquis de sade's food coefficient of 107, but the machine is so complex that it is impossible to get a clear idea or definition about it. Character and morality differ depending on temperament, heredity and environment. Mind and body are interdependent, one modifies the other (fever and anxiety interfere with sleep). Anatomically, there is a great similarity between humans and mammals, the main difference is that a person speaks and has the heaviest and most complex brain. Man at birth is the weakest and stupidest of all animals, because his instincts are weak; the more animal intelligence, the fewer instincts. Imagination, which creates images, is the main function of the soul, all other abilities stem from it. Philosophy is imagination plus self-criticism. "**""" In the course of this essay, he allows himself a number of generalizations unrelated to the subject, which are either directly or through the criticism they caused him, of great importance in the study of de sade, nature^he says that god is the high priest.Confusion is pointless, and inequality is one of them.Higher characteristics. It's me. * ^ - " ~~" '- -~ ~ _ - ' the law of nature says: "don't do to others what you wouldn't do to yourself." People's appearance and character correspond to each other (de sade adhered to this idea very firmly). Movement is a property of matter, for example, the muscular reactions of dead animals. Everything that does not concern feelings is an impenetrable mystery. In the eyes of nature, all beings are equal; there is only one substance in the universe, modified in different ways. Finally, three axioms: "never make generalizations in science."; "Only good doctors should be judges"; "we were not born to be wise, but to be cunning, from the eagle in the heart of joy." Epicurus' system is a series of apophegms that determine his attitude to life. It's definitely hedonistic and pragmatic. This is jsjaqjloiil ^^1 08 philosophy causes ^ but it's useless to worry about them.. _ nature is the main engine and is immoral, indifferent and purposeless. Man occupies the last place in creation because he is the most complex. Life is too serious; materialism is the antidote to misanthropy. A person is not responsible for his qualities or defects, and therefore remorse is useless, and he is not a criminal for following his instincts. Death is annihilation, and therefore it doesn't matter; what are we risking by dying? And what are we not risking by living? Knowledge is only useful ^^^ just as medicine is often just the science of medicines with beautiful names, philosophy is just the science of beautiful words: doubly lucky when the first medicine and the second mean something." "Anti-seneca" is a call to sensitivity against stoicism. Happiness depends on character and consists in the fact that a person can be happy by refraining from what causes remorse: but by doing so, he often refrains from pleasure, from the demands of nature." This is an unpleasant reality. Knowledge is good only insofar as it contributes to happiness, and worrying about the future is stupid. Menj]education; nevertheless, the tendency to evil is such that it is easier for good to become bad than for bad to become good. Virtues and vices exist only relative to society, and the appearance of virtue is as good as virtue itself. Happiness comes from consciousness, not from fame, and remorse is a childish and useless feeling. Crime is also a search for happiness, it is a matter of character. Happiness does not depend on virtue, and a person who gets more satisfaction from doing evil will be happier than someone who has fewer good deeds. There are criminal natures who like to torture. Instincts are stronger than education. The happiness of the marquis de sade does not depend entirely on sensuality, although the pleasures of his intellect are partial - people are not socially, but personally. . Public opinion doesn't matter, and fame is useless. Adversity is the middle of virtues; suicide is justified, but stupid. In "la folupte" and "huart de juire" he gives his description of happiness. It is very tender, very sentimental and very erotic, illustrated with excerpts from imaginary classical idylls. He dislikes obscenities and obscene books (which he considers dangerous because they destroy illusions) and prefers what i can only qualify as elegant poetic pornography. For him, pleasure does not exist without sentiment. Within the limits that he sets himself, he shows considerable interest and knowledge in sexual techniques and variations, even going beyond what is usually considered permissible, with the explanation that "tout est femme dances for one purpose." Because of his bragging, and partly because of him, it seems that he was not particularly powerful. Ii. General principles i found it desirable to give this rather detailed exposition of lametri's ideas in a somewhat boring style, which is associated with the works of aristotle, since this is a convenient point of view for considering de sade's general philosophy. He fully accepted from la metri the materialistic concept of man and the universe, largely developing the thesis, but not questioning it, and with it la metri's view of nature. He also took from him the idea that the pursuit of happiness is the main goal of all activities after self-preservation, and fatalistic acceptance of irresponsible manifestations of character. He grasped and developed in great detail the purely temporal and local aspect of actions that are not considered philosophically virtuous or vicious; he compiles huge catalogues of examples taken from the literature and folklore of each country to show that actions considered virtuous in eighteenth-century france were considered vicious in other times and places, and vice versa; so much so that one of the early critics considered this his main goal in writing. This is an interesting part of his work and one of the earliest examples of systematic comparative anthropology from a moral rather than a physical point of view. In the end, he recognized the primacy of imagination in intellectual and sensation in physical activity, the futility of remorse, the value of truth for its own sake and the paramount importance of education. Its main difference from la metric was in character. La metric was a happy and contented man, an epicurean with epicurean pococurantism. He was interested in truth as an abstract idea, not how it affected his fellow men; like many scientists and philosophers, he had no desire to apply his results in life. Even his devotion to the truth was not fanatical; he quotes montaigne's remark with great approval: "la verite doit se soutenir jusqu'au feu, mais exclusivity." He was quite happy to be illogical and never tried to bring his ideas to a logical conclusion. De sade, on the other hand, was a fanatic, his moderation during the terror is sufficient proof and mercilessly logical: "philosophy is not that. Jxt .Of . Consoling .Fools : his only goal is _j_s__ to .Xeac is the truth. And . Destroy prejudice." 2 he was also interested only in the truth, since it affected humanity here and now, and all his initial work was devoted to man in his relationship to god, the state and his neighbors, in other words, religion, politics and what for convenience can be called sex; but before considering the marquis de sade's diagnoses and suggestions in these three areas of human life, it will be convenient to dwell in more detail on some of his more general ideas. Perhaps the most important of his philosophical concepts is his distinction between "real" and "objective" ideas and his treatment of the idea of cause and effect; the passage in question 3 is quite long and detailed; i have shortened it as much as possible. Mother superior instructs juliet. "What is intelligence? It is the ability given to me by nature to determine me in favor of one line of behavior as opposed to another, in accordance with the pleasure or pain received; the calculation is obviously determined by feelings. The mind, as fret says, is a scale with which we weigh objects and with which.... We know that we must think, by their mutual relation, the first consequence of reason is to establish an essential difference between an object that appears and an object that is perceived. The representative perception of the object is again different. If it shows us objects as missing but previously present, this is called memory. If he shows us objects without warning us about their absence, this is called imagination, and this is the true source of all our mistakes.... That we assume the real existence of the objects of these internal perceptions and believe that they exist separately from us, because we perceive them separately from us. To clarify this distinction, i will give this branch of the idea the name "objective idea" to distinguish it from true perception, which i will call a "real idea"..... An infinitesimal point, so necessary for geometry, is an "objective idea"; bodies and solids are "real". 1 .... Before continuing, it should be noted that mixing these two groups of ideas is extremely common, people have been forced to come up with common terms for groups of ideas similar to philosophy; and they called "cause" any thing that causes some change in the body independently of it, and effect * any change made for some reason. Since these conditions :all this creates for us a more or less confusing way of existence, actions, reactions, changes, the habit of using them made us think that they correspond to a clear and distinct perception, people do not want to think about it, because all things act and react to each other continuously: they produce and undergo changes at the same time " this idea has significant significance in his analysis of sex and other instincts and is the main reason for his divergence from the "causal" conclusions of psychoanalysis. It follows from this that words should be treated with the greatest caution. "Like all fools with the same principles, you will answer me that all these (problems of the soul, etc.) Are riddles; but if they are riddles, you do not understand anything about them, and in this case how can you make a positive decision about what you are not able to form there are someany ideas? To believe in something or to assert something, you need to at least know what you believe and what you are asserting. To believe in the immateriality of the soul is equivalent to saying that a person is convinced of something about which it is impossible to form any "real" idea; it means to believe words without attaching any meaning to them; to claim that a thing is what it is given out for is the height of stupidity and vanity." 4 about materialism. "People offer us as an objection that materialism turns a person simply into a machine, which, in their opinion, is very humiliating for humanity; will this humanity be much more honored if you say that a person acts under the influence of secret impulses of the spirit or something that somehow animates him?" 5 and again: "the respect that so many people have for spirituality seems to have its only motive in the impossibility in which they find 113 marquis de sade, to define it themselves in an intelligible way, when they tell us that the soul is thinner than the body, they do not tell us anything other than what we have performance. Absolutely no knowledge should be much more beautiful than that of which we have some vague idea." 6 unlike most of his contemporaries, de sade did not believe that the sum of possible knowledge was now at the disposal of his generation, although he believed that the development of chemistry and physics could one day make everything possible. 7 he categorically denies the existence of free will. He puts the following speech into the mouth of cardinal bernice, at that time the ambassador of france, previously considered one of the lovers of pompadour; his reputation for chastity was not above suspicion (see casanova), and his poems were not particularly moral; and while de sade endows him with considerable wit and quick wit, as one would expect, his reputation and rank are enough to drag him into some of juliet's most dubious adventures. I quote this speech in full because it is a good example of de sade's methods. "The ability to compare different methods of action and choose the one that seems best to us is what is meant by free will. Does a person have this ability? I take the liberty to say that he does not possess it and that it would be impossible for him to do so. All our ideas owe their origin to physical and material causes that lead us in spite of ourselves, because these causes belong to our organization and external objects that affect us; our motives are the results of these causes, and therefore our will is not free. Pursued by various motives, we hesitate, but the moment when we make a decision does not depend on us; it is caused by the different location of our organs; 114. We are always guided by them, and it never depends on us to choose one way of action and not another; always driven by necessity, always slaves of necessity, it is at the moment when we think we have most fully demonstrated our free will that we are led most invincibly. Hesitation and indecision make us believe in the freedom of our will, but this imaginary freedom is only a moment when the scales on the scales are equal. As soon as a decision is made, it happens because one side is heavier than the other, and we are not the cause of inequality, but physical objects that affect us and make us a toy of all human conventions, a toy of the motive power of nature, like animals and plants. Everything depends on the action of the nervous fluid, and the difference between a criminal and an honest person consists in the greater or lesser activity of the animal spirits that make up this fluid. "I feel," said f&nelon, "that i am free, that i am completely in the hands of my own decisions."It is impossible to prove this unfounded statement. What makes the archbishop of cambrai so confident that when he decided to accept madame guyon's pleasant teaching, he was free to choose the opposite path? The most he can prove to me is that he hesitated, but i challenge him to prove to me that he was free to choose a different path from the moment he made such a decision. "I am changing myself with god," this author continues, "i am the true cause of my own will."But felon did not take into account, saying this, that since god is stronger, he made him the true cause of all crimes; he also did not take into account that nothing destroys the omnipotence of god so much as the free will of man, for the omnipotence of god that you assume, and which i grant you for a moment, is such only because god has predetermined everything from the very beginning."5 marquis de sade nin, and precisely because of this unchangeable order a person can be nothing more than a passive being who cannot change anything in the order of things and who, therefore, does not have free will. If he had free will, he could at any moment destroy this first established order, in which case he would become as powerful as god. Such a supporter of the deity as fenelon should have considered this issue more carefully. Newton carefully overcame this great difficulty, not daring either to delve into it or to involve himself in it; fenelon, more positive, although much less educated, adds: "when i desire something, it is in my power not to want it; when i do not desire something, it is in my power." My strength is to desire it. 1 no. Since you didn't do it when you wanted to, it's because it wasn't in your power, and because all the physical reasons that should have guided the balance this time turned out to be on the side of the action you took, and the choice was no longer in your power from the moment you they were determined. Therefore, your will was not free; you balanced, but your will was not free and never will be. When you allow yourself to go in the direction you have chosen, it is because it was impossible for you to choose another. You were blinded by your indecision, you believed that you were capable of making a choice because you felt that you were able to balance. But this indecision, the physical impact of two external objects presented simultaneously, and the freedom to choose between them are two completely different things. " 8 earlier in his work, de sade, for convenience, defined everything that can affect a person, including memory, prejudices, etc. As external objects. I'm going to end this chapter with a call for consistency, which is not particularly appropriate, but which i want to introduce and for which i can't find another opportunity in philosophy 116. This is from the consistent villain de blamont to his wavering fellow vice. He writes: 9 "this is what your end will be; i see you from here surrounded by priests, proving to you that the devil is waiting for you, and you tremble and turn pale, cross yourself and renounce your tastes and friends, and then die like an imbecile. And why you'll be like this... Because you don't have any principles; i told you that you only listen to your passions without reasoning about their causes, you never had enough philosophy to subordinate them to systems that could identify them with you; you jumped over all your prejudices without trying to destroy any of them; you have left them all behind, and they will all come back to upset you when there is no longer any means of dealing with them." If only our innumerable well-meaning stupid socialists and pacifists would take the essence of this passage to heart! 117 chapter iv god and nature are cleaning up this black church. Take away this wedding hearse. Remove this blood man and you will completely remove the ancient curse. W. Blake, gnomic poems. From these opposites comes what religious people call good and evil. Good is passive, subject to reason. Evil is active, arising from energy. Blake, the marriage of heaven and hell. Gone to praise god, his priest and king, who create paradise out of our suffering. W. Blake, songs of experience. I've been obsessed with god all my life. People who want to denigrate him by calling him crazy would have much more reason to call him a religious, not a sexual maniac. There is not a single work of his that is not devoted to religion; quite a lot does not concern sex at all or, at most, briefly. We have seen that in his youth, in 1763, he attached great importance to the sacrament and spoke about religion with great piety. There is no particular reason to doubt his sincerity; his family, for seven hundred years of its existence, of which there are records, maintained constant contact with the church; faith in god and his ministry was a family tradition. 118 god and nature in 1782 he changed his position. It was in this year, the third year of his permanent imprisonment, that his first extant writings belong to us; and the very first thing that was developed was an elegant little dialogue between a priest and a dying man. This short essay in the style of fontenelle concerns the inadequacy of the religious description of the universe; adding the mysteries of god to the mysteries of nature only makes it difficult to understand the latter; with the unsatisfactory nature of prophecies, martyrs, miracles ("to believe in a miracle, i must be absolutely sure that the phenomenon that you claim as such is absolutely contrary to the laws of nature, because only in this way it can be a miracle: and who knows nature enough to be able to swear that this is exactly the moment when she draws the line and where she is outraged?" 1). The whole of this work is a well-reasoned fragment of dialectics; its language is moderate and full of dignity. Since that time, de sade cannot leave god and religion alone, especially the catholic church. For comparison, he showed a certain respect and tolerance for protestantism, i don't think there are fifty pages in any of his works in which this topic is not mentioned. His knowledge of the literature related to this is encyclopedic. He seems to know the bible almost by heart; he quotes christian apologists from the early church fathers to scott, phelon, pascal and even later theologians and deals with them; he mentions the koran and confucius; he is engaged in theological quibbles of the greatest subtlety. He is aware of the differences of heresies that have torn the church apart at different times; he discusses in detail each of its central tenets. All this scholarship is used in attacks on god and the church of the marquis de sade, which in duration and intensity can rarely be equal; he attacks them with reason, ridicule, curses, blasphemy; he attacks from philosophical, economic, political, ideal and pragmatic points of view. Corner; he hesitates from discussing inconsistencies in the bible (in the style of the question: "how could pharaoh's cavalry pursue the jews in a country where cavalry cannot act, and further, how did pharaoh have any cavalry, since during the fifth of egypt's executions, god had all the horses killed because of what?" 2 ) to the black mass, from the history of the papacy to the pre-christian origin of the eucharist, from the dogma of hell to the economic foundations of church property. The basis of all this is obvious. De sade was a passionate idealist and could not forgive either god, who allowed all the evil and misfortunes of which he was so terribly aware, nor the church, whose explanations could not satisfy his mind, and whose practices and representatives so completely contradicted the principles they supposedly observed. The climax of his attack is juliet's interview with pope pius vi; it begins as follows: 44 "arrogant ghost," i replied to this old despot, "your habit of deceiving other people makes you try to deceive yourself. .... Listen to me, you bishop of rome, and let me analyze your power and your claims for a moment. "A religion based on poverty, equality and hatred of the rich is being formed in galilee. The principles of this holy teaching are that it is as impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle; that a rich man is cursed only because he is rich. The followers of this cult are categorically forbidden to do anything, because god and nature, their head, jesus, says positively: "i did not come to be served, but to serve... There will be neither the first nor the last among you... The one of you who wants to be exalted will be humiliated, and the one who will be the first will be the last" (a). The first apostles of this religion earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. Is this all true?" "Of course/ "ok, then i ask you what is the connection between these primitive institutions and the huge wealth that you have received in italy. Does your wealth come from the gospel or from the fraud of your predecessors?.. Poor fellow, and you think you can still impose on us!"An atheist, at least respect the descendant of st. Peter." "You are not his descendant ()" 3 then juliet proceeds to analyze the origin of the papacy and explains its growth by its political usefulness to various rulers in the troubled ages of the middle empire; she accuses the church of obscurantism in the middle ages, and then gives a brief but exhaustive history of the crimes and inconsistencies of the papacy. To the quoted passage de sade adds two curious notes. The first (a) follows a quotation from the gospels; he writes: "it's funny that the jacobins during the french revolution wanted to destroy the altars of a god who used absolutely their language, and even more surprising that those who hate the jacobins and want to destroy them do it in the name of a god who speaks like the jacobins. If this is not the "ni plus ultra" of human absurdity, i would like to know what it is."The second () is a detailed discussion of the real meaning of the name peter and the holy pun made on this word, in which he decides that the christian peter is the same as arnak, hermes and janus of the ancients, each of whom had the gift of opening the gates to a certain paradise; and he uses the phoenician, hebrew and latin etymology of the marquis de sade to prove that peter, or cephas, can mean both the discoverer and the stone. Again and again he returns to the discrepancy between christian confession and practice; the most vehement reactionary in his works is the bishop of grenoble. In addition, he emphasizes the political reasons that allowed the church to appear and explain its continued support. The statesman saint-fond is forced to say: "the power of the scepter depends on the power of the censer; these two authorities are most interested in mutual assistance, and only by separating them will the masses throw off the yoke. Nothing humiliates people more than religious fears; it is right that they should fear eternal punishment if they rise up against their king; that is why the european powers are always on good terms with rome. 4 when juliet talks to ferdinand of naples, she says, with a strange echo of lenin's famous epigram: "you keep people in ignorance and arrogance... Because you are afraid of them if they are enlightened; you are drugging them with opium... So that they don't understand how you oppress them." 5 he attacks the church as an economic racket. "Undoubtedly, the priests had their own motives in inventing the ridiculous fable of the immortality of the soul; could they otherwise force the dying to contribute?" 6 this theme is designed with several variations. Religion is dangerous as the basis on which morality is built; for if the falsity of the foundations is recognized, the whole building will collapse. 7 similarly, the fact that this may be a consolation for some is not a sufficient reason for this. "I don't see that the desire to appease a few fools," says mother superior juliet, "is worth poisoning millions of honest people living in god and nature; and in general, is it reasonable to consider your desires as a measure of truth?" 8 saint-fond, reactionary statesman, superstitious and gullible; this is the last insult that de sade can inflict on his villains. He believes in a kind of manichaean diabolism in which hell plays a central role; and he thinks that through some kind of ritual he can force his victims to sell their souls to the devil. The admission of this weakness is the justification for a fifty-page study of the dogma of hell, viewed from all possible points of view. 9 first of all, the old and new testaments are examined in great detail to prove that the idea of eternal damnation does not exist in them, that the idea of gehenna was purely local and temporary; secondly, it demonstrates the ineffectiveness of fear of hellfire as a method of deterring people from evil deeds, since the damned who cannot repent are invisible and, therefore, useless as a warning to the living, and crimes, if anything, are more common in countries where they adhere to thirdly, he ridicules the confused thinking that can associate fire and torment with disembodied spirits; and finally, he talks about the barbarism of god, who can punish finite mistakes with endless torments. This is the essence of his complaint; for him, as for blake, the great sadistic poet, the christian god is too low and immoral to be accepted. "So," he writes, "by making a person extremely unhappy in this world, religion gives him a vision of god.... Which will make him even stronger in the next one. I know they are getting out of this dilemma by saying that god's goodness will give way to his justice; but the kindness that gives way to terrible cruelty is not infinite, wouldn't it be more in accordance with his kindness, reason and justice to create plants and stones, rather than to form people whose behavior can bring endless pain to the marquis de sade? A god who is insidious and evil enough to create one person and then expose him to the danger of self-condemnation cannot be considered perfect; he can only be regarded as a monster" and finally, "if you want god, let him be impeccable and worthy of respect! " This cry is constantly repeated; man created god in his own image and likeness, 10 god is either powerless or cruel; 11 give us a god worthy of respect! His hatred for the god who deceived him is furious. No opportunity is missed for insults, for ridicule, for curses, for blasphemy; taunts and insults are so strong that they tend to miss their effect. A number of black masses are described with noticeable inconsistency (at least at first glance). (An interesting remark about human weakness is that the engraving illustrating one of them is almost always torn from the first edition; the owners didn't mind reading the descriptions or admiring the naive obscenities of the other ninety-nine records; but there had to be a line drawn somewhere!) De sade really feels called upon to justify himself; the importance that others would attach to such actions is their justification. Ii instead of god, whom he could not respect, de sade enthroned nature as the primary engine of the universe; but this nature is not a consistent concept; in the fifteen years covered by his writings, the idea undergoes constant changes. In the dialogue, she is seen as pleasant, beneficent and philanthropic, something in the style of rousseau; within three years she becomes "this unknown brute" "beth", i think, carries the idea of stupidity without any moral intonation; three more years, and it's "the disorders of this stepmother, 124 god and nature nature"; until, finally, in the "new justine" she becomes something like an evil goddess, completely occupied with harming humanity, and which is best seen in the sahara desert or the crater of etna. 12 this degradation of nature is accompanied by the degradation of man and "kv". The latter changes from "you want to be yourself" to "please yourself, regardless of whose sole purpose in creation is to enjoy destruction; while a person destroys, gives free rein to all the criminal instincts inherent in him by nature, he behaves naturally, following the plans of nature; virtue and education leading to virtue are unnatural. It follows from this that, from an ethical point of view, man's mission is an endless battle with this opponent, this cannibal nature; but pleasure and pain are her weapons, and the first can be achieved only by following her will. From this personification of nature arises a version of bernard shaw's particularly unscientific worship of the "life force"-a force that possesses all the ascetic, benevolent and partly informed qualities of its inventor; de sade's version is not so personal. "As soon as man was launched to earth, he received direct laws from which he cannot deviate; these laws are the laws of self-preservation and reproduction. . Laws that affect him and depend on him, but which are in no way necessary for nature; for he is no longer a part of nature; he is separated from it. He is quite special, so much so that he is no longer useful for her progress... Or is necessary for its combinations so that he can increase his species fourfold or completely destroy it without changing the universe in the slightest. If he multiplies, he does right in his own eyes, if he reduces, he does wrong, equally in his own eyes. But in the eyes of nature it is quite another - 125 marquis de sade ferent. If he multiplies, he does wrong, because he deprives nature of the honor of a new phenomenon, the result of the action of its laws are necessarily creatures. If the ones that were launched didn't reproduce, she would launch new creatures and enjoy an ability that she no longer has. It's not that she couldn't get it if she wanted to, but she never does anything useless, and as long as the first launched creatures reproduce with the abilities they have, she won't reproduce anymore. Perhaps you will object that if this self-development ability that her beings have harmed her, she would not have given it to them... But she is not free, she is the first slave of her laws... She is bound by her own laws, which she cannot change one iota, and one of these laws is the vital urge of her creatures, once created, and their ability to reproduce themselves. But if these creatures stopped reproducing or were destroyed, then nature would regain its primitive rights. Doesn't she prove to us how much our reproduction annoys her.... The calamities with which she constantly visits us, the divisions she sows among us.... Wars and famine, epidemics and monsters, criminals like alexander, tamberlin, genghis khan, all the heroes who devastate the earth... " 14 the pope, who delivers this speech, continues to prove the equality of all things in the eyes of nature and, consequently, the inadmissibility of murder, whether as a result of passion, ritual, custom or war, by examples taken from each country. This view of nature, with all its consequences, is the most famous, in fact practically the only known part of de sade's worldview; since the new justine, by far the most famous of his books, is almost exclusively devoted to the development and application of this theory; in this book, almost all the characters are antisocial god and nature, social "natural" people, as in "juliet" they are antisocial rich people. The epigraph to the book: "in fact, a crime for the sake of justice in relation to the bizarre propensities to the inspiration of nature." Emphasizes this point. Nature develops through destruction and decomposition: "when a seed germinates in the earth, when it fertilizes and reproduces itself, is it not otherwise than through decomposition, and is not decomposition the first of the laws of generation?"15 and, consequently, human destruction and decomposition follow the laws of nature. Don't our instincts drive us to such actions, and aren't our instincts the voice of nature? 16 it follows from this that we are in no way responsible for our tastes and inclinations: "is man the master of his tastes? One should feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never offend them; their mistake is the mistake of nature; they were no more capable of coming into the world with different tastes than we are of being born ugly or beautiful." 17 and the one who gives himself most recklessly to the impulses of nature will be the happiest of all, although in our days "we are more creatures of habit than nature"18. This concept has much more ambitious results than the removal of responsibility from a person for his criminal behavior; it is a hidden and explicit criticism of the backward-looking optimism of rousseau and his entire school, including condorcet and babeuf. This completely debunks the "noble savage", with what glee de sade does not look through reports of foreign travels in search of examples of savage barbarism, lust and superstition1, as well as the idea that a person can return to justice and happiness. If the idea that a satisfactory civilization should be man-made, planned and unnatural had been able to gain popularity when the marquis de sade first formulated it, the history of the revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries would not have been so discouraging. For de sade, the savage knows only two needs: hunger and lust; 19 there is only one discriminating force, 20 resulting from the inequality of nature. "What mortal is so stupid as to claim, contrary to all evidence, that people are born with equal rights or power? Only a misanthrope like rousseau would dare to establish such a paradox, because, being very weak himself, he prefers to lower to his level those to whom he did not dare to rise himself. But how can a pygmy be equal.... Hercules?.... At the beginning of societies.... A family or village, forced to defend itself, chose among its members a person who seemed to combine the qualities (strength, intelligence, etc.) Mentioned above. As soon as the leader was given this power, he took slaves from among the weakest, when societies were created, the descendants of these first leaders, who were accused of representing their fathers, although often far from being equal to them in physical or moral qualities, continued to exercise power. Power transferred to their predecessors out of necessity; they abused it on their whim." 21 this view of the origin of society has a double advantage over rousseau's view: it is more in line with probability and places the golden age of humanity in the future, not in the past. The next two chapters will be devoted to de sade's diagnosis of modern civilization and the various remedies he has proposed. 128 chapter v politics i. Diagnosis prisons are built from the stones of the law, brothels - from the bricks of religion. W. Blake, the marriage of heaven and hell. In every cry of every man, in the cry of fear of every baby, in every voice, in every prohibition, i hear the shackles of reason. How the cry of the chimney sweep terrifies every black church; and the sigh of the unfortunate soldier flows blood down the palace walls. W. Blake, "songs of experience". I. Class division in europe, society is divided into two antagonistic classes - the haves and the have-nots. This point is so fundamental to de sade that he emphasizes it in every book. In aline and valcourt, the good king zam begins his description of his visit to europe with the words :"wherever i could divide people into two classes, both equally miserable; in one, the rich, who were slaves to their pleasures; in the other, unhappy victims of fortune; and i never found in the first a desire to be better, and in the second an opportunity to become such, as if both classes worked to the general misfortune....;! I saw the 129th marquis de sade, the rich, constantly increasing the chains of the poor, doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by others, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to carry his burden. I demanded equality, and they told me that it was utopia; but soon i saw that those who denied its possibility were the ones who would lose from it"! At. He defines his concept of these classes very precisely. "Don't think that i mean by people a caste called the tirs-etat [bourgeoisie in a limited sense]; no, i mean people... Those who can earn a living only by their work and sweat." This is the beginning of a treatise on class- the war of the extremely cruel fascist bishop of grenoble; and de sade, trying to protect himself from misunderstanding, of which he was constantly a victim, adds a footnote that says: "considering into whose mouths we put these projects of despotism and terror, our readers will not be able to accuse us of trying to please them." He deceived himself in the insight of his readers. The bishop continues: "this is the class that i would condemn to eternal chains and humiliation....; Everyone else must unite against this despicable class.... To put chains on them, because they, in turn, will be chained if they relax. He then outlines a number of repressive measures to be applied against workers and peasants, including public torture and executions, and adds: "how well will these projects satisfy the hatred of those numerous gentlemen towards this unfortunate class, whom saint-poinge, archbishop of toulouse, could not see a representative without subjecting him to insults and blows or assaulting him from his servants l" a 130 policy i. Diagnosis ii. The nature of property this class distinction is based on property; and with unusual epigrammatic brevity, de sade defined property as "a crime committed by the rich against the poor"3. But he investigated this institution more closely. "Returning to the origins of property rights," he writes, "we inevitably come to usurpation. But theft is punished only because it encroaches on the right of ownership; but this right is theft in itself, so the law punishes theft because it attacks theft, as long as there is no legally established property (which is impossible), it will be very difficult to prove that theft is a crime." 4 he accepts rousseau's premise about the social contract, but his development of this idea is individual. "When the laws were passed and the weak agreed to lose part of his freedom in order to preserve the rest, the continuation and peaceful use of his property was undoubtedly the first thing he desired and the first object of the restrictions he asked for. The stronger one agreed to the laws that he knew he could evade, and they were accepted. It was proclaimed that every person should quietly own his heritage, and anyone who encroaches on it should be punished. But this was not the work of nature, but of man, henceforth divided into two classes; the first, who gave up a quarter of his rights in order to quietly own the rest; the second, who, using this quarter and seeing that he could get the other three parts whenever he wanted, agreed to prevent, and not his class robbed the weak, but the weak robbed each other so that he alone could rob them with ease. So, theft... It was not driven off the face of the earth, but changed its shape; people robbed legally. Judges, robbed by the fact that they themselves paid for justice, which they should have done free of charge. The priest is robbed by the fact that the marquis de sade himself paid for acting as an intermediary between a man and his god. A merchant robbed by speculation when his goods were paid a third more than their real intrinsic value. The sovereigns plundered, imposing arbitrary taxes and levies on their subjects, etc. All these thefts were allowed under the plausible name of "rights", and actions were taken only against the most natural, that is, against a person who did not have enough money, and he tried to get them from those whom he suspected of being richer than him, not taking into account that the first thieves to which were not said nor words were the only reason for the crimes of the second. . . . When an unfortunate peasant, forced to sacrifice the huge taxes that you impose on him, leaves his plow, takes up arms and goes to wait for you on the highway, you commit a shameful act if you punish him; it is not his fault..." 5 iii. The ruling classes, their politics and mechanism these remarks on property are given at the beginning of "juliet" and are obviously intended to serve as a guide to understanding the motives of politicians, kings and financiers inhabiting the six volumes of this work. The first three volumes are devoted to france, the fourth to italy, and most of the fifth consists of a brief overview of the rulers of northern europe, with the exception of england. Without giving an accurate description of the whole work, it is difficult to illustrate de sade's very thorough study of the ruling classes; he exposes a system of corruption and intrigue that often reads like a description of the modern united states, along with the callousness and sanctimonious cynicism that could have served as a model for hitler's germany or our own national government- 132 diagnostic policy. The striking feature of the book is its modernity; it is difficult to realize that he describes the eighteenth, and not the twentieth century. Saint-fond's next speech, for example, could easily be part of the manifesto of one of the frankers on the tory front bench. "We are afraid," he says, "that a revolution will soon take place in the kingdom; we see its germ in too large a population. The greater the spread of the masses, the greater the danger; the more enlightened they are, the more they should be feared. First of all, we are going to suppress all free schools whose lessons, spreading too fast, give us artists, poets and philosophers where we need only workers. What is the need for such people in talents, and what is the use in giving them them? Let's rather reduce their number; france needs a strong exsanguination, and we must attack the shameful parts. To achieve this goal, we are first of all going to attack the unemployed with the greatest brutality; agitators almost always belong to this class; we are going to destroy hospitals and shelters; we do not want to leave the masses any shelter that could encourage their audacity. Chained in chains a thousand times heavier than those they wear in asia, we want them to crawl like slaves, and we will spare no means to achieve this goal. "These processes will be long," clairville said, "and if you want to act quickly, you need faster ones: war, famine, plague." "The first is certain," saint-fonds replied, "we will soon have a war. We don't need a third, because we may be among the victims. As for hunger, the shortage of grain that we are working on will first cover us with wealth, and soon lead to the fact that the masses will eat each other. The cabinet made the decision on this because it is fast, error-free and will cover us with gold." 133 marquis de sade (it may be recalled that in 1932-33 the national government attacked the principle of free secondary education and scholarships; reduced unemployment benefits with a means test; and raised the prices of bread and many other foodstuffs with tariffs, quotas, import commissions and the like. On the other hand, their preparation for war is too effective to be criticized.) Then saint-fond continues his speech praising the state, which neither hitler nor mussolini could improve. "For a long time," the minister continued, "despite the fact that i was imbued with the principles of machiavelli, i was completely convinced that individuals do not matter in politics. Secondary management mechanisms, people should work for the prosperity of the government, and not the government for the prosperity of the people. The governments occupied by the individual are weak, the only strong government is the one that considers itself for everything, and people for nothing; more or less slaves in the state are indifferent, it is important that the chains weigh heavily on the people and that the sovereign should be despotic. While rome was a democracy, she was weak and feeble; when tyrants came to power, she was the mistress of the earth. All power must be concentrated in the sovereign, and since this power is only moral, since the masses are physically more powerful, the government can acquire the physical strength it lacks only through a continuous series of despotic actions; otherwise it will exist only ideally. When we want to impose ourselves on others, we must gradually teach them to see in us something that does not really exist, otherwise they will see us as we are, and we will fail unmistakably." "I have always believed," said clairville, "that the art of managing people is something that requires maximum hypocrisy / "it's true/ 134 politics i. The diagnosis," saint-fond replied, "and the reason is obvious; you can control people only by deceiving them; you need to be hypocritical to deceive them; an enlightened person will never allow himself to behave, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment in order to lead him the way we want, and this can only be done by hypocrisy. ...The government should have more energy than the governed; well, if the energy of the governed is mixed with crime, how can you expect the government itself not to be criminal? Are the punishments applied against men anything other than crimes? What justifies them? State necessity" 6. Elsewhere, he (saint-fond) develops his desire for a plutocratic oligarchy with a slave-owning basis; 7 he gained his position by sleeping with the king's mistress. I thought it would be better to give one rather long and exhaustive quote, rather than a large number of shorter ones that i originally prepared. They all hold roughly the same opinion; they all demonstrate the same greed for money and power; machiavelli is constantly quoted; and they all demonstrate the same hatred and fear of the masses. For example, the police chief of rome plans to destroy all unemployed people on the grounds that "they are not only an accusation for an honest person, but they will also become dangerous if unemployment benefits are stopped."8 juliet" is one of the most thorough, since it is the first analysis of a money-driven society for fifty years. Noirsay, one of juliette's former lovers, gives her an income of a thousand crowns with the remark that it was intended for hospitals: "patients will have a few soups less, and you will have a few spoons more."9 and in "alina and valcourt" the judge remarks: "the happiness of being above others gives a person the right to think differently than they do; this is the first effect of superiority; the second is abuse of it.... What allows one person to betray the state of the marquis de sade of the 35th year, get rich and resign on the grounds that he is ruined (disgusting sartin), another to destroy the internal trade of france, because the absurd plan of his mistresses costs him two million (the criminal lenoir); and hundreds of other people gather together to make money on folk food, and then starve the same people by reselling the food stolen from them at a price ten times higher than its proper value." 10 these passages read as if they were excerpts from some work by upton sinclair describing the scandals with the american red cross or the operations of chicago judges and speculators. Indeed, there are certain similarities between the two authors, including the gusto with which they describe capitalist villainy; but de sade's firmer and more logical principles would never have led him to make a hero and martyr of a man like william fox. Both, for example, could notice: "he ran his business honestly; wasn't that more than enough for him to be crushed immediately?" 11 kings were at the head, at least nominally, of various states. Nominally, since in some states the real power belonged to financiers and politicians; saint-fond is more powerful than the king himself. De sade takes a quick look at the owners of more european thrones. He wrote at a time when the royal family was particularly unlucky in its representatives and rich in fools and monsters. France possessed some ridiculous louis xvi and his wife; tuscany, leopold; naples, terrible ferdinand and carolina; russia, catherine the great, a nymphomaniac and a poisoner... The list is tedious. De sade praises gustav iii of sweden to a certain extent, and to a greater extent frederick of prussia, the philosopher king; and he is silent about the policy of the king of england. De sade never takes them seriously, although his criticism is not unfounded; he shrewdly observes that if kings begin to lose trust in europe, then their humanity destroys them. 12 tyranny is accompanied by organized religion. "When the strong wanted to enslave the weak, he convinced him that god had sanctified the chains in which he had chained him, and the latter, overwhelmed by suffering, believed everything he was told."13 this point was discussed in the previous chapter, but a curious passage in aline et falcour, a discussion between a frenchman and a portuguese, is worth quoting. The portuguese complains about the damage caused by the inquisition to the trade and agriculture of his country, and the predominant place that the british have taken in their domestic trade; the frenchman advises to rebel against the inquisition: "destroy them; put these dangerous enemies of your freedom and commerce in their own chains; let the last auto-dafe in lisbon be these criminals. But if you ever had the courage to do this, a very funny thing would happen; the english, who are quite rightly the enemies of this monstrous tribunal, would nevertheless become its defenders.; They would protect him because he serves their purposes; they would support him because he keeps you in subjection they desire; it would be a story again about how the turks defended the pope from the venetians, so true is it that superstition is a powerful hand in the hands of despotism, and that our own interests often force us to force others to respect what we ourselves despise." 14. Politics and finance are summarized briefly. In two sentences: "politics, which teaches people to deceive their equals without being deceived themselves, is the science of the marquis de sade, born of lies and ambition, which a statesman calls a virtue, a public man a duty, and an honest man a vice... , " 15 " the financier told me about the tax increase, about the monstrous system of enrichment alone at the expense of many unfortunate people... Without thereby helping the state."16 war is simply a public and sanctioned murder in which hired men kill each other in the interests of tyrants. 17 this proves nothing but the ambitions of the people promoting it: "the sword is the weapon of the one who is wrong, the most common source of ignorance and stupidity."18 it's just an imperial robbery. "When bras-de-fer and his companions unite to rob a carriage, are they any different from two monarchs who unite to rob a third? Nevertheless, the latter expect laurels and immortality for crimes committed unnecessarily, while the former will receive only contempt, shame and the gallows for crimes sanctioned by famine, the most powerful of laws."19 the inconsistency of governments is ridiculed when "they publicly teach the art of killing and reward the one who is the most successful practitioner of it, and yet punish the person who gets rid of his enemy for a personal reason." 20 he had no patience for the concept of honor, whether it concerned private duels or war. "It is pride, not necessity, that makes tyrants order their generals to destroy other nations." 21 about duels, he says: "honor is an illusion generated by human conventions and customs that are simply based on the absurd; it is equally wrong that a person gains honor by killing the enemies of his country, and that he loses it by killing his own." 22 the goal of colonial expansion is to acquire cheap labor and raw materials: "as long as the wealth of the state is calculated in gold, and the mineral is in the depths of the 138-millimeter earth, labor is necessary for its extraction, therefore slavery and enslavement of negroes by whites are necessary"23 we are shown colonial expansion in action, in the person of a kind and noble delegate of the port, using all forms of lies, bribery and treachery to achieve state goals; when he acts on behalf of his prince, he can commit crimes that would make him tremble if they were personal. 24 it is clear that the great fear of the inhabitants of tamoe in the south seas is caused by european colonization. We have seen that de sade described the penetration of the english into portugal; similarly, he writes about sweden: "the english are always ready to serve those whom they think they can swallow one day, after they have disrupted their trade or weakened their power with usurious loans." 25 it may be noted that in passing i will note that de sade, apparently, had great sympathy for the british; he constantly excludes them from his repressions and praises them for their honesty. He also predicts a great future for the united states: "the republic of washington will grow little by little, like the republic of romulus, and first conquer america, and then make the rest of the world tremble"26. Iv. Their attitude towards the poor. In addition to contractual relationships, there are also emotional ties between the haves and have-nots. The feelings of the rich towards the poor can be divided into two groups: dislike and fear on the one hand, pity and mercy on the other. The first are commoners. When juliette was suddenly left an orphan and penniless, she turned to the abbess of the convent where she was educated for charity, thinking that since she had always been her great favorite when she knew that the marquis de sade was rich, she would get help when she was poor. She received a rude rebuff and at first could not understand why. "Alas," i said to myself, "why does my misfortune make her so cruel? Are rich juliet and poor juliet two different beings? .... Ah! I did not yet understand that poverty is the price of wealth, and i did not know how much it fears the latter... To what extent wealth runs away from him, and that the fear he feels that he will be forced to get rid of it leads to a strong antipathy towards him. But, i continued to ponder, how is it that this libertine, no, a criminal woman, is not afraid of the imprudence of those with whom she treats so rudely? Another childishness on my part; i did not know what impudence and shamelessness in vice wealth and credit show. Madame delbain was the abbess of one of the most famous abbeys in paris, she had an income of 60,000 livres, influence on all important people at court and in the city; to what extent should she not despise a poor girl like me, young, orphaned and penniless, who could only resist her injustice with statements that would soon be disposed of, or complaints that, being immediately regarded as slander, might have brought a girl who had the courage to them to express, the eternal loss of freedom! Very well," i said to myself, "my only plan is to try to get rich in turn, then i will be as shameless as this woman, and i will enjoy the same rights and the same pleasures." 27 her plan was crowned with success; as the mistress of saint-fond, she became excessively rich, and local hunger gave her a reason to put into practice the lesson she had learned. "People came to beg; i was firm and with great audacity embellished my refusal by justifying the huge expenses that my gardens caused me. 4 how can i afford to give alms," i said impudently, "when i have to have mirrored boudoirs in my forests and alleys decorated with statues?"88 (see further, the constant cry that crushing taxation makes it impossible to maintain large estates, and yet people are idling in luxury on unemployment benefits). This is the most common attitude; sometimes it is decorated with the pleasure that people experience from their wealth, contrasting with the surrounding poverty. This trait is most characteristic of financiers. 29 however, among others, and especially among the less wealthy, this attitude is replaced by the manifestation of the base virtues - pity and mercy. "Pity is a purely selfish feeling that makes us regret the misfortunes of others, whom we fear for ourselves. If there were a person free from all human troubles, he would not only not feel any pity, but could not even imagine it. Another proof that pity is just a passive reaction.... It lies in the fact that we are always more touched by the misfortune that happened to an unknown person before our eyes than with our dearest friend a thousand miles away. Another proof that this feeling is based solely on weakness and cowardice is that it is stronger in women and children than in men, as well as in the poor, who are closer to unhappiness. The richer, naturally, are more touched by the misfortunes that chance offers to their eyes; since these troubles are closer to them, they feel more sympathy for them..." 30 he further claims that this is an undesirable and offensive feeling. Similarly, charity is "harmful to the poor... And it is even more dangerous for the rich, who think that they have acquired all the virtues when they gave a few shillings to clergymen or idlers - a sure way to cover up their own vices by encouraging others."31 elsewhere charity is defined as a vice of pride rather than a virtue of the soul."32 de sade constantly repeats on this topic, perhaps with a premonition that in old age he will be reduced to this humiliation (despite his general skepticism of the marquis de sade, de sade recognizes as proven premonitions mind reading, biolocation, clairvoyance and fantasies of the living. 33) the attitude of the poor to the rich varies from religious and patriotic humility to complete cynicism. The poor do not figure in his works to a large extent, and they are not very eloquent. The adventurer la dubois says to the resigned justine: "the cruelty of the rich legitimizes the wickedness of the poor; let their purse be open to our needs, let humanity reign in their hearts, and virtues can be established in ours; but as long as our misfortune, our patience in supporting it, our honesty and our slavery only help to double our burden, our crimes become their work. ... It amuses me to hear how rich people, judges, magistrates preach virtue to us; indeed, it is difficult to refrain from stealing when you have three times more than you need for life, it is really difficult never to think about murder when you are surrounded by flatterers and prostrate slaves, it is terribly difficult to truly be moderate and sober when pleasure intoxicates them, and the most exquisite food surrounds them, the real test of being truthful is when they are not interested in lying /'34 later in the book, when justine, more unhappy than ever, meets la dubois, who has achieved prosperity, the latter explains: "i want equality, i only preach it. If i corrected the vagaries of fate, it is because, crushed and destroyed by the inequality of wealth and position, seeing tyranny on the one hand, and poverty and humiliation on the other, i did not want to shine with the pride of the rich, nor to vegetate in the humility of the poor."35 de sade has some extremely touching passages in which he describes the life of the poor. "An unhappy man is watering his bread with tears; a day of hard work hardly gives him enough to return to his 142-year-old family the means to save their lives in the evening; the taxes he has to pay take away most of his meager savings; his naked and illiterate children argue with the forest animals about the most disgusting food, while his wife's breasts, dried up from need, cannot give the infant that first part of the food that will give him the strength to leave, take the rest, share it with the wolves ; until, finally, bent under the weight of years, abuse and grief, always at the hand of misfortune, he sees that the end of his career is approaching, and not for a single moment has the heavenly star shone pure and serene over his humble head."36 in "philosophical dances in the boudoir," the young chevalier reproaches the libertine dolmanka: "when your body, exhausted by pleasure alone, is languidly resting on downy bedding, look at them, exhausted by the work that makes you rich, gather some straw to protect them from the cold of the earth, the surface of which, like animals, is their only resting place; look at them when, surrounded by juicy dishes with which twenty cooks tickle your sensuality every day, these poor people are arguing with wolves about the bitter roots of the dried-up earth. ; When laughter, grace and sport bring to your unclean bed the most charming objects of the temple of cythera, look at this unhappy man lying next to his sad wife, content with the pleasures he collects among tears, unaware of the existence of others; look at him when you don't deny yourself anything and swim in the midst of excess; look at him, i say, he doesn't even have the essentials for life; look at his inconsolable family; see how his trembling wife gently divides herself between the attention she owes to her husband, languishing next to her, and what is prescribed by nature for the vows of their love; deprived of the opportunity to perform any of these duties, so sacred to the sensitive mind of the marquis de sade, listen to her without trembling, if you can, ah! You refuse her out of excessive cruelty... Dolmank answers: "you're young, as your conversation proves, and inexperienced; you won't talk like that later." ," 24 it may now be easier to understand why de sade desired legally enforced promiscuity. Happiness depends on the maximum possible expansion of sexual pleasure; but his very strong respect for the rights of each individual prevents him from imagining the idea of a caste of slaves or quasi-slaves 25 (wives [and whores]) who will be the objects by which this extension of pleasure 211 marquis de sade to be obtained; and so his only solution was to grant everyone momentary rights to the body of every citizen. Logically, there is something to be said in favor of this idea, but i doubt that it is practical. De sade suffered from the universal idea that his sexual constitution belongs to the normal type. Perhaps he was more justified than most people because of the huge expansion he accepted. We still know so little about how this instinct works in "normal" people that, unless our behavior is almost criminally extravagant, we cannot imagine that other people treat us quite differently. Until "normal" behavior is statistically investigated and determined, it will be almost impossible for sincere writers not to fall into this trap. The scientific papers published so far almost inevitably concern cases that, due to their specificity, have been brought to the attention of doctors or the law (havlock ellis, aware of this contradiction, tried to collect several examples of "normal" behavior in appendices to his "psychology of sex"; insufficient results are striking) so in sexual terms, humanity seems to be divided into two camps of perverts and the rest. The falsity of this dichotomy becomes obvious as soon as a man tries to sincerely state his conclusions on paper; and we are witnessing the curious spectacle of h. G. Wells claiming that it is normal to love several women at the same time, unlike many writers who say that passions are mutually exclusive; both frank harris and bernard shaw simultaneously raise their hands in response to each other's monstrous deviation from the norm, which for the former is a rough seduction of a new woman every week, and for the latter - an easy and hardly physical flirtation about once every ten years. 212 sex, pleasure and love so far we have dealt only with physical satisfaction. De sade admits that the pleasures that can be obtained from the manifestation of virtues, such as kindness, pity or mercy, are very real, but claims that for this reason there is no special merit in them. 26 moreover, he considers the obligations of gratitude unbearable; "a person puts himself above you by a gratuitous act of kindness, hurts your pride and thereby makes you feel unforgivable humiliation."27 it may be recalled that mercy was one of the undesirable qualities that tamoe's constitution did away with. He also fully acknowledges the very great pleasures that can be derived from art; 28 he even points out the great poetry of some parts of the bible. 29 but he does not consider such joys to be incomparable with or superior to physical pleasure. However, there are three emotions that are very closely related to sexual desire, love and jealousy. For de sade, desire is sometimes as pleasant as satisfaction ("happiness is not in pleasure, but in desire and in the destruction of difficulties in the way of its realization..." 30); love is suffering and madness, jealousy is a useless insult. De sade is really very serious about love; at least three long passages, one of which occupies more than thirty pages, are entirely devoted to her analysis. However, in its intensity, this is a rare phenomenon ; i can think of only three characters in his works who persist in love after enjoyment and cognition, with perhaps the unfortunate justine as the fourth, who naturally falls in love with a "homosexual". The following definition of love seems to me adequate : v "we call love that inner feeling which attracts us, as if apart from ourselves, to some object, which makes us want to connect with it, to be constantly near it, which flatters and intoxicates us when we manage to connect in this way, and which torments us and leads us to despair, if this extravagance had never attracted us to anything other than pleasure, obtained with such fervor and intoxication, it would have been simply ridiculous.; But since this leads us to a certain metaphysics that turns us into an object of love and makes his actions, needs and desires as dear as our own, this alone becomes extremely dangerous, forcing us to neglect our interests for the sake of the interests of a loved one; by identifying us, so to speak, with this object, it forces us to accept its misfortunes and sorrows and add them to the sum of our own. In addition, the fear of losing this object or seeing that his affections have cooled constantly worries us; and from the calmest state of mind, we imperceptibly move on to the most cruel one that can be found in the world. If the reward and reward for so much suffering were something other than ordinary pleasure, perhaps i would advise you to risk it; but all the cares, torments and thorns of love lead only to what can be easily obtained without it; where then is its use? "When i meet a beautiful woman and fall in love with her, my goal is no different from the goal of a man who sees her and desires her without any love. We both want to go to bed with her; he only wants her body, while i, because of false and dangerous metaphysics, close my eyes to my true motives, which are exactly the same as my rival's, and convince myself that i just want her heart, that any idea of sex is excluded, and i convince myself so well that i would willingly agree with this woman to love her only for her sake by myself and to win her heart at the cost of sacrificing all my physical desires." 31 madame de mistival says to the girl she is raising: "you are talking about the bonds of love; may you never know 214 sex, pleasure and love for them! For the sake of the happiness i wish you, i pray that your heart will never know such feelings 1 what is love? I suppose this can only be considered as a result of the effects on us of the qualities of a beautiful object; these effects captivate us and inflame us; if we possess this object, we are happy; if we can't get it, we're desperate. But what is the basis of this feeling? Desire. And what are its results? Madness, let's stick to the motive and defend against the results. (The motive is to possess the object; very well, let's try to succeed, but with caution; let's have fun when we have the opportunity, and comfort ourselves in the opposite case; ^ thousands of other objects, similar and often much better than the one we lost, will comfort us; all men and all women are the same. ...What a deception is this intoxication, which absorbs the results of our feelings in us and leads us to such a state that we see only, we live only through the adored object! Is this life? Wouldn't it be better to voluntarily deprive yourself of all the delights of life? Is it not insisting on being in a burning fever that consumes and devours us, leaving us no other happiness than metaphysical pleasures, so similar to the consequences of insanity? If we were sure that we would always love the object of adoration and would never be separated from him, love would undoubtedly still be an extravagance, but at least it could be forgiven. But does it happen? Do we have many examples of these eternal unions that never stop? A few months of enjoyment will soon put the object in its rightful place and make us blush for the incense we burned on its altars.; Often we can't even imagine what could tempt us so much."32 de sade knew what he was writing about. He was one of those comparatively rare mortals who possess the marquis de sade's ability to fall deeply in love, and a failed love made his life miserable for nine years. Not everyone who writes in praise of this passion has so much to say. The following passage on jealousy, love and desire will complete the description of de sade's views on these topics. "I have sometimes heard myself asked if jealousy was a flattering or insulting mania for a woman, and i admit that i never doubted that since this emotion was just selfish, women would gain nothing from the effect it has on the spirit of their lovers. They are jealous not because they love a woman very much, but because they are afraid of the humiliation that may arise as a result of her infidelity; and the proof that this passion is purely selfish is that there is not a single honest lover who would not agree that he would rather see his mistress dead than unfaithful. Consequently, we are saddened by her inconstancy rather than her loss, and, therefore, we consult only ourselves in this case. From which i conclude that after the unforgivable extravagance of falling in love with a woman, the biggest thing you can do is be jealous of her. This feeling is offensive to a woman, because it proves to her that we do not respect her; it is painful for us and always useless, because it is a sure way to inspire a woman with a desire to deceive us by letting her see how afraid we are that this will happen. Jealousy and the fear of cuckolding are two things that hinder our pleasure with women; without this cursed habit of stupidly wanting to tie moral and physical things together on this issue, we would soon get rid of our prejudices. Why can't you go to bed with a woman without loving her, and can't you love her without going to bed with her? But why should the heart have r6le in a situation in which only 216 sex, pleasure and love play the role of the body? It seems to me that there are two very different desires and needs there. Araminta has the most beautiful body in the world; her sensuous face and dark eyes full of fire... They promise the greatest pleasure. What is the need for the feelings of my heart to accompany the action that the body of this being gives me? It seems to me again that love and pleasure are two very different things; that not only is it not necessary to love in order to have fun, but it is even enough to have fun in order not to love. For feelings of tenderness arise because of the similarity of temperament and taste and are in no way inspired by a beautiful breast or a well-tanned ass; and these objects, which, according to our tastes, can greatly excite our physical senses, do not, as it seems to me, have the same right to our moral feelings. To continue my comparison: jane is ugly, she is forty years old, in all her appearance there is not a single grace, not a single regular feature, not a single beauty; but she is witty and has a charming character and millions of traits that are consistent with my feelings and tastes; i have no desire to go to bed with jane, but, nevertheless, i will madly love her; i will want araminta very much, but i will sincerely hate her as soon as the fever of desire passes, because i have found in her only a body and none of the moral qualities that could win the affection of my heart for her."33 it may be added that de sade shared a family reverence for the "family" poet petrarch, whom he several times calls "the sweet singer of vaucluse"* 217 chapter viii sadism and algolagnia cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy has a human face; horror makes the human form divine, and mystery - human clothing. Human clothing is wrought iron, human appearance is a fiery forge, human face is a crucible, human heart is its hungry gorge. W. Blake, appendix to songs of innocence and experience. "It's impossible... For an engineer to destroy his own machines: it would be like a parent plunging a dagger into the heart of his child." A. Monkhouse, during his trial in moscow, april 1933. Almost a century after de sade conducted his analysis of sexual instincts and perversions, a german professor named krafft-ebing began work anew and, with a mixture of indecency and ignorance, took de sade's name for one of the perversions he described and defined sadism as "a sexual emotion associated with the desire to cause pain and use violence'; with even greater audacity, he took the name of the now living second-rate novelist sacher-masoch to give a name to masochism "the desire to be treated rudely, humiliated and ill-used/ by the way, the idea of using the names of living writers to denote sexual perversions may be 218 sadism and algolagnia funny a game, but for fear of slander, i will not continue it. Although these definitions were so unsatisfactory that they have since been modified and supplemented by almost every author on the subject, these words have come into almost universal use and have indeed been so expanded that they have become almost meaningless. Sadism is now, at least for non-professionals, practically synonymous with cruelty, and masochism is misfortune with a slight hint of pleasure; as such, they are a useless addition to an already overloaded vocabulary and simply serve to create a false impression of objective detachment and the halo of non-existent science. Seeing that the connection between sexual pleasure and pain is a single manifestation without clear dividing lines between active and passive relationships, havelock ellis followed schrenk-notzing's example in using the term algolagnia for all activities in which sex and external pain were combined. I would like to continue using this term for such manifestations and keep the word "sadism" to refer to a special group of instincts that de sade was the first and almost the only person to describe and which today constitutes his most important contribution to psychology. I am aware of the obvious ambiguity of using a word that already has so many meanings, but i do not see any way out of the dilemma; for this is de sade's contribution to the analysis, and there is no existing word to cover the questions that have arisen, and i have neither the qualifications nor the desire to invent another hybrid term. I would like to recall here the passage already quoted in chapter iii on cause and effect, in which he says: "since all things act and react to each other continuously, they produce and undergo changes at the same time."219 the marquis de sade for sadism and sex are two instincts strongly connected and equally strongly separated; each of them significantly modifies the other, but it cannot be said that one of them causes the other; they act and react continuously to each other. Sadism, as the analyst describes it, i would define as the pleasure experienced from the observed changes in the external world produced by the observer. This is a universal instinct and very strong, only following the instinct of self-preservation and sexual instincts, of which it is a manifestation and which are its manifestation. It could also be defined as "the pleasure of changes in the external world produced by the ego," but i think the first definition is clearer. It will be seen that this definition is extremely broad and covers a huge range of human activities from creating works of art to blowing up bridges, from making little girls happy by giving them sweets, to bringing them to tears by slapping them. However, it would be wrong to say that it covers all human activity, since there are two essential provisions in it; there must be reasonable modifications of the external world, and they must be the volitional product of the agent. This means that there may be sadistic satisfaction in painting a picture, but not in painting a house on the orders of another person and following the taste of another person; there may be sadistic pleasure in killing a person, but not if this murder is ordered and independent of the killer. Like all human emotions, this one is dual and can be both constructive and destructive. This can be applied to people or things, but obviously the biggest and most noticeable changes can be made to other people; and emotional connections with other people can be more or less sexual. In the sexual act itself, the changes are very strong and sadism and algolagnia are obvious; solely by your actions, a person, like the rest of the world, turns into a writhing, panting, often almost silent animal in an ecstasy of pleasure-pain. What is it? Pleasure or pain? Can an uneducated observer observing the "copulation" of people or animals tell whether the couple made love or fought, whether the spasms were unbearable pleasure or unbearable pain? In my opinion, this is a matter of degree, not difference. Any pleasure is limited by pain in its excess, sometimes on both sides, sometimes only on one side. The pleasures of temperature, for example, are limited to very narrow limits with countless degrees of pain on both sides. Some people can push the boundaries of pleasure a little; they may train themselves to enjoy bathing in water so cold or so hot that for most others it would be torment; but the limits of pain still exist. The same standard applies to the pleasures of other senses: pleasure is reduced pain, pain is absolute. What is certain is that you can effect much greater, more diverse, and more obvious changes on other people through pain than through pleasure, and therefore greater satisfaction for the agent.; And it is precisely because de sade also described these pleasures that his name and his reputation have received their current stigma from people who can understand the letter, even if they completely ignore the spirit. Precisely because pain and destruction are easier and more spectacular, de sade mainly described such actions in his characters, which he described as depicting "not a person as he is or pretends to be, but as he can be, as he is 221 marquis de sade, who is under the influence of vice and shocks all of them and because of his pessimistic view of human nature, he made destructive sadism much more common than constructive sadism. This is especially true of the new justine, the work by which he is most often judged; in a number of his other works, this feature is hardly emphasized at all. "The new justine" is first of all an attempt to explain why the revolution failed, and in everything it is colored by the fact of de sade's imprisonment for moderation. His conclusion is that a much larger number of people want to hurt and oppress their fellow human beings; the desire to help them is much rarer, although by no means absent from this work, as many commentators suggest. To illustrate this point, he lets his characters do whatever their imagination suggests; and from his view of human nature, it follows that they are mostly prone to torture, cruelty and murder. His literary conscience prevents him from presenting this almost universal human trait for him with too much monotony in all his works, the gradation and development of his revelations are most cunningly revealed bit by bit; consequently, his imagination and knowledge lead him to describe an amazing collection of tortures. Both his personal experience and historical research were used; many of the described actions have direct historical parallels with the revolutionary massacres; a number of others are taken directly from the entertainment of such people as charolais, blaise ferraget, count potocki, bullion, duke de richelieu and many others of both his own and previous eras. Indeed, one could argue that as far as the scenes of cruelty in "justine and juliet" are concerned, de sade acted not so much as a writer with a rich imagination, but as an anthologist. Although this description of torture and murder is usually considered the main originality of de sade's sadism and algolagnia, there is really very little that cannot be paralleled in fox or wright's book of martyrs; the horrors described and illustrated in this pious book are as terrible as de sade's; he simply collected facts in the form of fiction and arranged them so as to create a crescendo; but if he had done only that, he would have done a little-used job, which, moreover, would not have been condemned, but which could well have served for the secret schadenfreude and painful fantasies of a humanist, like fox for a pious protestant. Wright's description of bishop bonner's deeds, for example, almost completely coincides with de sade's dictionary of the clergy. Precisely because he went beyond religious, political or legal justifications for these actions and described with precision and insight the true motives of the executioners and persecutors, his work becomes extremely original and important.; And it is for the same reason that the authorities, who still use the same excuses for the same cruelties, have condemned and persecuted his work with such energy as they have never shown to any other writer. People who imagine that de sade wanted justine and juliet to be instigators of cruelty show unusually little insight, unless they really speak from personal experience, and find even the coldest and most objective descriptions fascinating. Even in these works, de sade did not completely ignore constructive sadism, although, with the exception of a couple of scientists, it mainly manifests itself in kindness and adornment. The more mental side of this destructive sadism is the destruction of barriers, moral or legal, and the pleasure of realizing that someone's actions or words can cause extreme suffering to other people. The search for this pleasure, the reputation of the impudent devil often 223 marquis de sade leads to seemingly paradoxical results - the immersion of the ego in self-abasement. The most obvious expression of this is the constant admission of guilt in notorious crimes by virtually innocent people. The degree of satisfaction to which this instinct strives naturally depends on the individual character and circumstances. But this is a strong and universal instinct, and if no direct satisfaction is given to it, it will seek it in devious and, as a rule, socially more harmful ways. Like the sexual instinct, randomness can cause an individual to fixate on one particular form of satisfaction. The most direct methods of satisfaction are constructive work of any kind and domination, whether in sexual, individual or social terms; the most impressive crimes related to destruction without motives, especially arson and murder. For most people, it is impossible to get enough direct satisfaction, and the lack is made up for by creative imagination, either inspired by themselves or offered by entertainment. It can be argued that mass production through machine production has eliminated much of the constructive sadistic pleasure these days. This is partially offset by the appearance of mechanical tools for private cars with rides, wireless communication, cameras that allow some people to enjoy doing something with their own hands/structurally changing the environment. But these pleasures are distributed too narrowly to create a counterbalance. There is usually very little direct destructive sadism allowed; lovers carve their initials on trees when they have trees, and nazis carve inverted swastikas on the faces of jews when they have jews; but in general, people should seek satisfaction either by identifying themselves with some larger group in society - the party, the army, the empire, or with the help of fantasy. The amount of sadistic satisfaction provided by the popular entertainment 224 sadism and algolagnia is as amazing as it is historically unprecedented. The most immediate are those entertainments in which death, sadistic destruction in its fullest manifestation, plays a potential, and often a real role - racing on various dangerous cars, dangerous acrobatics, and so on. But the forms that affect the largest audience are exteriorized fantasies, movies, and a popular novel. Cinema is becoming more and more sadistic. Film after film is immersed in reflections on successful crimes and murders or on beauty and virtue in distress - the themes of justine and juliet. What is probably the best american, and therefore the best film ever made, "i am a fugitive from a chain gang," was a complete essay on various forms of sadism. It was probably an accident, but a very significant accident that the protagonist turned from a real estate agent in his autobiography into a design engineer in the film, that his main desire was not to make money, but to build. The russian film, and russian propaganda in general, is trying to concentrate the audience's energy on the constructive sadism of dneprostroy instead of al capone. But the most impressive changes have taken place in literature. Careful consideration of murders and crime, especially gangsters, in the press, as it seems to me, is a fairly new, but very popular phenomenon. But the fantasy of sadistic crimes has dominated the novel in an unprecedented way in recent years. Before the war, there was not much room for destruction in a novel about crimes or disclosures, sherlock holmes was much more involved in robberies, counterfeiting coins, kidnapping, loss of documents, etc. Than murders; and the novels of phillips oppenheim, which are quite typical of the period of the marquis de sade, are mainly related to lost documents. But today a detective story is a murder story. I think the words "death" or "murder" occur in the title of a quarter of published books much more often than any other noun; the novels in question range from the classic contemplation of evidence with one corpse in the first chapter to orgies of bloodletting with the mechanical triumph of the law, after all. The most popular books like sexton blake keep detection to a minimum. The happy loosening of the bonds of christian "morality" and the spread of knowledge about contraceptives have weakened the requirements for vicarious sexual satisfaction; the conditions of modern life have significantly increased the requirements for vicarious sadistic satisfaction, and therefore charles garvis and eleanor glyn gave way to edgar wallace and agatha christie. As the most popular dream makers. This is a curious comment on the opinion of the ministers of the church that they should consider the contemplation of murder more moral than the contemplation of love; since the clergy often declare in the press that a detective story is much more useful than a "sexual" novel. There is one widespread type of sadist today that de sade did not foresee, the only type as far as i know; and that is the animal lover. Being the main tyrant and the fate of any animal is already a direct sadistic satisfaction; but this, apparently, is not enough. Opponents of vivisection protest against the use of animals to alleviate human suffering; and they often say, with unconscious self-disclosure, that if such experiments are to be carried out, they should be carried out on other people - murderers, communists, huns. And their constant accusations of sadism (which means pleasurable cruelty) against scientists are just as damning; "i have always noted 226 sadism and algolagnia, that people who very quickly suspect a certain type of crime are those who are addicted to it themselves; it is very easy to imagine what a person admits, but it is not so easy to understand what causes disgust."1. This generalization of de sade is very widely applicable. There is another pleasure that is usually classified as sadistic, but i think it is wrong to enjoy the contemplation of pain, suffering or discomfort of other people, which cannot be considered the work of a contemplator in any way (this should not be confused with fantasy, in which the viewer temporarily identifies himself with active sadist); this is a very real and universal pleasure, for which there is no name in english, but which the germans call schadenfreude. I don't think it's a sadistic pleasure, but the opposite of pity. One of them is sadness about the troubles that could have touched us, but did not touch us, the other is joy about the troubles that could have touched us, but did not touch us. Therefore, in my opinion, it is more closely related to the instinct of self-preservation than to the instinct of creation-destruction. De sade considered this pleasure the most barbaric of all: "then i learned that if there are some people who can take pleasure in the suffering of others under the influence of revenge or disgusting lust, there are others so cruelly organized that they enjoy the same pleasures without any other motive than the satisfaction of pride or the most terrible curiosity. Then a person is inherently evil, both in the delirium of his passions, and when they are calm, and in both cases the troubles of his neighbors can become a source of disgusting pleasures for him." 2 the criminal noirsay, advising juliette how to treat the ward entrusted to her, analyzes and distinguishes between two pleasures. "What i would do in your place," he says, "would be to have fun with this girl as much as the marquis de sade wanted, and steal her fortune, and then put her in such an unhappy position that you could increase your happiness at every moment by watching with fascination she languishes with it; as for the pleasure, it would be better than killing her. The happiness that i advise will be much stronger; for you will receive both physical satisfaction from the pleasures that you have experienced with her, and intellectual satisfaction from comparing her fate with yours; for happiness consists more in such comparisons than in actual pleasures. It's a thousand times nicer to say when you see unhappy people: "i'm not like them, and that's what puts me above them," rather than just saying, "i enjoy myself, but i enjoy myself among people as happy as me." It is the privations of others that make us feel our pleasures; among equals we could never be satisfied; that is why it is so correctly said that in order to be happy, one must always look down, not up. If then it is the spectacle of someone else's grief, a comparison with which should complement our happiness, then, obviously, we should not lighten them.. . . Not only that: we have to create the unfortunate whenever there is an opportunity to multiply this class and make one that, since it is your own work, will do much more. Sharper pleasure delivered. So.... You must force this girl to beg, and then refuse her, and thereby increase your pleasure by comparing it with a brighter and more pleasant one, since this will be your handiwork." 3 i believe that the distinction between accidental misfortune and misfortune caused by voluntary actions is justified. By the way, this passage will help explain the (probably unconscious) reactions of people who are emotionally opposed to any form of egalitarian socialism. The writer who seems to excite this kind of opposition more than any other 228 sadism and algolagnia is h.G. Wells in his "prophetic" works; from max beerbohm to the current reviewers of the shape of things to come, we constantly hear complaints that a state in which everyone could be happy and healthy would be unpleasant and uninteresting; until i read this passage by de sade, i was always at a loss why such comparatively benevolent people should so passionately oppose the imagined destruction of ignorance, disease and poverty, and that reviewers should attack what seemed to me indisputably desirable goals of wells' work, and not political prejudice in favor of a kind of liberal fascism and blind optimism, which must assume a miraculous comet or a discriminating plague to achieve these goals; but now i understand that a noble intellectual, when threatened in his only point of superiority, should be considered an antisocial obstructionist. Now there is no need to point out that the passage quoted above is taken from a novel in which de sade describes the thoughts and actions of his characters, and not his own. Ii in the extant works of de sade there is no complete definition of sadism. Whether it existed in any of his lost philosophical works can only be assumed; it is quite possible that this did not happen, since psychology as a science had yet to be invented. But, as i will try to show, he was very close to defining it; and in "juliet" he wrote a novel about sadism in action. I should have thought that the completely unsexy actions from which the characters of this novel derive satisfaction would be enough to show other readers that sadism is not just a kind of sex; for although he uses the same physiological terms to denote the satisfaction experienced, he also does it for gluttony. 229 marquis de sade the best possible example would be an excerpt from the book. The following is a case that occurred when juliette was about twenty-one years old; at that time she was at the height of her prosperity as saint-fond's mistress; he had left her alone in his country house; after seven years of increasingly unpleasant experiences, she was enjoying a little independence for the first time. She tells this story: "but in what moral state did so much wealth leave me? This, my friends, is what i dare not admit and what i still have to confess to you. The extreme debauchery in which all my senses were drowned daily has so dulled the reaction of my heart that i do not believe i would give a farthing of my treasures to save an unhappy life. About that time, a famine broke out in the neighborhood, accompanied by the greatest disasters. I was asked for alms, and i refused, pointing out the huge expenses that my gardens cause me. Analyzing my feelings, i found, as my teachers told me, that instead of an unpleasant feeling of pity, a certain pleasure caused by pain, i thought what i was doing, refusing these unfortunate people who they spread in my nerves a feeling similar to the one that occurs every time a person violates restrictions or overcomes prejudice, i felt pleasure simply by refusing to alleviate the misfortune, what would i not feel if i myself were the true cause of this misfortune? "A quarter of a mile from my house was a squalid cottage owned by a poor peasant named martin de grange, who had eight children and a wife whose common sense and economy justified her being called a treasure."Elvira, my maid, and i brought with us some boulogne sadism 230 and algolagnia phosphorus; i instructed this clever girl to distract the attention of the family, and i went and carefully hid the phosphorus in the straw in the attic above the poor room. On my return, i stroked the baby, chatted with my mother about household details; my father insisted that i eat, received me as best he could... Nothing made me hesitate... And i left, giving my mother some ribbons, and the children sweets. Upon returning home, i was in such a state that i had to ask elvira for help..... When i returned home, i was in an indescribable state; it seemed that all the disorders and vices combined together to come and corrupt my heart, i felt that i was in some kind of intoxication, in some kind of madness: there was nothing that i would not do, no vice that i would not dirty myself with. I was in despair that i had touched such a small part of humanity; i would like all of nature to feel the effects of my influence. I threw myself naked on a sofa in one of my boudoirs and ordered elvira to bring all my men to me and let them do whatever they wanted, provided they cursed me and treated me like a whore. And i was happy; the more i wallowed in filth and shame, the more my mind was inflamed and the more my delirium intensified." When we returned to my boudoir, we saw that the sky had lit up. "Oh, madame," said elvira, opening the window, "look, look! There's a fire... The fire is where we were this morning.' I almost fainted: "come on," i said to her, "i think i hear screams, let's go and enjoy a delightful sight. This is my doing, elvira, my doing. I must see everything, hear everything, nothing must escape me." We came out with our hair down, our dresses disheveled, intoxicated; we seemed like two 231 bacchantes of the marquis de sade. Twenty yards from this terrible scene, hidden behind a low hill that prevented us from being seen, hiding nothing from us, i fell back into the arms of elvira, who was almost as touched as i was. Illuminated by the murderous flames kindled by my ferocity, hearing the piercing cries of suffering and despair that my lust caused, i was the happiest of women. "Finally, we went to see the details of my crime. I was sorry to see that two of my victims managed to escape; i recognized the other corpses and turned them upside down. "All these people were alive this morning," i said to myself, "i destroyed them all in a few hours for my pleasure... And that's what murder is: a little disorganized matter, a few altered combinations, a few atoms broken up and returned to the crucible of nature, from where they will return in a few days in a different form; where is the evil in this? Are women or children more valuable to nature than flies or worms? If i take a life from one, i give it to another; where is the crime in what i do?' This little rebellion of my head against my feelings caused me another strong feeling, if i were alone, i do not know where my madness would lead me. Like the negroes, i could devour my victims. They were all piled up there... Only the father and one of the children escaped; my mother and seven others were before my eyes; and i said to myself, looking at them, even touching them... "Did i just commit these murders, is this my job and only mine? There were no traces of the house; it was hard to guess where it had once stood. "Would you believe me, my friends, that when i told clairville about what i had done, she told me that i had only shown sadism and algolagnia, playing crime, and made some serious mistakes. "First of all," she said.... * You behaved stupidly, and if someone had come, you would have given yourself away, secondly, you did it in a small way, just set fire to the cottage when there are large villages nearby, and you are left with unpleasant remorse because you could have done more and did not this; and even considering what you've done, there's another big mistake. I would have degrange prosecuted. He could have been prosecuted for inciting arson, when a fire starts in the house of one of the lower classes on your land, you have the right to have the case examined by local magistrates to make sure that he is innocent. How do you know that this man did not want to get rid of his wife and children in order to go to work elsewhere? As soon as he turned his back on you, you should have arrested him as a fugitive and instigator and handed him over to justice. With a few pounds you could find witnesses, elvira herself would be useful; she could testify that in the morning she saw this man wandering aimlessly in his attic; that she asked him about it, and he could not answer; and eight days later, you would have the pleasure of seeing this man burned at your door." 4 this typical passage is interesting for many reasons; it is even more disgusting than most, by its very probability; it is as disgusting as the burning of the reichstag in berlin on february 27, 1933, with which it bears such a striking resemblance. (I must apologize for the constant references to nazi germany, but its history in every detail is so similar to the conditions described by de sade that it seems as if you are reading the plot of an unknown novel by the marquis de sade "233", and suitable comparisons arise spontaneously.) In this incident, one can see all the typical features of the destructive sadism described by this author and committed by so many lesser people; its independence from gender and interdependence with it; its constant emphasis on the personal nature of the act; preference given to the influence of personality on other people, not on objects; and the desire for voluntary humiliation. It also contains the constant dilemma of the sadistic hero about the impossibility of a real crime. "I rationalized my fantasies too well," clervil complains. "It would be a thousand times better if i never did it; if i left them in their criminal shell, they would at least excite me, but the indifference that my philosophy causes them does not allow them to touch me anymore."5. As proust and huysmans pointed out, this is the last suffering of evil. Torture, murder and arson bring the greatest satisfaction, because they are the most perfect acts of destructive sadism; de sade, who saw the uncontrolled excesses of the nobility before the revolution and the masses during it, knew to what limits liberated human nature can reach.; And, consequently, they make up the main entertainment of the vile characters he writes about. But not the only ones; he also notes the pleasure that can be obtained by scaring people, slamming doors, or making little girls cry, making scandals or shocking people; "there is a petty triumph of one's own love in shocking people, which cannot be despised." 6 de sade believed that this human instinct, especially when it is deprived of direct satisfaction, is the most dangerous of all antisocial forces ; in order for his destructive powers not to cause too much harm, he wanted it to be 234 sadism and algolagnia channeled into sexual activity. " There is not a single man who does not want to be a despot when he is excited .... He would like to be alone in the world, any equality would destroy the despotism he enjoys then;.... If he makes others suffer, he tastes all the delights that a nervous individual experiences when displaying his powers; then he dominates, he is a tyrant; what a pleasure for his own love! " 7 " i would like women to use active flagellation, with which cruel men get rid of their ferocity. I know some people do that, but not as many as i would like. Society would benefit from this problem of female cruelty; for if they cannot be cruel in this way, they are in another and spread their poison in the world and drive their husbands and children to madness. . . . Other means by which they could calm their passions are dangerous."8 it is for this reason that, as a kind of social insurance, de sade wanted brothels to be universal, and visitors would find in them "the most complete submission with the right to arbitrary punishment in front of the guardians, any disobedience/" it would be interesting to find out whether such a policy would lead to the desired the result. It was for the same reason that he proposed the introduction of such cruel spectacles as bullfights, gladiators, boxing and wrestling. "I understand that people would be afraid at first glance of the project of such an inhumane sport. But can you doubt that they will soon become as popular as your balls and comedies? Can you doubt that your lovely ladies with their nerves and fumes would not have come to disperse them on these massacres? Porcius and cornelias wept over the tragedies of sophocles and yet they were just as ready to go to the excitement of the roman circus, such spectacles worthy of a great nation 235 marquis de sade would be disgusting to us only because our eyes were not used to them; perhaps someone would shudder from the first (tragedies); someone would crush each other to be present at the latter. Aren't our public spaces crowded every time there's a court murder? (What's very strange is that it's mostly women; then they're more prone to violence than we are, and that's because their organization is more sensitive. This is what fools don't understand.) There would be exactly the same case here. We would be really consistent if we objected to such things, while we allow so many secret atrocities. And who knows if, in this way, we would not have given an outlet to human cruelty, would not have dried up at the source of their mysterious crimes? The famous marshal de retz probably would not have killed four or five hundred children if there were spectacles on which his lust could find satisfaction. ..." 9 probably with the same intention, he drew up a plan for the presentation of gladiators. This meeting place of aristotle's catharsis and freud's sublimation is curious. From the moment he began his analysis of human behavior, de sade emphasized this desire for dominance, which, if it does not find a way out sexually, will create it elsewhere; in "120 journeys" he makes his characters talk about "the importance of despotism in the pleasures we enjoy", "the unfortunate perversion that makes us take pleasure in the misfortunes we cause others"' ; in the castle where the orgies took place, the mere sight of instruments of torture was enough to maintain "the subordination so necessary in such cases, the subordination from which almost all the pleasures of the persecutors flow." 10 and in "justine" the bloodthirsty innkeeper asks: "what is a crime? It is an action that subordinates people to us and unmistakably elevates us above them; it is an action of 236 sadism and algolagnia, which makes us masters of other people's lives and destinies . . . ." N at this stage, when a discussion of destructive sadism leads to a discussion of algolagnia, it may also be appropriate to note that although de sade practiced the latter both actively and passively, there is no reason to assume that he either practiced or wanted to practice the former; he described with precision and enthusiasm, unparalleled in the machinery of criminals, tyrants, oppressors and persecutors; but therefore he himself was not a criminal or a persecutor. He deliberately stated that such an objective description should have been scientific; he claims that the image of "the character of a man, completely naked, gives all the necessary shades for a philosopher who wants to catch them, and seeing him like this, one can confidently predict the result of the spasms of his disgusting heart and terrible passions." 12 his work, far from being a justification of crime, is a horror-filled analysis and accusation of human nature, similar to, but more dispassionate and at the same time more cruel than swift's. Algolagnia the intimate connection of sex and pain is a meeting place of sexual and constructive-destructive (sadistic) instincts. Based on de sade's analysis, it would be wrong to give priority to one of the instincts, to say that one of them was the cause of the other. All direct sexual manifestations can be regarded as sadistic acts; viennese psychoanalysts believe that all creative and destructive manifestations have a sexual origin. According to de sade and, in my opinion, correctly, these two instincts are potentially equal in strength. The role that cruelty plays in "normal" sexual intercourse has been sufficiently studied by scientists who have conducted research on such subjects, so there is no need to repeat their conclusions about love bites and similar acts. About cruelty de sade says: "this is far from a vice, this is the first feeling that nature inspires us. A child breaks his rattle, bites his nurse's breast, kills his pets long before he reaches a reasonable age. Cruelty is instinctive in animals, in which the laws of nature are much more obvious than ours, and in savages, who are closer to nature than civilized people; therefore, it would be absurd to claim that this is the result of depravity . . . Cruelty is inherent in nature; we are all born with a part of cruelty that only education changes; but education is not natural; it contradicts nature to the same extent as cultivation. Cruelty is nothing but human energy, not spoiled by civilization."13 he continues: "we usually distinguish between two types of cruelty; that which is born of stupidity, which is never analyzed or reasoned and likens a person with such a physique to a wild beast, and the other, which is the result of excessive sensitivity of the organs, is known only to extremely delicate people, and the excesses to which it leads them, just their refinement delicacy, too quickly violated by their excessive sensitivity and which, in order to sharpen their feelings, uses all the resources of cruelty. How few people understand these differences... How few feel them! But they exist and there is no doubt/'14 it is possible that de sade described himself in this last passage. There is no doubt that his sensitivity was excessive; this is evidenced only by his extreme devotion to art and his high appreciation. And it was his excessive horror of even minor and usually unnoticed cruelties, in addition to sexual arousal, that led him to a sweeping condemnation of humanity in "justine and juliet", as well as endless attacks on the church and 238 sadism and algolagnia in the state. Cynicism was an ill-fitting protective mask. His attempt to analyze algolagnia for us is largely devalued by his ideas of physics and anatomy; nevertheless, i think it is of sufficient interest to give it in some detail. Saint-fond asks noirsay to explain how you can have fun watching others suffer or suffering yourself. He responds as follows: "according to the definition of logic, "pain is simply a feeling of disgust that the soul feels for certain movements that contradict the construction of the body that it animates," that's what nicole says; he distinguished in man the airy substance, which he called the soul, from the material substance, which we call the body. Since i do not recognize this edification and see in man only a completely material animal, i will say that pain is the result of the lack of connection of foreign bodies with organic molecules of which we are composed; so instead of the atoms released by these foreign bodies binding to the atoms of our nervous fluid, as happens with the movement of pleasure, they only show their rough sides, prick and repel those that belong to our nervous fluid, and never mix with them. And yet, although the effects are repulsive, they are always effects, so that regardless of whether we get pleasure or pain, there is always a certain movement of the nervous fluid. What will prevent this agitation of pain, much stronger and more active than the other, from eventually arousing in this liquid the same heat that arises from the mixing of atoms released by objects of pleasure? And being driven for the sake of emotion, what prevents me from habitually getting used to being as satisfied with the emotion caused by the repulsive as with sympathetic atoms? Having become jaded by the effects of those who simply produce a 239 marquis de sade simple sensation, why don't i train myself to get the same pleasure from those whose effect is acute? Both emotions are perceived in the same place; the only difference is that one of them is soft and the other is strong; but isn't the latter much preferable to the former for the people of blas? Don't we see people every day who blame their taste for the irritation they like, next to others who could not support such irritation for a moment? Now, isn't it true (since my hypothesis is accepted) that it is a habit of a person in his pleasures to try to move objects that serve these pleasures in the same way as he moves himself, and that these actions are what in the metaphysics of pleasure is called "the consequences of his delicacy"? Then isn't it just that a person with such an organization, as we have described, using the same processes as ordinary people, and guided by the same principles of delicacy, imagines that he will evoke emotions in his partner by the same means that affect him? He acts exactly the same as the others; i agree that the results are different, but the initial motives are the same... Both use for their partner the same means that they themselves use for pleasure. "But," the man replies, driven by cruel pleasure, "i don't like it." Very well; it remains to be seen whether i can force you or not. If i can't, go away and leave me; if, on the contrary, my money, my credit, or my position give me some kind of power over you or some confidence that i can suppress your complaints, endure whatever i want to impose on you without saying a word, because i have to have fun, and i can't get it without tormenting you and without seeing your tears. Flow. But in no case be surprised and do not blame me, because i follow the movement inherent in me by nature, and by forcing you to share my cruel sadism, algolagnia and cruel pleasures, the only ones that can lift me to the top of happiness, i act with the same purpose. The principle is like an effeminate lover who knows only roses feelings, of which i recognize only thorns. ; For by torturing you, i am doing the only thing that moves me, just like he does by making sad love with his mistress 4 * you want to make your partner feel not pleasure, but the impressions you want to make; pain is much stronger than pleasure, and it is indisputable that it is better that the excitement produced on our nerves by this foreign spectacle be caused by pain, not pleasure. A person wants to cause a strong excitement in his nerves; he understands that the pain will be much stronger than the pleasure; he uses it and is satisfied. "But," the fool will object, "beauty softens the heart, it's interesting; it's an invitation to gentleness, to forgiveness; how can you resist the tears of a pretty girl who, with folded hands, begs for mercy from her executioner?" But really... It is from this state that the libertine we are talking about gets the most pleasure; he would be very upset if he were working with an inanimate object that feels nothing; the objection is as absurd as if a person told me that one should never eat mutton because a sheep is a meek animal. V the passion of lust desires to be served; she is demanding, tyrannical, she must be satisfied with complete abstraction from any other considerations. Beauty, virtue, innocence, sincerity, poverty - none of these can serve as a protection for the object we crave.) (On the contrary, beauty excites us more; innocence, sincerity, virtue add even more charm; poverty gives us our sacrifice and makes it pliable; so all these qualities only serve to inflame us even more, and only the marquis de sade's 241 q can be considered as another means of inflaming our passions. In addition, there is another barrier that needs to be overcome; there is a kind of pleasure that we get from blasphemy or worship of the objects offered for our worship. This beautiful girl is an object of reverence for others; by making her the object of my most acute and violent passions, i get a double pleasure by sacrificing to this passion a beautiful object and an object worthy of public respect. Is it necessary to reflect on this thought longer in order to feel the delirium that it provokes? But a person does not have such a goal at hand every day; and yet he is used to playing the tyrant and would like to be him always; very well, you need to learn how to compensate yourself with other small pleasures; cruelty towards the unfortunate, refusal to help them, an action aimed at plunging them into misery themselves, are in some way substitutes" 15 there are several interesting points in this long speech put into the mouth of the criminal. The most curious thing is that the passive algolagnia should precede the active one. It is also interesting to observe the transition, very cunningly marked and developed, from active algolagnia to destructive sadism; when from direct sensual gratification, noir-seil proceeds to consider the effect that such an act would have on other people; until in the last paragraph he reaches a completely sexless sadistic satisfaction. I have already said that the concept of constructive-destructive sadism is de sade's most important contribution to psychology. It also has an extremely wide application. Recognizing its existence together with the existence of sex, we get an understandable explanation for many human actions and suffering. This will explain the arsonist and the unmotivated murderer; it will explain the annoying harshness and malicious incitement of scandals by wives and teachers, the cruelty of 242 sadistic and algolagnian fathers, imperialists and revolutionaries. This will explain the terrible fact that whenever people gain unlimited power over their fellow men, whether in revolution or counter-revolution, in prisons in america, guiana, morocco, poland, hungary, germany, or due to their position among the races, they are allowed to consider themselves inferior in the colonies, in putumayo, in in the belgian congo, in polish ukraine, or among non-aryans in germany, or due to their position and wealth, as in cuba or in the states of native indians, they will practice the most disgusting tortures on their victims, and tortures that receive a greater or lesser, and usually a greater sexual connotation. And this not only explains these horrors, but also offers a possible solution; if you can educate all people and give them the opportunity for constructive sadism, you may be able to end the unnecessary suffering that human beings are now happy to inflict on their fellow human beings. 243 one more judgment one more judgment must be considered by de sade in three different aspects in order to be able to make any judgment about him as a person, as a writer and as a thinker. We know too little about his life to be able to make any final statement without arrogance; his main qualities, apparently, were great charm, courage, quick temper, kindness, greed, very strong idealism combined with sensitivity, which suffered from the slightest encroachments on the individuality of any person, enterprising and extremely highly developed erotic temperament and passionate love of justice. It was these last two qualities that led him into trouble, completely disproportionate to any offense. All the harm that has ever been recorded against him is that he caused several women discomfort or discomfort for several days; i don't want to whitewash him, but twenty-seven years in prison and the "bitch of life", as his valet called it, are so disproportionate to his crimes that it has forever taken away from posterity the right to condemn. He treated his wife very badly, who loved him and helped him as much as she could; but it was not without reason that he considered her the indirect cause of all his misfortunes. Phrenologists were closer to the truth than usual when they said that his skull displayed the usual mixture of vices and virtues, benevolence and criminality, but that the bumps of tenderness and love for children were developed to an almost unprecedented degree. As a writer, de sade suffered from three serious shortcomings: too much volume, excessive stretching and the inability of 247 marquis de sade to shorten his work. A person who can write more than adequately in all styles will not write very well in any of them. But his quickness was his main curse; he developed, reinterpreted and expanded the same themes in his works over and over again; and at every step he added something to his books until they grew to an incredible size. Too rarely did he rule out an incident. This is the main reason why, despite their unprecedented gloomy grandeur, his works are often boring, and also, perhaps, the reason why his rough sketches from a literary point of view are the most satisfying of his works. I hope that this book is sufficient proof of the breadth of his interests and great originality as a thinker. Like any other person, he could adopt terence's nihil humani a me alienum puto technique. Ii the reflection that has often occupied me is who de sade would be and what he would do today if he were alive and at the peak of his power. The influence of judeo-christianity, although still quite sinister, is now on the defensive; for an ever-growing number of people and in almost all branches of knowledge, it has disappeared as a force to be reckoned with; it would no longer need to expend so much vitality and energy on this attack. The uncharted lands of scientific socialism, psychology and the study of sex that he first explored are now well developed and built up; indeed, in some parts they resemble slums. Since his interests were entirely related to man as an individual and as a social being, he would probably still continue to study these three subjects, which were no longer outlawed and taboo. The only living person i can think of who is at least a little like him in terms of breadth of interests, and i mean this as a compliment to both people, is 248 another judgment of havelock ellis; but, as far as i know, the latter has never been particularly involved in politics. I cannot decide whether he will like the communism of lenin and stalin. From a political point of view, it tries to implement almost all of his favorite ideas; and it has in many ways made the life of a soviet citizen more free from unnecessary hassle and worry than any other system. I do not know whether he will consider these achievements sufficient to compensate for the almost complete extinction of individuality in the state. What is quite obvious is that his duty would still be to write to justine and juliet. The century and a half that has passed since they were first written has more than justified his darkest predictions; fate, which has always treated him with great irony, has never been more harsh than when it marked the centenary of his death with the outbreak of the european war. He would no longer have to dig through classical literature for examples of gratuitous cruelty and oppression; the daily press would provide him with enough examples. The following two clippings, taken at random from a series that took place during the writing of this book, give sketches of completed plots for further sadistic works. The first is taken from the week-end review of august 1-9, 1933, the second from reynold's with an illegible date later that month. "Most of the post-war political history of germany was overshadowed by the shadows of these people, who, without fear of any crimes, are almost all pathological cases, sadists, drug addicts, homosexuals. One of them is edmund haines, the leader of the silesian sa. Who was sentenced to death for murder in stettin. ...Haines organized sensational bomb explosions in silesia in july 1932 and a brutal murder in potempe, where a worker was tortured to death in front of his wife. The other is 249 marquis de sade, oberleutnant schultz, leader of the berlin sa, former commander of the "black reichswehr", proven by german courts as responsible for at least half a dozen murders, who was in prison for a long time. The third is captain von killinger, the leader of the sa. In saxony, who participated in the murders of erz-berger and rathenau and is known for his book "fires and serious side effects of the putsch", in which he describes in unprintable (sic) terms how he ordered the flogging of a young girl. To the same circle belong the leader of the sa, count helldorf, the chief of staff of the sa in munich, rehm (known for his homosexuals with children of tender age) and others, including until recently the bavarian sa. Leader george bell bell later came into conflict with the remaining accomplices (of the reichstag arson), fled to austria and was killed there by pursuing agents sent by gaines." The second clipping refers to the maharaja of patiala. "This document, based on the testimony of witnesses, alleges that the maharaja exerted pressure, amounting to kidnapping, on wives and girls from poor families to encourage them to enter his harem. Husbands and fathers who protested were imprisoned and in some cases tortured. The maharaja and his european friends hunted for growing crops and banned the destruction of wild animals, so that two-thirds of the country's agricultural output was wasted. After the indictment was published on april 14, 1930, the patiala government issued a statement saying that the charges were so serious that they could not be left unanswered and that steps would be taken to restore the maharaja's honor as soon as possible. During his visits to london, the maharajah always lavished money on luxury, which contrasted sharply with the appalling poverty of his possessions, where masses of people say they are "too poor to marry." Out of curiosity, i started collecting relevant clippings from the very unsensational daily and four weekly newspapers that i receive, but in a very short time the collection became too cumbersome, even for another court decision, although i excluded the crimes against which a legal charge was brought. Only industrial sadism, especially during this period in america, reached orgiastic heights. The main difference since de sade's time lies, firstly, in the scale of operations, and secondly, in the fact that his millionaires justified the means by which they made their fortunes using the loot for their pleasures, while ours accumulate for the sake of accumulation. Perhaps it is important that the majority of our millionaires are protestants, more than ever, today it would be de sade's duty to bring his black accusation against man and against society, and today, as before, the only answer he would receive would be the persecution, suppression and destruction of his work. 251 bibliography and references bibliography and references. I do not propose to give a complete bibliography of various editions and unpublished manuscripts of de sade, since this has already been very adequately done in three standard reference books about him: eugene dtikhren (ivan bloch): marquis de sade and the time of the seine: marquis de sade and the son of time. (Harsdorf, 1901, in french and german.) The new forschungen, killing the marquis de sade. (Harsdorf, 1904, in german only.) Guillaume apollinaire: the work of the marquis de sade. (Cure's library, collection of amorous maitre d', paris, 1909.) In addition to a very good introduction and bibliography, this volume contains the only available selection of de sade's works. Its quality is hindered by the tone of the series in which it appeared, but it has good examples, and especially the very important brochure franfais, encore un effort si vous voulez etre republicains! In full. K. R. Dawes: marquis de sade. (Holden, london, 1927.) Numerous other works about him contain little that is truthful or relevant, which is not in these three. The following list includes, as far as i know, all of de sade's published works. I have given it, as far as i can tell, in the order in which it was written. The editions that i used are indicated in capital letters so that i can check the links. It will be seen that there are several works that i could not track. There are some of his books in the british museum, but they are not catalogued and are under pledge and seals, for the issuance of which, as i was told, the presence of the archbishop of canterbury and two other trustees is required. Marquis de sade 1. The plot of the play zelonida. Written in 1782. Not intended for publication. The play entitled "sophie and de france" was unanimously accepted by the comedie francaise in 1790, but it was never staged. Published by maurice heine in mino- tjure, no. I, march 1933. 2. Dialogue before and after death. Written in 1782. Edited by maurice heine, published by stendhal et al. 1926.3. The diaries of sodom and the school of liberty, written in august and september 1785. First published by eugene duren in 1904. Reprinted by maurice heine, published by stendhal et al. 1931. Only volume i. 4. "The misfortunes of vertu" is the first version of "justine", written in june-july 1787 and not intended for publication. Edited by maurice heine, published by editions fourcade in 1930. 5. Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu> written in 1788, first published in 1791. Two volumes. 6. Contes and fablio from the "troubadour of provence" of the xviii century. Fifty stories written before october 1788. Of these, eleven were published during his lifetime under the title crimes of love, the twelfth by anatole france in 1881, and another twenty-five were edited by maurice heine and published by simon krah under the title historical chronicles, stories and fabliaux, 1927. I have also read ernestine and the double epreve (cabinet of life, 1926), juliette and raunai in crimes of love, brussels, gay and douce, 1881, and miss henrietta stralson in the work edited by apollinaire quoted above. 7. Alina and valcour on roman philosophy. Written in 1788, first published in 1792. Published by j. J. Gay, brussels, 1883, four volumes. 8. The play "oxtierne about the boy of freedom", staged in 1791, published in 1801. 9. "Conversations about the holiday" in the section "piquant manners of marat and le pelletier", 1793. Quoted by dawes. 256 bibliography i o. Petition of the section of pickets of representatives of the people. 1 1 . The idea of a sanctions regime against louis. 1,795 ? Quoted by j.J. Apollinaire. 12. Juliet on the prosperity of vice. Written in 1790?- 1796? First published in 1796, the final edition in 1797. My copy is a reprint in jn dat format, as evidenced by the presence of the author's name on the frontispiece, but the page numbering is the same as in the final edition. Six volumes. 13. Philosophical dance in the boudoir. The first edition of 1795. My : opy is an undated poor and unpleasant imprint of two volumes. In-i6, of 206 and 247 pages. In vol. I, [dialogue i begins on page 9, dialogue ii on page 27, dialogue iii on page 30 and dialogue iv on page 188; vol. Ii opens with dialog v (pam- )hlet (pp. 83-179), dialog vi begins on p. 202, and dialogue vii is on page 209. 14. The new justine. Written and published in 1797. My copy is, if not the first, then a very early edition. >the agitation is the same as in the final edition. Four volumes. 1 5. An idea for the romans. Published as a preface to "crimes of love". 1 800. This and the following pamphlet are reprinted in "crimes of love", gay et douce, 8ruxelles, 1881. 1 6. The author of crimes of love in the village and the follicle. Written and published at the beginning of 1801 17. Gold and his assistants, about the decades of life of trotsky joliy women. Written and published in the fall of 1800. My edition is bibliotheque des curieux (coffret du bibliophile) 1912. 1 8. The couplets are sung by the son of the eminence le cardinal mori, le 3 october 1 8 1 2,