SOURCE: "Sade and His Critics," in The Marquis de Sade, Twayne Publishers, 1984, pp. 122-32.

[Lynch has published several books and articles on eighteenth-century French literature. In this excerpt, he reviews the influence of Sade's writings and his critical reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.]

Sade in the Nineteenth Century

Sade's last three contributions to literature, the trilogy of historical novels, did not attract much attention, a fact that is quite understandable when one recalls that two of them remained unpublished until 1953-54. But Sade's reputation had already been fixed at the turbulent conclusion of the eighteenth century, and we have seen ample proof of its "infamous" nature. Furthermore, when we compare the literary trends which dominated the first part of the nineteenth century to the content of Sadian fiction, we can readily understand the relative silence on him before 1860. Although the restored Bourbon regime and the July monarchy were not as overtly stifling as their counterparts in England, they were no more receptive to Sade's intensity than revolutionary Paris had been. Claude Duchet's article, "L'Image de Sade a l'epoque romantique," explains Sade's anonymity for almost fifty years. Other than the 1834 study by Jules Janin on Sade, which was condemnatory and which drew enough public attention to justify a separate reprint, the Marquis de Sade was relegated to infrequent quips and references in journals and personal diaries. Such is the case with Benjamin Constant, who observed in a note in his Journal intime in 1804: "The novel Justine is not in the least an exaggeration of human corruption." Curiously, Sade himself had foreseen the unflattering treatment which his best work would receive when, together with the name of his nemesis Villeterque, he cited those of Mme. de Genlis, Chateaubriand, and La Harpe in his Notes litéraires. In 1840, the young Flaubert recommended to Ernest Chevalier: "Read the Marquis de Sade and read him to the last page of the last volume; that will complete your moral education." In contrast, Stendhal limited himself to several uncomplimentary associations between Sade, Eugene Sue, and François Cenci, in 1834.

A few years later, Sainte-Beuve, one of the greatest literary critics of them all, published an item entitled "Quelques verites sur la situation en litterature" in the Revue des deux mondes. After citing traces of Sade's influence on several writers of the period, Sainte-Beuve set forth this observation: "I dare ascertain, without fear of being contradicted, that Byron and Sade—and I beg forgiveness for the association—are perhaps the two greatest sources of inspiration for our moderns, the first being ostensibly visible, the second clandestine, but not too clandestine." Sainte-Beuve's judgment is astute for two reasons: its date (I July 1843) marks the beginning of an increase in visibility for Sade, and second, his presence in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century was felt primarily among poets. The most frequently cited instance is that of Algernon Swinburne, who came to know Sade through the intermediary of Lord Houghton, the latter having provided the poet with pornographic works of all kinds, including some by Sade. In a letter to Houghton of July 1865, Swinburne recognized his debt to the French author: "The poet, thinker and man of the world from whom the theology of my poem ["Atalanta"] is derived was greater than Byron… He indeed, fatalist or not, saw to the bottom of gods and men." Swinburne also wrote a long poem in French, "Charenton en 1810" (written in 1861, published in 1951), and an "Apologie de Sade," also in French (written in 1916, printed for private circulation).

It is among the poets of the latter nineteenth century that one would expect to find the greatest recognition of Sade's importance, and such is precisely the case with Baudelaire and Verlaine. Baudelaire, the father of modern poetry who emphasized sensations and sensitivity, the diabolic and the occult in his unprecedented and unrivaled verse, did not dwell at any length on his debt to Sade. In his "Projets et Notes diverses," however, he wrote one memorable sentence: "One must always come back to Sade, by that I mean to Natural Man, in order to explain evil." Verlaine was more explicit, in four lines from the poem "A Gabriel Vicaire":

I am a sensualist, you are another.
But you, gentle, riant, a Gaulois and a half.
While I am the shadow of the Marquis de Sade, and this I am
Among the occasional false and naive airs of a good apostle.

Verlaine's personal anxieties and sexual frustrations and eccentricities cannot be totally attributed to his reading the Marquis de Sade; the same can be said of Swinburne. We prefer to think that some of the more refined literary and philosophical aspects of his volumes were involved in the process of influencing later authors, but detailed studies of this type of influence have yet to be done.

Sade in the Twentieth Century

The poets of the first part of the twentieth century continued to stress the importance of the Marquis de Sade in the formation of their literary ideas and their manner of expression. This applies to the most unique poet of the first two decades of this century, Guillaume Apollinaire, who was directly responsible for resurrecting Sade. In 1909, Apollinaire prefaced a partial edition of Sade, L 'Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade, pages choisies, with a fifty-seven-page essay entitled "Le Divin Marquis." In it, he wrote a biographical sketch of Sade, provided synopses of his major writings, corrected the denunciations and misconceptions of Sade which had surfaced in the preceding century, and concluded with a citation from Sade: "I address myself only to people capable of understanding me, and these people will read me without danger." Apollinaire's approach to Sade inaugurated a positive trend that has continued to the present. We have already indicated the 1904 edition of Les 120 Journes de Sodome by Iwan Bloch, which associated Sade with Krafft-Ebing and his Psychopathia sexualis. The positive trend was pursued foremost by two scholars, Gilbert Lely and Maurice Heine, whose efforts resulted in several major editions of Sade's works and included a wealth of material previously unedited. Lely was so taken with the importance of Sade and so obsessed with his efforts at restoring him to dignity that he reputedly left a place setting, albeit a vacant one, for Sade at his dining table. His encyclopedic contributions to Sade studies culminate with a poem, "Sade," and which concludes thus:

We believe in the revolt of Rimbaud, in that of Lautreamont and of Sade.
We believe in the value of Poetry, of Love and of Liberty.
We believe in the Surrealist Revolution.

Paperback editions of Sade continue to appear regularly in France, notably in the 10/18 series. The 1957 Pauvert edition of Sade's opus, and the ensuing trial which ended in the deletion of the more controversial writings, are symptomatic of the continually troubled reception of the "Divine Marquis" by the public. Regarding that trial, one should at least mention that testimony in favor of the unexpurgated publication of Sade was given by writers such as Georges Bataille, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Paulhan. The indebtedness of Breton and other poets to Sade antedates 1957 by many years, however. Sade was indeed the "Right Person for Surrealism." Emphasizing revolt, nihilism, and a search for new orientations in art by means of outrage and shock tactics, these writers appropriately singled out Sade as one of their apostles. In the first Manifeste du Surrealisme (1924), Breton included Sade in his famous enumeration of precursors: Sade was "surrealistic in Sadism," as Swift was in mischief, Chateaubriand in exoticism, and so on. In the second Manifeste (1930), Breton eulogized Sade again for the perfect integrity of his thought and life. He continued to praise Sade in his Anthologie de l'humour noir, and later made it known that the "Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surrealisme, 1959-1960" had been organized under the aegis of the Marquis de Sade.

Other members of the surrealist group continued the homage which Breton paid to Sade. Rene Char published a "Homage a D. A. F. de Sade" in 1931, and identified Sade and Lautreamont as the cornerstones of his system of thought. Similarly, Paul Eluard explained Sade's insistence on virtue punished as an effort to return man to his primitive instincts, as opposed to the respect of traditional Christian values, which only perpetuated moral enslavement (Evidence poetique, 1939). Sade's name and his radical literature entered not only the polemical writings of dadaism and surrealism; he also penetrated the realm of painting. Rene Magritte executed an interpretation of La Philosophie dans le boudoir, and Man Ray painted a stylized portrait of Sade in which the rugged stones of the Bastille fortress are blended into the subject's face.…

The specific questions of direct influence by Sade on modern writers, both French and non-French, are yet to be answered. One of the more obvious areas where such influence should be found is in the theatrical writings of Antonin Artaud; according to Ronald Hayman, Artaud's idea for a Theater of Cruelty was based on Sade's principles. But before a comprehensive account can be made of the degree of Sade's penetration into the ideas and expressions of major contemporary writers, we must content ourselves with occasional manifestations of indebtedness. Such is the case with Albert Camus who, like Baudelaire, briefly but poignantly acknowledged the importance of Sade: "With him really began the history and the tragedy of our times." Aldous Huxley's evaluation of Sade is almost identical. In his note on Sade in Ends and Means, he wrote: "De Sade's philosophy was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Life was without significance … His books are of permanent interest and value because they contain a kind of reductio ad absurdum of revolutionary theory.… De Sade is the only completely consistent and thorough-going revolutionary of history." When one recalls the pessimistic social and political atmosphere of 1930-40, one can appreciate why the name of Sade was quoted in this manner by Huxley and Camus.

More recently, two leaders of the nouveau roman phenomenon of the 1950-60 period contributed essays on Sade: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. Sade has even been commemorated in film. Luis Bufiuel's 1930 surrealist film, L'Age d'or, contains a scene derived from Les 120 Journées de Sodome. In that scene, the Duc de Blangis appears as a Christ-like figure who offers help to a young girl. For this scene and others, the film elicited such a scandal that it was withdrawn from public circulation in 1934. Similar to the 1957 trial of the Pauvert company, the surrealists circulated a questionnaire defending the Buñuel film; it was signed by Aragon, Breton, Char, Dali, Eluard, Ernst, Man Ray, Tzara, and others. In 1975, the Italian cinema director Pasolini produced a film entitled Salo, ou les 120 Journées de Sodome. As one can easily imagine, the life and legend of the Marquis de Sade have also fostered the production of a series of x-rated films (Justine, De Sade).

One of the most penetrating accounts written on Sade by modern authors is Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-it bruler Sade? Together with the insights mentioned previously in the course of this study, Beauvoir compares Sade's biographic and literary situation to that of Oscar Wilde, another author whose personal behavior and writings were viewed as being so outrageous that public humiliation and ruin were the results. The case of Wilde shows that even one hundred years after Sade, unconventional private behavior, when made public (what is labeled outrage aux moeurs in France), can entail the most dire of consequences for an author.

Since 1945, the number of books and articles written on Sade has multiplied rapidly, each year witnessing dozens of essays, commemorative issues in serials, and books. It is no mere coincidence that some of the most perceptive and most highly regarded analyses of him have been from the structuralist point of view. The cyclical nature of Sade's fiction, his verbal aggression, and the need to say all about the previously ineffable, make Sade a likely candidate for such an approach. As indicated in the discussion of Sade's philosophical treatises, the structuralist psychologist Jacques Lacan was the first to point out the kinship between Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Sade's thought, and the relationship between crime and pleasure derived therefrom. Roland Barthes, in his essay "L'Arbre du crime" (in the winter 1967 edition of Tel Quel devoted to Sade), and in his Sade, Fourier, Loyola, used a topical approach to identify the significance of things in Sade's linguistic system: food, clothing, mirrors, among others. Pierre Klossowski has been cited twice in the course of this study. If we had to reduce his abundant criticism on Sade to several cardinal points, they would be the following: (1) the relationships between the Sadian conscience, God, and fellowman are negative, but to the extent that these negations are real, they introduce the very notions which they suppress; without the notions of God and fellowman as points of attack, there can be no Sadian conscience; (2) Sade's use of the word vertu, as is amply done in Justine, La Nouvelle Justine, and Juliette, does not automatically translate as its closest equivalent "virtue," but rather as a primordial virginity which is the focus of Sadian oppression; (3) the idea of delectatio morosa, that is, the desire for death by those who are incapable of finding it, is frequently manifested in Sadian characters, and again, a seemingly negative exponent becomes a positive, creative one.

Two other critics of structuralist affiliation have contributed significantly to our understanding of Sade today. Georges Bataille, who testified at the Pauvert trial in 1957. prefaced La Nouvelle Justine with an essay, "Sade et l'homme normal" (6:45-65). Like Barthes and Klossowski, Betaille concentrates on Sade's langage; using La Philosophie dans le boudoir as his point of reference, Bataille arrives at a different conclusion. Since the language of normal men opposes the expression of violence, violence itself must be suspended when the discursive element of Sade assumes priority, and the resultant situation is, as illustrated in La Philosophie dans le boudoir (and in all of Sade's other extreme works), the dual structure of action (sex) interrupted by lengthy philosophical discourse. According to Bataille, Sade's language is more than that of a man revolting against confinement or against a few particulars; it is an assault against all of humanity.

The only major nineteenth-century writer not examined previously and who felt the influence of Sade is Lautreamont (Isadore Ducasse). In another monumental work of Sadian criticism, Lautreamont et Sade (1963), Maurice Blanchot is less preoccupied with the question of direct influence than with affinities between the two, although he does list obvious areas of influence. Like Philippe Sollers, in his 1967 Tel Quel article "Sade dans le texte," Blanchot concentrates on a passage of vital importance in Julieffe, where Clairwil offers her definition of the perfect crime:

I would like, said Clairwil, to find a crime whose everlasting effect would continue to act, even when I would no longer be acting, so that there would not be one single moment in my life, even when asleep, during which I would not be the cause of some disturbance, and this disturbance could extend to the point of causing general corruption or so formal a disruption that its effect would be prolonged beyond the limit of my life.

To this desire of the utopian, self-perpetuating crime, Juliette responds: "In order to complete this project, my angel, I responded, I see few alternatives other than what can be called moral assassination, which is realized through counsel, through writing, or through action." From this and other glans of verbal rebellion, we can see why Sade has had a captive audience among recent critics and why, as early as 1909, writers like Apollinaire spoke of Juliette as a new woman with "wings" who breaks loose from the rest of humanity… Sade's depictions of human sexuality, femininity, and masculinity are at times as credible as Lautreamont's hero Maldoror, who copulates with a female shark. We have already seen that to the extent that Sade was fascinated with feminine beauty, his numerous portraits of women pose many problems of credibility. Sade's violence is indeed that of language. If he were interpreted literally, there would be no survivors left to read him.

For these and other reasons, it is not surprising that the majority of studies on Sade which have appeared in the last few years have been authored primarily by women. The problem of cruelty to women in his fiction is bound to provoke reactions of one form or another.… [These recent studies] are not necessarily feminist criticisms; nor are they merely "corrected" views of Sade's treatment of women. Alice Laborde has traced the evolution of Sade's most famous work from the draft of Les Infortunes de Is vertu through the definitive Justine and La Nouvelle Justine, and has also shown that to the degree that the text is amplified, its plausibility decreases. Beatrice Didier has explained the nature and function of the chdteau interieur motif in Sade's principal works.…

Dictionaries and biographies have a rather significant role in determining the manner in which an author becomes known to the general public. In the third chapter of this study, the hostility against Sade of Michaud's Biographie universelle was noted, and even against the relatively innocuous texts Aline et Valcour and Isabelle de Baviere. The publication date of Michaud's biography (1854) shows that its negativity corresponds to the generally hostile reception of Sade at that time. The Petit Larousse dictionary is probably the most popular of all French dictionaries. Its encyclopedic section contained no entry on Sade until 1935. That particular edition tersely introduced Sade with: "Sade (Marquis de), famous for his morbidly obscene novels, born in Paris (1740-1814)." The Petit Larousse entries on Sade improved commensurately with his restoration to dignity through the efforts of writers cited in the preceding paragraphs. The 1969 version of the same dictionary was remarkably more favorable to Sade; its entry, which remained virtually unchanged until 1980, read: "Sade (D. A. F., Marquis de) French writer, born in Paris (1740-1814). His novels depict characters obsessed with the demonic pleasure of making innocent victims suffer, but the importance of his works derives from his presentation therein of the revolt of free men against God and society." Even the reservations concerning demonic cruelty and the persecution of the innocent have disappeared in the revised 1981 edition of the same popular dictionary: "Sade (Marquis de). French writer born in Paris (1740-1814). His work, which is both the theory and illustration of sadism, constitutes the pathological double of naturalist and liberal philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment." This newest entry goes so far as to cite two of Sade's creations, Justine and Le Philosophie dans le boudoir. The gradual evolution in the entries from a mass-distributed dictionary may seem to be a trivial detail, but it also demonstrates the general ideological progress made in Sade commentaries.…

Obviously, Sade's letters do not have the historical or literary significance of the correspondence of Voltaire or that of Rousseau, for example. But the almost three hundred of his letters which have survived deal with a vast range of subjects and temperaments, and include satire, parody, and scatology. They are an accurate source of reflections of the real man. His correspondence was submitted to a fate which recalls that of many of his other writings; it was published for the first time in 1929 by Paul Bourdin, who disdainfully qualified the letters with the remark: "I never succeed in taking him [Sade] seriously." Gilbert Lely eventually produced a more complete and more reliable edition of these letters. Those of the beginning of Sade's first long period of incarceration (1777-90) witness the agony of imprisonment: "Never … has my blood or my mind been able to bear total confinement." His protests against isolation recall the grim despair of the victims of Ste.-Marie des-bois: "I am alone here, I am at the limit of the world, removed from all eyes, without any creature ever being able to reach me." …

Perhaps writing was the "perfect crime" for the Marquis de Sade, as he had Juliette observe so bluntly. Since he already faced indefinite isolation for debaucheries which were left unpunished when others of his stature committed them, and since the ire and disgrace felt by his mother-in-law was continued by his own family, he could not be punished any further, and spent the two decades following 1781 writing books which provoke the most vociferous reactions today. His personal letters of the 1790-1800 period show only that he was obsessed with survival and monetary solvency—a trait which may explain the scope and intensity of La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette. In the final stage of his imprisonment (1802-14), he was still denying the authorship of Justine, the point of departure for the pornographic expansions mentioned and concentrated mainly on obtaining official pardon. But the image of Sade as the author of the "infamous" Justine was so firmly established even then that the remark which he flippantly made to his lawyer Gaufridy in 1775, that "not one cat will be beaten in the province without people saying: it was the Marquis de Sade," remains fairly valid for his reception by posterity.