Books: He Drained the Dregs of Man

THE LIFE AND IDEAS OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE by Geoffrey Gorer. 250 pages. Norton. $5. “This is the most impure tale that has been written since the world began,” the Marquis de Sade said of his novel Les 120 Journees de Sodome; and the world has tended to agree. Les 120 Journees has been banned almost everywhere—even in France, and so have most of the rest of De Sade’s works, which describe in relentless detail murder, torture, coprophagy, and sex orgies that are a triumph of human engineering. “Here I am,” boasts a De Sade heroine during an epic orgy, “at one stroke incestuous, adultress, sodomite; and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today!” If De Sade’s books were only pornography, they would long ago have been forgotten. But the pornographic passages are ostensibly meant to demonstrate De Sade’s passionately held conviction that man is at heart a criminal.

Now that recent history—world wars and totalitarianism—has provided evidence on his side of the case, De Sade has been enjoying a revival. He has fascinated such unsadistic modern writers as Albert Camus, Edmund Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir, and Roman Catholic Historian Christopher Dawson.

Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, treats the violent marquis much too nicely. He almost turns him into a cranky English squire. Even so, Gorer discovers in De Sade “a misanthropy that is unequaled in human history.”

Rage at the World. In an era when the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were arguing that man was a rational being whose natural instincts were good and had only to be allowed free expression to achieve the millennium, De Sade insisted that man’s true instincts were to steal, rape and murder.

Since nature is cruel and destructive, he reasoned, man must be too. Committing a murder, in fact, is simply lending nature a helping hand. “What difference does it make to nature,” asks a homicidal aristocrat in the novel Justine, “if a mass of flesh that is shaped like a biped today is reproduced tomorrow in the form of 1,000 different insects?” But De Sade’s elaborately reasoned philosophy often seems written to justify his own special taste for vice and violence. Did he have to describe so many bloody orgies, and participate in so many, to prove his philosophical point?

Joining the army at 14, De Sade was soon launched on a program of orgies.

When he was discharged, his father forced him to take a rich, respectable wife, whom De Sade found “too puritanical and too cold.” The honeymoon was scarcely over before De Sade went back to his orgies, which his ever faithful wife helped him to prepare.

Even in an age of sexual laxity, the marquis was often in prison for sexual offenses. In a frolic in Marseille, four prostitutes took turns flailing De Sade with a twig broom (they had refused to use his favorite whip studded with nails). Then De Sade fed a girl candies which she claimed were poisoned, but which De Sade insisted were only aphrodisiacs. The girl became so ill she went to the police. De Sade, who skipped town in the nick of time, was condemned to death in absentia and burned in effigy. When he ran off with his wife’s younger sister, his mother-in-law finally had enough. She trapped the wily marquis and had him flung into prison.

De Sade was horrified by prison but hardly cowed. He wrote a typically arrogant appeal to his wife: “Imperious, quick-tempered, uncontrolled, extreme in everything, with an unbridled imagination about sex that has never been equaled—there you have me; and once more, either kill me or take me as I am, for I shall not change.” Cut off from sex, De Sade wrote about it—incessantly. His novel Aline et Valcour was mild enough; it contained only one poisoning and just a few flagellations.

But De Sade’s rage at the world was irrepressible. In two other novels, Justine and Juliette, he created an aristocracy of sexual perverts who inhabit lonely castles where they have unlimited license to commit foul crimes; where the most heroic is the most corrupt; where the true heroine does not try to preserve her virtue but to lose it as quickly as possible. Eventually, De Sade could not put on paper crimes vicious enough to satisfy him. “To attack the sun,” he wrote, “to deprive the universe of it or to use it to set the world ablaze —these would be crimes indeed!” Madness & Insight. During the French Revolution, De Sade was released from prison and found himself something of a hero because of his attacks on the established order. He was even made a judge. But the man who endorsed private crime was repelled by institutionalized murder. “Murderers, imprisoners, fools of every country and every government, when will you prefer the science of knowing man to that of shutting him up and killing him?” He let off so many aristocrats who came before him, including his hated mother-in-law, that the revolutionaries clapped him back into prison to be guillotined.

The day he was to die, Robespierre was overthrown and the Terror ended.

Free again, De Sade gave up public life in disgust and returned to his private orgies. Accused of writing an obscene pamphlet ridiculing Napoleon and Josephine, he was incarcerated for the last time—in an insane asylum. There he amused the inmates by staging his plays, which had flopped outside the asylum but were a big hit within. “This man is not insane,” De Sade’s last doctor declared, “he is just mad about vice.” Despite that madness, De Sade’s writing showed an early insight into the makeup of man. Before Freud, De Sade saw that cruelty can be part of sex and that men often get pleasure from the pain of others. Man’s aggression finds an outlet, one way or another, De Sade was convinced. Better for him to discharge his aggressions by whipping a sex partner than in repressing them, for they would reappear unconsciously in more virulent forms: legal punishment, revolution, war. In an era of freer discussion of sex and its meaning, the reasons for revival of interest in De Sade are perhaps best indicated by the opinion of Simone de Beauvoir: “Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice and misery. He chose cruelty rather than indifference. This is probably why he finds so many echoes today, when the individual knows that he is more the victim of men’s good consciences than of their wickedness.”