Whipping-boy of the Revolution
Leslie Mitchell
THE MARQUIS DE SADE by Donald Thomas Allison & Busby, £1 5.99, pp. 326 here seems to have been a wild gene in the make-up of the Sade family that expressed itself in a desire to irritate and provoke. In the late middle ages, Laura de Sade might have been the 'Laura' that beguiled Petrarch. At the end of the 19th century, another Laura, Comtesse de Chevigne, contributed her cold self- obsession to the character of Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes. In between was the 'Divine Marquis'.
In a real sense, therefore, sadism has a past and a future. In France, girls were reported to have been driven mad simply by reading the Marquis, and, as recently as 1956, Sartre, Cocteau and de Beauvoir had to assure courts that his work had literary merit. In London, it was rumoured that the British Library was so nervous about even housing certain of his books that it was decreed that they could only be read in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and two trustees. Rarely has a man's reputation grown so richly on the strength of his books not being read.
In fact, as this effective biography sug- gests, Sade's life, though hardly humdrum or domesticated, barely meets the expecta- tions of those who would like to shiver at the mere mention of his name. In his petite maison at Arceuil, he certainly employed women to take part in extensive sexual entertainments, of which flagellation was usually one. His protegees were always paid handsomely, and always given a hot meal before being driven home to the Faubourg St Antoine or the Faubourg St Marceau. Few complained. Only the drivers of the hackney carriages were of the opinion that the Marquis's pourboires were on the niggardly side. In all this, Sade mir- rored his age. Louis XV had his own petite maison, the Parc aux Cerfs in Versailles. The sexual behaviour of Richelieu, Conde and Orleans had all attracted notoriety. The 18th-century public was used to seeing women flogged for theft and branded for prostitution. Value systems varied greatly. When the Duchess of Devonshire read Les Liaisons Dungereuses, she simply found it 'instructive.
Why then is Sade so infamous? First, it is possible that on three occasions he went a little too far. In 1768, a putain complained of brutality. In 1772, a trio of Marseilles prostitutes claimed attempted murder. In the winter of 1774-5, the Marquis indulged himself in a remote castle with a number of village girls. As Thomas presents the evidence, a jury might find at least two of the charges to be non-proven.
Secondly, he wrote some very odd books. Even this, though, was not entirely surpris- ing. He was locked up from 1777-89 and again from 1801-14, often in solitary confinement and finally in the Charenton asylum for the insane. Little wonder that his imagination wandered. That it should have travelled as far as Justine or The 120 Days of Sodom may confer a special dis- tinction on Sade, but it confirms an impres- sion that he was condemned for what he thought rather than for what he did.
As Thomas persuasively argues, the Marquis became a scapegoat onto whom everyone off-loaded guilt. If an example had to be made, members of the royal family could hardly be touched, though there was no shortage of candidates. Equally, to punish a man of no rank was pointless. Sade fitted the bill nicely. As the Marquis himself pathetically complained: 'If anyone so much as whips a cat in this province they all say "It's M. de Sade who did it ".' A society's moral tone is always improved by a little well-advertised persecution.
With guilt went fear. Sade thought of himself as a philosopher, and his ideas frightened people at the time and have continued to do so since. The Enlighten- ment destroyed God as a reference point for moral values. According to Sade, only the authority of Nature was left. Nothing that could be observed in Nature could be called immoral, and all too obviously ani- mals killed, fornicated and raped. Even among the species known as homo sapiens, there was no agreement about what was moral or immoral. Sade delighted in the story of a Moghul prince who slaughtered his harem as a mark of respect to a dead brother. As Baudelaire noted, 'One must always return to Sade to observe mankind in its natural state and to understand the quality of Evil.' The Marquis terrifies because he suggests what could so easily be.
En route to infamy, Sade had lots of adventures that make for a jolly biography. Dramatic escapes from prison, a tour of duty as a minor official in the French Revolution, and his dodging of a vengeful mother-in law of heroic proportions all make for colourful reading. Donald Thomas handles this difficult and sensitive subject with a commendable lightness of touch, though his grasp of the background history is sometimes a bit shaky. Indeed,
at the end of the book, one is not so much frightened of de Sade as beginning to feel rather sorry for the old boy.
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