Must We Burn Sade?

The Marquis de Sade spent eleven years in the Bastille, was transferred to Charenton asylum, released briefly into the chaos of revolutionary France, imprisoned again for the sin of moderation — of all things — and finally died in that same asylum in 1814, aged seventy-four, having outlived most of his persecutors and nearly all of his defenders. His name has given the language a word — sadism — that most people use without ever having read a line he wrote, which is perhaps just as well. He is one of those figures whom history has flattened into a symbol: the emblem of depravity, the philosopher of cruelty, the man whose imagination mapped every conceivable violation of the human body and several that had not previously been conceived. But symbols, as a rule, are poor substitutes for understanding. To grasp what Sade actually was — what he meant, what he reveals about the Enlightenment’s darker currents — requires a guide of uncommon intelligence and nerve. That guide exists. Her name is Simone de Beauvoir, and her essay “Must We Burn Sade?” remains, some seventy years after its publication, the most penetrating study of the Divine Marquis ever written. · 10 min read

Beauvoir’s essay runs to roughly one hundred pages — a small book, really — and it treats its subject with a seriousness that neither his detractors nor his more enthusiastic admirers have generally managed. The detractors dismiss Sade as a monster. The admirers, particularly the Surrealists and certain post-structuralists who adopted him as a patron saint of transgression, celebrate him as a liberator. Beauvoir does neither. She reads him as a philosopher — a bad one in many respects, but a philosopher nonetheless — and she reads him as a man, which is to say as a creature of contradictions, driven by compulsions he could not fully control and animated by ideas he could not fully think through.

Sexuality as Ethics

Beauvoir’s central insight is both simple and devastating: Sade did not merely indulge his appetites; he systematised them. “He made of his sexuality an ethic,” she writes, “he expressed this ethic in works of literature.” The sentence deserves a moment’s contemplation, for it identifies something genuinely unusual about Sade’s project. Most libertines are content to practise their libertinism. They do not feel the need to construct a philosophical justification for it. Sade did. He took his sexual preferences — which ran, to put it with considerable understatement, toward the extreme — and elevated them into principles. He built from them an entire cosmology, a vision of nature as fundamentally destructive, of pleasure as inseparable from the infliction of pain, of the sovereign individual as answerable to no authority but his own desire. It was monstrous, but it was also, in its perverse way, intellectually rigorous. He did not merely do terrible things; he reasoned his way toward them, and the reasoning, however repellent its conclusions, follows a logic that is not easily dismissed.

This is what makes Sade a problem rather than merely a scandal. A scandal can be ignored. A problem demands engagement. And the problem Sade poses is this: if the Enlightenment insisted that reason, not revelation, should be the foundation of morality, then what happens when reason, pursued without flinching, arrives at conclusions that are morally abhorrent? Sade is the Enlightenment’s nightmare — the thinker who took its premises seriously and followed them to places its more respectable exponents preferred not to go. If nature is all there is, if God is a fiction, if the soul is a superstition, then on what grounds do we condemn cruelty? Sade’s answer — that we have no such grounds, that cruelty is as natural as kindness and considerably more honest — is one that the philosophes never adequately refuted. They simply looked away.

Imagination and Its Limits

It is important, however, to distinguish between what Sade wrote and what Sade did. The two are not identical, and the confusion between them has done much to obscure the nature of his achievement, such as it was. Sade himself was quite clear on this point. “I have imagined everything conceivable in this sort of thing,” he wrote, “but I have certainly not done…all that I have imagined.” The ellipsis in the original is eloquent. It acknowledges a gap — between fantasy and action, between the page and the world — that Sade understood even if his readers have not always done so. The novels are thought experiments carried to grotesque extremes. They are not autobiographies.

This is not to say that Sade was innocent. He was not. The documented incidents — the beatings in brothels, the use of a knife on a woman named Rose Keller, the affair of the poisoned sweets in Marseilles — confirm that he was capable of serious transgressions against real human beings, not merely fictional ones. But the scale of his actual crimes, while sufficient to land him in prison under any legal system deserving of the name, falls considerably short of the apocalyptic depravities catalogued in The 120 Days of Sodom or Juliette. Sade the writer went further than Sade the man, and the distance between them is part of what makes him interesting. The imagination, it turns out, is more radical than the body. It can go where the flesh hesitates.

His hostility toward religion was absolute and, one suspects, genuinely felt rather than merely strategic. The Church represented everything Sade despised: restraint, guilt, the subordination of the individual to a supposed higher authority. His libertine philosophy was, in this sense, a counter-theology — an attempt to replace the Christian cosmos, with its moral order and its promise of judgement, with a universe governed entirely by appetite and force. That his alternative was considerably less attractive than the system it sought to replace does not diminish the ferocity of the critique. Sade saw, with a clarity that the more polite critics of religion could not match, that Christian morality depended on metaphysical foundations that the Enlightenment had already undermined. If God was dead — and Sade, writing decades before Nietzsche, was quite certain that He was — then the moral edifice built upon His authority was a ruin, however imposing its façade.

The Paradox: Revolutionary Moderation

And here we arrive at the great paradox of Sade’s life, the fact that makes him something more complicated than a symbol of depravity and something more human than a philosophical abstraction. In December 1793, at the height of the Terror, the Marquis de Sade — the man whose name would become synonymous with cruelty — was arrested and imprisoned for moderatism.

The word bears repeating. Moderatism. The author of Justine, the philosopher of absolute licence, the man who had imagined tortures that would have made Torquemada blanch, was judged insufficiently ruthless by the Committee of Public Safety. The reason was specific and revealing. As Grand Juror of his section during the Terror, Sade had been called upon to condemn the family of Madame de Montreuil — his own mother-in-law, the woman who had been instrumental in having him imprisoned for years. Here was a chance for revenge that most men in his position would have seized with both hands. The Revolution had placed his enemies within his power. All he had to do was vote.

He refused. “I considered myself obliged to leave the chair,” he wrote. “They wanted me…to vote [for] a horrible…act. I never would.” The man who had spilled oceans of fictional blood could not bring himself to spill real blood, even the blood of those who had persecuted him. The libertine who recognised no moral authority nevertheless found, at the decisive moment, that he possessed a conscience. It was not a philosophical conscience — his philosophy had no room for one — but it was a conscience all the same, and it cost him his freedom. He was arrested, imprisoned, and came within days of the guillotine before Thermidor intervened and the Terror consumed itself.

This episode is, for Beauvoir, the key to understanding Sade. It reveals the gap between the system and the man, between the philosophy of absolute transgression and the human being who, when confronted with the opportunity to enact it, discovered that he could not. Sade’s philosophy denied the existence of conscience, of mercy, of any obligation to one’s fellow creatures. But Sade himself, at the moment of crisis, acted as though all three were real. The theorist of cruelty practised clemency. The apostle of vengeance forgave. It is the most Dostoevskian moment in the life of a man who predated Dostoevsky by half a century, and it suggests that Sade’s philosophy was, in the end, less a description of human nature than a protest against it — a howl of rage at the fact that we are not, and can never be, the sovereign, self-sufficient creatures that his system requires.

The Reader’s Ordeal

I must confess that my own attempts to read Sade directly have met with limited success. The Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, which is often recommended as the most accessible entry point, offered little more than recycled materialist arguments dressed up in dramatic form. The dying man defeats the priest with the same objections to religion that Holbach and Diderot had already stated more elegantly and with considerably less self-congratulation. One finishes the dialogue with the uncomfortable sense that Sade believed himself more original than he was — a common affliction among writers who spend long periods in solitary confinement, where every thought, for want of competition, begins to seem unprecedented.

Justine; or Philosophy in the Bedroom proved a more serious test of endurance, and I confess I failed it. The relentless catalogue of violations, the mechanical quality of the depravity, the curious flatness of the prose — for a man of such extreme passions, Sade wrote with remarkably little passion — produced in me not shock, not outrage, but something closer to boredom, punctuated by intervals of genuine revulsion. The combination is uniquely unpleasant. One feels neither the thrill of transgression nor the satisfaction of moral instruction, but merely the leaden accumulation of atrocity upon atrocity, each more elaborate than the last and each less affecting. It is pornography in the strict etymological sense — writing about prostitutes — and it shares with most pornography the quality of being simultaneously excessive and monotonous.

This is precisely why Beauvoir’s essay is so valuable. She has done the reading so that the rest of us need not, and she has extracted from it everything of genuine intellectual interest while sparing us the considerable stretches of tedium and disgust. Her essay treats Sade with a seriousness that his own works, taken on their own terms, do not always merit. She finds the philosophy inside the filth, the genuine questions buried beneath the mechanical provocations, and she presents them with a lucidity and a moral intelligence that Sade himself conspicuously lacked. To read Beauvoir on Sade is to understand why he matters without having to endure the full experience of why he is so difficult to read.

The Final Irony

There is a genre of biographical fact that is too perfect to be believed and too well documented to be denied: the manner of a famous person’s death. Albert Camus, the philosopher of the absurd, died absurdly — in a car accident, with an unused train ticket in his pocket. Leon Trotsky, the prophet of permanent revolution, was permanently stopped by a mountaineer’s ice axe in the hands of a Stalinist agent in Mexico City. The deaths seem to comment on the lives, as though fate, or whatever we choose to call it, possessed a literary sensibility.

And Sade? The Marquis de Sade, author of the most violent, the most transgressive, the most deliberately shocking body of literature in the Western canon — the man who had imagined every conceivable form of torture, mutilation, and murder, who had peopled his fictions with libertines of superhuman cruelty and victims of infinite suffering — died peacefully. In his sleep. In the Charenton asylum, where he had spent his final thirteen years in relative comfort, staging theatrical productions with the inmates and receiving visitors. Among those visitors was a young woman who presented herself as his daughter and who attended him with filial devotion for the entirety of his confinement. She was not, in fact, his daughter. She was an admirer. The deception lasted thirteen years, and Sade either never discovered it or chose not to acknowledge it — a final ambiguity in a life constructed almost entirely of ambiguities.

It is the quietest possible ending for the loudest possible life. No guillotine, no poisoning, no duel at dawn. Not even the dignity of a lingering illness nobly borne. Just sleep, and then the absence of sleep, and then nothing — or everything, depending on which of his philosophical opponents one believes. The man who had raged against nature, against God, against every constraint that civilisation had devised to contain the human appetite for destruction, was in the end contained by the most ordinary of all constraints: the simple failure of the body to continue. Even Sade could not transgress that final boundary. Even the Divine Marquis was, in the end, merely mortal. It is the one indignity his philosophy had no answer for, and it is, perhaps, the most eloquent refutation of his system that reality ever offered.