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Almost everyone has heard of the Marquis de Sad, the immoral aristocrat from whose names the words “sadism” or “sadomasochism” come. In his works, philosophy is intertwined with pornography, violent sexual fantasies are open, and there are many episodes of blasphemy.
He spent many years in jails or insane shelters, his books were banned in many countries after his death, and his most famous book, The 120 Days of Sodom, tells the story of four pranksters seeking sexual gratification in increasingly brutal orgies. , first published only in 1904.
These are the basic facts known to many. But there is a bigger story behind them. We invite you to meet her on the occasion of the 280th anniversary of de Sade’s birth.
The Marquis de Sade did not live in a vacuum: his vision of the world was determined by the philosophical ideas of his time, and his literature, as impressive as it was, influenced other thinkers.
The current reader may be surprised, but in France at the time, de Sade was imprisoned and censored for the first time, not because of sadism or pornography in his texts. And for the philosophical ideas that his texts represented.
Illustrations from Wikipedia / The only surviving drawing of the Marquis de Sade made while he was alive
De Sade’s life story
Donatien Alphonse Francoise de Sade was born in 1740. In a noble family. Her mother was a midwife in the French royal family. He hoped that his son would become friends with children’s games from the royal family.
However, from an early age, the young marquis did not like to follow the rules. He repeatedly had problems with the princes of the royal family, and his mother sent him to live with his uncle.
He had a good education, attended a Jesuit school, and then entered an academy that trained light cavalry. This academy accepted only the descendants of the best families. He also fought in the Seven Years’ War of 1756-1763.
Returning after the war, he married and then began to realize that he was not like everyone else.
Many biographers of De Sade’s life argue that this was due to the conditions in which he grew up, without a father, in a strict family, attending a school that encouraged shame at “wrong” thoughts and widespread corporal punishment.
However, no one can fully say what prompted the promising young soldier to start getting involved in strange things. First of all, prostitutes started complaining about it.
Shortly after their wedding, de Sade locked himself in his home with a young prostitute. According to his story, he began to step on the cross, shout obscenities and demand that he examine it with an edge.
It was not the only story like that. Eventually, some shelters were instructed not to allow De Sade to take the girls home.
1768 On Easter Sunday, de Sade took the prostitute home, where they matched her with an edge and dripped hot wax on her body. Finally he ran away and told me everything.
Although the Marquis’ family later paid him to drop the charges, the King deported the Marquis de Sade. The real “exile” was not very strict: de Sade only had to move to his mansion in Provence.
Located far from the capital, in a remote region of France, de Sade was able to go even further. With the help of his servant and lover Latouro, de Sade imprisoned four prostitutes in his mansion and forced them to have sex in a variety of circumstances.
He even turned exploitation into impromptu theatrical performances, of which the viewer was his wife.
Wikimedia Commons / Public domain photo / Stately Lade where Sade lived. Theater festivals are held here.
The villagers began to watch over De Sade. When the mother of his wife in 1772. Upon learning what was happening at the mansion, he reported to the authorities, and they set out to hunt down De Sade. He and Latour attempted to escape to Italy but were arrested.
Still, they managed to escape and even return to the mansion, where they continued their activities. Many of the servants who went to work for De Sade at the mansion eventually fled and said that the Marquis was harassing them.
He is also known to have incarcerated five local girls and a young man once every six weeks in his mansion. He was finally arrested and imprisoned in 1776.
De Sade’s work
Altogether, de Sade spent 30 years in various prisons. Sitting in prison, de Sade began to write. He wrote a manifesto promoting atheism, “A Conversation Between a Priest and a Dying Man,” and a work based on his sex life, now known as “120 Days of Sodom.”
Marquis de Sade also wrote in 1791. The book “Žiustina” has been published, the main character of which is a girl who is tried for various crimes and tells the story of her life.
Wikimedia Commons / Public domain image / The first page of the book “Žiustina”
In one part of the story he goes into a monastery, becomes a sex slave, and is forced to participate in orgies, in another part he is treated similarly by a respected nobleman.
During the French Revolution, de Sade was transferred to a mentally ill shelter in Paris and was soon released and even became a delegate to the National Convention. 1793 he was arrested again, this time for political reasons, and imprisoned until 1794.
1801 On Napoleon’s instructions, he was arrested again and sent to prison. He died in 1814, after spending the rest of his life in prisons and mental health centers.
It is known that in the last years of his life he had an affair with the daughter of a 14-year-old prison worker. After his death, all of De Sade’s unpublished works were burned at the request of his son.
Ambiguous evaluation of works
Until 1957. Sade’s works have been banned in France, but recently they are experiencing revivals.
There are critics who affirm that De Sade was one of the first heralds of the sexual revolution, some even consider him one of the first feminists.
They argue that the main character of “Žiustina” is interested in his sexuality, is not afraid to talk about it.
In De Sade’s other book, The Philosophy of the Bedroom, two important characters are women who make bold decisions about their lives, whose characters are not questioned by men.
However, even the biggest fans of De Sade can hardly consider him a hero. There is no doubt that much of his books have been inspired by his life. And that the orgies in which he participated and held were marked by violence and coercion.
And there are also those who argue that it is thanks to De Sade that pornography and violence against women are often considered synonyms in modern society.
Until recently, de Sade’s descendants avoided mentioning his name in public. Recently, however, his aine, Count Hugues de Sade, began enjoying the glory of his ancestor by selling wine and lingerie by the name of Sade.
There are also a growing number of historical and artistic works dedicated to the life of Sade and France at the time. It tries to understand why De Sade was the way he was and how it affected others.
The dangers of De Sade’s philosophy
And the impact was great. The Marquis de Sade lived in the Enlightenment, during which rationality, science, humanism and the mind rose as values for the first time.
Now the name of the Marquis de Sade is associated with sadism and pornography for many. But in the years of de Sade’s life, he was persecuted not primarily for that reason.
Eighteenth c. In the late 19th century, there were many more authors in France, whose works are rich in erotic themes, and similar signs of sadism and pornography can be found.
But they were not so persecuted and did not receive such “fame”. No sexual deviations were named after them. Because its authors did not seek to reflect broader philosophical ideas.
De Sade’s work shocked the French not because of pornography, but because of the attitude toward morality: de Sade perceived true morality as satisfying man’s deepest passions, “being himself.”
De Sade’s position, which was reflected in all his work, was that torturing other people is not only that there is nothing wrong, but perhaps even virtuous, if man follows his passions.
As already mentioned, the Enlightenment period is associated with science, rationality, etc. This was emphasized by the greatest Enlightenment thinkers.
Like Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire or Rousseau, De Sade’s works are written for two purposes, both for reading entertainment and for philosophical treatises.
Like many Enlightenment people, de Sade spoke out against religion, against moral standards based solely on respect for authority or religion.
However, his approach was quite different from that of other Enlightenment thinkers. The Marquis de Sade thought that a truly moral man is one who follows his passions, even if those passions are particularly dark and destructive.
According to the marquis, a person must listen to his “voice of the heart” to the end, even if other people will suffer as a result. He did not believe in the power of rationality.
An example of how such an approach manifested itself in practice: de Sade spoke out against the death penalty because it seemed rational to him, to justify murder by law.
But at the same time, it seemed to him that there was nothing wrong with killing another person while overwhelmed with passion.
“It just caught our eye then. But we never thought that passion is a flame that lights the torch of philosophy,” de Sade wrote.
De Sade thinks that secret desires and fantasies, cruel as they are, are not abnormal. It is one of the most important elements of human existence.
De Sade argued that reason and rational thought, exalted by Enlightenment thinkers, is only a by-product of those desires and fantasies.
That passions and desires are a greater incentive for people to behave in one way or another than rational thinking, and it is necessary to recognize and enjoy it. Cruelty is innate. Immorality is the only morality. Being yourself is the only virtue.
As already mentioned, de Sade not only wrote about immoral things, but often acted cruelly in his life. After his death, his books were quickly banned.
However, his dark moral vision became widespread among artists. Perhaps they did not follow de Sade in their lives, but took one or another aspect of his worldview in their work.
In the paintings of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, for example, cruelty often triumphs over the virtues and nonsense over rationality.
Painting by Francisco Goya / Image from Wikimedia Commons / Saturn devouring his son
According to Michel Foucault, a thinker who has studied the history of sexuality, F. Goya’s paintings are a visual equivalent of De Sade’s work.
And that is far from everything. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelair is a collection of poems that shocked the 19th century. Middle of France: He also reversed traditional standards of morality and aesthetics, as did Sade. Books like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice are also full of “sadistic” themes.
Guillaume Appolinaire, a French poet who coined the term “surrealism”, was also the editor of Sade’s first collection, published a hundred years after his death. He and many other surrealists were influenced by Sade.
De Sade is also known to have been read by Friedrich Nietsche, and similar themes can be found in his philosophy. After all, Sade is considered by many to be the forerunner of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s work also reflects the idea that sexual desires and hidden thoughts are an important determinant of motives for human behavior.
It is clear that the Marquis de Sade was probably a sadist in the modern sense of the word: that he raped women, sometimes men, and that he was happy to do it, nobody disputes it.
But the Marquis de Sade also tried to interpret sadism philosophically. His developed idea of the exaltation of freedom and absolute passions, without restrictions of law, religion, or traditional moral norms, as well as his influence on other thinkers, means that his works and his life are now being analyzed more widely than never. So de Sade entered the history of high and popular culture.
Prepared by the BBC, All That Interesting, Smithsonian Mag.
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