Over the last few years, I have read biographies of the following people: Jacob Riis, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Maynard Keynes, Isabella Bird, Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicola Tesla, Joseph Smith, Walt Whitman, Simon Bolivar, Walter Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Jack Johnson, Billy the Kid, Ibn Battuta, Fred Astaire, John Brown, Hildegard of Bingen, Jack Kerouac, Leni Riefenstahl, Maximilien Robespierre, Ring Lardner, Charles Wesley, Jose Rizal, Girolamo Savonarola, Park Chung-Hee, Samuel Pepys, Oscar Wilde, Mickey Mantle, Albert Einstein, Stevie Ray Vaughan, William Faulkner, Roger Bannister, Edgar Snow, Hiram Bingham, Johann Gutenberg, Lord Byron, Kemal Ataturk, Bob Feller, Mao Zedong, Robert Johnson, Henry Clay, Lincoln Perry (a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit), Jack Dempsey, Jane Digby, Benjamin Franklin, Marco Polo, Sandy Koufax, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Richard Francis Burton and Michelangelo, and I just purchased three more—of Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence and Florence Nightingale.
Reading a person’s life history does not necessarily equate to admiring him/her. Of those listed above, there are a few for whom I have mixed feelings and a couple I loathe. All of them, however, led interesting lives or did something remarkable so I bought and read their bios. Having recently completed my 62nd summer, I am disinclined to seek others’ approval of what I read.
Nevertheless, that rather lengthy introduction seems necessary because of the newest addition to my library: Neil Schaeffer’s The Marquis de Sade / A Life (Harvard University Press, 1999). His name is the root for such lovely terms as “sadist,” “sadistic” and “sadism.” These are the people who enjoy exploring the nexus of pain and pleasure, domination and submission, humiliation and sex. To be very clear, I neither admire nor respect Donatien Alphonse Francois, the Marquis de Sade (1740−1814).
Born into an aristocratic family in Paris, he fought bravely in the Seven Years War and seemed to have a nice future with a family and a chateau (including a bevy of servants) in Provence. But Sade, who had a voracious sex drive, was noted for his mistreatment of prostitutes and other poor women. He brutalized them, chained them, whipped them and was not averse to being on the receiving end. In 18th century France, that was not altogether unusual behavior for upper-class men; it was seen as their prerogative. What differentiated Sade from other libertines was that he brazenly boasted about it and formulated a philosophy of radical freedom. In his opinion, by indulging in the most extreme deviant behavior, he was merely being true to himself and insisted that neither government nor religion should try to rein him in.
It was one scandal after another before his mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil, convinced the king to issue a lettre de cachet—a royal order of arrest and imprisonment, without stated cause or access to the courts. He was clapped into Vincennes Prison, the notorious Bastille and finally Charenton Asylum. Sade spent 32 years, much of his adult life, behind bars. He was in a non-stop rage against the injustice placed on him. Oh, he loved playing the victim. His dowdy but faithful wife, Renee-Pelagie, brought him food, paper, pens and books. Sade wrote incessantly, and much of it was over-the-top obscenity—orgies, rape, sodomy, incest, bestiality, murder and dismemberment. His extant books (many were destroyed or lost during the French Revolution) include Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue; 120 Days of Sodom; Philosophy in the Bedroom; Aline and Valcour; Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man; The Crimes of Love; and Juliette.
His name was anathema to his family and indeed all of France for more than 100 years after his death. But times changed, and scholars started paying closer attention to what he had written. Guillaume Apollinaire called him “the freest spirit that has yet existed.” In the 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir and others also spoke of him in respectful tones. The one-time prince of smut had become as praiseworthy as Enlightenment figures like Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (spanked as a boy, and he found that he liked it!), Voltaire and Montesquieu. If the diabolical Marquis de Sade can be rehabilitated, who cannot?
Sade’s views on politics, literature and psychology are now highly esteemed, and some writers say he was a forerunner of Sigmund Freud. When Sade lived, 2½ centuries ago, there was no understanding of the unconscious mind. He is said to have shown us the way. Maybe so, but after reading Schaeffer’s 516-page book I think of him as little more than a self-centered jerk, a profoundly flawed person with a dark moral vision.
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