Background on the Marquis de Sade
Who
was the Marquis de Sade (Really)?
Many hold a visual image of Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) based on Geoffrey Rush’s relatively lithe, lean portrayal of the notorious French libertine in the 2000 Quills. Though he gives a fine performance, Rush’s line and shape could hardly be different from those of the historical Sade, who was morbidly obese. This is but one of the misrepresentations of the man who would lend his name to a concept of sexual cruelty.
Sade’s corpulence was the result of imprisonment with little exercise and a frequently privileged diet. He was interred for much of the second half of his life. His confinement, though related to his sexual indiscretions, was largely because both his sacrilege and political-familial conflict with his powerful in-laws, the Montreuils.
Life and Lack of Liberty Under Louis
Much has been made of the time the young aristocrat
spent with his uncle, Jacques Francois Paul Aldonse, the abbe de Sade, who,
though a priest, was known for his licentiousness. From the age of five,
and continuing through until he was 11, the marquis would live under the abbe’s
tutelage, reportedly delving into forbidden sections of the clergyman’s library,
thus developing his bawdy disposition.
Maurice Lever has uncovered, however, Sade’s “lost years,” noting that for a period of time he was raised with the son of the comte du Charolais, a psychotically brutal nobleman whose violent sexual transgressions—and stunning pardons by King Louis XV—cause Sade’s life to pale in comparison.
By the age of 12, he had been placed in a military regiment by his father. He would spend nine years there, reaching the rank of captain of cavalry before being discharged and marrying Renee-Pelagie de Montreuil. In 1763, the same year of his marriage, Sade was arrested in Paris for an unseemly episode with prostitute Jean Testard. The investigation that followed determined his guilt based not solely on charges of his use of implements of torture—including his insistence that Testard first beat him with a cat-o-nine-tales, not unlike Section 20 of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade—but was primarily based upon the ritual defilement of several crucifixes.
After several of these incidents, the mother of Mlle. Montreuil secured a letter of cachet from the king. The document was essentially a “form letter” that allowed her to fill in the name of her son-in-law, who would be, ostensibly, detained indefinitely without charge. Of course, the day-to-day expenses of incarceration had to be financed; but, so important was it to Sade’s mother in law that he remain in custody, that the Montreuils continued to pay to keep him in prison for some time. His first imprisonment resulted in the initiation of his career as a writer. The resulting short play, Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, showed how little he actually regretted his misbehavior. Immediately upon his release, he reposed to Provence, the vicinity of his own family fortunes, where he laced some confections with Spanish Fly and served them to some women at a party. This brought more legal attention, as the women became ill and the marquis was subsequently charged with poisoning. Of course, he fled.
Evolution
and Revolution
What would follow was a many-years-long cycle of debauchery, indictment, detention, escape, and discharge. During this period, Sade would pass the time through writing—mostly of his fantasies, which were always much more brutal than his actual conduct. At this point, however, it is important not to minimize the tangible transgressions of the marquis. He had little regard for the ladies of leisure whose services he frequently secured. Though sex acts—and perhaps bondage and dominance games as well—were a foregone conclusion, the extent to which he would inflict bodily damage and restriction of freedom were never agreed upon from the beginning. Sade did not engage in “consensual play,” as it is known in the S-M vernacular today. The actual accounts of witnesses and victims do indicate what would be characterized as felonious assault and battery in today’s courts. Though he never fell to the extremes in degradation that can be seen in fictional works such as The120 Days of Sodom, it is irresponsible to portray his escapades as anything less than repugnant criminality. However, an examination of the man—and his ultimate contributions to modern thought—necessarily cannot end here.
Because of his societal placement, his sexual orientation, and his lack of conscience—perhaps endemic and related to a solipsism derived from a form of “autism” he is said to have been diagnosed with in his childhood—he was the perfect “whistle-blower” for the excesses of the French upper class of the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, his book Crimes of Love exposes and personalizes the exploitation of the lower-classes by the aristocracy. In his novel Justine, Sade describes the overwhelming attitude of the privileged toward prostitutes when he writes, “since they are made solely to serve as victims to our passions, it is only their disobedience that must be punished, and not our caprices.”
Modern socialists give credit to Sade for originating many of their own worldviews. Among these is the notion of prison as a place not of contrition, but of coalesce of criminal conduct. Further, he believed that punishment should not be reflective of crime. For example, he saw the death penalty as an absurdity, since it resulted in the murder of two people. He also writes with an egalitarian orientation toward both civilization and culture when he published his political allegory Aline and Valcour, comparing monarchy to democracy; when he characterizes theft as acceptable for the destitute, seeing the concept of “property […] itself [as] theft” in his Philosophy of the Boudoir; and, when he advises scribes, in his primer on writing entitled Reflections of the Novel, never to sacrifice artistic principles to commercial interests.
Some have said, in fact, that he helped to ignite the French Revolution in 1789 when he shouted entreaties from his Bastille window to the citizenry in July of that year. The upshot of this was his conveyance to Charenton, an insane asylum in which, during a second tenure nearly ten years later, he would live the remainder of his years. Of course, shortly after his relocation, the Bastille was overtaken by the rebellious population. A number of Sade’s papers were left behind in his quarters in the Bastille. Before they could be sent forward to him, the building was looted and all these writings were lost.
After a short incarceration at Charenton, Sade was
freed to find that the system of nobility had all but evaporated from French
life and that his lands in Provence had been seized by the revolution.
Returning to Paris, he took up with a peasant woman named Marie-Constance
Quesnet, who helped to support him, along with her son Charles. This move
squarely redefined Sade as working class. Because of his renunciation of titles
and because of his honest need to make his own way through labor, he took a
number of jobs during this period of freedom. He worked as a theatre
usher at one point, but later rose to the position of revolutionary
magistrate—a posting which allowed him the magnanimity of absolving his former
in-laws when they were arrested. During this phase of his political
career, he was made the head of a committee to oversee the rehabilitation of
healthcare in Paris. It is because of Sade that fundamental reforms were
instituted, including the basic tenet of hospital sanitation that requires each
patient to have an individual bed. Finally, he was appointed as the president
of the arrondissement of Paris, which put him at odds with the renowned
and reviled Robespierre. Somehow, Sade managed to survive the Reign of
Terror, only to be taken into custody again under Napoleon, who saw his
writings, which were gaining popularity and helping to provide the former
marquis with a supplemental income, as a threat to public decency.
Final Years at Charenton
From 1799 until his death in 1814, Sade would be provided with quarters at the Charenton mental asylum. His companion Marie-Constance and her son were given adjacent lodgings within the facility, and their domestic relationship continued. This, despite the fact that Sade had begun an affair with 12-year-old Marie Leclerc, the daughter of one of Charenton’s nurses. Quesnet barely tolerated the association, which would continue four more years, until Sade’s death.
It is interesting to note that the scenario of Weiss’s play is both accurate and false. Sade, always a man of the theatre, did supervise plays at Charenton. Those plays were enacted by the inmates of the sanatorium, but were never political in nature. Certainly no evidence exists that a play about Jean-Paul Marat was staged, despite the fact that Marat and Sade had a political association that, though it never led the two men to physically cross paths, is interesting in its paradoxical nature. Several years prior to Sade’s final interment, Marat wrote an order for the marquis’ execution. Through a clerical error, a noble named de la Salle was instead guillotined. In 1793, following Marat’s assassination, Sade wrote and delivered a eulogy in which he would praise the revolutionary spirit of the politician, saying, “The voices of centuries to come will only add to the homages that the generation now in bloom is paying you today.”
Diagnosis of Sade: Then and Now
DSM-IV (listed in the Paraphilia section):
302.84 Diagnostic Criteria for Sexual Sadism
1. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving acts (real, not simulated) in which psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.
2. The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Getting Sade placed in Charenton—which was undergoing revolutionary changes under its directeur, Francois Simonet de Coulmier—was a political move that was engineered only with the help of the marquis’ estranged, but still strangely loyal wife. Unlike facilities such as Bicetre, where Sade had been first imprisoned under Napoleon, Charenton was forward-looking insofar as inmates were treated humanely and given a number of what would seem to be modern therapies.
Most of those who lived there would be described today as mentally ill or mentally retarded. If living today, many of these patients would, undoubtedly, be diagnosed (according to modern standards) and cared for within the mental health system. However, Sade fit no criteria known by the physicians of the age. The term “libertine dementia,” apparently on his behalf, was coined to justify his incarceration in this benevolent environment.
When German psychiatrist Friedrich Krafft-Ebing first
classified this “malady” in his 1886 medical tome Psychopathia Sexualis
(which, oddly enough, is the source material for a 2005 film of dramatized case
study vignettes), he characterized it as a hyper-aggressive version of normal
male sexual behavior; whereas, sadism’s counterpart masochism—named for the amorous
daydreams Leopold von Sascher-Masoch detailed in his novel Venus in Furs—was
seen as the truly aberrant conduct. At least this was the case for the
male masochist, as female sadomasochism was not measured. This was no
oversight, as the belief existed that not only were no women truly sadistic,
but also that masochism was a conventional carnal craving in the fairer sex.
Certainly Sade’s fiction outpaced his actual practice in the boudoir. His inscribed fantasies were shocking in the 18th and 19th centuries, and they remain so today, as they are representations of the disorder in the extreme. But, perhaps it is not entirely correct to typify sadomasochism as a mental illness. John Cloud, writing for Time magazine in 2004, notes that the pursuit lies squarely in grey zones of both the canons of mental health issue and legal concerns.
What follows is a combined case study of the two halves of a sadomasochistic relationship from contemporary patients:
“We’re perfectly suited,” said Samuel Brock. “I like to do it, he likes it done.”
He and Martin Allingham had come to medical attention the night Martin almost died. In their bedroom they had devised an elaborate contraption of pulleys, ropes, collars, and shackles that they used to turn Martin upside down and partly strangle him while Sam applied the whip.
“I get the most beautiful orgasm when I’m about to pass out,” reported Martin.
Sam and Martin had been in school together. Sam was a jock; Martin was the class wimp. How perfectly this suited them they didn’t realize until one Saturday afternoon on the deserted playground when they were 15. The two were fighting, and Sam began sitting on Martin, twisting his fingers into pretzels. Although Martin cried, the growing urgency of his erection was evident as the pain increased. After they parted, Sam had masturbated while recalling the sensation of absolute control.
Without discussing it much, by common consent Sam and Martin met again two weeks later. When they were 19, they got an apartment together; they had been living together ever since. Now they were 28.
Martin didn’t have to be hurt to enjoy sex, but it greatly enhanced the pleasure. He had tried spanking and bondage, but asphyxia was the best. When he was younger he had played the field and tried other partner. But most of them had either hurt him too much or not enough; besides, he and Sam were both afraid of AIDS. For the last several years they had worked at the same department store and had been faithful to each other.
The night of the accident, Sam was at work and Martin got himself into the harness. He apparently cinched the noose a shade too tight and lost consciousness, though he didn’t remember that. When San found Martin, he had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. Fortunately, San had learned CPR in the Boy Scouts. He called 911, and Martin made a full recovery.
A police report was made, and a pair of officers interviewed Sam. He admitted that their sex life had recently become increasingly violent, even death-defying. But that hadn’t been his idea; it was Martin who had needed more to produce the same effects. Sam admitted that he “got off” on pain, but some pain seemed to do about as well as a lot.
“I wouldn’t want to really hurt him, he said. “I love him.”
Perhaps it is best to end this examination of Sade’s life, love, passions, and politics with an assessment by 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault, who writes, “Sadism [...] constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”
