After the Revolution came the Terror. It was a time of self-congratulatory moralism, disgust at one’s enemies, endless bloody revenge. There were murders and executions. There was treason. Besides Robespierre - darling and victim of the Revolution – there was one other of history’s most notorious villains. He certainly committed far more crimes in his imagination than ever he managed in real life, yet his name has become a permanent part of criminal history. His ideas are amongst the most notorious, misunderstood, and reactionary in the history of criminology. They even managed to upset Napoleon.
He was the Marquis de Sade. Few criminals in history are so notorious. Even fewer did so little to deserve it. Sade’s strange career reads like a fable in negative of his rollercoaster times. Old certainties – Catholicism, the social order, aristocracy – had capsized and the upturned world was bloody and violent. Despair was all about. It seemed that Enlightenment, the foundation of the French Revolution, had failed. As his biographer puts it, Sade’s writing:
“fits with deadly precision a secular universe bereft of divine power, a society where reason can justify no other laws than those of nature… [his] universe [was] dominated by evil and destruction, where the men and women of reason indulge themselves in [a] brutal erotic prelude to the unlamented obliteration of humankind”[i].
Novelist, philosopher, actor, aristocrat, revolutionary, jailbird, john, judge, Sade is probably best pictured as a satirist. The muddled times badly needed one. Sade loathed the Revolution, yet he worked in the same room as Robespierre. His novels were considered foul enough to drive readers insane, yet, as a judge, he was so merciful that he endangered his own life. His very name stands for pain and cruelty, yet he seems to have longed for better, gentler, things. What sense can we make of this?
Sade was born an aristocrat. Indeed, the Sades were by any reckoning one of France’s top families. If his future looked promising, the child’s personality did not. His temper was terrible. Despite a small and girlish appearance, he once gave a playmate such a beating that he, Sade, was rushed away to live with his grandmother. Youth brought an undistinguished military career (he accidentally fired a cannon through someone’s roof), after which Sade dashed off to enjoy Paris and its endless erotic opportunities. Not even marriage got in the way of Sade’s brothel-hopping. He even went so far as to buy himself a petite maison. This was the name given by aristocrats to the secluded houses in which they conducted their affairs. Some of Sade’s visitors were willing and some were less so.
One was a lady of the night named Jeanne Testard. She claimed that Sade took her to a room filled with whips, rods, and blasphemous images. He shook his fist at heaven. “If you are God,” he cried, “let’s see you take revenge on me!” He threatened to murder Jeanne unless she joined him in a demonic ritual. Jeanne haggled with him. If he’d release her, she promised to accompany him to church the following Sunday and help steal holy wafers to use in their own black mass. Naïve Sade agreed. Jeanne hurried straight to the police. Sade soon found himself in trouble not only with the law and the king, but, worse, with his wife. Likely, the whole episode had been little more than an example of his perverse sense of humour, but no one saw the funny side. His apologies were profound, profuse, and probably pretend.
Sade began splitting his time between Paris, his petite-maison, and Versailles. The eyes of the police were on him constantly. Sade’s own eyes, meanwhile, were on various actresses, dancers, and ladies of easy virtue. He liked to see them whipped. Brothel-keepers were forever banning him.
Without doubt, Sade’s behaviour was extreme, promiscuous, and mildly perverted. It was also pretty typical of the spoilt young aristocrats of the time (it seems they were all up to it). That was, until the Rose Keller affair.
Rose was a German whose French was poor. Perhaps she misunderstood Sade when, one Easter Sunday, he invited her to his petite maison. Here – Rose claimed – Sade stripped her naked, tied her down, and beat her. He cut her buttocks with a knife and poured wax into the wounds. The blasphemer even offered to hear her confession. Rose leapt out of the window in outrage and disappeared over the garden wall. Although Sade denied the whole improbable story, his family paid the supposed victim an extravagant bribe.
France decided to make an example of this turbulent youth. Rumours spread, each uglier than the last. It was an age of Gothic fiction, social change, a lingering belief in demons. Sade’s crime – erotic, secretive, devilish – was fashionably appalling. The whole country united in revulsion. This “satanic madman” seemed to personify the infamous corruption of the aristocracy. To lock him up would be excellent public relations. Sade was imprisoned under one of the country’s worst pre-Revolutionary laws: the lettre de cachet. His term would be indefinite. There was no prospect even of a trial, let alone release.
Eventually, Sade was permitted to return to his estates at Lacoste. He was not, however, permitted to leave. The winter of 1771 passed with barely a murmur. Sade was quietly at work, producing plays for his private theatre. And then he poisoned a group of prostitutes with arsenic.
Or perhaps he didn’t. No one knows. Certainly, a number of young women became physically ill at one of Sade’s orgies. Certainly, he’d had them eat some suspicious-looking bonbons, and, certainly, their symptoms resembled arsenic poisoning. On the other hand, everyone soon recovered, and analysis of the bonbons revealed no suspicious ingredients; and, anyway, arsenic produces symptoms similar to those of an aphrodisiac called Spanish Fly. Most of the facts in the case, then, are debateable. Two, however, are beyond dispute: First, Sade was never tried for his supposed crime. Second, he spent most of the rest of his life in prison for it.
The courts sentenced both Sade and his valet to death. They fled. Unconcerned by the prospect of public ridicule, the courts decided that if they couldn’t get hold of the real culprits, they’d execute two dummies instead.
Sade – the real, live, unstuffed one - was eventually captured late one winter’s night. Back he went to prison, to repent for a crime that he may very well never have committed. The following April brought a night-time escape daring enough for any television mini-series.
At length Sade’s conviction was quashed. By now, though, it was the least of his troubles. He was not the first or last man ever to feud with his mother-in-law, but few before or since have encountered so ruthless a foe. Madame de Montreuil even helped pay for a police operation to recapture him. A search-party rampaged around Lacoste, their aim “to put three bullets into [Sade] and take his body back [to Mme de Montreuil]”. Slippery Sade, however, escaped once more.
What next? A girl of fifteen emerged with the story that she’d recently escaped from Sade’s private harem. She mentioned abduction, whippings, human remains. Another police raid; another escape. Sade spent a year on the run. He went to Italy, where the sexual habits of the locals offended him, or so he said. Next summer, he returned to Lacoste. An outraged father came to his door and tried to shoot him, missing by inches.
Sade was arrested yet again. A new king, Louis XVI, meant a new lettre de cachet.
Conditions in Vincennes prison were appalling. The so-called House of Silence was cold, dark, and full of disease. Sade endured lengthy solitary confinement. He emerged desperate and determined. Taken for a hearing, he escaped yet again.
Exciting chase scenes followed. At the end of them, Sade was recaptured. “Talk, talk, little man,” said Inspector Louis Marais, “you are going to be locked up for the rest of your life for the things you’ve done…”[v] As we know, Sade may well have done nothing much at all.
Sade’s next prison term would be his longest. There was gloom and isolation worthy of a pharaoh. Such conditions broke some men, while they hardened others. If the man who entered the darkness had been relatively ordinary, the one who emerged from it was not. Fat, half-blind, resentful, Sade was also, in a sense, triumphant. He had, after all, survived the world’s most infamous prison.
The Bastille was old and dilapidated. It should long since have been demolished. By the time of the Revolution, the grim fortress housed just seven prisoners. It also housed a lot of books. This is why: Prohibited books were literally put on trial and condemned, then sent to the Bastille in a sack with a label that told you what the book had done wrong. It was here – in the so-called Tower of Liberty - that Sade worked on his own most notorious book: The 120 Days of Sodom. If Sade’s evil reputation can be traced to any single thing, it is surely this satirical tale of “those who did well out of other people’s miseries”[vii]. He completed only the very first section, but that alone is long and unpleasant enough for all but the most determined reader. It tells of four “pillars of society” (banker, bishop, nobleman, judge) who carry out every possible sexual depravity on a group of captive women. It is cartoonish, violent, and bizarre. It is also incredibly boring. Notorious, too, but its notoriety is purely accidental. Sade probably wrote the book for his own private entertainment, never intending it for publication. It lay in his cell till 1904. The author wept “tears of blood” over his loss. Many would-be readers have done the same thing.
Revolution was coming. Perched as he was high above the city, even Sade became aware of a crisis in the streets. On 2nd July, 1789, he somehow managed to incite a riot. Fashioning a megaphone from a metal pipe, he urged the crowd to attack the prison. The staff, he said, were murdering prisoners. Scant days later came the famous Storming of the Bastille. The building was destroyed, the prisoners were freed, the governor’s head was sawn off. Sade saw none of it. He’d just been transferred to a lunatic asylum.
In 1790, Citizen Sade was freed at last into the bright new republic. Uppermost in his mind was money. The unreadable author began writing potboilers. He sexed up his philosophical novel Justine. He dashed off plays by the dozen The odds might be poor, but who would bet against him? Sade was clever, famous, endlessly well-read. He was energetic, optimistic, and literate. He could not fail.
He failed horribly. Energetic, optimistic, and literate he may have been, but Sade was also fat, short of breath, and penniless. Pictures from the time make him look a little like a postal parcel, overstuffed and badly-wrapped. No one read his novels. His plays were hopeless. There would be no literary miracles. There was, however, a miracle of a different sort. The aristocrat now fell in love with a working-class single mum. The perfectly-named Constance was to be Sade’s partner for the rest of his life - for richer, and, especially, for poorer. The wretched odd couple were quartered in some last-ditch doss-house when the tireless Constance at last secured her lover a job.
Sade toiled away as a secretary, hospital administrator, and propagandist to the revolutionaries. He stressed the satanic qualities of the old regime: “Being works of darkness, like the actions of the Prince of Hell, they live only in the dark night of prejudice, fanaticism, and slavery. The torch of philosophy blazes forth and they are eclipsed…”.
And then it was time for the Terror. Sade’s response may surprise you. Despite his name, and the opportunities that surrounded him, Sade was no sadist. In fact, he was disgusted by a world that had grown viler even than his own novels. Working as a judge, he tried to have all his prisoners released. When that failed, he could at least vote against their execution: “They wanted me to put through a bestial and bloody resolution, which I couldn’t do”. Sade even went so far as to risk his own life to spare those eternal enemies, his in-laws.
Sade was elected president of Robespierre’s own section of Paris. It must have been quite a sight, the infamous author wheezing fatly opposite the very man who saw the problems that confronted France in exactly the same brutal, simple way that one of Sade’s heroes might. Robespierre said that the Revolution was “a period of transition from the rule of crime to the rule of law”. But Sade thought the opposite. His own, imaginary world was run by The Friends of Crime. They had a frightful “philosophy” to guide them - one that was little more than homicidal mania. This was savage and bloody satire.
Rumours began about the suspicious ex-aristocrat of a judge. The Revolution had promised heaven, but it seemed that Sade had his doubts. Perhaps he thought utopias were impossible here on earth. As we know, such independence of mind is heresy to a fanatic. Sade must be punished! What pretext could the fanatics invent?
Sade – who’d once been imprisoned for poisoning people who may not have been poisoned, using a substance that may not have been poison – was now sent back to prison because he’d once applied for a job with the royal guard. Such a connection to royalty was damning.
The new prison term started at a cesspool called the Madelonnettes, where Sade had to sleep on a pile of straw in the lavatories. When he was transferred to Picpus, things grew even worse. His cell was a stone’s throw from the guillotine at the Place de la Concorde. When the attendants emptied the urn from beneath the blade, they did it in his very building. Sade lived in the smell of human blood. He claimed to have seen 1800 people die.
Sade’s own execution was scheduled for 27th July, 1794. Luck, for once, was on his side. The guards could not find him. It seems they went to the wrong prison. Twenty-three others were, however, needlessly guillotined. Needless, because the Terror stopped next day. Robespierre himself had been beheaded.
And so Sade saw a quick blink of freedom. The Republic failed. Napoleon took over. For Sade, it was yet another dark day in a lifetime of dark days.
“[T]he Corsican terrorist-turned-French general saw a copy of Justine and Juliette. Not averse to sending thousands of young men to their deaths, he was on the other hand appalled by fictional horrors, and gave the order that the anonymous author must be found and locked up for the rest of his life”.
Sade’s book bristles with infamous satire. Its criminal cast consider morality unnatural. They prefer to say, “Do unto others as you would not have them do unto you”. One character claims that there is no happiness except in crime. The heroine performs a black mass at St Peter’s (“the navel of Christianity”). The Pope promptly sodomises her on the altar. Sade – whom the great novelist Gustave Flaubert called “the one ultra-Catholic writer” - was clearly using a gruesome brand of irony. Napoleon, never a man for subtleties, had missed them again.
The author found himself in yet another prison. This one was called Bicêtre. Here, in a strange twist, “criminal lunatics” were rather well cared-for. Their superintendent was no less a man than Philippe Pinel, a pioneer of psychotherapy.
Pinel had developed the idea of “moral insanity”, which is the modern view that certain criminals need hospitals more than they need prisons. He had no time for superstitions like demonic possession, or the revolting treatments that were common in his day. Paintings and prints commemorated the triumphant day Pinel had his patients’ chains removed.
A true man of the Enlightenment, Pinel relied on human understanding and moral therapy. For just a moment, Sade found himself under the very best care available. It didn’t last. His family paid for his transfer to an asylum at Charenton-Saint-Maurice.
Here was another great Enlightenment psychotherapist. He was a controversial, dangerous dwarf named Abbé de Coulmier. Controversial because his envious rivals were forever trying to get Coulmier fired. Dangerous because he considered madness not a crime to be punished, but a sickness to be cured. And what a challenge the mad Marquis made!
Coulmier was more than equal to it. Surprising many who should have known better, Sade soon returned to the Catholic Church. He turned his pen to nice respectable historical fiction. He wept pure tears when he learned that Constance had died, blind, sick, and at the last a stranger to him.
Sade himself was far from well. He was suffering from rheumatism, partial blindness, and gout. He wrote to Napoleon, asking for release on compassionate grounds. Napoleon, who was about as renowned for compassion as he was for subtlety, decreed that Sade would die at Charenton. He did so on December 2, 1814, just days before Coulmier’s rivals finally got what they wanted: news that the smart, optimistic, humanitarian psychotherapist had been fired.
What are we to make of Sade’s sad story?
Most commentators saw the Terror as a perversion of the Enlightenment. Others saw it as the Enlightenment’s natural climax. This second group formed the so-called Counter-Enlightenment. Philosophers like Joseph de Maistre called for a return to monarchy and religion (but then again, de Maistre was called “more Catholic than the Pope and more royalist than the king”). He “yearned for that bygone era when the executioner’s axe and the inquisitor’s fire had preserved people from the temptations of political disorder and theological error”. He hoped that the excesses of the Revolution would make its citizens rebuild a newer, better, more Christian Europe. Such a change would not be bloody, like the Terror. Rather, it would be peaceful – the “opposite of revolution”. Promises like that were extremely powerful, and appealed to everyone who lamented the Revolution. To that aristocratic bookworm, the Marquis de Sade, they must have carried particular force.
Sade’s complex character seems less puzzling when we view it against the background of this Counter-Enlightenment. Neither his aristocratic background nor his horrific personal experiences made the Enlightenment seem terribly appealing. In prison, he had read all the Enlightenment philosophers. He did not like them.
Voltaire’s negative attitude to Christianity would have disgusted Sade. So did the work Julien La Mettrie, whose ideas read like a summary of Enlightenment attitudes to what we now call Psychology.
La Mettrie had once made a study of the hallucinations he’d experienced during a fever. He’d concluded that mental phenomena were nothing more than the effects of identifiable, unmysterious physical causes. Human beings were just complex machines. We could understand them in the same way we could understand any machine – through the methods of science. The outcry that greeted this idea forced La Mettrie to leave France. The one that followed his next book, called Man a Machine, forced him to leave the Netherlands. La Mettrie reappeared in Berlin, where he argued that the purpose of life was pleasure, and virtue nothing more than a disguise for self-love[xvii]. Every one of his ideas influenced the Enlightenment’s philosophers – especially the world’s first criminologist, Cesare Beccaria, who will be the subject of an upcoming newsletter, never fear.
Sade, however, was profoundly disturbed. His own writing was a more or less a direct response. Perhaps he really was “the one ultra-Catholic writer”. Sade pined for the Church of previous centuries. His characters asked difficult questions like this: If we adopt a rational, atheistic view of the universe, how can we also believe in the morality that supposedly came from God? Either the universe is rational or it isn’t. If God does not exist, neither do His laws. If there are no laws, there can be no such thing as crime. In La Mettrie’s mechanical universe, it seemed that literally everything was allowed. If everyone agreed with La Mettrie, then the world would resemble the nightmare that was The 120 Days of Sodom.
In Sade’s novels, the characters are Enlightenment figures who inhabit a universe without a God. They predict that humankind will soon destroy itself. Meanwhile, in the limited time they have, they feel free to behave in any way they wish. If they decide to eat children, or torture people to death, well, that’s simply their choice. No one can rationally object. If their creator, Sade, really did torture Rose Keller or poison those Marseille prostitutes, no one could rationally object to that, either. Murder and rape, in fact – to judge from the behaviour of animals - appear quite natural, and therefore, if anything, to be recommended. This seemed to be the terrible consequence of Enlightenment philosophy.
Some said that Sade’s books were unnecessarily grotesque. Why didn’t he try to write fashionable Gothic fiction instead, the kind that created polite shudders inside corsets middle-class ladies’ corsets? Sade had a simple answer. The Terror was beyond fiction. “There was not a single person,” Sade wrote, “who had not experienced greater misfortune in four or five years than the most famous novelist in literature could paint in a century”. When reality was so awful, the obscenity was in writing politely. Sade called upon “the assistance of Hell in order to compound the interest and to find in the realm of fantasy those things which we know only too well by investigating the everyday life of mankind in this age of steel”.
In his most notorious novels, Sade presented an upside-down world in which good and evil have swapped places. Characters sermonise about the virtues of crime; torture leads to happiness; people eat other people. In Aline and Valcour, the hero is revolted when he is served human meat for dinner in a far-away land. His host forgives him:
“’Let’s attribute [your revulsion] to your habits of mind or our patriotic prejudices. But you take it too far. You must stop making difficulties and adjust to our actual situation. My good friend, revulsion is merely a weakness, a minor defect of our make-up which we neglected to cure ourselves of when young, and which seizes us if we yield to it...’”
Aline and Valcour was published in 1795, which was a long time after it was written. By then, it is quite possible that Sade had heard Robespierre himself make exactly the same argument. Reason and logic have led the novel’s characters into horrors that would have been unimaginable before the Enlightenment. A greater satire on the Terror is difficult to imagine.
To Sade, the Revolution was a fraud. The Revolutionaries wanted to improve nothing but their own lives. Their only interest was self-interest. They were inspired less by the philosophes than by their own greed, cruelty, and perversions.
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La Mettrie and others seemed to claim that happiness was the only virtue. If they were right, then the most virtuous people were simply those who derived the most pleasure from rape, torture, and murder. Sade stated this very clearly in a poem called “The Truth”:
Nature allows all, by its murderous laws:
Incest and rape, all theft and parricide,
All Sodom’s pleasures, Sappho’s lesbian games,
All that destroys and sends men to their graves.
It was meant as satire. Nevertheless, believers and atheists alike were upset. The new order was certainly rational, reasonable, and atheistic. Sade did not argue with that. He simply asked whether it was necessarily a good thing.
Sade’s novel Philosophy in the Boudoir looks, on the face of it, like an extended wallow in cruelty, pain, and brutality. All three, the satirical characters claim, are good, because all three are “republican”. No one saw the lunacy more clearly than Sade, who began writing the book within smelling distance of the guillotine.
Long after his death, Sade’s name was made immortal by the neurologist Richard Kraft-Ebing. He used the term “sadist” in 1834, in his book Psychopathia Sexualis. Today, it is used to describe those repulsive criminals who gain sexual pleasure from hurting others. Doubtless, Sade did have something of the sadist about him. So too do the characters in his novels, to a much greater extent. The man who had once been imprisoned for the crime of “moderation” was giving a warning of the crimes that were still to come.
Sade is Trump. Trump is Sade.