123 Rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France
Marquis de Sade studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
123 Rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France
Marquis de Sade studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Napoleon Bonaparte
(This is the first new translation in over forty years of ...)
This is the first new translation in over forty years of Sade's novel "Justine." It is also the first-ever critical edition, based on the original 1791 version of the story, which is the most accessible and artistically successful of the three versions. The novel tells the story of the beautiful and devout Justine, whose steadfast faith and naive trust destine her from the outset for sexual exploitation and martyrdom. The unending catalog of disasters that befall her, during which she is subject to any number of perverse practices, illustrate Sade's belief in the primacy of Nature over civilization.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199572844/?tag=2022091-20
1791
(The name of the Marquis de Sade is synonymous with the bl...)
The name of the Marquis de Sade is synonymous with the blackest corners of the human soul, a byword for all that is most foul in human conduct. In his bleak, claustrophobic universe, there is no God, no human affection, and no hope. This selection of his early writings, some making their first appearance in English in this new translation by David Coward, reveals the full range of Sade's sobering moods and considerable talents.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019954042X/?tag=2022091-20
1791
(Herman and the noble and proud Ernestine, two young lover...)
Herman and the noble and proud Ernestine, two young lovers, find themselves confronted with a pair of libertines who will stop at nothing - not even the confines of the law - to assuage their desires. Count Oxtiern, villainous and dissolute, and his accomplice Madame Scholtz, a widow of lusty temperament, will shrink from nothing, no lie, no treachery is beneath them in their quest for sexual fulfillment.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843911914/?tag=2022091-20
1791
(Philosophy in the Bedroom is a 1795 book by the Marquis d...)
Philosophy in the Bedroom is a 1795 book by the Marquis de Sade written in the form of a dramatic dialogue. Though initially considered a work of pornography, the book has come to be considered a socio-political drama.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y4DHP1P/?tag=2022091-20
1795
(An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adven...)
An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digression.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802130852/?tag=2022091-20
1798
(The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened durin...)
The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened during his reign while draining the State's treasury and exhausting the substance of the people, none the less contained the secret that led to the prosperity of a swarm of those bloodsuckers who are always on the watch for public calamities, which, instead of appeasing, they promote or invent so as, precisely, to be able to profit from them the more advantageously. The end of this so very sublime reign was perhaps one of the periods in the history of the French Empire when one saw the emergence of the greatest number of these mysterious fortunes whose origins are as obscure as the lust and debauchery that accompany them.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GUA4NTC/?tag=2022091-20
1904
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was born on June 2, 1740, in Paris. His father, Jean Baptiste François Joseph was a diplomat in the court of Louis XV, and his mother, Marie Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, was a cousin and lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Condé. When he was a child, his father abandoned his mother, who took refuge in a convent.
By the age of 4, de Sade was known as a rebellious and spoiled child with an ever-growing temper. He once beat the French prince so severely that he was sent to the south of France to stay with his uncle, an abbot of the church. During his stay, while he was 6 years old, his uncle introduced him to debauchery. Four years later, de Sade was sent back to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He attended Lycée Louis-le-Grand for four years. There Abbé Jacques-François Amblet, a priest, tutored him. At school, he received "severe corporal punishments," including flogging for repeated misdeeds.
When he was 14, he attended an elite military academy, and at 15, he was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant. He eventually became Colonel of a Dragoon regiment and fought in the Seven Years' War.
As a young man, de Sade had many affairs with women, most of them prostitutes. De Sade’s father was frantic to find his son a rich wife. The de Sades, although stable in status, had drastically decreased their financial holdings. In 1763, de Sade married Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the daughter of a wealthy government official. Married life didn’t slow his sexual pursuits, however, and within a few months, he was renting out rooms to carry on his intense fantasies.
His first serious offense came when he forced a prostitute to incorporate crosses into their sexual acts, something that seemed altogether blasphemous. The woman immediately told the police about the event, and de Sade was arrested and imprisoned. They released him after a short time, and he promptly returned to his old habits. Of course, his behavior tested his wife’s limits, but divorce was practically impossible. The couple eventually had three children.
On Easter Sunday in 1768, de Sade invited a chambermaid to his room, cut her, and then dripped hot wax drip into her wounds. The de Sade family paid the woman to keep her from testifying, but after such social embarrassment, de Sade was made to live on the margins of society. Obsessed, he committed sodomy with four prostitutes and his manservant just four years later. Even though the act of sodomy was rather common among the aristocracy, the court decided to make an example of him and banished him to exile in Italy.
By 1772, at which time he was condemned to death by decapitation, Sade had been incarcerated for extravagant debauchery, for vicious abuse of a woman, and for conducting sodomy with four women whom he also attempted to poison (the latter incident being the famed scandal of Marseilles). Sade fled to Italy but was soon arrested and imprisoned for five months before managing to escape. He returned to France after the annulment of the Marseilles decision but was sent to Vincennes prison in 1777 by the special order of Louis XVI. He was transferred to the Bastille in 1784 and five years later to the insane asylum at Charenton. Sade was released from Charenton in 1790 but was arrested again during the Reign of Terror. From 1794 to 1800 he was free and able to publish some of his works. However, their publication resulted in his imprisonment once again. De Sade was put into an insane asylum. From 1810 until his death on December 2, 1814, he conducted a relationship with the 13-year-old daughter of an employee at the asylum. He died there on December 2, 1814.
During the 29 years Sade spent in various prisons, he peopled his solitude with numerous spokesmen who articulated his philosophy on man, nature, and God. Although he was a prolific writer who worked in many genres, his most famous works are his novels: Justine, 1791; La Philosophie dans le boudoir, 1795; Aline et Valcour, 1795; Juliette, 1797; Les Crimes de l'amour, 1800; and Les 120 Journées de Sodome, 1931-1935. (For English translations see The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, New York, Grove Press, 1965 and The 120 Days of Sodom, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957.) They expound a philosophy that rejects two postulates of Christian philosophy, the existence of God, and the inherent goodness of nature. To deny the first postulate, he attacks established religions; to deny the second, he exalts what he considers man's innate malevolence. According to Sade everything in nature contains a duality, the capacity for destruction as well as for creation. Descriptions of sexual perversions serve as a vehicle for affirming his metaphysical position: for him, the "sadist" expresses the forces of nature.
Donatien Alphonse François, was a libertine, debaucher, pornographer, and sadist - a term derived from his name. The Marquis de Sade has been traditionally viewed as the greatest incarnation of evil that ever lived. Recently, however, new interpretations of his life and writings have begun to appear. It is now generally agreed that despite his reputation, his works, which were ignored for over a century, must be considered as of the first rank. Sade has been termed the "most absolute writer who has ever lived." His best-known books include Justine; ou, Les Malheurs de la vertu (1791) and its sequel, Histoire de Juliette; ou, Les Prospérités du vice (1797).
(The extensive wars wherewith Louis XIV was burdened durin...)
1904(Herman and the noble and proud Ernestine, two young lover...)
1791(The name of the Marquis de Sade is synonymous with the bl...)
1791(An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adven...)
1798(Philosophy in the Bedroom is a 1795 book by the Marquis d...)
1795(This is the first new translation in over forty years of ...)
1791Sade's atheism is viewed as the first element in a dialectic which destroys divinity through sacrilege and blasphemy and raises to preeminence an indifferent and unfolding nature which destroys to create and creates to destroy. Nature itself is then destroyed by being constantly outraged because it takes on the same sovereign character as God. What emerges is the "Unique One," the man who rises above nature and arrogates to himself the creative and destructive capacities of nature in an extreme form, becoming solitary, alone, unique in the conscious awareness that he is the creative force and all others are but the material through which his energy is expressed.
Despite his aristocratic background, after the French revolution, de Sade supported the Republic and managed to obtain several official positions.
In 1790, he was elected to the National Convention, where he represented the far left. He was a member of the Piques section, notorious for its radical views. He wrote several political pamphlets, in which he called for the implementation of the direct vote, and called himself "Citizen Sade." However, there is much to suggest that he suffered abuse from his fellow revolutionaries due to his aristocratic background. Moreover, he did not acknowledge class society and marked out just two "classes" - masters and slaves.
Marquis de Sade has been hailed as "the freest spirit who has ever existed." He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion, or law. He promoted the idea of eschewing all limitations and exceeding the bounds of convention and knowledge.
His philosophy was interpreted in many ways by other philosophers and scientists. Mainly Sade's works have been seen as an exploration of sexual and political freedom. On the other hand, he was a multiple rapist, torturer, and proto-murderer.
Various influential cultural figures have expressed a great interest in Sade's works and partly shared his philosophy. Numerous writers and artists, especially those concerned with sexuality, have been both repelled and fascinated by Sade.
Quotations:
"Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity... Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice. "
"Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy... Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice. "
"How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold. "
"Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence. "
Marquis de Sade lived a scandalous libertine life, and repeatedly indulged in severe sexual offences. He was also charged with blasphemy, a serious offense at that time, and was imprisoned several times for committing sexual brutalities against women.
Recent works on his life have justly sought answers about his personality in his literary works, and because of this most commentators tend to psychoanalyze him. Although many of these works have offered brilliant insights into the character of the man, none of them is definitive and most treat him out of context, as though his life and aberrations were apart from life. Most Sadean scholars tend to agree that his hostility to religion, to the established social and political order, and to the despotism of existing law was similar in many ways to that of the philosophes. Some writers believe that he carried the beliefs of the philosophes to the rational conclusions, which in the end negated the conclusions and opened for succeeding generations a moral abyss. Others focus on what is termed a philosophy of destruction found in Sade's writings.
In 1763 Marquis de Sade agreed to an arranged marriage to Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil. The couple had two sons and a daughter.
