Not surprisingly, the Marquis de Sade and his licentious writings were quickly linked to the Terror’s justification of violence. A contemporary of Sade, Charles de Villers, attributed a rejuvenating effect to the author of Justine:
On dit que lorsque Robespierre, lorsque Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot, ses ministres, étaient fatigués de meurtres et de condamnations lorsque quelques remords se faisaient sentir à ces cœurs de bronze, et qu’à la vue des nombreux arrêts qu’il leur fallait signer, la plume échappait à leurs doigts, ils allaient lire quelques pages de Justine, et revenaient signer.150 A writer capable of immense violence in his own stories, Sade nevertheless had no tolerance for the unending carnage associated with the Terror. In a November 1794 letter, Sade talks of the
148
Sade was sentenced to death in absentia following his conviction for poisoning a prostitute in 1772. He was also condemned to death in 1793 for anti-Revolutionary activities. Both times, it was only through personal connections and administrative errors that he was able to escape his sentence.
149
Sade letter to Gaufridy, 21 January 1795. Cited in Laborde’s Correspondances, vol XXIV, 25. It is interesting to note that this torturous scene was used by Sade in his fictional works. The first instance of it was in his 1785 manuscript, Les 120 journées de Sodome, well before his 1795 letter to Gaufridy. In this story, a judge has a man broken on the rack while his wife and daughter submit themselves to rape in a mansion overlooking the execution site, in order to save him. The next time this particular denouement is seen is in 1800’s Ernestine, a short story in the Crimes de l’amour collection. However, this time the plot has a girl trying to save her beloved. The hero is guillotined, while his fiancée is raped in an apartment overlooking the bloody scene. In both cases, the judge demonstrates a horrible abuse of power, but it is not until the Terror that the guillotine becomes an instrument of torture in Sade’s stories.
150
Charles de Villers, Lettre sur le roman intitulé Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, in Le Spectateur du Nord, 1797. Villers was one of the editors of this “political, literary, and moral” journal which was published from 1797- 1802. Cited in Blanchot’s Inconvenance majeure in Sade’s Français, encore un effort, 42.
elimination of Robespierre and his cohorts as an opportunity to heal the country’s recent wounds: “[La] tranquillité va renaître à jamais, la mort des scélérats a dissipé tous les nuages et le calme dont nous allons jouir va consolider toutes nos plaies.”151 This calm and somewhat hopeful sentiment reveals Sade’s desire to see an end to the recent upheavals.
Sade’s hope for tranquility and healing is perhaps at odds with the apathy touted as a cure for the country’s ills in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. During a debate about the importance of listening to one’s heart, the libertines are counseled against such weakness:
Encore une fois, Eugénie, que cette perfide sensibilité ne vous abuse pas ; elle n'est, soyez-en bien sûre, que la faiblesse de l'âme ; on ne pleure que parce que l'on craint, et voilà pourquoi les rois sont des tyrans. [… Les] plaisirs qui naissent de l’apathie valent bien ceux que la sensibilité vous donne ; celle-ci ne sait qu’atteindre dans un sens le cœur que l’autre chatouille et bouleverse de toutes parts. 152
Sentiments are seen as a “weakness,” something associated with unnecessary upheaval and tyrants. Maurice Blanchot explains Sadien apathy as a necessary trait for those who seek sovereignty. The “coldness” associated with laws is in direct relation with apathy, which is needed to balance man’s passionate instincts.153 This negation of any sentiment toward another “ne consiste pas seulement à ruiner les affections « parasitaires, » mais aussi bien à s’opposer à la spontanéité de n’importe quelle passion.”154 For a generation that had seen perhaps too much passion, a bit of apathy must have sounded quite soothing.
Sade’s life, like that of many of his contemporaries, had come to depend on how well he could adapt to the ever-changing tide of events. By the end of the Terror, the Marquis de Sade felt an overwhelming need for calm and order. Apathy is a common trait among his great libertine characters. It allows them to proceed through life, taking what they need to be
151
Sade letter to Gaufridy, 19 November 1794. Cited in Laborde’s Correspondances, vol XXIII, 231.
152
Philosophie, 539.
153
See the discussion of “cold laws” on p. 77.
154
momentarily satisfied, yet never permitting them to care what happens to others around them. Undoubtedly a tenet by which Sade tried to live, this indifference to the outside world was difficult to achieve in such a chaotic environment.
After the Terror, Sade’s works reflect some of the changes that society had undergone. Indeed, it is not until after the Revolution that some of the era’s more barbaric practices appear in Sadien stories. His earlier 120 journées de Sodome (1785) contains limited beheadings, but the use of guillotine machinery becomes prominent in the later Juliette (1796) and La nouvelle Justine (1797). Parricide, as well, will first make repeated appearances after the Terror, with Juliette being the most notable example in Sade’s stories. As Lucienne Frappier-Mazur notes, the obsession with the father is “contemporaneous with a certain questioning of paternal power,”155 a result of the overthrow of so many father figures, including the ultimate sources of authority, the king and the Church.
In both Sade’s works of fiction and his own life, escaping authority was not limited to the borders of France. His 1796 Juliette describes the title character’s flight to Italy, which is portrayed as a world turned topsy-turvy. Here, libertinage is openly practiced and Juliette moves from being a student to establishing herself as a dominant power. Idée sur les romans (1800) explains the latest interest in gothic and fantastic literature as “le fruit indispensable des secousses révolutionnaires,”156 although no one is truly able to capture the chaos of recent events. The idyllic setting of La Philosophie dans le boudoir can also be read in reaction to the violence surrounding its creation. As Neil Schaeffer observes:
The beauty, the handsomeness, the air of courtesy and the ready compliance of the participants, as well as their general cheerfulness, suggest, if not a happy fantasy of the
155
Lucienne Frappier-Mazur “A Turning Point in the Sadean Novel: The Terror” in Deepak Narang Sawhney, ed.
Must We Burn Sade? (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 120. 156
ancien régime, then perhaps a happy fantasy of the Thermidorian thaw following the atrocities of the Reign of Terror.157
Sade’s use of Madame de Saint-Ange’s country estate as the setting for his libertine “school” does indeed evoke the lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy libertines before the Terror’s brutality. The sheer fact that no hints are given as to the chronological setting of the story tells the reader that Sade is trying to situate the story outside of the violence and chaos of the external world. It is only the inserted pamphlet that provides clues for its time period.
In real life, Sade continued to live much as he had before the Terror. He was arrested under the Law of Suspects in December 1793 and was held until October 1794 in a series of prisons. Following his release, he reestablished communication with his solicitor and discovered that many of his friends and distant relatives had been killed during the most violent year of the Revolution. His finances deteriorated to the point that he had to sell his ancestral estate, La Coste, and he once again tried to make a living from his writing. Along with Philosophie, Sade produced La Nouvelle Justine, Juliette, Les Crimes de l’amour, and several other works in the years immediately following the Terror. Most of his works from this period are now unfortunately lost to posterity. Sade’s clandestine publishing career would soon be exposed and he would be arrested one last time under Napoléon. He would finish the remainder of his life in the asylum of Charenton, where he had earlier spent nine months during the Revolution.158
157
Schaeffer, 456.
158
For a full discussion of Sade’s last imprisonment, see Schaeffer’s chapter “Charenton” in The Marquis de Sade: