Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

This man, who seems to have counted for nothing during the whole nineteenth century, might become the dominant figure of the twentieth. —Guillaume Apollinaire, 1909¹⁶³

Surrealists in both Paris and Prague were fascinated by the Marquis de Sade. The Paris surrealists made a number of pilgrimmages to his ancestral home, the Château la Coste, and Štyrský, who was exploring Sade by the early 1930s (in 1932 he published a Czech translation of Justine illustrated by Toyen, discussed in Chapter 4), visited the chateau and took atmospheric photographs of the ruins.¹⁶⁴ Indeed, Czech intellectuals had earlier access to Sade’s important text 120 Days of Sodom, which Bataille described as “the first expression of the full horror of liberty.”¹⁶⁵ The manuscript had been lost during Sade’s lifetime and was first printed in 1904, in German. It was not published in French until 1931.¹⁶⁶ The Czech surrealists-to-be were at least somewhat familiar with the writings of the Marquis de Sade by early 1929, when the selection

“O přírodě” (On Nature) from La Nouvelle Justine appeared in ReD. Toyen herself planned to illustrate Sade’s Historiettes et fablieux in the late 1940s, a project that apparently did not come to fruition.¹⁶⁷

The reasons for surrealist adulation of the Marquis de Sade become clearer when seen in the larger context of early twentieth-century interest in Sade. During the early twentieth century, Sade’s image underwent a shift from that of an evil and depraved pervert to that of a

163Guillaume Apollinaire, “Introduction,” in L’Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Bibliothèque des curieux, 1909), 17, translated and discussed in Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 159.

164Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists, 116.

165Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars Ltd, 1973), 88.

166Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 34. Sexologist Iwan Bloch was responsible for the German edition of 120 Days of Sodom.

167 Jindřich Heisler to Frederick Kiesler, undated letter from 1947, in František Šmejkal, ed., Jindřich Heisler/Z kasemat spánku (Prague: Torst, 1999), 320.

misunderstood, martyred, even sanctified prophet of the psyche and human sexuality. While the surrealists played a major role in this transformation, they did not begin the process, which had begun in the late nineteenth century.¹⁶⁸

Apollinaire, significantly, envisioned Sade not as the incarnation of sin, but as a modern spirit who expressed important aspects of human nature and who espoused radical political ideas and the liberation of women.¹⁶⁹ The surrealists followed Apollinaire in perceiving Sade in these terms and as a victimized visionary who affirmed the strength of the libido and was a precursor to Freud. Breton, for example, described him in the First Manifesto as “surrealist in sadism”

because for the most part his excesses were written (imagined) rather than performed.¹⁷⁰ Robert Desnos wrote in 1923, “In essence, all our current aspirations were formulated by Sade. He was the first to posit the integrity of one’s sexual being as indispensable to the life both of the sense and of the intellect.”¹⁷¹

How did the surrealists justify this enthusiasm for a writer who visited unspeakable torments upon many of his female characters and who described gruesome rapes and murders? A partial answer lies in theorization of Sade as a moralist and social satirist. Sade did not assume sadism to be a male prerogative, nor victimization a female duty. Instead, he argued that the individual must seize control of his or her own sexuality.¹⁷² On its surface, for example, Sade’s Justine details the degradations thrust upon one of his most blameless victims. But, as Angela

168See Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 123–69.

169Guillaume Apollinaire, “Introduction,” 17–18. See discussion in Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 159.

170 Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” 26. Breton also stated that Sade’s oeuvre “can be considered the most authentic precursor of Freud’s work and all of modern psychopathology.” (André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997], 18.) All are discussed in Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 162–63.

171 Quoted in Annie Le Brun, “Desire—A Surrealist ‘Invention’,” in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy, Vincent Gille, and Dawn Ades (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 305.

172 Jane Gallop proposes that Sade created his cruel characters to be identified by readers as “the image of their own unspeakable, aggressive desires.” (Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 3.)

Carter suggests, it can also be read as the story of a woman who adheres rigidly to conventional notions of female virtue. Because Justine equates her honor with virginity and frigidity, she consistently invites her own victimization and allows her friends to be killed as a result of her spineless obedience to evil men. Apollinaire judged that

It is not by chance that the Marquis chose heroines instead of heroes. Justine is the woman of former times: subjugated, miserable, and less than human. Juliette, on the contrary, represents the new woman that he foresaw, a being of whom we still have no idea—a woman who, breaking away from humanity, will take wing and renew the universe.¹⁷³

Few would want the rapacious Juliette to be a model for the modern woman, yet at least she makes her own choices and is no man’s victim. Sade’s monstrous “philosophers” can be either male or female but are invariably opposed to motherhood.¹⁷⁴ Though the ways they express this opposition are brutal, this represents acceptance of women as other than reproductive.

At times, Sade expressed proto-feminist sentiments: “no one sex can ever be granted a legitimate right to take exclusive possession of the other. [...] We must unquestionably recompense these women that we have so cruelly enslaved. [...] O enchanting sex! You will be free. Like men you will enjoy all the pleasures that nature has created your duty. There will be no restrictions on any of them for you. Why should the most divine half of humanity be chained up by the other? Break your chains, nature wishes it.”¹⁷⁵ He was not consistent, however, and may even have written such words ironically. He pursued a double standard in marital relations and

173 “Ce n’est pas au hasard que le marquis a choisi des héroïnes et non pas des héros. Justine, c’est l’ancienne femme, asservie, misérable et moins qu’humaine; Juliette, au contraire, représente la femme nouvelle qu’il entrevoyait, un être dont on n’a pas encore idée, qui se dégage de l’humanité, qui aura des ailes et qui renouvellera l’univers.” (Guillaume Apollinaire, “Introduction,” 18. See discussion in Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History [London: Virago, 1979], 79.) Alternately, Justine can be seen as virtuous but refusing to learn from experience, while Juliette successfully adopts the world’s worst values and becomes rich and powerful (Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 35).

174 Gallop, Thinking Through the Body, 3.

175 Sade, La Philosophie dans le Boudoir, in Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, Selected Writings of de Sade, ed.

and trans. Leonard de Saint-Yves (New York: Castle Books, 1954), 108–9.

defended prostitution.¹⁷⁶ Thus, Sade’s attitudes about women were not unreservedly egalitarian, but his proto-feminist remarks were there for the surrealists to use.

As Carolyn J. Dean observes, the idea of Sade as martyr “was rooted in the surrealist contention that texts were not necessarily mirrors of reality, that Sade’s crimes were the stuff of fiction.” Thus, as Dean suggests, “Writers in the 1930s [...] considered Sade significant less for his sadism than for having written about it.”¹⁷⁷ Thus, when we look at how the surrealists saw Sade, we must recognize their vision of him and not overlay a later assessment onto their version. Both the Paris and Prague surrealists celebrated Sade as a revolutionary philosopher of human liberty. Breton regarded Sade, Fourier, and Freud to be the “three great emancipators of desire,”¹⁷⁸ and Toyen evidently shared this view. The fact that she not only illustrated Justine in 1932, prior to becoming a surrealist, but planned to illustrate Historiettes et fablieux in the late 1940s and gave paintings the titles Château La Coste (1946) and At Silling Castle (1969), when she had had ample time to consider the author’s significance, shows her acceptance of the surrealist position on Sade. Both Château La Coste and At Silling Castle, incidentally, depict predatory beasts.