Our Dark Side (7 page)

Anne-Prospère delighted in the practices into which she had been initiated by her brother-in-law. For her part, Renée-Pélagie was for some years her husband's accomplice. Although it disgusted her, she allowed herself to be sodomized and was an impotent witness to the acts of debauchery he committed with their very young domestics, both boys and girls. Sentenced to death for murder, blasphemy, sodomy and poisoning,
¹⁴
Sade was imprisoned, at his mother-in-law's request, first in the keep at Vincennes in 1777, and then in the Bastille in 1784. He lived there for five years in relative comfort, surrounded by a library of six hundred books.

This was the period of what Maurice Blanchot (1965) calls his ‘major inconvenience'. Unable to act out his fantasies, he could only indulge in furious masturbation. He had haemorrhoids, was becoming obese and was losing his sight, but he took advantage of his confinement to achieve, in a violent confrontation with himself, the highest of freedoms, and the only one to which he could aspire: the freedom to say everything – and therefore to write everything. In the course of this initiatory ideal, which was punctuated by a long series of recriminations against others, he made the transition from abjection to sublimation, from an instinctual barbarity to the elaboration of a rhetoric of sexuality. The pervert acquired, in a word, the status of a theoretician of the human perversions. Well aware that he had become the author of works that would never be acceptable to society, he wrote the
One Hundred and Twenty Days
of Sodom
, taking the precaution of recopying the manuscript on to tiny sheets that could be rolled up and easily hidden. ‘When written, shit does not have an odour. Sade can inundate his partners with it, we receive not the slightest whiff, only the abstract sign of something unpleasant' (Barthes 1997: 137).

Deemed mad because he had shouted from his cell that prisoners were being slaughtered inside the fortress, Sade was transferred to the hospice in Charenton on 2 July 1789. Twelve days later, his cell was sacked and the precious rolls of paper vanished. Sade never saw them again. They remained in the possession of a noble family for three generations before being sold to a German collector who put them in a box. First published in 1904 by the German psychiatrist and sexologist Iwan Bloch, who was himself the author of a biography of the Marquis (published under the pseudonym ‘Eugène Duehren'), the manuscript of a work that has a uniquely transgressive power left Germany in 1929. It was in January of that year that the writer and doctor Maurice Heine, the founder of Sadean studies, went to Germany to bring it back to France.
¹⁵

When the
lettres de cachet
were abolished in 1790,
¹⁶
Sade was able to leave the hospice in Charenton at the very moment when his wife took the decision to divorce him. The spectacle of the Revolution had brought about a strange conversion in her. Just as he had disobeyed her mother's orders and had yielded to the demands of a sacrilegious husband who defined the law of men and profaned the Church, she rejected him as soon as the laws on blasphemy and sodomy were abolished. And she saw the sacking of the churches as the incarnation of an absolute evil which was, in her view, the bloody vector for the great sacking of Christian values: an inescapable real.

Sade, for his part, sang the praises of the Revolution that had put an end to his confinement, declared himself to be a man of letters, published mediocre plays under a pseudonym and, in great secrecy, wrote some of his most subversive works. Just as the Revolution had changed the course of Renée-Pelagie's life, it introduced a new split into Sade's relationship with the Law.

Thanks to the Revolution, the Marquis succeeded in officially cutting himself off from his dark side, while torpedoing, in his clandestine writings, the ideals of a society whose structures had already been badly shaken.

Thanks to Marie Constance Quesnet, an actress from a humble background, the great libertine preacher who had once been so violent was transformed into a lover who was, if not virtuous, at least almost faithful, and into a father. While he showed almost no interest in his legitimate children, and continually cursed them, he took great care of his mistress's son for several years, and kept both him and his mother in complete ignorance of the works he was publishing under a pseudonym. They included
Justine
, the first volume in the interminable saga of two sisters (Justine and Juliette), one virtuous and destined to be unhappy, the other depraved and destined for prosperity.

In September 1792, Sade joined the Pikes Section, where he was known as ‘Citizen Sade'. He was no doubt dreaming of a Revolution that would not betray the Revolution and that would take as its slogan: ‘Frenchmen, some more effort …' Presumably he aspired, without believing in it, to establishing a perverse society, with the law of murder, incest and sodomy as its categorical imperative. That is, in any case, presumable why he did not, in the midst of the turmoil, try to identify with some new world order. He seemed to live in an eternal present, like a diamond suspended over the void of the abolished Law.

The former Marquis and Prince of the perverse excelled at the roles he had given himself as the multi-faceted spectacle of the Revolution unfolded before his eyes. He therefore found it impossible to find a place within any one faction, group or appurtenance. In his letter of 5 December 1791, he stated: ‘I am anti-Jacobin, I hate them heartily, I adore the old king, but abhor the old abuses; I love a mass of articles in the constitution, but others repel me. I want their lustre to be returned to the nobility because I see no point in taking it away. I want the king to be the head of the state … What am I? An aristocrat or a democrat? You tell me, if you please … for I am unable to judge' (cited Bataille 2006a: 112–13).

As a citizen, he reportedly saved the lives of his in-laws when a warrant was issued for their arrest, even though he loathed them. The man who, in his books, had advocated torture and murders of all kinds, provided that they were committed as so many natural acts that expressed a sovereign impulse, had, as I have said, a horror of even the idea of the institutionalization of murder. The sight of the scaffold made him ill, and the spectacle of decapitated bodies plunged him into an abyss of terror. The theoreticians of the most sophisticated sexual perversions could never tolerate the idea that his barbarous imagination might have to face up to the reality of an event that, through its very savagery – the Great Terror – might exorcise or even abolish it. When Marie-Antoinette was executed, after having been accused of incest and depraved sexual practices, he identified with the destiny of the fallen Queen and was filled with compassion for the humiliations she had undergone.

The most tragic moment in this impossible encounter between the Sadean world and the reality of the revolutionary adventure coincided with the attempt to dechristianize France. Professing a radical atheism and wearing a red cap, Sade celebrated the event: ‘How could tyranny fail to prop up superstition? Both were nursed in the same cradle, both are daughters of fanaticism, and both are served by the same useless creatures known as the priest in the temple and the monarch on the throne, so they must have the same basis and must protect one another' (cited Lever 1991: 510).

Less than a week after this diatribe against ‘holy inanities', Robespierre put an end to the anti-Christian campaign. ‘He who wishes to prevent mass from being said', he said in his speech of 21 November 1793 to the Convention, ‘is more fanatical than he who says mass. There are men who want to go still further and who, on the pretext of destroying superstition, want to turn atheism itself into a sort of religion […] If God did not exist, we would have to invent him' (cited Lever 1991: 511).

Condemned under the Ancien Régime for crimes – sodomy and blasphemy – that had been abolished by the new Constitution, Sade was arrested for atheism and
modérantisme
, and was then incarcerated in a former convent used to hold prostitutes. It was so overcrowded that he spent three weeks in the latrines. The smell was overpowering. And yet, in his writings and in his earlier life, he had been the initiator of and propagandist for a veritable cult of the olfactory power of excrement. While he aspired to being a servant of the Enlightenment, in that respect he remain attached to the archaic world of stench that so fascinated the libertines and repulsed a bourgeoisie that wanted to establish the principles of a new hygienics.
¹⁷
Be that as it may, the extreme way in which he had ritualized the practices of defaecation and the ingestion of turds, allowed him to use the language of the Enlightenment to depict the darkest side of a pedagogy of ordure and filth, traces of which can be found in both the discourse of the sexologists and that of the followers of Nazism.

It was, ultimately, because of his atheism, and because he was suspected of being the author of
Justine
that Sade was sentenced to death in March 1794, but not before had had tried in vain to reaffirm his loyalty to the nation. He succeeded, however, in finding lodgings in the Maison Coignard, where mad and wealthy aristocrats found, at a price, a refuge that allowed them to escape the guillotine. Every evening, guards acting on the orders of the Convention threw the bleeding bodies of those who had not escaped decapitation into the garden. Rather than enjoying the spectacle like the characters in his books, Sade was horrified at the sight. The fall of Robespierre allowed him to regain his freedom.

Yet no regime could tolerate the presence of such a man in civil society. And as his actions were no longer illegal, traces had to be found, not just within him but in his works, of the vice that made it possible to imprison him by on the grounds that he was mad. They had found in his room ‘an enormous instrument that he had made from wax and which he had himself used, as the instrument bore traces of its culpable introduction' (police report, cited Lever 1991: 593). How could anyone fail to see that such an object had to be related to the fictional world of
Justine
, that ‘monstrous production, a horrible collection of improbable cruelties' (cited by Delon, Sade 1990: xxxv). This was more than enough to justify a diagnosis of neither blasphemy, debauchery, sodomy or masturbation – which, it will be recalled, were no longer regarded as crimes – but of ‘libertine dementia'.

1803 marked the beginning of the long journey that was, a year later, to take Sade to the asylum in Charenton, where he spent the rest of his life.
¹⁸

At this time a terrible battle was beginning over how to define madness, and over the possibility of curing it. It brought jurists and psychiatrists into conflict for more than one hundred years. As the gradual medicalization of the great human passions got under way, it began to be asked what would become of the nature of perversion in a world in which the perverse, who were not now treated as though they were ill, could no longer defy God and had no option but to place their trust in science.

It is quite understandable that the bourgeoisie of the Empire should have wanted to consolidate its power by describing Sade as mad so as to reduce his work to silence. But that is no reason to avoid the debate as to the status of Sade the man: how could he be insane when he was obviously in full possession of his mental faculties?

The Director of the asylum was François Simonet de Coulmier, former
montagnard
, defrocked priest and one of the architects of the new Pinelian psychiatry, which was based on the moral treatment and humanization of the mad.
¹⁹
Ever since his appointment in 1797, he had, with the help of
médicin-chef
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Gastaldy, who shared his convictions, devoted all his energies to reforming the conditions under which his patients were held and putting more emphasis on intellectual activities than on physical intrusions such as diets, bleeding and purgatives.

Although he was ordered by the Minister to whom he answered to keep Sade under close surveillance, he gave his famous guest the wherewithal to lead a comfortable existence, to write and to indulge his passion for the theatre. He even allowed Constance to be with him. He thus refused to classify Sade as insane, and encouraged him to write plays that acted out his impulses. He was no doubt aware of the mental state of the Marquis, who was convinced that he was the victim of serious persecution. But he thought it preferable to mobilize his talents for the benefit of the asylum community rather than make him, in his daily life, the equivalent of what he had always threatened to become, namely a Dolancé or a Bressac.

A past master in the art of splitting, Sade had little in common with the characters in his novels, now that he had been transformed into an actor-martyr, a stage director and a nurse. He therefore continued to deny that he was the author of licentious texts, but went on writing them, despite being constantly searched by the police. While he denied being the author of his other books – and especially the saga of Justine and Juliette
²⁰
– which had been judged to be obscene, he described himself as the most virtuous dramatist of his day, and wrote many plays that were performed inside the asylum by both the insane and actors.

Sade drew both hostile and enthusiastic crowds as he alternated, both in his heart of hearts and in his dance with the insane, between playing the role of Juliette and that of Justine. From the depths of his prison, he parodied the new world order, which was torn between a desire for
jouissance
and a resolve to normalize the vile, the perverse and the abnormal. Which is why the representatives of bourgeois medical science feared that this preacher from a different age might still have a bad influence on the society of his day: ‘The man's libertinage be assuaged by the inmates, but his ideas might corrupt their morals' (Delon in Sade 1990: xxxix).

Sade's success with his theatre of the mad inevitably displeased all those who regarded him primarily as a criminal. That is why Antoine Royer-Collard immediately tried to put an end to the experiment when he took over from Castaldy in 1805. A former supporter of the Bourbons, this mediocre doctor saw Sade as an incurable perverter: ‘He does not belong in a hospital but in a secure place or a fortress. His madness is the perversion of others. Society cannot hope to cure him, and must subject him to the most severe sequestration. He enjoys too much freedom in Charenton. He is able to communicate with quite a large number of individuals of both sexes […] He preaches his horrible doctrine to some of them, and lends his books to others' (Delon in Sade 1990: xxxix).