June 14, 2025 • 58 mins
Dive into the captivating and controversial world of Marquis de Sade in this thought-provoking podcast episode, "Marquis de Sade: Visionary, Villain, or Both?" Explore the scandalous life and enduring legacy of one of history's most notorious figures. Born into aristocracy, de Sade's life was marked by privilege, scandal, and literary rebellion. Journey with us as we unravel his tumultuous early years, his infamous scandals, and the provocative works that challenged societal norms.
Discover the complex interplay between de Sade's personal excesses and his audacious literary pursuits, from the infamous "One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom" to the philosophical provocations of "Justine." Was he a revolutionary thinker or a depraved iconoclast? Join us as we examine his controversial impact on society, his influence on intellectuals and psychoanalysts, and the debates his works continue to spark among existentialists and critics.
In this episode, we invite you to ponder the enigmatic nature of Marquis de Sade—was he a visionary mind ahead of his time or simply a scandalous deviant? Delve into the extreme edges of human experience and reflect on how de Sade's life and writings compel us to question the very essence of human nature and societal norms.
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(00:04):
The man known to history as the Marquis de Sad was born on the
2nd of June 1740 in the Hotel deConde in the city of Paris in
France. His full Christian name was
Donacian Alfonse Francois de Sad.
His father was Jean Baptiste Francois Josef Dassad Marquis or
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Count Dassad in the French minornobility.
The Desad family was of the ancient aristocracy, able to
trace their lineage back to the High Middle Ages over 5
centuries earlier. Consequently, Jean Baptiste had
obtained a number of senior governmental positions during
the 1730s as both a military commander and a diplomat.
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Donacian's mother was Marie Eleanor de Mayed de Calman.
She came from an even more esteemed branch of the French
aristocracy that was a junior branch of the Conde family.
The Princess of Conde were some of the most senior aristocrats
in France during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was owing to her background that Desard was born in the
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Hotel de Conde in Paris. The Condes were also related to
the House of Bourbon, the royal house in France since the late
16th century. As such, the Saud was distantly
related to King Louis the 15th, the ruler of the country from
1715 to 1774. His family ties would ensure
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that the Saud escaped punishmentfor many of his misdeeds in the
1760s and 1770s as he grew older, but also that he acquired
a public notoriety which might have been avoided had his family
been more obscure. Donacian spent his first years
growing up in Paris, often at the Hotel de Conde where he was
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born and where his mother servedin the household of the Conde
family during a period of transition as Prince.
Louis Joseph became Prince of Conde in 1740, when he was
little more than an infant, right around the time Donacian
was born. The Saud and the Prince of Conde
were playmates here during the early 1740s, Though the
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relationship became tempestuous.It is believed that Donacian may
have struck Louis Joseph at somepoint in 1744.
A brawl between children is perhaps not the worst of crimes,
but Donacian had struck a royal Prince and so he had to be
punished. He was dismissed from the Hotel
de Conde and sent to live with his grandmother in Avignon in
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the South of France. A year later he was then
transferred to the home of another relative, his father's
brother. The Abe Desaad, Donacin's uncle,
was an ecclesiastical Lord, though one with a liberal
streak, and he was much influenced by him in his youth.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Donacian's parents marriage collapsed at
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the end of the 1740s as his father fell out of royal favour
and his mother went to live eventually in a convent.
Biographers have noted the ironyof the fact that Dassad's mother
became a nun, though perhaps hisobjection to the Church in later
years was in part owing to this development in his childhood
years. In examining Desard's life, it
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is worth bearing in mind the social and political
circumstances in which he grew up and lived.
Europe in the 18th century was still broadly mired in the
restrictive social circumstancesthat had prevailed for
centuries. Christian morality predominated
with all of its prohibitions on promiscuous sexual activity and
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also on modes of thought and social activities.
Social life was also regulated insofar as people thought there
were acceptable and unacceptablecodes of conduct.
This is not unusual for all of our own ages, alleged
libertarianism. There are all manner of rules
and regulations for how we behave within society and
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towards others. Some socially regulated, others
politically and legally regulated.
The same was true in Desard's time, in particular in the realm
of pornography and open discussion of sexual activity,
things which were not only socially prohibited but which,
it is fair to say, nobody even really considered writing about
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in a public way. However, Desard was also living
in an age of social and political change.
The 18th century was the era of the Enlightenment, when men and
women began to question a great many firmly held views about
everything from religion and politics to sex and social
interaction. This created an environment in
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which somebody might begin to discuss sex in a more open
manner, though, as will become clear, the sexual activity which
Dassad would describe in his work was of a kind which was
deemed to be so depraved that hesoon ran into legal jeopardy.
And even in our time, he is still a very controversial
figure. Donacian's relatively sheltered
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upbringing in the South of France was to change in the
early 1750s, when he was still very young.
In 1750 he was sent to a Jesuit College in Paris.
Here he received a good education, but biographers have
speculated that he also sufferedcorporal punishment and possibly
even abuse while there. In 1754 he headed to a French
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Military Academy. This was a not altogether
uncommon Ave. for a son of a French noble at the time, and in
December 1755, when he was just 15 years of age, he was
commissioned into the King's Footguard as a sub Lieutenant.
France was already at war by that time in North America
against the British and their Native American allies.
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However, this soon expanded intothe Seven Years War in Europe
after Britain allied with Prussia and France with Austria
in a growing continental conflict over a wide range of
disputes. Disad spent the entire war in
service until 1763, when it ended in a stalemate in Europe
and a British victory in North America.
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With the transfer of the French colonies in what is now Canada
to England. Donacian's military career had
been mixed. He was praised by his commanding
officers as an intelligence sub commander, the one who had
problems with authority and the chain of command, not ideal
characteristics for a military career.
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Unsurprisingly, he was discharged from his post when
the war ended. Even in these early years, there
were difficult elements emergingsurrounding Donacian's
character. While in the army, he developed
a taste for cards and games of chance.
Gambling was a perennial problemof the nobility in early modern
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Europe, and more than a few aristocratic families had been
bankrupted and destroyed in France, England and other
regions on the back of a delinquent member running up
huge debts and having to sell off their estates.
On top of this, the Saud quicklydeveloped a reputation as a
reckless spendthrift, spending beyond his means and having a
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taste for the high life. On the surface, as a distant
relative of the royal family, hemight have had the money to pay
for this, but in reality the Desard family were not doing
well financially and his father regularly lambasted Domacion for
his excessive expenditure. Combined with all of these was
his marked tendency towards whatwas deemed libertine behaviour
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at this time, a general tendencyto disregard the social mores of
the day and to ignore the rigorous morals of Christianity,
instead showing a dispensation towards atheism and a disregard
for social conventions. As much as his father might have
tried to correct his son, he ultimately failed, and when Jean
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Baptiste died in 1767, Donacian succeeded to the resources that
came with becoming the Marquis de Saad at just 27 years of age.
By the time Donacion became the marquee, he had been married for
several years. Back in 1763, as the Seven Years
War came to an end and Donacion was discharged from the
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military, his father organized an arranged marriage for him.
The prospective bride was Rene Pelagi de Montroy, a member of
another French noble family, though one whose financial
circumstances were much better than the decades.
Donacian's father had hoped thatthe marriage would both improve
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the family's financial affairs through a large dowry and also
set the future marquee on the straight and narrow.
Donacian was unenthused by the prospect.
He already had a lover in the early 1760s, Laur de Lochies,
though she eventually rejected him.
It is unclear if the venereal disease he began to suffer from
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around this time was a byproductof their fling.
In any event, he eventually agreed to marry Rene Pellargie,
doing so on the 17th of May 1763, after the king had given
the union involving his distant cousin the royal blessing.
Initially the marriage was a relatively stable 1 and over
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time they had three children, Louis Donacier Junior and
Madeleine, born respectively in 17671769 and 1771.
However, even by the time the eldest, Louis was born in 1767,
the sad had grown weary of his wife's Catholic moralizing and
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the marriage was strained. She was nevertheless determined
not to divorce or separate, and they would remain married for 27
years, with Rene Pelagi becomingthe epitome of the
long-suffering wife in the process.
Just months after he married Rene Pellargie, Desard became
embroiled in the first of numerous affairs and scandals
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which would result in personal and legal difficulties and
eventually land him in prison, forever expanding periods of
time. This first incident centered on
Desard's hiring of a prostitute by the name of Jean Testard in
October 1763. After spending the night in an
apartment which Desard had rented in Paris, she went to the
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police the next day alleging that Dassad had behaved in an
abominable manner towards her. Amongst her claims were that
Dassad had locked the apartment and refused to let her leave.
He had then unleashed a wave of atheistic obscenities and had
allegedly desecrated a holy chalice with bodily fluids.
He had apparently also asked herto flagellate him, while Testard
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claimed that Desad had requestedher to perform illegal lewd acts
on his fundament, something which she had drawn a line at.
Not only were the acts illegal, but sacrilege and unacceptable
in Catholic France at the time. Just over a week later, Desad
was arrested and imprisoned withthe consent of the king, who had
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been consulted on the matter. He was sent to a prison in
Vansen, near Paris. Exactly what we should make of
the whole affair is unclear. Many of these things Desaad was
accused of were not criminal by today's standards. 1 of
Testard's accusations was that the Marquis had read atheistic
poetry to her. Dassad was quickly free.
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He began writing to the court, expressing his deep regret for
his actions and his desire to see a priest who would hear his
confession so that he might get back to a more Christian life.
This certainly wasn't what happened, though.
Released through the intervention of the king after
just a few weeks, Desard left Paris thereafter and spent much
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of the mid 1760s living between a property owned by his wife's
family in Normandy and one of his own family's chateaus in the
South of France. He had little choice in this
initially, as the terms of his release from the prison in Van
Cen had been that he did not return to Paris for some time.
However, eventually the king sent word that he could return
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to the capital. Desaad chose not to, instead
harbouring a series of mistresses in his new home in
Provence and beginning his literary career as a would be
dramatist, even setting up a small theatre in his country
retreat. The birth of his first child
ended this period of exile, and in 1767 he largely returned to
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Paris to live with his wife. Not long after Dassad settled
back in Paris, a fresh scandal arose.
At Easter 1768, he hired a womanby the name of Rose Keller.
Accounts of what occurred are mixed.
The Marquis later claimed that he had hired her as a
prostitute, but Keller stated that she had been homeless and
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begging near the Place de Victoire in Paris when Dassad
offered her a position as a housekeeper.
Having been duped, she then claimed that Dassad sought to
engage her sexually and had effectively imprisoned her in
his country house. At a koi.
She escaped out of a window and went to the authorities, whom
she informed that Dassad had threatened her with a knife and
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had tried to coerce her into sordid activities involving
ropes, horse whips, and candle wax.
When he was questioned several days later, Dassad claimed that
he had hired Keller as a prostitute and that some of what
she was claiming was not accurate.
After the king was informed of the case, he ordered his distant
cousin's arrest, and the Marquisspent several weeks imprisoned
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yet again. Eventually, after several months
of toing and froing, Desaad was fully released and the charges
dropped after he agreed to make a charitable donation to the
poor of Paris. His release on this occasion
seemingly followed his wife's family's intervention with the
king, while the Saud was once again out of legal trouble.
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By the end of 1768, the case hadgenerated a lot of publicity in
Paris on account of it involvinga minor noble who was a distant
cousin of King Louis the 15th, who was also married to a woman
hailing from another aristocratic family.
In an age of growing disaffection with the crown and
nobility and the aloof manner inwhich they lived at Versailles
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outside of Paris, here seemed tobe evidence of the perversity of
some of these people. In annoyance, the king banished
Desard from Paris yet again and ordered him to maintain a lower
profile. The marquee responded by once
again taking up residence at hiscountry estate in the South, at
Lacoste, near Vaucluse. He spent much of 1769 here,
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though he also re entered the military at this point, in large
part in an attempt to improve his financial situation.
He spent part of 1769 and 1770 commissioned as an officer in a
regiment stationed near the eastern border of France in the
Burgundy region. His financial troubles briefly
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led him to being sent to debtorsprison.
If Tassad managed to remain largely out of trouble for a
year or two after the Keller affair in 1768, the early 1770s
saw a new bout of sordid behaviour which would eventually
culminate in him going on the run from the authorities and
then landing in prison for the first really sustained period of
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time in his life. Matters began in 1771 when the
Marquis sister-in-law, his wife's younger sister Anne
Pourperre, visited the Dassades where they were living at the
time in their Chateau at Lacoste.
During the visit, Donacian is believed to have begun an affair
with a 19 year old sister-in-law, doubtlessly
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creating further problems for his long-suffering wife and
within her family at the same time.
Tasad's literary and cultural ambitions were evident during
this time as he established a small theatre at Lacoste and
began to stage plays there whilealso writing himself.
Here was the mix which would characterize the rest of his
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life, literary ambitions walkinghand in hand with personal
turmoil. His legal difficulties began
afresh in the summer of 1772. At this time, the Marquis and
one of his manservants by the name of Latour visited the city
of Marseille. The trip was ostensibly to
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acquire some lines of credit to aid the decades in their
difficult financial circumstances at Lacoste.
Or at least this is what Dissardtold his wife.
He was visiting the southern city for in reality, Dissard
organized elaborate acts of depravity with multiple persons
while there. For the purposes of this,
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Dissard had Latour hire the services of four women.
What followed apparently involved group copulation and
the use of implements for the purpose of heightening physical
arousal. Lewd acts involving the
fundamental orifice, which was acrime at the time in France, may
also have been involved, though the details were disputed.
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What created a problem was that Dassad had seemingly introduced
some cantaradine into the mix, asubstance which is secreted by
the blistering beetle and which is more commonly known as
Spanish fly. It was used extensively as an
aphrodisiac in early modern times, but can be poisonous and
extremely harmful if used incorrectly.
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In the aftermath of the event, one of the prostitutes by the
name of Marianne became very illand a second Marguerite filed a
report with the local magistratein Marseille.
Thus, after remaining largely out of trouble for three years
after the Keller scandal in Paris back in 1768, Dassad once
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again found himself under investigation.
As with previous scandals, Dassad's Montreuil relatives
tried to intervene to stop details of the incident becoming
widely known and to keep Donacian out of prison.
One might ask why. The simple reason would seem to
be that for all his mistreatmentof her, Dissard's wife remained
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committed to their marriage, perhaps partly for the sake of
their growing family and her Catholic unwillingness to
divorce, but also because, for all his flaws, Dissard was
believed to have been charming in some respects.
One modern study has argued thatpart of this was owing to his
unusual personality. He was a figure who seemed to be
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interested solely in the personal domain when so many men
of the French nobility were obsessed with public affairs.
Whatever the reasons, it LED Rene Bellagi to stay with him
for far longer than she should have, even dropping goods off
for him multiple times a week when he was in prison throughout
the 1780s. In 1772, it LED her to yet again
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intervene to have her family payoff the prostitutes involved in
the scandal in Marseille to droptheir charges.
They did so, but the case had come to public attention and the
magistrates in the city decided to continue the investigation,
while in September 1772, the people of Marseille executed
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straw effigies in the city centre which were meant to
represent the Saud and his servant Lac Tour, an indication
of public revulsion at the scandal.
The next two years were chaotic in Desard and his wife's lives.
The Marseille case refused to goaway, and as the authorities in
the city continued to press for the Marquis arrest, Donacian
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decided to abscond abroad to Italy for a time.
Spending several months living in the Kingdom of Sardinia,
which contrary to its name, was centred on the Piedmont region
straddling the modern day borderbetween France and Italy, the
rulers of which had latterly acquired the island of Sardinia
as a territorial possession. Warrants were active for
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Dassad's arrest during this time, and his mother-in-law,
Madame de Montroy had also turned on him this time, wishing
to see the apparent monster thather daughter had married removed
to prison. She was petitioning King Louis
the 15th to follow through on imprisoning the Saud for a
sustained period over the Marseille charges, but the king
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died in May 1774 before Donaciancould be imprisoned again.
The royal warrant against Assad lapsed thereafter, though his
mother-in-law continued to petition the new King Louis the
16th for the Marquis arrest. Meanwhile, back in France in the
mid 1770s, Dissard began writinga book entitled Voyage Ditali or
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Italian Voyage, based to some extent on his brief period as a
fugitive in northern Italy. If there was a pattern to
Dissard's behaviour in the 1760s, it was one of general
quiet for a few years at a time,punctuated by periods of him
engaging in certain reprehensible actions which
turned his life upside down. By the 1770's the direct
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opposite was the case. There seemed to be very few
periods in which he was not engaged in one scandalous action
or another in this vein. Shortly after, the Marseille
affair seemed to be behind him and he was able to return to
live at Lacoste unhindered, He created another crisis.
In the winter of 1774 into early1775, he saw to it that his wife
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hired several young women as servants at Lacoste.
Given Desard's behaviour over the previous decade, it was no
surprise to find the charges soon emerged that the Marquis
had engaged in copulation with his new household staff in a
sordid party involving flagellation.
He was soon being investigated anew by the authorities, this
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time based out of the city of Lyon.
It only added to the growing scandal that one of the servants
in question died at Lacoste a few months later, although there
is no evidence to suggest that this was related to some form of
mistreatment, and given the prevalence of fatal diseases
like smallpox in Europe at the time, it was possibly unrelated.
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The exact specifics of everything that occurred and
debated. What is known is that several of
the staff involved remained working at Lacoste for some time
to come, but the Saud was not there.
After a time, with legal jeopardy mounting yet again, he
repeated his earlier disappearing act and headed to
Italy for a time. By 1776, the marquee was back in
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southern France as the legal investigations over the events
of the previous year died down. Incredibly, he made no efforts
to reform his behaviour or to avoid coming quickly to
attention again. In the winter of 1776, for
instance, he hired several new servants and was soon involved
in a fresh outrage centered on a22 year old woman by the name of
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Katherine Treyer. It was largely based on the
marquee offering to pay some of his servants to engage in sexual
activities with him, an offer which led several of his staff
to understandably leave their employment at Lacoste.
Treye's father learned of these developments, and he took
matters into his own hands in a way which Desard had not
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previously experienced, arrivingto Lacoste and shooting at the
Marquis, who only survived because the gun misfired.
But the fallout was more damaging.
Desaad was soon arrested in 1777, and in the months that
followed, a trial commenced. This time, the Marquis could not
abscond to Italy. Instead, he was held while the
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trial was proceeding in Vansen Prison outside Paris, where he
had spent several months a decade earlier.
Convicted in 1778 of quote, debauchery and in moderate
libertinage, he would now spend the next 12 years in prison.
Key's scandalous and criminal behaviour had finally caught up
with him. Desard's time in prison between
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1778 and 1790 was under better circumstances than was typical
of most prisons in the 18th century.
He was provided with material needed to write and maintain an
extensive correspondence with his family and others.
This was especially the case from early 1784 after he was
removed from Van Cen to the Bastille prison near the centre
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of Paris, a prison where his wife was nearby and was able to
call regularly. Incredibly, despite the
humiliations she had been through over a period of 15
years before he was finally imprisoned for an extensive
period of time, she continued tocall to the Bastille regularly
to drop off packages for him. Resigned to his fate, he became
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quite productive here, writing with considerable energy and
producing plays, treatises and books.
The prison authorities at Van Sen and at the Bastille were
well aware of his reputation andwould have checked the material
he was writing to avoid having his more extreme writings
confiscated. Dissard stored many of them in a
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copper cylinder which he was able to hide in a crevice in the
wall of his cell at the Bastille.
Desard's first major work produced during his imprisonment
and his most well known today, was written in the mid 17
eighties. 120 Days of Sodom or The School of Libertinage is not
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for the faint hearted and if it is read literally, contains some
remarkably unpleasant content. The book is set in the early
18th century, towards the end ofthe reign of King Louis the 14th
of France, who had died in 1715.In it, 4 wealthy aristocrats
representing the nobility, church, the legal system and the
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business class in France, isolate themselves in a Chateau
on a mountain in the Black Forest, their accomplices of
four women and eight male attendants, while they have
numerous younger victims. The plot, such as it is,
revolves around four months or 120 days of the aristocrats and
their servants, inflicting a wide array of torture and
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humiliations on their victims, ranging from corporal
punishment, coprophilia and muchworse.
Besides, many of those involved are murdered, while acts of
group copulation occur amongst the aristocrats intermittently.
The events at the Chateau culminate in part four of the
book in the fourth month of its narrative, February, with some
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of the aristocrats murdering some of their own daughters and
family members. The content of the book is
shocking even today, but as we will see, it has been
reconsidered over the two or more centuries since it was
written to focus more on what Dassad was trying to say about
society at large and people within it through its violent
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allegories, rather than as a literal promotion of the
activity he was describing. 100 and. 20 Days of Sodom was just
one of the numerous works which Dassad composed while imprisoned
throughout the 1780's. The others are often far less
graphic and controversial. A good example of this is the
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Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, written around 1782.
It is written in dialogue form, a common literary form of the
early modern era, and is essentially a study of the
growing atheism and libertinism of 18th century France.
Another well known work of his from these years is Histoirette
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Comte de Fablio. Translating as Small Histories,
Tales and Fables, this consistedof 25 different short stories of
varying length. One, The Mystified Magistrate,
is lengthy enough to be considered a novella of a kind.
The story here revolves around ajudge who is due to marry a
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woman who is simply marrying himfor social advancement.
The action concerns a series of efforts made by the prospective
bride's brother-in-law to undermine the judge and prevent
the wedding. Again, there are elements to
some of these stories which are unpleasant, but some are
explicable as efforts by Desard to condemn sections of French
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society. The Marquis was surely toying
with the judge who is central tothe mystified magistrate as a
form of literary therapy, condemning on the page a legal
official as a way of working outhis rage at the French legal
system which had sent him to prison.
How these? Writings of Dassad should be
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analysed has been a subject of intense debate over the years.
Some scholars have dismissed them as vile pornography, the
product of a quasi deranged mindthat viewed torture and worse
besides as acceptable topics fordepiction.
Others have in turn dismissed these criticisms and argue that
Desard's work has to be viewed more as allegory and that in
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presenting absurdist or outlandish stories he was
actually trying to reflect on the absurdity of society.
In this light, it should be noted that the four central
characters of 120 Days of Sodom are meant to represent the tiers
of French high society, the aristocracy, the church, the
judiciary, and the mercantile and banking class.
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It is held that Desard was effectively satirizing the
depravity of the elites of France prior to the French
Revolution through an outlandishaccount of what they got up to
behind closed doors. There were precedents for
writing in this absurdist strainto highlight political and
social issues. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
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Travels, written towards the start of the 18th century, was a
tale of a bizarre land called Lilliput inhabited by tiny
people, which Swift used as an allegorical means of assessing
Britain's policies in Ireland. While in his Condeed, published
1/4 of a century before Dissard wrote 120 Days of Sodom,
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Voltaire effectively tortures his titular character by having
him suffer through an appalling array of physical and social
disasters, including two earthquakes and torture at the
hands of the Portuguese Inquisition.
As such, Desard was writing within a well established
absurdist and satirical tradition during the
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Enlightenment. In many ways it.
Is peculiar that Desard's work is read so literally by critics
of his. Consider the fact that Dissard
was writing just a few decades before the Germanic folklore
revival in Germany and Scandinavia saw writers like the
Brothers Grimm begin to compile compendia of what we call fairy
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tales today. Some of the tales they presented
are actually quite shocking. In the tale of Snow White, the
Huntsman is instructed to take Snow White into the woods and
kill her before bringing her organs back to the Evil Queen as
evidence that he has murdered her.
In another Grimm Brothers story,The Juniper Tree, a woman kills
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her son before cooking him in a Stew and serving it to her
husband. The barely concealed innuendos
are bound throughout tales like Rapunzel, and there are passages
of the original Cinderella where, in an effort to make the
slipper fit on their feet, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off
their own toes. And in Hansel and Gretel, the
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action centres on a witch who isa cannibal.
However, despite these shocking scenes, the tales collected by
the Brothers Grimm have become central to the stories told to
children in modern times and thecore of Disney's 20th century
film output. The reason is that nobody reads
them and thinks that the Brothers Grimm were actually
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advocating the things that happened in the stories.
The difference with Disad is that people are conflicted as to
whether or not he was condoning and promoting the behaviour he
described, or whether books like120 Days of Sodom should also be
read as allegory or satire of a kind.
Of course, in any such evaluation of Desard's intent,
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his own personal conduct comes into consideration.
The Brothers Grimm, for all thatthey might have liked collecting
and editing shocking tales of violence in the woods of
Germany, were two fairly upstanding middle class
academics. The most controversial thing
they ever did was to join a protest at the University of
Gertengen against some constitutional changes in the
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Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. In contrast, Dassad was
implicated in numerous sexual scandals and spent much of his
life imprisoned. Owing to this, critics of
Dassad's writings have tended tosuggest that he wasn't just
writing about sexual depravity as a means of critiquing French
society, but was describing his own perversions and thoughts.
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Even here, though, there is a debate.
For all that he was mired in scandal and spent much of his
life imprisoned, Dissard didn't engage in many of the crimes
that he described, though admittedly he was fond of
prostitutes, engaged in sadomasochistic behaviour, and
by any modern standard breach many people's boundaries and
rights. His activities also involved
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teenagers. However, while it is not to
defend him, it should also be noted that the understanding of
the age at which people reached sexual maturity differed
considerably in early modern times.
Marie Antoinette, for example, was just 14 years old when she
married the future King Louis the 16th in 1770.
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Indeed, the things which the authorities were most concerned
with in Desard's behaviour were his engagement in sordid acts
and his general atheism and immorality.
However it is assessed, it should be noted that the wanton
acts and murder which he described in his writings can't
be attributed directly to him inreal life.
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Analysts of. Desard's personality have
suggested he was an ESTP type onthe Myers Briggs Personality
Type Indicator. ESTP stands for Extroverted,
Sensing, Thinking, and Perceiving.
Desard was certainly extroverted, though his
extroversion more often than nothad fairly harmful consequences.
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ESTTP personality types often engage in risky behaviour but
are good at escaping consequences by thinking and
arguing their way out of their predicaments, characteristics
which certainly fit to some extent with Dissard's life in
the 1760s and 1770s until he wassent to jail for a prolonged
period. At the same time, it could be
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argued that he managed to escapeextensive punishment for so many
years simply owing to his privileged position within
French aristocratic society. There were also other elements
to him, as we will see shortly. The Marquis eventually ended up
in an insane asylum. This was broadly the result of a
society that had no real understanding of psychology from
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a clinical perspective, and which shoehorned people with all
sorts of psychological maladies into their one-size-fits-all
definition of being insane. That said, it also seems clear
that he was prone to bouts of depression and severe mood
swings, which exacerbated his tendency to mire himself in
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scandal. This odd.
Circumstances changed dramatically in 1789 as a result
of events out in the wider world.
The same forces of social and intellectual change which had
created a figure like Dissard inthe 1st place were also changing
French society. In 1789, King Louis the 16th had
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convened the Estates General, the French parliament for the
first time in 175 years, in order to acquire a financial
subsidy from the French political nation as a means of
escaping from an economic crisiswhich had enveloped France.
As is well known, matters slipped quickly out of the King
and his government's control once the Estates met at
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Versailles, and the Parliamentarians quickly took
over the government. In the start of what became the
French Revolution, the revolutionaries were committed
to changing French society in a host of different ways.
In line with the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Everything from the French calendar to the system of
weights and measurements in the country was changed during the
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course of the 1790s. A new approach to those who were
imprisoned prior to the Revolution also opened up, one
in which individuals like Dassad, who had been imprisoned
under the old regime of king, nobility and church, were
suddenly released from prisons across France.
Desard's release was not immediate.
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He remained under detention in the Bastille prison in Paris.
In fact, his few liberties therewere further restricted when he
was informed in June 1789 that he would no longer be able to
walk outside in the yard, as theprison guards were wary of the
tents Revolutionary atmosphere in the streets of Paris.
Desard responded to this development by shouting out of
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the windows of the prison that the warders inside the Bastille
were killing the prisoners. Fearing a riot, the guards then
had Desard sent to the Charentonasylum at Saint Maurice in the
suburbs of Paris. Consequently, he was not in the
Bastille when the prison was stormed by the revolutionary mob
in Paris on the 14th of July 1789.
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The event was significant, as Dassad's revised and completed
copy of 120 Days of Sodom had been left behind in the Bastille
when he was moved, and he believed it had been destroyed
and otherwise lost when the prison was attacked.
It would not be published until 19 O 4.
Meanwhile, Dassad did not have to remain at Chehon Ton for
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long. In the spring of 1790, as the
revolutionary overhaul of Frenchsociety continued, he was placed
on a list of those to be released.
In early April 1790, he walked out of Chaconton a free man.
Peculiarly, one of the first things to happen after Dassad
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was released from prison in 1790was that his wife sought a
divorce. She had not sought 1 during all
his years in prison, and had actually remained loyal to him
in some senses. The possibility of a return to
the chaos of the 1770s, though, appears to have been too much
for her, and in September 1790 they legally separated.
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In the new spirit of the revolutionary period.
Desaad was somewhat rehabilitated following his
release, as many of the views which he had espoused on atheism
and sexual license became less controversial.
He intended to fully capitalize on this.
Reinventing himself as a man of letters and attempting to launch
his literary and dramatic career.
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This included staging his play Oxtean in Paris in the autumn of
1791. But the most notable output in
the first years after his release was the publication of
the novel Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue, which he
had begun and written a full draft of while imprisoned in the
Bastille. In 1791 he finished a revised
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version and published it anonymously.
The novella focuses on a woman called Justine and her passage
through her teenage years into her young adult years up to the
age of 26 / a period of a decadeand a half.
Justine suffers innumerable indignations, many perpetrated
by the monks of a monastery she seeks shelter in.
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Others take place out in wider French society.
Large parts of the book diverge from this theme of sexual
violence and are concerned more with her own efforts to
establish her freedom within society.
Consequently, much like 120 Daysof Sodom, the book has produced
widely differing interpretations.
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Some view it as another example of the perversity of Disad's
mind and writings. Others have argued that the
novella is actually a story about the many horrors of French
society, in which Decade presents Justine as the heroine
who eventually breaks free of her many oppressions.
Though in typical Decade absurdist form, Justine is
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killed by a bolt of lightning atthe end.
By the time. Justine was published.
Dissard was married again, having met and wed an actress by
the name of Marie Constance Quesnay shortly after his first
marriage ended. Curiously, the second marriage
was more settled, and Dissard continued to be a productive
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writer throughout the 1790s, avoiding the overt scandals of
the 1770s. Perhaps thinking better of it in
a time when the revolutionaries were more prone to behead people
they disagreed with than threw them in prison, as King Louis
the 15th and King Louis the 16th's governments had done.
He published numerous works in the years that followed, notably
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Philosophy in the Bedroom, a dialogue formed treatise in
which the two protagonists debate the centrality of
libertinism and atheism to the French Revolution.
An expanded version of Justine was published anonymously in
1797 as The New Justine, while at the end of the decade he
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produced a collection of short stories entitled Crimes of Love.
By then many were aware that several scandalous publications
which had appeared anonymously in print in France in the 1790s
were the work of the infamous marquee, and unrest was once
more beginning to build up around him.
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The last months of the 18th century saw events occur in
France as a whole, which, as with those which had occurred in
1789, would have implications for Desard's freedom and the
course of the remainder of his life.
While the Revolution 10 years earlier had ushered in a period
of reaction against the old order which had conspired to
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make the marquee a free man in 1790, In November 1799, Napoleon
Bonaparte, a Corsican general who had risen to immense
popularity in the Republic on the back of his victories in
Italy in 1796 and 1797, seized power in Paris in a coup.
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He now set up a dictatorship in all but name, known as the
Consulate, with himself as FirstConsul of France.
One of the major decisions Napoleon took was to reverse
some of the social changes whichhad been initiated under the
revolutionaries during the 1790s.
For instance, it was Napoleon who reached a rapprochement with
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the Roman Catholic Church after years of revolutionary attacks
on Catholicism. This drift towards a more
conservative social outlook on the part of the consulate
government ensured that public morals and social views drifted
away from the libertine approachof the 1790s towards a more
conservative outlook. Dissard once again became a
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figure of dubious views in France in the process.
The spring of. 18 O1, by which time Dissard had reached his
60th year, saw growing censorship of the Marquis work.
Thousands of copies of his bookswere confiscated from
booksellers in Paris. Then, after 11 years at large in
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French society, Desard was arrested again.
There would be no show trial such as had occurred back in
1777 and 1778 on the strength ofhis crimes in the 1770s.
Instead, Desard was initially held under the pornography laws
active in France at the time, and additional charges were
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added in the weeks that followed, culminating in the
marquee being declared insane. He was sent initially to beset
hospital in the South of Paris, an asylum which had variously
functioned over the past centuryas an orphanage, a prison and
then a hospital for the mentallyill.
In the 1780s. It was viewed as the most
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notorious of all the prisons in France, and its reputation had
clearly not improved by eighteenO 1.
Assad's wider family petitioned the government for his removal
and so he was sent to the ChahonTong asylum, where he had spent
the last months of his initial prolonged period in jail back in
the second-half of 1789 and intoearly 1790.
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Desaad would spend the remaining13 years of his life at Chahon
Tong. The life of Desad at Chahun Tong
over the 1800s and early 1810s was certainly not as bad as
might have been the case in other prisons or institutions.
One of the products of the Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment was an attempt to understand mental illness and
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psychological maladies in a morescientific fashion, rather than
attributing them to some sort ofdivine judgement against the
afflicted. Consequently, there were growing
efforts to treat those who were psychologically disturbed in a
more humane fashion, and the director of the asylum, the Abe
de Culmier, ran the asylum in a liberal fashion.
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The result of this for Dassad was that he was given materials
with which to continue to write and direct plays there.
There was even a theatre with seating for scores of guests
built at the asylum in eighteen O 5.
As the Abbe conjectured, the pursuit, such as acting or
viewing plays, might be therapeutic for the inmates at
Chahontong. There were issues from time to
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time, mostly from the authorities in Paris, who
pressured the Abbe to be less lenient on the sod, and on at
least one occasion he was placedin solitary confinement for a
time in the early 1810s. But for the most part, Dissard
was given a remarkable degree ofliberty to write at Charenton
during the last 13 years of his life.
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Whatever one might. Think of them.
There is no doubting that there were a lot of works produced
during the 1800s at Charenton byDissard Lejournay de Flor.
Belle, for instance, was seemingly A10 volume work.
We have, though, no idea what itmight have been about or how
extensive those volumes were, asDassad's copies were seized in
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1807 after a crackdown on Dassad's literary activities,
and another copy was destroyed by his eldest son several years
later. Several of the works he produced
in those years were plays, Others were novels.
One was the Marquis de Gorge, based on the true story of the
murder of Diane Elizabeth de Gorca, A noted beauty of 17th
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century France. The novel diverged from Desard's
usual style, instead being more of an early example of the
Gothic novel, which was to be popularized in years to come by
Mary Shelley and others in England and by Edgar Allan Poe
in the United States. The Marquis de.
Gorge was completed in 1813. By then, events in the outside
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world were once again bringing forth the possibility of a
change in desired circumstances.Napoleon had invaded Russia in
the summer of 1812, and after a disastrous retreat from Moscow
earlier that winter, his empire had begun to crumble.
When he finally abdicated in April 1814, it paved the way for
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the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
King Louis the 18th had other things on his mind when he first
assumed power in Paris, but by the autumn of 1814 a new
director was appointed to run Chacon Ton and one of the first
instructions he had from the government was to move the Assad
from the asylum, who clearly wasnot insane in the way that the
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other patients there were. Yet he would never be
transferred. By then he was 74 years of age
and in declining health. He died at Chahun Tong on the
2nd of December 1814 after his condition rapidly deteriorated
in November. The exact cause of his death is
unclear. On the evening that he passed he
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had complained of severe pains in his chest and stomach and it
was quite possibly a heart attack or coronary problems
which killed him. He was buried at Sharon Tong.
A specific request that he had made for his body to be left
intact was ignored, and several years later his skull was taken
on a peculiar tour of Europe as interest in the father of Sadism
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increased. Though reviled.
In his own time, judgements of Desard and his writings have
oscillated over time in the two centuries since.
In the 19th century, his work influenced a number of important
European intellectuals. In France, the poet Charles
Baudelaire was clearly referringto some of Dassard's work in his
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most notable collection of poemscalled The Flowers of Evil,
first published in 1857, while the great German philosopher and
philologist Friedrich Nietzsche was considerably influenced by
Dassard, though neither he nor Baudelaire acknowledged the
debt. However, the foremost influence
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of Dossad's writing in the 19th century was within the Vienna
school of the burgeoning psychoanalysis movement.
There several individuals, including Sigmund Freud and
following the psychiatrist Ricard von Kraft Abing, who
coined the term, began to refer to the act of receiving sexual
gratification through the inflicting of pain, or the
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observation of the same as sadism.
After Dossad, the word was soon being used in combination with
the term masochism to form the modern term sado masochism.
The masochism element derives from Leopold Fonsaca Mazak, an
Austrian writer who in 1870 had published Venus in Furs, a work
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in which the male central character obtains gratification
by being humiliated by his mistress.
Freud compared the Sard's and Saka Mazak's writing
dialectically in his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, written in 1905. By the time.
Freud's theory of sadomasochism was first published.
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Europe was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
published in 1899. It features a central character,
Kurtz, who has become a wild ivory trader in the Congo and
who could have easily been lifted out of the pages of 1 of
Disad's novels. Disad was perhaps the most
influential, though in the 20th century when it came to
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influencing the work of the French surrealists.
Guillaume Polonaire was the first French writer to try to
openly rehabilitate Dissard's reputation by stressing the
absurdist and surrealist qualities of his writings.
Georges Batai followed in this pattern in the interwar period,
while French existentialist writers such as Albert Camus and
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Simone de Beauvoir were also concerned with Dissard's
writings after the Second World War.
For sure, many have continued tocriticize the surface layers of
unethical and objectionable topics that Desard wrote about,
notably the prominent American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin,
who suggested that the rehabilitation of Desard's
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reputation in the 20th century constituted veneration of an
extreme misogynist. A film version of 120 Days of
Sodom, produced by the Italian director Pierre Paolo Pasolini
in the mid 1970s, right before Pasolini was murdered, was
banned in most countries either before it was ever shown in
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theaters or within days or weeksof release.
As such, Desard's legacy has been complex, from influencing
the field of psychoanalysis to being both venerated and reviled
within different 20th century social and artistic movements.
The Marquis. Desard has been an enormously
controversial figure for the last two centuries since his
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death, just as he was in his ownlifetime.
It isn't hard to understand why his works, such as 120 Days of
Sodom and Justine, are concernedwith a wide range of deviant
practices from people deriving gratification from inflicting
bodily harm on others, and a wide range of other perversions.
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His writings are explicit even today, and were unprecedented in
their pornographic content in their own time.
Were they to be read literally by everyone, Desaad would
probably be dismissed as something of an abomination.
However, there is a debate whichwill seemingly never be fully
concluded, as to whether these texts should be read literally
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or interpreted as allegorical stories designed to illustrate
elements of the absurdity of human society.
While even for those who do readDesard's text in a literal
fashion, they often find them ofsignificance as constituting the
first written expression of numerous sexual disorders, which
were only studied in a scientific fashion from the late
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19th century onwards. Overshadowing all of this was
Desard's own life. He spent much of it in prison,
accused of deviancy and even insanity.
Given all of this over 200 yearsafter he died, the Marquis
Desard remains something of an enigma.
What do you think? Of the Marquis Desard, was he a
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revolutionary writer who used tales of overt deviancy to
explore power structures and themorays of society in innovative
ways? Or was he simply a depraved
deviant himself? Please let us know in the
comments section and in the meantime, thank you very much
for watching. The.
The man known to history as the Marquis de Sad was born on the
2nd of June 1740 in the Hotel deConde in the city of Paris in
France. His full Christian name was
Donacian Alfonse Francois de Sad.
His father was Jean Baptiste Francois Josef Dassad Marquis or
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Count Dassad in the French minornobility.
The Desad family was of the ancient aristocracy, able to
trace their lineage back to the High Middle Ages over 5
centuries earlier. Consequently, Jean Baptiste had
obtained a number of senior governmental positions during
the 1730s as both a military commander and a diplomat.
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Donacian's mother was Marie Eleanor de Mayed de Calman.
She came from an even more esteemed branch of the French
aristocracy that was a junior branch of the Conde family.
The Princess of Conde were some of the most senior aristocrats
in France during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was owing to her background that Desard was born in the
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Hotel de Conde in Paris. The Condes were also related to
the House of Bourbon, the royal house in France since the late
16th century. As such, the Saud was distantly
related to King Louis the 15th, the ruler of the country from
1715 to 1774. His family ties would ensure
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that the Saud escaped punishmentfor many of his misdeeds in the
1760s and 1770s as he grew older, but also that he acquired
a public notoriety which might have been avoided had his family
been more obscure. Donacian spent his first years
growing up in Paris, often at the Hotel de Conde where he was
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born and where his mother servedin the household of the Conde
family during a period of transition as Prince.
Louis Joseph became Prince of Conde in 1740, when he was
little more than an infant, right around the time Donacian
was born. The Saud and the Prince of Conde
were playmates here during the early 1740s, Though the
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relationship became tempestuous.It is believed that Donacian may
have struck Louis Joseph at somepoint in 1744.
A brawl between children is perhaps not the worst of crimes,
but Donacian had struck a royal Prince and so he had to be
punished. He was dismissed from the Hotel
de Conde and sent to live with his grandmother in Avignon in
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the South of France. A year later he was then
transferred to the home of another relative, his father's
brother. The Abe Desaad, Donacin's uncle,
was an ecclesiastical Lord, though one with a liberal
streak, and he was much influenced by him in his youth.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Donacian's parents marriage collapsed at
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the end of the 1740s as his father fell out of royal favour
and his mother went to live eventually in a convent.
Biographers have noted the ironyof the fact that Dassad's mother
became a nun, though perhaps hisobjection to the Church in later
years was in part owing to this development in his childhood
years. In examining Desard's life, it
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is worth bearing in mind the social and political
circumstances in which he grew up and lived.
Europe in the 18th century was still broadly mired in the
restrictive social circumstancesthat had prevailed for
centuries. Christian morality predominated
with all of its prohibitions on promiscuous sexual activity and
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also on modes of thought and social activities.
Social life was also regulated insofar as people thought there
were acceptable and unacceptablecodes of conduct.
This is not unusual for all of our own ages, alleged
libertarianism. There are all manner of rules
and regulations for how we behave within society and
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towards others. Some socially regulated, others
politically and legally regulated.
The same was true in Desard's time, in particular in the realm
of pornography and open discussion of sexual activity,
things which were not only socially prohibited but which,
it is fair to say, nobody even really considered writing about
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in a public way. However, Desard was also living
in an age of social and political change.
The 18th century was the era of the Enlightenment, when men and
women began to question a great many firmly held views about
everything from religion and politics to sex and social
interaction. This created an environment in
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which somebody might begin to discuss sex in a more open
manner, though, as will become clear, the sexual activity which
Dassad would describe in his work was of a kind which was
deemed to be so depraved that hesoon ran into legal jeopardy.
And even in our time, he is still a very controversial
figure. Donacian's relatively sheltered
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upbringing in the South of France was to change in the
early 1750s, when he was still very young.
In 1750 he was sent to a Jesuit College in Paris.
Here he received a good education, but biographers have
speculated that he also sufferedcorporal punishment and possibly
even abuse while there. In 1754 he headed to a French
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Military Academy. This was a not altogether
uncommon Ave. for a son of a French noble at the time, and in
December 1755, when he was just 15 years of age, he was
commissioned into the King's Footguard as a sub Lieutenant.
France was already at war by that time in North America
against the British and their Native American allies.
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However, this soon expanded intothe Seven Years War in Europe
after Britain allied with Prussia and France with Austria
in a growing continental conflict over a wide range of
disputes. Disad spent the entire war in
service until 1763, when it ended in a stalemate in Europe
and a British victory in North America.
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With the transfer of the French colonies in what is now Canada
to England. Donacian's military career had
been mixed. He was praised by his commanding
officers as an intelligence sub commander, the one who had
problems with authority and the chain of command, not ideal
characteristics for a military career.
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Unsurprisingly, he was discharged from his post when
the war ended. Even in these early years, there
were difficult elements emergingsurrounding Donacian's
character. While in the army, he developed
a taste for cards and games of chance.
Gambling was a perennial problemof the nobility in early modern
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Europe, and more than a few aristocratic families had been
bankrupted and destroyed in France, England and other
regions on the back of a delinquent member running up
huge debts and having to sell off their estates.
On top of this, the Saud quicklydeveloped a reputation as a
reckless spendthrift, spending beyond his means and having a
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taste for the high life. On the surface, as a distant
relative of the royal family, hemight have had the money to pay
for this, but in reality the Desard family were not doing
well financially and his father regularly lambasted Domacion for
his excessive expenditure. Combined with all of these was
his marked tendency towards whatwas deemed libertine behaviour
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at this time, a general tendencyto disregard the social mores of
the day and to ignore the rigorous morals of Christianity,
instead showing a dispensation towards atheism and a disregard
for social conventions. As much as his father might have
tried to correct his son, he ultimately failed, and when Jean
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Baptiste died in 1767, Donacian succeeded to the resources that
came with becoming the Marquis de Saad at just 27 years of age.
By the time Donacion became the marquee, he had been married for
several years. Back in 1763, as the Seven Years
War came to an end and Donacion was discharged from the
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military, his father organized an arranged marriage for him.
The prospective bride was Rene Pelagi de Montroy, a member of
another French noble family, though one whose financial
circumstances were much better than the decades.
Donacian's father had hoped thatthe marriage would both improve
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the family's financial affairs through a large dowry and also
set the future marquee on the straight and narrow.
Donacian was unenthused by the prospect.
He already had a lover in the early 1760s, Laur de Lochies,
though she eventually rejected him.
It is unclear if the venereal disease he began to suffer from
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around this time was a byproductof their fling.
In any event, he eventually agreed to marry Rene Pellargie,
doing so on the 17th of May 1763, after the king had given
the union involving his distant cousin the royal blessing.
Initially the marriage was a relatively stable 1 and over
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time they had three children, Louis Donacier Junior and
Madeleine, born respectively in 17671769 and 1771.
However, even by the time the eldest, Louis was born in 1767,
the sad had grown weary of his wife's Catholic moralizing and
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the marriage was strained. She was nevertheless determined
not to divorce or separate, and they would remain married for 27
years, with Rene Pelagi becomingthe epitome of the
long-suffering wife in the process.
Just months after he married Rene Pellargie, Desard became
embroiled in the first of numerous affairs and scandals
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which would result in personal and legal difficulties and
eventually land him in prison, forever expanding periods of
time. This first incident centered on
Desard's hiring of a prostitute by the name of Jean Testard in
October 1763. After spending the night in an
apartment which Desard had rented in Paris, she went to the
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police the next day alleging that Dassad had behaved in an
abominable manner towards her. Amongst her claims were that
Dassad had locked the apartment and refused to let her leave.
He had then unleashed a wave of atheistic obscenities and had
allegedly desecrated a holy chalice with bodily fluids.
He had apparently also asked herto flagellate him, while Testard
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claimed that Desad had requestedher to perform illegal lewd acts
on his fundament, something which she had drawn a line at.
Not only were the acts illegal, but sacrilege and unacceptable
in Catholic France at the time. Just over a week later, Desad
was arrested and imprisoned withthe consent of the king, who had
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been consulted on the matter. He was sent to a prison in
Vansen, near Paris. Exactly what we should make of
the whole affair is unclear. Many of these things Desaad was
accused of were not criminal by today's standards. 1 of
Testard's accusations was that the Marquis had read atheistic
poetry to her. Dassad was quickly free.
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He began writing to the court, expressing his deep regret for
his actions and his desire to see a priest who would hear his
confession so that he might get back to a more Christian life.
This certainly wasn't what happened, though.
Released through the intervention of the king after
just a few weeks, Desard left Paris thereafter and spent much
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of the mid 1760s living between a property owned by his wife's
family in Normandy and one of his own family's chateaus in the
South of France. He had little choice in this
initially, as the terms of his release from the prison in Van
Cen had been that he did not return to Paris for some time.
However, eventually the king sent word that he could return
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to the capital. Desaad chose not to, instead
harbouring a series of mistresses in his new home in
Provence and beginning his literary career as a would be
dramatist, even setting up a small theatre in his country
retreat. The birth of his first child
ended this period of exile, and in 1767 he largely returned to
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Paris to live with his wife. Not long after Dassad settled
back in Paris, a fresh scandal arose.
At Easter 1768, he hired a womanby the name of Rose Keller.
Accounts of what occurred are mixed.
The Marquis later claimed that he had hired her as a
prostitute, but Keller stated that she had been homeless and
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begging near the Place de Victoire in Paris when Dassad
offered her a position as a housekeeper.
Having been duped, she then claimed that Dassad sought to
engage her sexually and had effectively imprisoned her in
his country house. At a koi.
She escaped out of a window and went to the authorities, whom
she informed that Dassad had threatened her with a knife and
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had tried to coerce her into sordid activities involving
ropes, horse whips, and candle wax.
When he was questioned several days later, Dassad claimed that
he had hired Keller as a prostitute and that some of what
she was claiming was not accurate.
After the king was informed of the case, he ordered his distant
cousin's arrest, and the Marquisspent several weeks imprisoned
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yet again. Eventually, after several months
of toing and froing, Desaad was fully released and the charges
dropped after he agreed to make a charitable donation to the
poor of Paris. His release on this occasion
seemingly followed his wife's family's intervention with the
king, while the Saud was once again out of legal trouble.
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By the end of 1768, the case hadgenerated a lot of publicity in
Paris on account of it involvinga minor noble who was a distant
cousin of King Louis the 15th, who was also married to a woman
hailing from another aristocratic family.
In an age of growing disaffection with the crown and
nobility and the aloof manner inwhich they lived at Versailles
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outside of Paris, here seemed tobe evidence of the perversity of
some of these people. In annoyance, the king banished
Desard from Paris yet again and ordered him to maintain a lower
profile. The marquee responded by once
again taking up residence at hiscountry estate in the South, at
Lacoste, near Vaucluse. He spent much of 1769 here,
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though he also re entered the military at this point, in large
part in an attempt to improve his financial situation.
He spent part of 1769 and 1770 commissioned as an officer in a
regiment stationed near the eastern border of France in the
Burgundy region. His financial troubles briefly
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led him to being sent to debtorsprison.
If Tassad managed to remain largely out of trouble for a
year or two after the Keller affair in 1768, the early 1770s
saw a new bout of sordid behaviour which would eventually
culminate in him going on the run from the authorities and
then landing in prison for the first really sustained period of
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time in his life. Matters began in 1771 when the
Marquis sister-in-law, his wife's younger sister Anne
Pourperre, visited the Dassades where they were living at the
time in their Chateau at Lacoste.
During the visit, Donacian is believed to have begun an affair
with a 19 year old sister-in-law, doubtlessly
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creating further problems for his long-suffering wife and
within her family at the same time.
Tasad's literary and cultural ambitions were evident during
this time as he established a small theatre at Lacoste and
began to stage plays there whilealso writing himself.
Here was the mix which would characterize the rest of his
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life, literary ambitions walkinghand in hand with personal
turmoil. His legal difficulties began
afresh in the summer of 1772. At this time, the Marquis and
one of his manservants by the name of Latour visited the city
of Marseille. The trip was ostensibly to
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acquire some lines of credit to aid the decades in their
difficult financial circumstances at Lacoste.
Or at least this is what Dissardtold his wife.
He was visiting the southern city for in reality, Dissard
organized elaborate acts of depravity with multiple persons
while there. For the purposes of this,
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Dissard had Latour hire the services of four women.
What followed apparently involved group copulation and
the use of implements for the purpose of heightening physical
arousal. Lewd acts involving the
fundamental orifice, which was acrime at the time in France, may
also have been involved, though the details were disputed.
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What created a problem was that Dassad had seemingly introduced
some cantaradine into the mix, asubstance which is secreted by
the blistering beetle and which is more commonly known as
Spanish fly. It was used extensively as an
aphrodisiac in early modern times, but can be poisonous and
extremely harmful if used incorrectly.
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In the aftermath of the event, one of the prostitutes by the
name of Marianne became very illand a second Marguerite filed a
report with the local magistratein Marseille.
Thus, after remaining largely out of trouble for three years
after the Keller scandal in Paris back in 1768, Dassad once
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again found himself under investigation.
As with previous scandals, Dassad's Montreuil relatives
tried to intervene to stop details of the incident becoming
widely known and to keep Donacian out of prison.
One might ask why. The simple reason would seem to
be that for all his mistreatmentof her, Dissard's wife remained
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committed to their marriage, perhaps partly for the sake of
their growing family and her Catholic unwillingness to
divorce, but also because, for all his flaws, Dissard was
believed to have been charming in some respects.
One modern study has argued thatpart of this was owing to his
unusual personality. He was a figure who seemed to be
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interested solely in the personal domain when so many men
of the French nobility were obsessed with public affairs.
Whatever the reasons, it LED Rene Bellagi to stay with him
for far longer than she should have, even dropping goods off
for him multiple times a week when he was in prison throughout
the 1780s. In 1772, it LED her to yet again
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intervene to have her family payoff the prostitutes involved in
the scandal in Marseille to droptheir charges.
They did so, but the case had come to public attention and the
magistrates in the city decided to continue the investigation,
while in September 1772, the people of Marseille executed
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straw effigies in the city centre which were meant to
represent the Saud and his servant Lac Tour, an indication
of public revulsion at the scandal.
The next two years were chaotic in Desard and his wife's lives.
The Marseille case refused to goaway, and as the authorities in
the city continued to press for the Marquis arrest, Donacian
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decided to abscond abroad to Italy for a time.
Spending several months living in the Kingdom of Sardinia,
which contrary to its name, was centred on the Piedmont region
straddling the modern day borderbetween France and Italy, the
rulers of which had latterly acquired the island of Sardinia
as a territorial possession. Warrants were active for
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Dassad's arrest during this time, and his mother-in-law,
Madame de Montroy had also turned on him this time, wishing
to see the apparent monster thather daughter had married removed
to prison. She was petitioning King Louis
the 15th to follow through on imprisoning the Saud for a
sustained period over the Marseille charges, but the king
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died in May 1774 before Donaciancould be imprisoned again.
The royal warrant against Assad lapsed thereafter, though his
mother-in-law continued to petition the new King Louis the
16th for the Marquis arrest. Meanwhile, back in France in the
mid 1770s, Dissard began writinga book entitled Voyage Ditali or
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Italian Voyage, based to some extent on his brief period as a
fugitive in northern Italy. If there was a pattern to
Dissard's behaviour in the 1760s, it was one of general
quiet for a few years at a time,punctuated by periods of him
engaging in certain reprehensible actions which
turned his life upside down. By the 1770's the direct
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opposite was the case. There seemed to be very few
periods in which he was not engaged in one scandalous action
or another in this vein. Shortly after, the Marseille
affair seemed to be behind him and he was able to return to
live at Lacoste unhindered, He created another crisis.
In the winter of 1774 into early1775, he saw to it that his wife
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hired several young women as servants at Lacoste.
Given Desard's behaviour over the previous decade, it was no
surprise to find the charges soon emerged that the Marquis
had engaged in copulation with his new household staff in a
sordid party involving flagellation.
He was soon being investigated anew by the authorities, this
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time based out of the city of Lyon.
It only added to the growing scandal that one of the servants
in question died at Lacoste a few months later, although there
is no evidence to suggest that this was related to some form of
mistreatment, and given the prevalence of fatal diseases
like smallpox in Europe at the time, it was possibly unrelated.
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The exact specifics of everything that occurred and
debated. What is known is that several of
the staff involved remained working at Lacoste for some time
to come, but the Saud was not there.
After a time, with legal jeopardy mounting yet again, he
repeated his earlier disappearing act and headed to
Italy for a time. By 1776, the marquee was back in
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southern France as the legal investigations over the events
of the previous year died down. Incredibly, he made no efforts
to reform his behaviour or to avoid coming quickly to
attention again. In the winter of 1776, for
instance, he hired several new servants and was soon involved
in a fresh outrage centered on a22 year old woman by the name of
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Katherine Treyer. It was largely based on the
marquee offering to pay some of his servants to engage in sexual
activities with him, an offer which led several of his staff
to understandably leave their employment at Lacoste.
Treye's father learned of these developments, and he took
matters into his own hands in a way which Desard had not
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previously experienced, arrivingto Lacoste and shooting at the
Marquis, who only survived because the gun misfired.
But the fallout was more damaging.
Desaad was soon arrested in 1777, and in the months that
followed, a trial commenced. This time, the Marquis could not
abscond to Italy. Instead, he was held while the
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trial was proceeding in Vansen Prison outside Paris, where he
had spent several months a decade earlier.
Convicted in 1778 of quote, debauchery and in moderate
libertinage, he would now spend the next 12 years in prison.
Key's scandalous and criminal behaviour had finally caught up
with him. Desard's time in prison between
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1778 and 1790 was under better circumstances than was typical
of most prisons in the 18th century.
He was provided with material needed to write and maintain an
extensive correspondence with his family and others.
This was especially the case from early 1784 after he was
removed from Van Cen to the Bastille prison near the centre
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of Paris, a prison where his wife was nearby and was able to
call regularly. Incredibly, despite the
humiliations she had been through over a period of 15
years before he was finally imprisoned for an extensive
period of time, she continued tocall to the Bastille regularly
to drop off packages for him. Resigned to his fate, he became
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quite productive here, writing with considerable energy and
producing plays, treatises and books.
The prison authorities at Van Sen and at the Bastille were
well aware of his reputation andwould have checked the material
he was writing to avoid having his more extreme writings
confiscated. Dissard stored many of them in a
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copper cylinder which he was able to hide in a crevice in the
wall of his cell at the Bastille.
Desard's first major work produced during his imprisonment
and his most well known today, was written in the mid 17
eighties. 120 Days of Sodom or The School of Libertinage is not
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for the faint hearted and if it is read literally, contains some
remarkably unpleasant content. The book is set in the early
18th century, towards the end ofthe reign of King Louis the 14th
of France, who had died in 1715.In it, 4 wealthy aristocrats
representing the nobility, church, the legal system and the
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business class in France, isolate themselves in a Chateau
on a mountain in the Black Forest, their accomplices of
four women and eight male attendants, while they have
numerous younger victims. The plot, such as it is,
revolves around four months or 120 days of the aristocrats and
their servants, inflicting a wide array of torture and
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humiliations on their victims, ranging from corporal
punishment, coprophilia and muchworse.
Besides, many of those involved are murdered, while acts of
group copulation occur amongst the aristocrats intermittently.
The events at the Chateau culminate in part four of the
book in the fourth month of its narrative, February, with some
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of the aristocrats murdering some of their own daughters and
family members. The content of the book is
shocking even today, but as we will see, it has been
reconsidered over the two or more centuries since it was
written to focus more on what Dassad was trying to say about
society at large and people within it through its violent
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allegories, rather than as a literal promotion of the
activity he was describing. 100 and. 20 Days of Sodom was just
one of the numerous works which Dassad composed while imprisoned
throughout the 1780's. The others are often far less
graphic and controversial. A good example of this is the
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Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, written around 1782.
It is written in dialogue form, a common literary form of the
early modern era, and is essentially a study of the
growing atheism and libertinism of 18th century France.
Another well known work of his from these years is Histoirette
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Comte de Fablio. Translating as Small Histories,
Tales and Fables, this consistedof 25 different short stories of
varying length. One, The Mystified Magistrate,
is lengthy enough to be considered a novella of a kind.
The story here revolves around ajudge who is due to marry a
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woman who is simply marrying himfor social advancement.
The action concerns a series of efforts made by the prospective
bride's brother-in-law to undermine the judge and prevent
the wedding. Again, there are elements to
some of these stories which are unpleasant, but some are
explicable as efforts by Desard to condemn sections of French
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society. The Marquis was surely toying
with the judge who is central tothe mystified magistrate as a
form of literary therapy, condemning on the page a legal
official as a way of working outhis rage at the French legal
system which had sent him to prison.
How these? Writings of Dassad should be
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analysed has been a subject of intense debate over the years.
Some scholars have dismissed them as vile pornography, the
product of a quasi deranged mindthat viewed torture and worse
besides as acceptable topics fordepiction.
Others have in turn dismissed these criticisms and argue that
Desard's work has to be viewed more as allegory and that in
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presenting absurdist or outlandish stories he was
actually trying to reflect on the absurdity of society.
In this light, it should be noted that the four central
characters of 120 Days of Sodom are meant to represent the tiers
of French high society, the aristocracy, the church, the
judiciary, and the mercantile and banking class.
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It is held that Desard was effectively satirizing the
depravity of the elites of France prior to the French
Revolution through an outlandishaccount of what they got up to
behind closed doors. There were precedents for
writing in this absurdist strainto highlight political and
social issues. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
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Travels, written towards the start of the 18th century, was a
tale of a bizarre land called Lilliput inhabited by tiny
people, which Swift used as an allegorical means of assessing
Britain's policies in Ireland. While in his Condeed, published
1/4 of a century before Dissard wrote 120 Days of Sodom,
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Voltaire effectively tortures his titular character by having
him suffer through an appalling array of physical and social
disasters, including two earthquakes and torture at the
hands of the Portuguese Inquisition.
As such, Desard was writing within a well established
absurdist and satirical tradition during the
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Enlightenment. In many ways it.
Is peculiar that Desard's work is read so literally by critics
of his. Consider the fact that Dissard
was writing just a few decades before the Germanic folklore
revival in Germany and Scandinavia saw writers like the
Brothers Grimm begin to compile compendia of what we call fairy
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tales today. Some of the tales they presented
are actually quite shocking. In the tale of Snow White, the
Huntsman is instructed to take Snow White into the woods and
kill her before bringing her organs back to the Evil Queen as
evidence that he has murdered her.
In another Grimm Brothers story,The Juniper Tree, a woman kills
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her son before cooking him in a Stew and serving it to her
husband. The barely concealed innuendos
are bound throughout tales like Rapunzel, and there are passages
of the original Cinderella where, in an effort to make the
slipper fit on their feet, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off
their own toes. And in Hansel and Gretel, the
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action centres on a witch who isa cannibal.
However, despite these shocking scenes, the tales collected by
the Brothers Grimm have become central to the stories told to
children in modern times and thecore of Disney's 20th century
film output. The reason is that nobody reads
them and thinks that the Brothers Grimm were actually
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advocating the things that happened in the stories.
The difference with Disad is that people are conflicted as to
whether or not he was condoning and promoting the behaviour he
described, or whether books like120 Days of Sodom should also be
read as allegory or satire of a kind.
Of course, in any such evaluation of Desard's intent,
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his own personal conduct comes into consideration.
The Brothers Grimm, for all thatthey might have liked collecting
and editing shocking tales of violence in the woods of
Germany, were two fairly upstanding middle class
academics. The most controversial thing
they ever did was to join a protest at the University of
Gertengen against some constitutional changes in the
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Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. In contrast, Dassad was
implicated in numerous sexual scandals and spent much of his
life imprisoned. Owing to this, critics of
Dassad's writings have tended tosuggest that he wasn't just
writing about sexual depravity as a means of critiquing French
society, but was describing his own perversions and thoughts.
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Even here, though, there is a debate.
For all that he was mired in scandal and spent much of his
life imprisoned, Dissard didn't engage in many of the crimes
that he described, though admittedly he was fond of
prostitutes, engaged in sadomasochistic behaviour, and
by any modern standard breach many people's boundaries and
rights. His activities also involved
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teenagers. However, while it is not to
defend him, it should also be noted that the understanding of
the age at which people reached sexual maturity differed
considerably in early modern times.
Marie Antoinette, for example, was just 14 years old when she
married the future King Louis the 16th in 1770.
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Indeed, the things which the authorities were most concerned
with in Desard's behaviour were his engagement in sordid acts
and his general atheism and immorality.
However it is assessed, it should be noted that the wanton
acts and murder which he described in his writings can't
be attributed directly to him inreal life.
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Analysts of. Desard's personality have
suggested he was an ESTP type onthe Myers Briggs Personality
Type Indicator. ESTP stands for Extroverted,
Sensing, Thinking, and Perceiving.
Desard was certainly extroverted, though his
extroversion more often than nothad fairly harmful consequences.
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ESTTP personality types often engage in risky behaviour but
are good at escaping consequences by thinking and
arguing their way out of their predicaments, characteristics
which certainly fit to some extent with Dissard's life in
the 1760s and 1770s until he wassent to jail for a prolonged
period. At the same time, it could be
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argued that he managed to escapeextensive punishment for so many
years simply owing to his privileged position within
French aristocratic society. There were also other elements
to him, as we will see shortly. The Marquis eventually ended up
in an insane asylum. This was broadly the result of a
society that had no real understanding of psychology from
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a clinical perspective, and which shoehorned people with all
sorts of psychological maladies into their one-size-fits-all
definition of being insane. That said, it also seems clear
that he was prone to bouts of depression and severe mood
swings, which exacerbated his tendency to mire himself in
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scandal. This odd.
Circumstances changed dramatically in 1789 as a result
of events out in the wider world.
The same forces of social and intellectual change which had
created a figure like Dissard inthe 1st place were also changing
French society. In 1789, King Louis the 16th had
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convened the Estates General, the French parliament for the
first time in 175 years, in order to acquire a financial
subsidy from the French political nation as a means of
escaping from an economic crisiswhich had enveloped France.
As is well known, matters slipped quickly out of the King
and his government's control once the Estates met at
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Versailles, and the Parliamentarians quickly took
over the government. In the start of what became the
French Revolution, the revolutionaries were committed
to changing French society in a host of different ways.
In line with the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Everything from the French calendar to the system of
weights and measurements in the country was changed during the
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course of the 1790s. A new approach to those who were
imprisoned prior to the Revolution also opened up, one
in which individuals like Dassad, who had been imprisoned
under the old regime of king, nobility and church, were
suddenly released from prisons across France.
Desard's release was not immediate.
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He remained under detention in the Bastille prison in Paris.
In fact, his few liberties therewere further restricted when he
was informed in June 1789 that he would no longer be able to
walk outside in the yard, as theprison guards were wary of the
tents Revolutionary atmosphere in the streets of Paris.
Desard responded to this development by shouting out of
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the windows of the prison that the warders inside the Bastille
were killing the prisoners. Fearing a riot, the guards then
had Desard sent to the Charentonasylum at Saint Maurice in the
suburbs of Paris. Consequently, he was not in the
Bastille when the prison was stormed by the revolutionary mob
in Paris on the 14th of July 1789.
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The event was significant, as Dassad's revised and completed
copy of 120 Days of Sodom had been left behind in the Bastille
when he was moved, and he believed it had been destroyed
and otherwise lost when the prison was attacked.
It would not be published until 19 O 4.
Meanwhile, Dassad did not have to remain at Chehon Ton for
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long. In the spring of 1790, as the
revolutionary overhaul of Frenchsociety continued, he was placed
on a list of those to be released.
In early April 1790, he walked out of Chaconton a free man.
Peculiarly, one of the first things to happen after Dassad
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was released from prison in 1790was that his wife sought a
divorce. She had not sought 1 during all
his years in prison, and had actually remained loyal to him
in some senses. The possibility of a return to
the chaos of the 1770s, though, appears to have been too much
for her, and in September 1790 they legally separated.
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In the new spirit of the revolutionary period.
Desaad was somewhat rehabilitated following his
release, as many of the views which he had espoused on atheism
and sexual license became less controversial.
He intended to fully capitalize on this.
Reinventing himself as a man of letters and attempting to launch
his literary and dramatic career.
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This included staging his play Oxtean in Paris in the autumn of
1791. But the most notable output in
the first years after his release was the publication of
the novel Justine or the Misfortunes of Virtue, which he
had begun and written a full draft of while imprisoned in the
Bastille. In 1791 he finished a revised
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version and published it anonymously.
The novella focuses on a woman called Justine and her passage
through her teenage years into her young adult years up to the
age of 26 / a period of a decadeand a half.
Justine suffers innumerable indignations, many perpetrated
by the monks of a monastery she seeks shelter in.
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Others take place out in wider French society.
Large parts of the book diverge from this theme of sexual
violence and are concerned more with her own efforts to
establish her freedom within society.
Consequently, much like 120 Daysof Sodom, the book has produced
widely differing interpretations.
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Some view it as another example of the perversity of Disad's
mind and writings. Others have argued that the
novella is actually a story about the many horrors of French
society, in which Decade presents Justine as the heroine
who eventually breaks free of her many oppressions.
Though in typical Decade absurdist form, Justine is
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killed by a bolt of lightning atthe end.
By the time. Justine was published.
Dissard was married again, having met and wed an actress by
the name of Marie Constance Quesnay shortly after his first
marriage ended. Curiously, the second marriage
was more settled, and Dissard continued to be a productive
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writer throughout the 1790s, avoiding the overt scandals of
the 1770s. Perhaps thinking better of it in
a time when the revolutionaries were more prone to behead people
they disagreed with than threw them in prison, as King Louis
the 15th and King Louis the 16th's governments had done.
He published numerous works in the years that followed, notably
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Philosophy in the Bedroom, a dialogue formed treatise in
which the two protagonists debate the centrality of
libertinism and atheism to the French Revolution.
An expanded version of Justine was published anonymously in
1797 as The New Justine, while at the end of the decade he
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produced a collection of short stories entitled Crimes of Love.
By then many were aware that several scandalous publications
which had appeared anonymously in print in France in the 1790s
were the work of the infamous marquee, and unrest was once
more beginning to build up around him.
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The last months of the 18th century saw events occur in
France as a whole, which, as with those which had occurred in
1789, would have implications for Desard's freedom and the
course of the remainder of his life.
While the Revolution 10 years earlier had ushered in a period
of reaction against the old order which had conspired to
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make the marquee a free man in 1790, In November 1799, Napoleon
Bonaparte, a Corsican general who had risen to immense
popularity in the Republic on the back of his victories in
Italy in 1796 and 1797, seized power in Paris in a coup.
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He now set up a dictatorship in all but name, known as the
Consulate, with himself as FirstConsul of France.
One of the major decisions Napoleon took was to reverse
some of the social changes whichhad been initiated under the
revolutionaries during the 1790s.
For instance, it was Napoleon who reached a rapprochement with
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the Roman Catholic Church after years of revolutionary attacks
on Catholicism. This drift towards a more
conservative social outlook on the part of the consulate
government ensured that public morals and social views drifted
away from the libertine approachof the 1790s towards a more
conservative outlook. Dissard once again became a
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figure of dubious views in France in the process.
The spring of. 18 O1, by which time Dissard had reached his
60th year, saw growing censorship of the Marquis work.
Thousands of copies of his bookswere confiscated from
booksellers in Paris. Then, after 11 years at large in
(44:47):
French society, Desard was arrested again.
There would be no show trial such as had occurred back in
1777 and 1778 on the strength ofhis crimes in the 1770s.
Instead, Desard was initially held under the pornography laws
active in France at the time, and additional charges were
(45:08):
added in the weeks that followed, culminating in the
marquee being declared insane. He was sent initially to beset
hospital in the South of Paris, an asylum which had variously
functioned over the past centuryas an orphanage, a prison and
then a hospital for the mentallyill.
In the 1780s. It was viewed as the most
(45:30):
notorious of all the prisons in France, and its reputation had
clearly not improved by eighteenO 1.
Assad's wider family petitioned the government for his removal
and so he was sent to the ChahonTong asylum, where he had spent
the last months of his initial prolonged period in jail back in
the second-half of 1789 and intoearly 1790.
(45:53):
Desaad would spend the remaining13 years of his life at Chahon
Tong. The life of Desad at Chahun Tong
over the 1800s and early 1810s was certainly not as bad as
might have been the case in other prisons or institutions.
One of the products of the Scientific Revolution and the
Enlightenment was an attempt to understand mental illness and
(46:16):
psychological maladies in a morescientific fashion, rather than
attributing them to some sort ofdivine judgement against the
afflicted. Consequently, there were growing
efforts to treat those who were psychologically disturbed in a
more humane fashion, and the director of the asylum, the Abe
de Culmier, ran the asylum in a liberal fashion.
(46:39):
The result of this for Dassad was that he was given materials
with which to continue to write and direct plays there.
There was even a theatre with seating for scores of guests
built at the asylum in eighteen O 5.
As the Abbe conjectured, the pursuit, such as acting or
viewing plays, might be therapeutic for the inmates at
Chahontong. There were issues from time to
(47:02):
time, mostly from the authorities in Paris, who
pressured the Abbe to be less lenient on the sod, and on at
least one occasion he was placedin solitary confinement for a
time in the early 1810s. But for the most part, Dissard
was given a remarkable degree ofliberty to write at Charenton
during the last 13 years of his life.
(47:25):
Whatever one might. Think of them.
There is no doubting that there were a lot of works produced
during the 1800s at Charenton byDissard Lejournay de Flor.
Belle, for instance, was seemingly A10 volume work.
We have, though, no idea what itmight have been about or how
extensive those volumes were, asDassad's copies were seized in
(47:46):
1807 after a crackdown on Dassad's literary activities,
and another copy was destroyed by his eldest son several years
later. Several of the works he produced
in those years were plays, Others were novels.
One was the Marquis de Gorge, based on the true story of the
murder of Diane Elizabeth de Gorca, A noted beauty of 17th
(48:09):
century France. The novel diverged from Desard's
usual style, instead being more of an early example of the
Gothic novel, which was to be popularized in years to come by
Mary Shelley and others in England and by Edgar Allan Poe
in the United States. The Marquis de.
Gorge was completed in 1813. By then, events in the outside
(48:32):
world were once again bringing forth the possibility of a
change in desired circumstances.Napoleon had invaded Russia in
the summer of 1812, and after a disastrous retreat from Moscow
earlier that winter, his empire had begun to crumble.
When he finally abdicated in April 1814, it paved the way for
(48:54):
the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.
King Louis the 18th had other things on his mind when he first
assumed power in Paris, but by the autumn of 1814 a new
director was appointed to run Chacon Ton and one of the first
instructions he had from the government was to move the Assad
from the asylum, who clearly wasnot insane in the way that the
(49:16):
other patients there were. Yet he would never be
transferred. By then he was 74 years of age
and in declining health. He died at Chahun Tong on the
2nd of December 1814 after his condition rapidly deteriorated
in November. The exact cause of his death is
unclear. On the evening that he passed he
(49:38):
had complained of severe pains in his chest and stomach and it
was quite possibly a heart attack or coronary problems
which killed him. He was buried at Sharon Tong.
A specific request that he had made for his body to be left
intact was ignored, and several years later his skull was taken
on a peculiar tour of Europe as interest in the father of Sadism
(50:00):
increased. Though reviled.
In his own time, judgements of Desard and his writings have
oscillated over time in the two centuries since.
In the 19th century, his work influenced a number of important
European intellectuals. In France, the poet Charles
Baudelaire was clearly referringto some of Dassard's work in his
(50:23):
most notable collection of poemscalled The Flowers of Evil,
first published in 1857, while the great German philosopher and
philologist Friedrich Nietzsche was considerably influenced by
Dassard, though neither he nor Baudelaire acknowledged the
debt. However, the foremost influence
(50:43):
of Dossad's writing in the 19th century was within the Vienna
school of the burgeoning psychoanalysis movement.
There several individuals, including Sigmund Freud and
following the psychiatrist Ricard von Kraft Abing, who
coined the term, began to refer to the act of receiving sexual
gratification through the inflicting of pain, or the
(51:05):
observation of the same as sadism.
After Dossad, the word was soon being used in combination with
the term masochism to form the modern term sado masochism.
The masochism element derives from Leopold Fonsaca Mazak, an
Austrian writer who in 1870 had published Venus in Furs, a work
(51:27):
in which the male central character obtains gratification
by being humiliated by his mistress.
Freud compared the Sard's and Saka Mazak's writing
dialectically in his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, written in 1905. By the time.
Freud's theory of sadomasochism was first published.
(51:50):
Europe was reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
published in 1899. It features a central character,
Kurtz, who has become a wild ivory trader in the Congo and
who could have easily been lifted out of the pages of 1 of
Disad's novels. Disad was perhaps the most
influential, though in the 20th century when it came to
(52:12):
influencing the work of the French surrealists.
Guillaume Polonaire was the first French writer to try to
openly rehabilitate Dissard's reputation by stressing the
absurdist and surrealist qualities of his writings.
Georges Batai followed in this pattern in the interwar period,
while French existentialist writers such as Albert Camus and
(52:35):
Simone de Beauvoir were also concerned with Dissard's
writings after the Second World War.
For sure, many have continued tocriticize the surface layers of
unethical and objectionable topics that Desard wrote about,
notably the prominent American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin,
who suggested that the rehabilitation of Desard's
(52:56):
reputation in the 20th century constituted veneration of an
extreme misogynist. A film version of 120 Days of
Sodom, produced by the Italian director Pierre Paolo Pasolini
in the mid 1970s, right before Pasolini was murdered, was
banned in most countries either before it was ever shown in
(53:18):
theaters or within days or weeksof release.
As such, Desard's legacy has been complex, from influencing
the field of psychoanalysis to being both venerated and reviled
within different 20th century social and artistic movements.
The Marquis. Desard has been an enormously
controversial figure for the last two centuries since his
(53:41):
death, just as he was in his ownlifetime.
It isn't hard to understand why his works, such as 120 Days of
Sodom and Justine, are concernedwith a wide range of deviant
practices from people deriving gratification from inflicting
bodily harm on others, and a wide range of other perversions.
(54:03):
His writings are explicit even today, and were unprecedented in
their pornographic content in their own time.
Were they to be read literally by everyone, Desaad would
probably be dismissed as something of an abomination.
However, there is a debate whichwill seemingly never be fully
concluded, as to whether these texts should be read literally
(54:24):
or interpreted as allegorical stories designed to illustrate
elements of the absurdity of human society.
While even for those who do readDesard's text in a literal
fashion, they often find them ofsignificance as constituting the
first written expression of numerous sexual disorders, which
were only studied in a scientific fashion from the late
(54:46):
19th century onwards. Overshadowing all of this was
Desard's own life. He spent much of it in prison,
accused of deviancy and even insanity.
Given all of this over 200 yearsafter he died, the Marquis
Desard remains something of an enigma.
What do you think? Of the Marquis Desard, was he a
(55:09):
revolutionary writer who used tales of overt deviancy to
explore power structures and themorays of society in innovative
ways? Or was he simply a depraved
deviant himself? Please let us know in the
comments section and in the meantime, thank you very much
for watching. The.
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