De Sade, Enlightenment thinker.

“Not for the first time you have shown an unhealthy obsession with this depraved individual.”

*****

Yep.
Blasphemy, eh?

If God is a figment of the imagination, how can he be calumniated?
And if he’s real, how can he be so petty as to be offended by calumny?

You cannot possibly tell me anything that’s true that I don’t already know about Sade. I’ve studied him since I was 12.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by Thomas_More.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by Thomas_More.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by Thomas_More.

It is Sade’s political and materialist views which interest socialists. Your attitude is sensationalist and outdated, given that Sade is on the university curricula in France for literature and philosophy, and has been of interest to radical thinkers since the early 20th century, including Simone de Beauvoir, one of his staunchest admirers.

Wait a minute. Just let me celebrate my victory:

Delalande – Complete Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy + Presentation (Century’s rec. : Hugo Reyne)

Gorer’s book: the 1964 edition was an updated and revised edition. The book was first published in the 1930s. Gorer also contributed to Ashley Montagu’s “Man and Aggression”, which exposed the human nature fallacy.
The first English study of Sade was C.R. Dawes’, published in 1927.
Dawes also wrote, about the same time, a biography of Nicolas E. Restif de la Bretonne, who had, together with a friend, first used the word ‘communism.’

This only shows you know very little about him.

You would have to include in your condemnation all those today who “get off” on silly “bondage” games.

Sade grew up. If you read the 18th century France expert Richard Darnton, you will learn that the era’s writers used pornography as the language of political dissent, as the previous century had used religion.

The reality of life surrounding Sade during the bourgeois Revolution and the Empire far outweighed in horror any fiction; and Sade witnessed it all. Furthermore, as far as he could, he tried to ameliorate conditions. As a representative of the Convention he reformed the hospitals and compelled negligent administrators to clean up their act. This “sadist” put his own neck at risk of the guillotine rather than vote a single death warrant while he was a judge on the tribunal. He even saved the life of his lifelong enemy Mme de Montreuil, who had robbed him of over 20 years of his life via lettre de cachet.
He opposed the slave trade and, with his friend Coulmier, director of Charenton, participated in the new therapeutic projects to help the mentally ill – projects which had included the invention of the manual alphabet for the deaf. …All later dashed by Bonaparte the military thug.
By far his best writings were not licentious at all, and only a few of these have only recently appeared in English, because, not being lewd, they don’t tend to sell here. (But in France they do).

A Christian I knew had a book identifying Marx as the devil. The cover showed a drawing of Marx with horns.

You accuse Sade of some terrible things. His writings can also be interpreted in other ways by anti-socialists. They focus always, and only, on the three or four “obscene” works, which, although weighty tomes, are but the smallest part of his output. These are in fact a critique of his own class, as well as of the haute bourgeoisie his father forced him to marry into.
The opening of the most infamous of these three books starts off by expressing Sade’s utter contempt for the super rich perpetrators of the horrors in the novel, whom he calls upstarts and parasites.

As to the worst of Sade himself, you can only be thinking of the Rose Keller affair, which is well documented. Known as a blackmailer, Rose Keller’s physical examination did not bear out what she had accused Sade of.

Had she been picked up by the comte de Charolais instead, she wouldn’t have lived to tell any tales.