Thomas_More
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Mme. de Stael had to keep fleeing the tyrant from land to land as Bonaparte’s armies marched through Europe.
Napoleon had overthrown the bourgeois democracy anyway, and made himself military dictator, so why would he be interested in communism?
He was the enemy of the working class. He crushed the free press, arrested critics, roped young men into his war machine, had thugs sent across borders to seize or murder political opponents. A real hero! Granted, he didn’t execute deserters, just re-drafted them. But the youth of France was collectively in dread of his press gangs.
No, I don’t think communism would even register on his radar, except to pounce and incarcerate.He also re-instituted slavery.
I remember a humorous scene from an old movie about a slave revolt, whereby one of L’Ouverture’s men is asked to give the password by a Napoleonic sentry. The slave replies, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!” The sentry says “That’s not the password”, to which the slave retorts, “It should be!” and clonks the sentry unconscious. 😀Napoleon also banned La Marseillaise, so Tchaikovsky was wrong to include it in his 1812 Overture.
The Discovery of Australasia by a Flying Man.
Thanks for this.
Just as utopian thinkers were anticipating socialism (communism) in the 18th century, they were simultaneously anticipating Darwin.
Not just, obviously, Erasmus Darwin and Buffon, but also Rousseau, at the beginning of his Discourse on Inequality, and Restif, in his The Flying Man. In the latter work, Restif proposes the opposite to violent colonisation, namely mutual aid and friendship toward newly discovered peoples.Movimiento, don’t leave the forum. You are invaluable and give us insights from your experience many of us don’t have.
Don’t let yourself be bullied. Ignore the bullies, but please don’t leave, comrade.If you don’t want to know anything about Sade, fair enough; but don’t begrudge me opening a thread on him, which I may. You jump straight in and tell me I “need help.”
I have always liked Sade, and that doesn’t mean I am somehow ill.
I have many interests and like many writers, artists, musicians (did you know Sade wrote musicals too?) and other great thinkers.Your words show any knowledge you have of him to be paltry.
Prostitution is sadly part and parcel of class society, both in Sade’s day and today. I say this because there is no proof Sade ever engaged in non-consenting sexual activity, not in rape, nor kidnapping.
Rose Keller was as hard-nosed a woman of the streets as they come. Her story was proven false and another attempt on her part to extort money, for which she was notorious.
Are those today who pay “dominatrices” for sex games guilty of a terrible crime?I doubt I would have liked Sade personally, but he was no Jack the Ripper or Gilles de Rais.
And as to Sade himself, again you have to use discernment and avoid the sensationalist trash out there.
These are the worthwhile writers available in English:
Geoffrey Gorer
C.R. Dawes
Guy Endore
Gilbert Lely
Maurice Lever
Francine du Plessix-Gray
Simone de BeauvoirGenerally I would avoid the internet.
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.
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).And many illnesses will disappear as pollution is tackled, poisoning of the environment halted, and the stress of life under capitalism ended. I see the number of pharmaceuticals drastically reduced, as most will become unnecessary. And with that reduction to only what is essential, so will be reduced the present vast number of debilities and even deaths caused by profit-motivated medication.
