Thomas_More
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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.
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.’And as time went on, the psychological harm created by capitalism will more and more become a distant memory, until its lingering effects will have faded and disappeared.
Wait a minute. Just let me celebrate my victory:
Delalande – Complete Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy + Presentation (Century’s rec. : Hugo Reyne)
Socialism can spread without people having heard of us, as threads of discontent begin to merge together.
That’s my hope anyway. And I ask of those who disagree: “What’s in the denial of socialism’s possibility for you?”” Actually, the Marquis de Sade, a contemporary of the Founding Fathers, who died over 200 years ago in an insane asylum, has better claim to the label socialist. He championed democracy, was opposed to every form of punishment (‘it is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them’), saw the class-divided nature of society and sided with ‘those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat.’ Indeed, Geoffrey Gorer in The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1964) points out that Sade stood in opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer thus argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’” (The Socialist Standard).
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.
“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.
