A Different Sade: Food for Thought

Thursday, 7 June 2007

A British Academy discussion evening convened and chaired by
Marian Hobson, FBA, Queen Mary, University of London

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Sade, Joseph de Maistre and Religion

Bob Gillan, University of Manchester

The first volume of Sade's works published in the Gallimard Pléiade series in 1990 was prefaced by Jean Deprun's essay 'Sade philosophe', presenting Sade as an Enlightenment philosopher according to the terms defined in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. Since then, the place of Sade's work in the philosophy of the Enlightenment has become increasingly entrenched. Over the last two years the popular magazines L'Histoire and Le Nouvel observateur have published issues on the Enlightenment treating works by Sade as defining events in its chronology. Speaking in 2004, Marcel Hénaff, the author of Sade ou l'invention du corps libertin (1978), claimed of Sade's reputation: 'Apparemment elle va de soi: nul n'ignore que Sade, même s'il avance des thèses extrêmes, reste profondément un penseur des Lumières.' ['Apparently, it goes without saying: everybody knows that, despite the extremity of his propositions, Sade remains, profoundly, a thinker of the Enlightenment.'] [1] Sade's status as a philosophe is justified by particular aspects of his work, perhaps the most important of which is its treatment of religion. The long dissertations attacking the existence of God and the practice of religion that fill his work have often defined his association with the philosophes. For example, in her recent biography of Rachilde, Melanie Hawthorne wrote: 'Despite being educated by priests, Rachilde remained a religious skeptic, thinking of herself as owing more to Voltaire and Sade than to religious or mystical patterns of thought.' [2]

Given that Sade's status as an Enlightenment philosopher, which is now often taken more or less as a matter of fact, rests largely on his reputation as an opponent of Christianity, it is paradoxical that a number of his readers, including Flaubert, Swinburne, Zola, Huysmans, Klossowski, Blanchot, Bataille and Breton have, in one way or another, described the essence of his thought as religious. These writers have contextualized Sade's work in many different ways, but, in order to stay as close as possible to the theme of the Enlightenment, what I want to do now is to point out some similarities between Sade's thought and the work of Joseph de Maistre, one of the leading figures of the counter-Enlightenment. De Maistre seems an unlikely intellectual bedfellow for Sade. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), de Maistre's reputation is that of 'an orthodox Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal authority'. [3] These are hardly the characteristics and beliefs that Sade brings to mind. Yet despite the clear differences in the values that Sade and de Maistre promoted, their ideas converge at certain points of which I am going to look at two: first, their conception of nature and, second, their ideas about the relationship of vice and virtue.

Sade's idea of nature as a force of criminal violence underpinned his philosophy and a similar idea constituted an important point of conflict in de Maistre's hostile intellectual relationship with the Enlightenment. In de Maistre's most famous work, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821) he presented a vision of nature governed by 'une loi occulte et terrible qui a besoin de sang humain' ['a dark and terrible law that requires human blood']. [4] For de Maistre, nature was a self-destructive entity whose operation was synonymous with sin. He believed that the Enlightenment view of nature was wilfully blind to what was for him an obvious fact: 'Il n'y a que violence dans l'univers; mais nous sommes gâtés par la philosophie moderne, qui nous a dit que tout est bien.' ['There is nothing but violence in the universe; but we are spoilt by modern philosophy, which has told us that everything is good.'] [5] He claimed that life, in all its manifestations, is driven by an unconscious force of violence and suffering: 'Une force, à la fois cachée et palpable, se montre continuellement occupée à mettre à découvert le principe de la vie par des moyens violents.' ['A palpable but hidden force manifests itself in a continuous effort to reveal the essence of life by violent means.'] [6]

A first point of concurrence between de Maistre and Sade, then, is found in the violent vision of nature that they shared, which can be illustrated by comparing the following two quotations. The first is from Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg: 'La terre entière, continuellement imbibée de sang, n'est qu'un autel immense où tout ce qui vit doit être immolé sans fin.' ['The world in its entirety, continually soaked in blood, is nothing but a vast alter on which all that lives must be unendingly sacrificed.'] [7] And the second is from Sade's La Nouvelle Justine: 'Etudiez-la [...], cette nature atroce, vous ne la verrez jamais s'engraisser [...] que du malheur et de la destruction des hommes.' ['If you study this atrocious entity of nature you will see that it feeds itself only with the suffering and destruction of men.'] [8] Both writers believed nature to be in a state of flux, driven by a force of self-destruction. De Maistre's idea of nature, like Sade's, was of a cannibal entity, hostile to humankind and sated only by constant blood-letting.

The second point of comparison that I want to consider concerns the way that de Maistre and Sade related this idea of nature to human life. Like many other eighteenth-century philosophers, de Maistre was preoccupied with the conflict of determinism and free will. While insisting on individual responsibility for sin, he simultaneously understood human behaviour as the expression of providence, which he conceived in terms of a particular relationship between vice and virtue, leading him to describe the fundamental concern of Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg as: 'La grande et éternelle plainte qu'on ne cesse d'élever sur le succès du crime et les malheurs de la vertu.' ['The great, perennial lament raised against the success of crime and the misfortunes of virtue.'] [9]

The central premise of de Maistre's consideration of morality, introduced in the third chapter of Considérations sur la France (1797) and echoed throughout his work, is that the sins of the guilty are atoned for by the suffering of the innocent. This was the essence of his interpretation of Christianity, which he summarized as follows:

On demande quelquefois à quoi servent ces austérités terribles exercées par certains ordres religieux, et qui sont aussi des dévouements: autant vaudrait précisément demander à quoi sert le christianisme, puisqu'il repose tout entier sur ce même dogme agrandi, de l'innocence payant pour le crime. [Questions are sometimes raised about the purpose of the terrible mortifications, which are also sacrifices, practised by certain religious orders: one might as well question the purpose of Christianity, since it rests entirely on the amplification of the same doctrine of innocence paying for crime.] [10]

The suffering of innocence for the crimes of the guilty lay at the heart of de Maistre's religious belief and constitutes a further point of comparison between his work and Sade's. Sade saw the operation of the universe in terms of a moral law guaranteeing the suffering of innocence and the triumph of crime. Amidst the description of Justine's suffering at the hands of the monks of Sainte-Marie-des-Bois we read that:

Il était écrit sur le grand livre des destins, sur ce livre obscur dont personne n'a l'intelligence; il y était gravé que tous ceux qui l'avaient tourmentée, humiliée, tenue dans les fers, recevraient sans cesse à ses yeux le prix de leurs forfaits... comme si la Providence eût pris la tâche de lui montrer le danger ou l'inutilité de la vertu... Funestes leçons qui ne la corrigèrent pourtant point, et qui [...] ne l'empêcheraient pas [...] d'être toujours l'esclave de cette divinité de son cœur. [It was written in the great book of destinies, in that obscure book that no-one understands, it was there inscribed that all those who had tormented her, humiliated her, held her in irons, would be rewarded before her eyes for their crimes... as if Providence had taken responsibility for showing her the danger or uselessness of virtue... Fatal lessons that, nevertheless, would do nothing to change her behaviour and nothing to present her servitude to the divinity of heart.] [11]

Sade, like de Maistre, presented the suffering of the innocent for the sins of the wicked as an inalienable fact of human life that is inscribed even in the operation of the universe.

I have made two points of comparison between de Maistre and Sade based on their understanding of nature and the human experience of it. Both considered nature to be violent and hostile to human life and both believed that the human experience of life must develop as a conflict between good and evil leading invariably to the suffering of the innocent. It remains to pre-empt a possible criticism and to say what I hope to have achieved in making this comparison. I should point out that it has not been my intention to deny the important influence that Enlightenment philosophy had on Sade's work, which has been well demonstrated, not least by Jean Deprun, through several decades of critical enquiry. The purpose of what I have said is not simply to encourage people to accord Sade a place 'in' or 'out' of the Enlightenment. My concern has been to raise a general question about Sade's intellectual mode of operation and the value of his work. My belief is that an increasingly favourable and forgiving interpretation of the content of Sade's work has paralleled the development of his status as an Enlightenment philosopher and I have sought to bring into question the terms on which this is justified. If, say, the legacy of the Enlightenment is a belief in intellectual freedom from superstition and in the possibility of improving the human experience of life on earth, then, the question that is implied by what I have said is: In what way can Sade's work be seen to support such beliefs?

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Notes

[1] Norbert Sclippa (ed.), Lire Sade (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004), p. 21.

[2] Melanie Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press), p. 48.

[3] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), p. 49.

[4] Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg; ou, Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence; suivi d'un traité sur les sacrifices, vol. 2 (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), p. 13.

[5] ibid, p. 116.

[6] ibid, p. 21.

[7] ibid, p. 24.

[8] D. A. F. de Sade, Œuvres, ed. by Michel Delon, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard 'Pléiade', 1995), p. 772.

[9] Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, vol. 2, p. 77. The terms on which the conflict is here formulated, opposing the prosperity of crime to the misfortunes of virtue, allow at least the conjecture that de Maistre had read and reflected on Sade's La Nouvelle Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu (1799) and Histoire de Juliette ou les prospérités du vice (1801).

[10] ibid, p. 116.

[11] Sade, Œuvres, vol. 2, p. 814.

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