The Evil Man

Man's cruelty to man as revealed in Naziism bit deeply into the consciousness of France's intellectuals. Since the end of the war, France's intellectuals have been sloshing through the sludge at the bottom of their own and other men's minds in search of some explanation. In this echoing and noisome place, time and again they have encountered the shadowy figure of the man known as the Marquis de Sade. Last week a Paris court debated a question: Was Sade an intrepid explorer and detached observer of the depths? Or was he there because he liked it? In a word, was Sade a pornographer whose works should be banned, or a serious contributor to the wisdom of mankind?

The question was just as puzzling to his contemporaries. Donatien-Alphonse-Franc,ois, Comte de Sade, was born in a Paris palace in 1740. His father was military ruler of four French provinces and lord of vast estates. His mother was of royal Bourbon blood. He was a youthful companion of the young Prince Louis-Joseph, fought as a cavalry officer in the Seven Years' War. At 23, he docilely married the daughter of a rich, petty aristocrat in a ceremony attended by King Louis XV and his Queen. Five months later he was arrested in a local bordello, and convicted of "outrageous debauchery," by a regime that considered ordinary debauchery routine. King Louis XV himself ordered him to prison and accorded no special privileges.

Naturally Bad. For the remaining years of his life, Sade alternated between orgiastic freedom and protracted prison terms. He indulged in perversion, flagellation and more ingenious tortures, made such extraordinary demands on Paris' prostitutes that the police ordered procurers not to furnish him with girls. One woman complained that he had lured her to a villa outside Paris, stripped her naked and bound her to a bed, beat her with switches, slashed her with a knife, and poured wax in the wounds. Exiled to his estate in Provence, Sade organized a private harem of both sexes. In a foray to Marseilles with his valet, he beat four streetwalkers and allegedly tried to poison one of them. When the police came to arrest him. they found he had run off to Italy with his wife's young sister. In 1777 he recklessly returned to Paris, where his long-suffering mother-in-law had him seized and confined in Vincennes prison. There, deprived of his pleasures, Sade began to write.

In the next 13 years, Sade transmuted his sexual aberrations into a philosophical theory. Where Rousseau argued that man was naturally good, Sade declared with savage cynicism that man is naturally evil "in the delirium of his passions as much as when they are calm, and in both cases the ills of his fellows can become the source of execrable pleasure to him." He insisted that man fully realized himself only in the expression of his natural, i.e., cruel, impulses, that even sexual pleasure was most intense when it was accompanied by the infliction of pain. Society had no right to condemn perversions (of which he meticulously catalogued 600 varieties) since they were "natural," and he cited anthropological and travel books to prove that there was scarcely any aberration that was not sanctioned in some society. In the course of pursuing this logic, he mordantly attacked the hypocritical "virtue" of monarchical France, from the "charity" of landlords, which served only to appease the wrath of the oppressed, to the "justice" of laws administered only to preserve the privileges of the established order.

Thus, when Sade was released from prison in 1790, he found himself a hero of the new revolution, and was made a judge. But the man who commended cruelty as a means of individual expression recoiled from institutionalized cruelty. Most of all, he denied that any man had the right to sit in judgment on another. He pardoned nearly every aristocrat brought before him, even spared the family of his detested mother-in-law. Soon he was arrested for "moderantism," was saved from the guillotine only by the fact that Robespierre fell from power the day before his scheduled execution. In 1800 he was consigned to a criminal asylum, whose chief doctor observed: "This man isn't crazy. He's just delirious about vice." There he died in 1814.

Freest Ever. Even before his death, Sade's books were banned in France or published only in expurgated editions. But already he was a literary legend. His defiance of convention and law appealed to the romantics, and in 1843 famed Critic Sainte-Beuve wrote that Byron and Sade "are perhaps the two greatest inspirations of our moderns." Poet Charles Baudelaire admitted: "One always comes back to Sade, that is to say to the natural man, to explain evil." Swinburne declared the day would come "when statues will be erected to him in every city." French Poet Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the freest spirit that ever lived." Surrealists were fascinated by him, and Photographer Man Ray did an "imaginative portrait" of him with the Bastille in flames behind him (see cut).

After World War II, French existentialists found new kinship with Sade's bitter cynicism. Simone de Beauvoir called him a "great writer and a great moralist." Albert Camus argued that Sade explained Naziism's "reduction of man to an object of experiment." Psychologists conceded that in his recognition of the impulse to cruelty in sexual relations, he anticipated some of Freud's thinking. Responding to this interest, alert, young Publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert printed a 28-volume set of Sade's complete works, put them on public sale for the first time in France in unexpurgated form.

In France, where presumably anything goes in such matters, this was too much for the police. In court last week, charged with "outrage of morality through books," Pauvert was defended by France's most prominent criminal lawyer, Maurice Garc,on. Morals are a function of a certain time and place, Garc,on argued. Bigamy, once punishable by death, is now simply fined. Abortion is legal in some countries. Jean Cocteau sent a letter arguing: "To attack Sade is to attack Jean Jacques Rousseau. The slightest mystery story from puritanical America is just as nefarious." Concluded Garc,on: "Sade is important. We cannot let false prudery prevent us from studying him. That is against all scientific doctrine."

The learned judges announced they would take some time to think things over. "Of course, we'll lose the case," sighed Lawyer Garc,on. Even in France, apparently, there are limits.

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