The Marquis of Sade for life 30 years in prison, was sentenced to guillotine and managed to escape, his texts were among the books declared cursed by the Church, and accused of murder and perversions, is only part of his life. Want to get to know him better?
His full name was Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade and he was the son of wealthy parents. He was born in Paris in 1740 and was a philosopher and writer. He has written famous books such as “Justine or the Woes of Virtue”, “The 120 Days of Sodom”, “The Crimes of Love”, “Aline and Valcour”, among others.
- The Marquis of Sade.
- Remembered for his ideas on sexuality.
- At the end of the eighteenth century introduced a new concept of sexual pleasure.
- Which at the time was understood as an incitement to crime and perversion.
“We will enjoy indiscriminately everything that our passions suggest to us and we will always be happy. Isn’t consciousness the voice of nature, but just the voice of prejudice?
The society of the time was heavily criticized for its cynicism in the work of the Marquis of Sade, as it taught women to be dignified, decent and to understand sex as a bad thing, but admitted the existence of prostitution as a means of allowing men to satisfy. your needs, your sexual needs.
For many people of his time, the Marquis de Sade was a madman who wrote about sex macabre, when he began publishing his books he was considered a cursed writer and his works were hidden for many years.
Today, when we think of Sade, we associate the term “sadism”, which is the realization of sexual pleasure through physical pain or someone else. We associated Sade with everything perverse, but it was much more than that.
We cannot forget that the Marquis of Sade was a great scholar of his time. He received a privileged education and loved exotic travel; devours books of philosophy and history, which are his two favorite subjects.
His education was his uncle, the abbot of Sade, a follower of debauchery and Voltaire. At the age of 23, Sade married a high society woman named Renee Pelagie, whom she was not in love with. in your book? Aline and Valcour, you’re talking about this arranged marriage.
“Modesty is a chimera, the only result of customs and education. Is it a habit?.
Sade spent most of his life in prison accused of torture and abuse, in these accusations the customs of society of the time and especially the antipathy that his father-in-law felt for him took great weight.
Despite all the ideas about the Marquis of Sade and his association with perversion, his works are truly committed to sexual freedom, in the sense of enjoying our own sexuality without the modesty and limitations imposed by culture and education.
Sade’s work can be studied from many points of view: social, political, psychological, moral, anthropological, historical, literary . . . But the words he used were loaded with irony and metaphors, in order to awaken the minds of his readers.
The reality is that Sade was not only a pornographic writer, but a political critic appreciated by other authors several years later, such as surrealists, his work was actually a pamphlet against the aristocracy of the time.
Sade basically proposes moral freedom in its most extreme aspect and combines two fundamental ideas: equality between people and radical selfishness based on the idea that we were born in one society and that we are condemned to it, without direct relationship with another person.
Therefore, the Marquis of Sade had advanced ideas about the time in which he lived, so they tried to silence him for a long time, even after his death, and to this day he continues to arouse the curiosity of being one of the most irreverent. personalities of history.
“Preaching without practice is like building a boat and leaving it on the river bank. “