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-François, 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.