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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.