Sade. Marquis of the Shadows, Prince of the Enlightenment. The Range of Libertinisms.
Flammarion| N° d'inventaire | 18671 |
| Format | 24 x 29.3 |
| Détails | 174 p., color illustrations, hardcover with dust jacket. |
| Publication | Paris, 2014 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782081353817 |
During the seventy-four years and six months of his life, as well as in the two centuries that separate us from his death, it may seem paradoxical today that the Marquis de Sade was so demonized, and that the man and his work were so long confused, to the point of taking the man and the novelist for the criminal characters of his fictions in general and of his handwritten "scroll" in particular. By insisting so much on the marquis of the shadows, we could have forgotten the prince of the Enlightenment. Between vice and virtue, between sulfur and incense, the manifestations, the different nuances of the range of libertinages that concerned the liberation of minds long before concerning that of bodies, do they not at once reflect the expression of a great unease, a terrible revolt and an incredible provocation in the face of the feeling of an existential awakening and of a life at an impasse, of a society without an exit? Between the age of 23 and his death at 74, between 1763 and 1814, Sade spent nearly 28 years in prison, more than half of his adult life, under three different regimes: the Monarchy, the Republic, and the Empire. From the dungeon of Vincennes to the lunatic asylum of Charenton, by way of the Bastille, he would have frequented a good ten jails. The enemy of monarchs, revolutionaries and emperors, the one who respected neither God nor the Supreme Being, the knight of being and of malaise, usher of the sad observation of the absurd and of nothingness, the one to whom rumor still attributes all the crimes of his fantasies, disturbed in his lifetime as he disturbs today: Sade, considered as the virus of a contagious disease, as an individual who should be removed from society, erased, eradicated.
During the seventy-four years and six months of his life, as well as in the two centuries that separate us from his death, it may seem paradoxical today that the Marquis de Sade was so demonized, and that the man and his work were so long confused, to the point of taking the man and the novelist for the criminal characters of his fictions in general and of his handwritten "scroll" in particular. By insisting so much on the marquis of the shadows, we could have forgotten the prince of the Enlightenment. Between vice and virtue, between sulfur and incense, the manifestations, the different nuances of the range of libertinages that concerned the liberation of minds long before concerning that of bodies, do they not at once reflect the expression of a great unease, a terrible revolt and an incredible provocation in the face of the feeling of an existential awakening and of a life at an impasse, of a society without an exit? Between the age of 23 and his death at 74, between 1763 and 1814, Sade spent nearly 28 years in prison, more than half of his adult life, under three different regimes: the Monarchy, the Republic, and the Empire. From the dungeon of Vincennes to the lunatic asylum of Charenton, by way of the Bastille, he would have frequented a good ten jails. The enemy of monarchs, revolutionaries and emperors, the one who respected neither God nor the Supreme Being, the knight of being and of malaise, usher of the sad observation of the absurd and of nothingness, the one to whom rumor still attributes all the crimes of his fantasies, disturbed in his lifetime as he disturbs today: Sade, considered as the virus of a contagious disease, as an individual who should be removed from society, erased, eradicated.