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00:04Oh
00:33I think there's no question when you say the word Saad,
00:37you think of monsters and whips and chains and evil and whatever it is.
00:52You have Christianity, came from a guy's name.
00:56Sadism came from Saad's name.
00:58He was the ultimate rebel.
01:04And when, after his arrest, he was being brought north to Paris by coach,
01:10Saad became the O.J. Simpson of his time.
01:13There were crowds at every stop.
01:15The word was out that the Marquis de Saad, the monster, was going to be,
01:19and they wanted to catch a glimpse of this monster.
01:28Saad is a major intellectual of the modern world.
01:37One can see him as a decadent aristocrat, as sort of the last gasp of a kind of degenerated feudalism,
01:43or one can look at him as the first true modern who can imagine a world as Darwin would see
01:50it,
01:51a world without God, a world of cold, natural law,
01:55that I think is so severe a vision that even many of his admirers have not fully absorbed it.
02:08It is important, the text,
02:14So this is the scene of the rape at the beginning of the novel.
02:22He wanted to discover and to document every possible sexual fantasy
02:29that any human mind could ever conceive.
02:35Somewhere in the history of crime worldwide,
02:39you can find an analog to every single fantasy that Saad imagined in his prison cell.
02:45Allons, préparez-vous, il faut souffrir.
02:47The guy who has protected Justine, I don't know the word in him, just to live there.
02:53If you take the most lurid moments of contemporary writers,
02:58be it Henry Miller or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth,
03:02they look like sweet valentines compared to the scenes in Saad.
03:07And 200 years ago, he simply reached out and pushed the limits further than anyone else.
03:13I think that's part of his curious kind of genius.
03:33We have a portrait of a young man aged 17 by the artist Van Loo,
03:38which may be of Saad, in which he's quite young, pretty, with a little bob pigtail.
03:46That's all that we have of him pictorially.
03:51There's no real, definite, authentic representation of him.
03:57What was his background?
04:00He was a man born into the very high aristocracy of Provence,
04:05and the aristocracy of Provence is notoriously arrogant,
04:10notoriously self-indulgent in its pleasures.
04:20If you want to understand Saad, don't think 18th century, think 10th century.
04:27You have to look at him like a feudal lord sitting on his mountaintop at Lacoste,
04:33which is extremely representative of the topography of power which he would prefer,
04:38making the law himself.
04:41He had a rather unhappy childhood.
04:45His mother just abandoned the family when he was about five.
04:49His father was a diplomat who was in disgrace much of his time because he was bisexual.
04:55And his uncle took him over and brought him up.
05:01Saad was sent to live with his uncle at age five
05:04because he was such a problem child to his parents.
05:08His uncle was an abbey,
05:10a man of the cloth and a very high-ranking man of the cloth.
05:14The years from five to ten that he spent there were very formative years in the Chateau de Solan.
05:21But it is forbidding, dark,
05:23and the dungeons thereof reoccur without question in his work later on in Justine and Juliet in 120 Days.
05:39And Saad also learned, as a very young boy,
05:45that men of the cloth did not necessarily refrain from sexual excesses.
06:09The abbey de Saad had a mistress.
06:11He had a mistress who lived in the Chateau.
06:15And it is probable that he also dallied with his mistress's daughter.
06:20So Saad, viewing this,
06:22had a rather jauncist view of the church from a very early age.
06:30And it affected him for the rest of his life.
06:41Saad hated the church because he thought it was hypocrisy.
06:48He thought it was totally fairy tales and nonsense,
06:50and he said it throughout his life.
06:59Blasphemy was one of the sins with which he was imprisoned.
07:09And then, at the age of 14, he was sent away to boarding school,
07:13a Jesuit boarding school,
07:14where they beat the students a great deal.
07:17I mean, very heavy physical punishment,
07:20whipping on the buttocks publicly in front of the rest of the school.
07:24And that lasted until he was 17.
07:26And then he went off to the war, the Seven Years' War.
07:29And then, after this rather disruptive childhood,
07:32all he knew was the barracks' life.
07:38The Maquis de Sade is not very much of a Saadian figure.
07:42He spent a third of his life in prison.
07:46He was born in a chateau and ended his life in a madhouse.
07:49He was not a very successful dominator.
07:52In many ways, he was blamed for the sins of his class.
07:57He isn't as awful as tradition would have it.
08:02Then there was an arranged marriage,
08:04as there was for most kids of the aristocracy in the early 20s.
08:09He and his wife actually were deeply fond of each other.
08:14As much as he could be in love, I think he was in love with his wife.
08:18Her name was Pelagie de Montreuil.
08:22One of the problems he got into trouble was he refused the king's invitation to go to the court,
08:27to have his marriage blessed.
08:29His wife went, his wife's family went, his father went.
08:31He refused to go.
08:32He said, I don't want any truck with those people.
08:35They're just awful.
08:36All that fawning and all that hypocrisy.
08:38He said, I just can't stand it.
08:39And there was this element of honesty about him.
08:45He became a writer, in effect, because he was confined to a jail cell.
08:52His mother-in-law was quite responsible for his writings.
08:57She would turn over in her grave if she knew.
09:01Her name was Madame de Montreuil.
09:04And at first, she's immensely drawn to Sade.
09:06She finds him quite as attractive as her daughter does.
09:10Very sexy.
09:12And so she finds an almost certain titillation in reading and hearing about his exploits.
09:19But then, when he does something truly naughty in her eyes,
09:24which is to commit apostasy with a prostitute,
09:27then that goes too far.
09:29And Madame de Montreuil, she starts to put the law down.
09:37On Easter Sunday, 1768, Sade stood in front of the statue of Louis XIV
09:43and noticed a beggar woman in front of a church.
09:47And he approached her and asked her to come with him.
09:52One of his first escapades with the law, he went with a prostitute.
09:57So, they spent the night together.
09:59But he made her trample on the crucifix,
10:02say, I deny God, I deny Christ, I mean, so forth and so on.
10:06She believed that he was asking her to clean his house in the country.
10:11He believed that he was hiring her as a prostitute.
10:15In any case, she went with him.
10:18What was her name?
10:19Rose Keller.
10:20She said she thought he was stabbing her with a small penknife.
10:25He said he never did.
10:27She said he was dripping hot wax on her buttocks.
10:31And he said he never did.
10:33And after a time, she said,
10:36Are you trying to kill me?
10:37But she was very smart and she bolted the door from inside
10:41and she created from the sheets on the bed a way to escape.
10:46And she sued him under civil law for the harm that had been done to her.
10:51But his mother-in-law paid off the debt.
10:55And that made Rose Keller, in the eyes of most of the people who write about her,
11:03the predator.
11:05Because she took money.
11:18He was sent to Vincennes under a letter de cachet,
11:23which was an instrument that a king could use to seclude wayward sons of the nobility
11:29so that they couldn't cause scandal.
11:31Je vais remettre au porteur le sieur-comte de Sade que vous retenez par mes ordres dans mon château de
11:36Vincennes.
11:37And this is a form of arrest which came without any trial
11:41and which came upon the caprice and whim of the king.
11:50What do you think of the relationship between Sade and his mother-in-law?
11:55I think she's the only woman who stood up to him over a period of time.
11:59The only one who tried to stop him from doing what he was doing.
12:06She's like the furies in Greek tragedy.
12:09I mean, she really is pursuing the male for having broken up that calm, peaceful harmony
12:17which women impose on the order of society.
12:22You have to look at him like a four-year-old child who is not socialized yet,
12:28who wants what he wants all the time and is screaming for it.
12:32That's the way you look at Sade's temperament.
12:34It's a profoundly retarded, pathologically retarded infantile mentality
12:39mixed into an extremely sophisticated intellectual development.
12:48He lost his fortune. He was terrible with money.
12:50He could not manage his marriage. He could not manage his mother-in-law.
12:53He could manage none of the regimes under which he lived.
12:57Sade was, in many ways, a total failure. He was a disaster.
13:00He was, of course, a triumph in his own mind.
13:03And that is where most of his books come from.
13:06They come from the time that he spent in prison,
13:09when he was in solitary confinement, when he was ill, when he was depressed,
13:15when he was not entirely in control of his mind.
13:48There's no question that he never would have died.
13:49He would have been a writer of any stature had he not been sent to prison.
13:56All of his major work was really from the period when he went into Vincennes in 1774 until 1790.
14:06That 16-year period was when he wrote almost everything that exists today.
14:16Prison did terrible things to the Marché d'Assad.
14:21His novels are full of chambers, underground passages, mountain fastnesses,
14:28monasteries which are lost in dark forests,
14:31which are unapproachable except by extraordinary means.
14:37There is this claustrophobia in the novels of Sade,
14:41which seems to me very much to reflect a certain mental attitude, which was forced on him.
14:48This is where she's shown all the instrument of doctrines in the cellar.
14:54What is it about his work that's so shocking?
14:57The work is so anti-social,
15:01not only in the sexual context of the term, but Sade was a revolutionary.
15:06Sade was someone who was out to take society and turn it on its head.
15:09And by the time he went into prison, he lived enough to have certain ideas about the world
15:15and about his own sexuality and about sexuality in general,
15:18to write about it for the first time in history.
15:23He saw society as a conspiracy mounted by the weak to stop the progress of the strong.
15:32What was his life like in prison?
15:35It's not like any life in prison we know now.
15:38It was extremely luxurious.
15:41A nobleman was allowed to bring into a good jail,
15:45and Bastille was really the four-star jail.
15:47He's allowed to bring his tapestries, his curtains, his dogs, a few domestics,
15:57his piano, his harp,
16:00most appurtenances of a decent home.
16:04And he was vastly obese by the time he had been in jail for seven or eight years.
16:09He weighed probably 300 pounds.
16:12He had his libraries.
16:14He had a secretary.
16:15It was really extremely conducive, this life, to writing books.
16:26I think Sade has to simply be treated as we treat the rest of pornography.
16:33You know, what I object to is making Sade into a literary man.
16:38That I object to.
16:40He's a pornographer.
16:42That's it.
16:43That's what he is.
16:43He's just another predatory pimp.
16:50The 120 Days of Sodom is quite the most gruesome book, I think, that I've ever come across.
16:57It's in four parts, only the first part of which was written,
17:01and the rest is a kind of catalogue.
17:03Actually, he calls it a menu of 600 horrible things that you can do to other people,
17:09singly, in pairs, or collectively, in groups.
17:16I think pornography's main interest is to allay anxiety,
17:21to present the sexual scene in such a soft, easy mode
17:26that you don't become disturbed at watching it.
17:31Sade's book, The 120 Days of Sodom, is designed to arouse anxiety.
17:37It's nervous reading.
17:41And the early ones are quite, maybe disgusting,
17:44but they involve, I think it's number three,
17:48it's a priest who likes to suck the snot out of a little girl's nose.
17:53There's a boy who has his penis cut off,
17:55and a red-hot poker to enlarge his anus,
17:59and he's turned into a kind of woman.
18:02And as you read on, you know it's only going to get worse.
18:07And it takes a kind of courage, I think, of the stomach,
18:11or the mind as well, to read the whole book.
18:22The great film is Pasolini's Salo.
18:30It modernises Sade's work,
18:33but it preserves the spirit of it, almost to the letter.
18:38What do you think of Pasolini's Salo?
18:41It made me feel quite ill.
18:43I was sorry I went to see it.
18:47It's a transposition of the plot of that novel
18:49to the collapse of Mussolini's fascist dictatorship.
18:59The passions of these four libertines, as Sade would have called them,
19:02are excited by four elder women who are like procuresses,
19:07who tell erotic tales.
19:13Since 1945, and what we know of the Holocaust,
19:16Sade seems to be a very modern author all of a sudden.
19:28He accepts human nature for what it is,
19:31not very pleasant.
19:33And he tears away the flimsy veil of sociability
19:38that we've plastered over this horrible monster that lies beneath.
19:42And Sade says, come out of your hole, it's playtime, away you go.
19:49Manja, Manja, Manja!
20:09The whole Nazi thing, and latterly, but to a lesser regimented degree, the Russian gulags
20:16and so forth, revealed something the world had thought did not exist, right out of Saab.
20:37One of the major mistakes made by contemporary admirers of Saab is that he was a liberal,
20:44that in some way his endorsement of free sex, the free sexual impulse, is the same thing
20:51as progressive politics. But on the contrary, he is, in political terms, a totalitarian.
20:58Or rather, he believes in the rule of the strong, of the best, a principle that looks forward
21:04to Nietzsche's Superman.
21:18Sade tests our limits. He breaks through every standard of decorum and taste. He pushes
21:25these primal buttons, I think, of disgust and revulsion. He's not just about sex as attraction.
21:39He attracts you, he lures you in, only in order to get his claws into your brain and then
21:47to torture you, to make you want to vomit. It's about the crudity and the barbarism of human physiology.
22:04Ss.
22:05Ss.
22:06Ss.
22:07Ss.
22:07Ss.
22:30men fear women because they fear woman's power to reduce them
22:37every time a heterosexual man has sex with a woman he's making a very charged journey back to the site
22:45of his origins
22:46and so he needs to dominate, man needs to dominate woman and woman needs to allow man to think that
22:53he is dominating her in the sex act or otherwise
22:57because men cannot function, men will just collapse into impotence
23:09and the Bastille, of course, he had the 120 days of Sodom which he wrote there and hid in the
23:15wall
23:16and when he was moved out of the Bastille, he left it
23:19and it was only recently published in the 20th century
23:26he called it the most impure book that was ever written since the world began
23:33you know reading Saad's work is still difficult
23:37it's both sometimes boring as people have pointed out
23:40you know repetitive, relentless kind of procession of grotesque acts
23:46and genuinely morally repulsive quite a lot of the time
23:50but that sense of moral repulsion is a part of what Saad is exploring or working at
24:02so many of them are childish, silly, stupid pranks
24:06so many of them are evil and frightening
24:11I don't think you'll read a more disturbing book
24:36he wants to make you uncomfortable
24:37that's one of the things about Saad
24:38and I think you need both hands steady to read him
24:43you're not going to hold the book with one hand if you're reading Saad
24:54he was a very difficult prisoner
24:57he abused turnkeys
25:00he satirized the governor
25:03he would make trouble all the time
25:09his correspondence was censored
25:11of course
25:12and Renée's, his wife's correspondence was censored as well
25:16so that when you read the letters in the Bibliothèque Nationale
25:20you find big black marks covering sometimes half the page
25:25almost all the letter
25:26things that were not permitted to be said
25:29the French Revolution
25:31the French Revolution had a period
25:33where anything went
25:36new ideas
25:38sexual liberty, etc.
25:47he was obsessed
25:48there were demons in this man
25:51and his fantasies were wild
26:01what we considered to be pornography at the time
26:04was a mixture of political satire
26:06anti-religious philosophy
26:09and pure sex
26:12his work philosophy in the boudoir
26:15is a mixture of all these
26:17you
26:17with her
26:18your head between her legs
26:19so that you can suck her clit
26:21then you shall exchange places
26:23so that I may suck your asshole
26:25like buttfuck Juliet once more
26:27while you rub her clit
26:28we shall all come together in that position
26:30together
26:31let's go
26:43the philosophy in the bedroom
26:44is a pastiche in court
26:47look at me Mr. Dolman
26:49I'm committing incest
26:50adultery
26:52sodomy
26:53and lesbianism
26:54all at the same time
26:56yesterday I was still a virgin
26:59I'm not a good student
27:01I find it a hilarious book
27:02as a pastiche
27:03and I think it's a deeply sophisticated book
27:06which meant to make people laugh
27:09there's no such thing as crime
27:11in nature's eyes
27:12what do you mean?
27:14if for example I would murder you
27:15for the sake of my orgasm
27:17you would consider it a crime
27:18whereas I would consider it a pleasure
27:20he carried anarchy
27:22to the ultimate
27:23in his ideal society
27:26anybody would be free
27:27to do anything they wanted
27:28now that's dangerous for any regime
27:31generosity
27:32charity
27:33good will to others
27:33for fools
27:36look at the real world
27:37and we'll see that sensible people
27:38take all that they can get
27:39and damn anyone who gets in the way
27:41we are born enemies Juliet
27:43that is nature's way
27:45if we were intended to be brothers
27:46we would not have been given such
27:47savage passions and desires
27:49we would not have been created
27:50to feel nothing of others suffering
27:51much less to enjoy it
27:53listen to nature and Juliet
27:55and follow her plan
27:56but Mr. Dolman
27:58the bible says
27:59bitch
28:02mention the bible once more
28:03and I'll leave teeth for us
28:04I'll lose your ass
28:06he makes the same calculation
28:08as existentialist man does
28:10there is no god
28:11there are no values
28:13by which I can lead my life
28:14so what do I do?
28:16your ideas excite me Mr. Dolman
28:18I would like to commit some crimes
28:20I would like to have a victim
28:21ah of what's the word?
28:23a woman
28:24I would torment her
28:25and make her absolutely miserable
28:27are you impressed with the progress
28:29I've made with her young pupil Angela?
28:31you've done a remarkable job Mr. Dolman
28:34I agree
28:38Sard's orgies are undoubtedly absurd
28:40the illustrations which he oversaw
28:42for the publication of his work
28:44you look at them and think
28:45these are not erotic
28:47these are not a turn on in any way
28:48I think they're a joke
28:51I think Sard was a man
28:53who was looking for extremes
28:55in everything he did
28:56in literature or in sex
28:58he was interested in testing the borders
29:00how far can one go
29:05in experiments in sexual coupling
29:07so that you have these extraordinary
29:10what we used to call daisy chains
29:12I don't know if that's still a term
29:13and I think he had a kind of thrill
29:16which is almost like a mathematical thrill
29:19in seeing how far
29:21and how complicated his couplings could be
29:47he was a survival artist
29:50and he certainly pretended that he was on the side of the revolution
29:54and acted like a revolution
29:57in June 1789
29:59a month before the storming of the Bastille
30:02Sard became very angry
30:03and ripped a pissing tube
30:05from the wall of his cell
30:07kind of funnel like object
30:09and began haranguing the crowds below
30:13saying that the prisoners were being killed
30:16using the tube as a megaphone
30:19exactly
30:21the National Assembly abolished Lettre de Cachet
30:25and then Sard had to be released
30:28even against the wishes of Madame de Montreuil
30:31who tried to keep him in
30:33the one person he has in mind when he's writing
30:36in my opinion
30:37is Madame de Montreuil
30:39the hated woman
30:40who was the cause of all his grief
30:45in 1792
30:46he was in a position of power in the revolutionary committees
30:50and the names of his in-laws
30:54appeared on a list of would-be emigres
30:58which meant in effect
31:00a death penalty would follow more or less automatically
31:03and Sard used his influence
31:05to have their names removed
31:07he refused to take his revenge
31:09on the people who had deprived him of liberty
31:13during most of his years as a man
31:25this is the title page
31:27and the frontispiece
31:30of the first edition
31:31right
31:33Justine
31:341791
31:35there's a simple rule of nature
31:37that the wicked will flourish
31:38and the good must found her
31:40the year after he got out of prison in 1790
31:43he published Justine
31:47any woman who goes out into the world
31:49not knowing that
31:50somebody is likely to hurt her
31:54that's the Justine woman
31:56and that would be almost all of us
31:58most of the time
31:59what do you consider his masterpiece to be?
32:03probably Justine
32:05probably Justine
32:08how old are you petite?
32:1017 madame
32:11Justine is younger by a year
32:12really?
32:14how nice
32:15Justine and Julieta's sisters
32:17separated at birth
32:18and both 13
32:20there's an innocence about Justine
32:23which never
32:23never
32:24she never loses
32:25no matter how much she's
32:27berated
32:28no matter how much she's
32:29taken advantage of
32:30she's raped numerous times
32:32she's branded
32:33she's imprisoned
32:37she still maintains somehow this belief that
32:40good will triumph
32:42and Saad is saying
32:44forget about it
32:50Justine come on
32:53Justine is tied
32:56to the chains
33:00for Saad
33:02for Saad
33:03is a kind of vacuum
33:04in nature
33:05virtue
33:06is
33:07without energy
33:08and therefore
33:09becomes a kind of magnetic
33:11attraction
33:12to the forces of evil
33:28what about Justine?
33:31I think she's a model of the masochist
33:33who goes through life being oppressed
33:35and offended
33:37and suppressed
33:38and beaten
33:44I'm being rather psychoanalytic here
33:46but I think
33:46that is the masochist
33:49in Saad
33:52I think the masochism
33:54was even more
33:55important
33:55in his psychological makeup
33:57than the sadism
33:58if you
33:59study the pattern
34:01of his sexual exploits
34:03you'll find that
34:04he's
34:05almost more often
34:07asking to be whipped
34:08than he is
34:09whipping
34:11women
34:11or men
34:12what about his relationship
34:13with his wife?
34:14well
34:14she loved him
34:16throughout prison
34:17and
34:18you might want to say
34:19that
34:19well maybe he was easier
34:20to love in prison
34:21when he was released
34:23from Sheraton
34:24after the revolution
34:25she
34:26formally
34:27separated
34:27from him
34:29and would not see him again
34:32and she dies with
34:34Juliet her sister
34:35exactly
34:36looking very happy
34:37thank you
34:37thank you
34:44Saad also
34:44by the way
34:45this is Saad
34:46I should not
34:46probably enter into
34:47but was very much
34:49a feminist before the time
34:50it's the life I chose
34:52you must remember
34:53that Juliet
34:54is an extraordinary
34:55phenomenon
34:56of feminine freedom
34:59would you rather be a mistress
35:00than a whore?
35:02Saad's women were out
35:04sexually free as the men
35:09I see the correlation of Juliet
35:11as Madonna
35:12as a woman
35:13who has infinite amount
35:15of transformations
35:15and a kind of protein
35:17personality
35:18I see that
35:19and who can act out
35:20a lot of sadom
35:21and masochistic fantasies
35:25Saad can be said
35:26to have created
35:27some of the most
35:28intellectually
35:29and psychologically
35:30forceful
35:31women characters
35:32in literature
35:34I have no idea
35:36about his psychology
35:37at all
35:37and I don't care
35:39I only care about
35:40what he did
35:41and it enrages me
35:43not Saad's work
35:45that doesn't enrage me
35:46what enrages me
35:47is the way
35:48that his biographers
35:49have treated
35:50his life
35:51because it's not funny
35:57most of what he wrote
35:58about he did
36:03he used force
36:05as part of sex
36:07and he used it
36:09against women
36:10and children
36:11whom he kidnapped
36:14that's what he did
36:16that's what
36:17is in common
36:18between his life
36:19and his work
36:20that's a lot
36:21to have in common
36:22he were prostitutes
36:24and it must be recognized
36:26that in his time
36:28in his generation
36:29prostitutes were not
36:30looked upon
36:31as human beings
36:33that's extremely regrettable
36:36but let's face the fact
36:37they were
36:38a kind of
36:39almost animal species
36:40and so
36:42you can't
36:43really condemn him
36:46any more
36:47for his mores
36:49than you could condemn
36:50Thomas Jefferson
36:50for owning slaves
36:52who causes it
36:52I think there is a parallel
36:58I would draw the conclusion
37:00that at some point
37:02early
37:02in his life
37:04one of the women
37:06that Saad assaulted
37:07should have
37:08killed him
37:10that's the conclusion
37:11that I draw
37:15feminists who are hostile
37:18to Saad
37:19are hostile
37:20to
37:21the entire
37:22modern
37:23experience
37:24because
37:25in dismissing
37:26Saad
37:27you are dismissing
37:28everything that Darwin
37:29and Freud
37:30also said
37:32that is the idea
37:34that we are innately
37:36aggressive beings
37:37that we are born
37:39not necessarily bad
37:40but with an impulse
37:42toward
37:43egotistical
37:44dominance
37:46this is why I believe
37:52that Saad should be
37:53required reading
37:54for all feminists
37:56and all women
37:57he should be on the
37:58curriculum
38:01If you think Saad is legitimate
38:03you think pornography is legitimate
38:05and Saad then becomes the intellectual of pornographers
38:10but pornography in general I think requires that one believe that women and children
38:17are lesser human beings
38:19Do you think that feminists have misunderstood Saad?
38:24I think they've taken him too seriously
38:26because I think that there is a lot of the buffoon inside
38:31it's he's an exhibitionist
38:32he's a child standing on the ramparts or the gates of his house saying look at me
38:37look at me
38:38and pissing down below
38:40or masturbating publicly
38:44this is the naughty exhibitionist child who is
38:46I think deep in the heart of every man that most men repress
38:51and this is what the literature is about
38:59So for me Saad is a hero of imagination
39:01I don't admire his life
39:04but few artists or intellectuals lives
39:07in fact show the kind of qualities that we would expect let's say in a man of the church
39:31Sard is initially imprisoned for sexual misdemeanors at the instigation of his mother-in-law
39:36When the final time came when he was imprisoned in Charentan
39:40this was due to his writings
39:49He was seized at his publishers with a brand new edition of Juliette
39:56with incredible pornographic illustrations
39:59and he was thrown into Charentan
40:02It was a mental asylum?
40:03It was a mental asylum
40:04This is quite common
40:06Just because he was thrown into mental asylum doesn't mean he was insane
40:09It was a conventional means of getting rid of unwelcome members of society
40:15and there he died at the age of 74 in 1814
40:22in his sleep as peaceful as any Christian
40:25A confessor was sent to him in his last hour
40:30and he peacefully recited his confession like a good Catholic
40:33and that was his end
40:58So who is this?
41:00This is the skull of Marquis de Sade
41:09A cast
41:10Because we don't have the original anymore
41:14I think it was stolen somewhere
41:16L'organisation cérébrale du Marquis de Sade
41:20considéré dans ses rapprochements avec la phrenologie
41:24He was considered to be such a maverick
41:26that his skull was opened and his brain taken out for study
41:29and the phrenologist who studied his skull and his brain
41:35made a report saying
41:37these skull shows the following character traits
41:41chastity, rectitude, self-discipline
41:44all in all it could be the skull of the father of the church
41:55Monsieur de Sade, auteur de Justine, roman licencieux
42:01dans lesquels on trouve le contraste le plus disparate
42:05de la passion la plus noble et la plus générosine
42:08What's the origin of his name being used?
42:11It's first used in medical dictionaries in the middle 1830s in France
42:16and it's used as a description of a very grave mental disease
42:22that has to do with harming others
42:26In the 19th century writers like Flaubert, Baudelaire
42:29were aware of Sade's work
42:32and always were interested in that sort of darker side
42:36if you like of human experience
42:37and then one of the most politically oriented
42:42avant-garde movements of 20th century art
42:44the Surrealists rediscovered Sade
42:46and transformed his reputation
42:48into a philosophical and revolutionary hero
42:54This is the drawing of Lacoste I did
42:58in Lacoste itself
42:59at the château of the Marquet de Sade
43:03What was your interest in him?
43:05Well I think he played quite an important role in Surrealism
43:10mainly I think because of his politics
43:13and his anti-establishment view about life
43:16This was the Marseille pack
43:18you know they were doing these in Marseille before they escaped
43:20Well the Surrealists are really the ones who resurrect Sade
43:24because at the beginning of the war they went down to Marseille
43:27What's that say?
43:28What is it? It's Sade, you see?
43:34The Surrealists saw in Sade transgression
43:37Sade tore up the rule book
43:39Sade did everything in a completely different way
43:43And who's this one? Freud, you see?
43:47Sigmund Freud
43:47And he was completely frank about his personal life
43:52his thoughts, his sexuality
43:53He simply rejected all the bric-a-brac
43:57of intellectual, rational, ecclesiastical, theological, philosophical assumptions
44:03and started again
44:04I think the other element of Sade
44:06that was important for early Surrealist work
44:10was his anti-clericalism
44:12his hatred of the Christian Church in particular
44:15Here's the nun
44:17who's exposing her breasts
44:19and here behind her is a sexual orgy going on
44:23you see
44:25of what could be childism
44:27And what is the figure on the wall?
44:29Well, I think it just crept in
44:33I think it could be almost an imaginary portrait of Sade
44:38Several of the Surrealists later on did portraits
44:41what they thought he looked like
44:43but of course they don't know
44:45And there was the project of making
44:47kind of imaginary portraits of Sade
44:49which the artist Man Ray did
44:50of making substitute portraits for Sade
45:08There's a man
45:09and behind a guy
45:10I have to explain that
45:12but behind there is a lady here
45:15What do you think it was simple?
45:18I would say between 14,000 and 50,000 pounds
45:21It's a very well suite of plates
45:23The question is to know
45:26if these plates have an autographed influence on Sade or not
45:32and you've got all the emblematic of the death in the borders
45:37which is one of the proof that the plates could be autographed
45:40I mean influenced by Sade
45:42Well, I'll tell you something else
45:45Tell me
45:45This is Sade's coat of arms
45:48Is it?
45:49You mean the star?
45:52It's an emblematic form of the spirit of arms
45:56Where... where have you seen that?
45:58Would you like the...
46:01Sade is very collected
46:02because it's in between literature and erotical books
46:06It had a strong influence on the Surrealists
46:10So all the people who are collecting Surrealist books
46:12must have first editions of Sade
46:14and it is part of French literature
46:17And Buñuel is another Surrealist who worshipped him
46:20and did a film version
46:23vaguely based on 100 days of Sade
46:31Right at the end of the film
46:33the last figure to emerge
46:35is clearly meant to be the figure of Jesus Christ
46:40and now this is not in Sade's novel
46:43but Buñuel did it as this kind of scandalous anti-clerical gesture
46:49Sade's influence in cinema is less in terms of themes
46:54than the way it's watched
47:05The classic example is of the final girl
47:08who's locked in a... almost like a haunted house
47:11This is the Gothic novel
47:13which is in turn inherited from Sade
47:15by Bienfaisance between prostitute
47:17by Bienfaisance
47:18and Libertine par Vertu
47:20which is again the same thematic
47:22it's reverse
47:23Captain, prostitute
47:25by Bienfaisance
47:27and Libertine par Vertu
47:31The direct line therefore from Sade
47:34is the Gothic novel
47:35horror
47:36to the horror movie
47:45I mean this is not erotic or pornographic literature
47:48because it does not incite you to commit the sexual act at all
47:53it's like a dose of saltpeter
47:55reading Sade
48:12So why should we pay any attention to him?
48:15Because the prose is very beautiful
48:16and because he tested the borders of literature
48:20and because he did set out the most radical notions of liberty
48:26ever set forth by probably any thinker in Western civilization
48:37So if he's endured I think it's because he was ahead of his time
48:40and in many ways time has caught up with him
48:46He would chortle today
48:48if he were to walk through some of the areas of the world
48:50or to go on the internet
48:52I think he'd be quite pleased with himself
48:54that this repression had been lifted
48:56and he would say to himself
48:58I suspect I had something to do with that
49:06But it's in the second half of the 20th century
49:08that Sade has emerged really
49:10as the voice of liberation
49:15Liberating late 20th century civilization from its illusions
49:19the idea that we can control history
49:22the idea that a set of laws is a satisfactory way of running a society
49:27the idea that there are moral values by which we should judge our actions
49:34in fact once Sade the demolition man goes in
49:38there isn't very much left
49:40and of course at the end of the 20th century
49:43that is exactly how we like it
49:49Should you go to bed or watch another Channel 4 program?
49:52Get the answer from the Ask Fate game on the Masters of Darkness website
49:57at Channel4.com History
49:59Next week's Master of Darkness is Queen Elizabeth's Magician
50:03at the earlier time of 10 o'clock
50:05Still real life next tonight with Love Off The Streets
50:12Let's see