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The original Mr Grey

The Marquis de Sade still shocks 200 years later

Evil, moi?

By Miranda Johnson

“I expect all memory of me shall fade out of the minds of all men,” wrote Donatien Alphonse François de Sade in his last will and testament. But the infamy of the Marquis de Sade, and of his erotic writings, endures, as does their ability to horrify readers. In 2014 sadists (among many others) may relish the release in August of the film adaptation of E.L. James’s bestseller “Fifty Shades of Grey”, but true Sadists will celebrate, on December 2nd 2014, the 200th anniversary of de Sade’s death in Charenton, a French lunatic asylum.

The marquis spent most of his life imprisoned, first by the monarchy, then the republic, and lastly Napoleon for crimes including “debauchery” and “excessive libertinage”. The turbulence of his era emerges in the extremity of his writings. From the violent eroticism of de Sade’s works, such as “Justine”, comes the concept of sadism: sexualised fantasies involving pain and restraint. Intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault have all produced work in response to de Sade, himself “a fetish of literary criticism”, according to Nicholas Cronk of Oxford University, a de Sade specialist.

In 2014 Mr Cronk and other academics will emphasise the importance of de Sade’s less salacious writings, including plays and dialogues, often overlooked by both readers and translators seeking thrills. A special edition of Romance Studies, a literary journal, will in part discuss the influence of natural history and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau on his work.

It is possible, too, that in 2014 the original manuscript of “The 120 Days of Sodom”, written by de Sade while imprisoned in the Bastille in 1785, will be returned from Switzerland for a place in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale. Legal disputes over ownership (after the manuscript’s theft in the 1980s) have kept the work from the city in which it was written. De Sade’s installation in one of France’s great literary institutions would, paradoxically, enshrine the subversive author in respectability—and could become the marquis’s most shocking feat.

Miranda Johnson: editorial assistant, The World in 2014