Sade Reads d'Holbach: Atheism, Materialism, and Atopy in the Rise of the Avant-Garde

Abstract

For all Sade’s insistence, in his “Last Will and Testament” of January 30, 1806, that his burial should be arranged in such a way that “the traces of [the] grave may disappear from the face of the earth as … the memory of [his existence] shall fade out of the minds of all men,” by the mid-twentieth century, he had acquired a status of almost mythical proportions among the artistic vanguard in France. From one of the most vilified aristocrats, who had been incarcerated under no fewer than four different political regimes and whose name had been employed to label an abhorrent sexual perversion, he had become the ultimate free spirit, an icon of obstinate revolt against all oppressive and restrictive systems of power. In his introduction to the first major anthology of Sade’s writings, published in 1909, the French proto-modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who famously invented the term “surrealism,” gladly invoked Sade as “the divine Marquis,” thereby borrowing the moniker he had been accorded by the French medical doctor and historian Augustin Cabanès. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Sade had already been the constant if silent companion to literary greats such as Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Huysmans, Swinburne, and d’Annunzio. With Apollinaire’s blessing, Sade would be discussed more openly as the most radical creative writer, away from the medico-legal and forensic textbooks in which he had featured prominently as the inveterate chronicler of the human sexual aberrations....