Must We Burn de Sade? by Simone de Beauvoir

Author:Simone de Beauvoir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs
Published: 2012-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

From LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR

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[Part of La Philosophie dans le Boudoir ( 1795) consists of an interpolated pamphlet which Dolmancé reads aloud to enlighten Eugénie and Madame de Saint-Ange. It is entitled: Frenchmen! A further effort is needed if you would be republicans!, and it is a résumé of Sade's philosophical, moral, and political ideas. The following is from the second part, “Les Moeurs.”]

Frenchmen! You are too enlightened not to feel that a new government will necessitate a new way of living; it is impossible for the citizen of a free state to behave as the slave of a despotic monarch; these differences in interests, duties, and relationships in themselves determine an entirely different fashion of behavior in society; a mass of minor faults and social transgressions deemed essential under the rule of kings, who had to be more and more demanding as they needed the restraints that would make them lofty and unapproachable to their subjects—all these will become meaningless. Other crimes, known by the names of regicide and sacrilege, under a government that knows neither kings nor religions, must equally wither away in a republican state. In granting freedom of belief and freedom of the press, realize, Citizens, that at one remove from that you must accord freedom of action; that, excepting those things that bear directly against the government, there remain an uncounted number of crimes no longer punishable, for in reality there are very few actions that are criminal in a society based on freedom and equality, and if we scrupulously judge and examine matters, there is nothing truly criminal but what the law itself forbids. For Nature teaches us both vice and virtue in our constitution, or, in yet more philosophical terms, by reason of Nature's need for both vice and virtue, her promptings would become a true guide to the precise determinations of what is good or bad. In order the better to develop my ideas upon such an essential subject, let us classify the various actions of man's life which up to now have been named criminal, and we will then measure them against the true duties of a republican.

First, those which his conscience and his credulity impose on him towards the Supreme Being; Second, those which he must fulfill towards his fellow men; Third, and finally, those which relate only to himself.

The assurance we should feel that no god has ever had a hand in our existence and that we are here because it could not be otherwise, inevitable creatures of Nature like plants and animals—this assurance without doubt quite demolishes, as one can see, the first group of duties, those which we falsely believe we have towards divinity; and with them disappear all the religious transgressions, all those known under the vague and intangible names of impiety, sacrilege, blasphemy, atheism, etc.: the transgressions, in fact, which Athens punished so unjustly in Alcibiades, and France in the unfortunate Labarre. If there is one thing in the world grotesque beyond others, it

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