Let us convince ourselves once and for all that laws are merely useless and dangerous; their only object is to multiply crimes or to allow them to be committed with impunity on account of the secrecy they necessitate. Without laws and religions it is impossible to imagine the degree of glory and grandeur human knowledge would have attained by now; the way these base restraints have retarded progress is unbelievable; and that is the sole service they have rendered to man.11
The passions, he maintains, have done more good to mankind than laws. Indeed, individuals who are not animated by strong passions are merely mediocre beings: ‘Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.’ We should therefore do away with laws: if man returns to a state of nature, he would be far happier than is possible under the ‘ridiculous yoke’ of the law. There is absolutely no need for laws to obtain justice, for nature has given man the instinct and necessary force to get justice for himself. The universal law which nature imprints in every heart is ‘to satisfy ourselves to refuse our passions nothing, whatever the cost to others’. If this means oppressing another, the oppressed would have the right to revenge himself, and could check the oppressor. As a result, ‘I have far less reason to fear my neighbour’s passion than the law’s injustice.’ Anarchy therefore has nothing to do with despotism and is best:
Tyrants are never born in anarchy, you only see them raise themselves up in the shadow of the laws or get authority from them. The reign of laws is therefore vicious and inferior to anarchy; the strongest proof of my proposition is the necessity a government finds itself in to plunge itself into anarchy when it wishes to remake its constitution.12
In the last volume of Juliette, the theme is taken up again at length and another Italian declares: ‘Give man back to Nature; she will lead him far better than your laws.’13 It is the conclusion towards which the most daring thinkers of the Enlightenment were groping.
De Sade did not however leave it at that. Conscious of the immediate practical task of remaking French society, and concerned at the authoritarian direction the French Revolution was taking, he include in his Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795) a long address entitled Frenchmen, a further effort if you wish to be Republicans! It offers a political programme for a ‘free State’; a State which he would like to keep to a minimum. As such it is a synthesis of his two earlier positions.
The address continues to reject religion completely. De Sade calls on his fellow countrymen to replace the ‘theistic follies’ introduced by the ‘infamous Robespierre’ with social precepts to be taught by a system of national education. Although he would give the State this task to perform it still would have little power as a legal order. A new society would develop new morals and in a State based on liberty and equality there would be practically no crimes to be punished. The laws which might remain should be ‘so element and so few that all men whatever their character can comply with them’.14 At a time when the French government had just pronounced the respect of private property, de Sade maintained that there should only be a law which punishes not the robber but the man who is careless enough to let himself be robbed.
De Sade always insisted that crimes are committed out of want or passion, and the best way to avoid them is to eradicate the interest in breaking the law. As for those who commit crime because it is a crime, one should try and win them by kindness and honour. Above all, the death penalty should be abolished forever. Although murder is a horror, de Sade recognized that some killing may be necessary to defend a country and as such should be tolerated in a republic. As a crime of passion, however, it should not be revenged by another judicial murder.
As for those crimes motivated by lust (including rape, sodomy and incest), de Sade suggests that the ‘it is less a question of repressing this passion in ourselves than in regulating the means by which it can be satisfied in peace.’15 He therefore recommends public brothels where people can satisfy their wishes to command and be obeyed. To avoid public disorder, de Sade advocates unbridled promiscuity: ‘give free play to these tyrannous desires, which despite himself torment him [man] ceaselessly’.16 The satisfaction of physical love as a natural passion should not be bound by marriage bonds, false modesty or even that love – called the ‘madness of the soul’—which is selfish and exclusive.17 And consistent with his doctrine of complete equality, de Sade insists that women should have the equal opportunity and the same licence as men to satisfy their own desires:
no act of possession can ever be exercised on a free person; it is as unjust to possess a woman exclusively as it is to possess slaves; all humans are born free and with equal rights; let us never forget that; consequently no sex can have a legitimate right to the exclusive possession of another, and no sex or class can possess the other exclusively.18
De Sade’s attitude to sex has often been misunderstood. He was the first to recognize the overwhelming importance of sex: ‘Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, it lends strength to them all.’19 But sadism is not merely a branch of sex. It has been defined more broadly as ‘the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer’.20 The crucial point is that the action is willed and that any act which produces visible and audible changes in another has a component of sexual pleasure. It so happens that for de Sade pleasure tends to be pain diminished, and pain is the absolute. It is easier to affect people by pain than pleasure, by destruction than creation, but this does not mean that constructive sadistic pleasure is not possible. And while he shows that the object of power is pleasure (which consists in applying sanctions to those in one’s control), de Sade’s egalitarian morality made him see all those who seek or acquire such power as evil.
Having witnessed the excesses of the nobles before the French Revolution and the Terror of the revolutionaries, he was fully aware of the desire for domination in human beings and wanted it to be channelled into sexual activity rather than cause social havoc. It is extremely difficult to follow de Sade in his fantasies of torture, murder and arson but at least he had the courage and frankness to recognize the existence of such desires and tried to sublimate them. Both the feminist Simone de Beauvoir and the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet have acknowledged positively the cathartic function of the sexual cruelty described by de Sade.21
De Sade was also a revolutionary thinker in attacking the right to property. He saw the real struggle as lying between the people and the ruling class – made up of the crown, aristocracy, and clergy, as well as the bourgeoisie. For this he has been called the ‘first reasoned socialist’.22 He undoubtedly anticipated Fourier in his project of a harmonious society based on the free play of passions.23 Like Wilhelm Reich, he also realized that repressed sexuality can lead to tyrannical behaviour on a large scale and that a real democracy must be sexually liberated.
This knowledge forms the basis of de Sade’s libertarian philosophy: aware that men in positions of unrestrained power over others, whether in governments or prisons, will dominate and torture, he argued that they should not be