Word: sadeness
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...LIFE AND IDEAS OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE by Geoffrey Gorer. 250 pages. Norton. $5. "This is the most impure tale that has been written since the world began," the Marquis de Sade said of his novel Les 120 Journees de Sodome; and the world has tended to agree. Les 120 Journees has been banned almost everywhere-even in France, and so have most of the rest of De Sade's works, which describe in relentless detail murder, torture, coprophagy, and sex orgies that are a triumph of human engineering. "Here I am," boasts a De Sade heroine during...
...that recent history-world wars and totalitarianism-has provided evidence on his side of the case, De Sade has been enjoying a revival. He has fascinated such unsadistic modern writers as Albert Camus, Edmund Wilson, Simone de Beauvoir, and Roman Catholic Historian Christopher Dawson...
Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, treats the violent marquis much too nicely. He almost turns him into a cranky English squire. Even so, Gorer discovers in De Sade "a misanthropy that is unequaled in human history...
Rage at the World. In an era when the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were arguing that man was a rational being whose natural instincts were good and had only to be allowed free expression to achieve the millennium, De Sade insisted that man's true instincts were to steal, rape and murder...
...Encyclopedist Denis Diderot and one Franç Marie Arouet, the talented son of a notary who later called himself Voltaire. "Everyone who carries a name in France has spent his early youth in Louis-le-grand," gloated the Archbishop of Paris -charitably including that perverted praetorian, the Marquis de Sade. The pattern continued despite the suppression of the Jesuits in 1762, when the jealous Sorbonne swallowed the school. During the French Revolution, the school doubled as a jail for "enemies" of the Revolution, including Old Grad Robespierre, on his way to the guillotine. So combustible was 19th century France that...