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"Aristocrate ou democrate? Vous me le direz": Sade's Political Pamphlets Author(s): Julie C. Hayes Source: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 24-41Published by: . Sponsor: The Johns Hopkins University Press American Society for

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'Aristocrate ou democrate? Vous me le direz": Sade's Political Pamphlets

JULIE C. HAYES

THE MARQUIS DE SADE'S FASCINATION with the structures of social relations and with the analysis of power make him an intensely political writer,' but he has traditionally been excluded from discussions of Enlightenment political thought. Sade only recently became a major eighteenth-century writer; he has appealed to modern readers insofar as he seems to have deliberately set out to write against the cultural norms and structures of thought constituting his (and our) world. He also figures prominently in the twentieth-century critique of Enlight- enment. For Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, his novel Juliette exemplifies the ways in which the Enlightenment predilection for clarity, organization and "demythologizing" leads to a moral vacuum, a totalitarian nightmare3 To look at Juliette in the context of Sade's other work, however, is to realize that his political thought cannot be so conveniently classified. Indeed, his most overtly political texts, the pamphlets and speeches from the early 1790s, indicate soul- searching and ideological unease in the face of revolutionary politics.

Scholars who have studied Sade's political leanings have been al-

I am indebted to Jeffrey Sawyer, Bernadette Fort, and Hugh West for their many helpful comments and criticisms.

I See Beatrice Fink, "The case for a Political System in Sade," SVEC 88 (1972): 493-512.

2 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectik der AuJklarung (1944). English trans. by John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

24



SADE'S POLITICAL PAMPHLETS 25

most exclusively concerned with two texts, the epistolary novel Aline et Valcour (written in prison in 1788, but revised to the order of the day in 1790-91) and the manifesto, "Franqais, encore un effort si vous voulez etre republicains," incorporated in the libertine dialogue La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795).3 Important as these works are in terms of Sade's literary output, it is curious that scholars have not given more attention to the pamphlets, the texts most pertinent to Sade's involvement in revolutionary politics. The editor of Sade's complete works, Gilbert Lely, gives us ten pieces under the rubric opuscules politiques: two printed speeches, an open letter to the king, and several petitions and proposals concerning hospital reform, the ratification of laws, the levy of a Parisian army, the use of de-christianized churches, and new street names.4

There are various possible explanations for the marginalization of Sade's political pamphlets. Their neglect is no doubt due in part to literary history's general tendency to overlook texts from the revolutionary period.5 A certain strain of Sade criticism, too, has tended to dismiss Sade's "public" productions -these fervent pamphlets and his sentimental plays -as insincere attempts to curry public favor.6 So, although the image of Sade haranguing the crowds during the Revo- lution continues to dazzle the imagination of artists and scholars, the relevant texts remain unremarked. As in the case of his theater, critics

3Along with B. Fink's article (cited above), political interpretations of Sade include Jean Goulemot, "Lecture politique d'Aline et Valcour," in Le Marquis de Sade, Centre aixois d'etudes et de recherches sur le dix-huitieme siecle (Paris: Colin, 1968), pp. 115-36; Pierre Favre, Sade utopiste: Sexualite, pouvoir et etat dans Aline et Valcour (Paris: P.U.F., 1967); Michel Delon, "Sade Thermidorien" and Jean Ehrard, "Pour une lecture non sadienne de Sade: mariage et demographie dans Aline et Valcour," both in Sade: Ecrire la crise, Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Belfond, 1983), pp. 99-117, 241-57. Marcel H6naWs excellent study, Sade: L'Invention du corps libertin (Paris: P.U.F., 1978), includes a chapter on class structure and the economy of exchange in the novels ("Le Mode d' improduction libertin," pp. 165-208).

4 Sade, Oeuvres compktes, ed. G. Lely (Paris: Cercle du livre precieux, 1966) 11: 65-141. All subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text.

s Mark Eli Blanchard critiques this tendency in Saint-Just et Cie: La Revolution et les mots (Paris: Nizet, 1980).

6 Gilbert Lely's distinctly anti-revolutionary sentiments prevent him from giving an impartial account of the pamphlets; Roger Lacombe discusses Sade's revolutionary activities at length, but rejects the opuscules as "oeuvres de commande et de circonstance" (Sade et ses masques [Paris, Payot, 1974], p. 137). One of the few commentators to take Sade's pamphlets seriously, Geoffrey Gorer (The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade [New York: Norton, 1962], pp. 58-59) nevertheless bases his discussion of Sade's political thought entirely on Aline, Philosophie dans le Boudoir, and other literary works.



26 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

have apparently preferred the revolutionary playwright depicted in Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade to the dramatist who let virtue triumph over vice or the orator who eulogized Marat.

It was an unlikely role for a man of his class and background. Prior to the abolition of the lettres de cachet in 1790, Sade had spent some thirteen years in prison, a victim, in his view, of his mother-in-law's ideas on family honor. He had passed through frustration, despair, and psychosis; he had progressed from some mediocre attempts at theater and verse to powerful, disturbing fiction. At the moment of his liberation he was prey to conflicting notions on society, government, and class structure. He hated the abuse of power, particularly as it had applied to him, but his sense of class consciousness was stronger than ever. He particularly resented the class of ennobled magistrates -his wife's background -whom he dubbed "la degoutante robinocratie." Sade came from the upper ranks of the noblesse depee: fourteen degrees of nobility on his father's side, kinship with the princes of the blood on his mother's. He had received a nobleman's educa- tion, including four years at Louis-le-Grand and military training at the prestigious academy of the Chevau-legers.

In his correspondence and other writings, Sade indicates that he identified with his class, but that he also saw himself as aphilosophe, feelings which were if anything intensified at the beginning of the Revolution. He wrote to his lawyer Gaufridy in December, 1791, that being a professional "man of letters" employed by different factions had created what he called "mobility" in his opinions. The letter ends in perplexity.

Que suis-je, 'a present? Aristocrate ou democrate? Vous me le direz, s'il vous plait, avocat, car pour moi je n'en sais rien. (12:505) [What am I at present? Aristocrat or democrat? You tell me, if you please, lawyer, for I haven't the slightest idea.]

Whatever confusion he may have felt, upon his release from prison Sade took up residence in northwest Paris, obtained a carte de citoyen actif, and became involved in activities of the Section de Vendome (later Section des Piques), attending meetings, standing guard, doing jury duty. In 1793 he served both as secretary and as president of




the Section; most of the opuscules are either speeches made during this time or motions drafted by Sade and passed by the Section?

His life was not without worry: his sons were listed as emigrants, as was he (due to his penchant for using various versions of his name at different times); his chateau was pillaged; a Jacobin clique upset the performance of one of his plays. And in late 1793, as the Jacobins were pressuring the Sections to purge their membership, Sade was arrested. The Section7s comite de surveillance cited his bad reputa- tion of long standing, his defense of Roland in 1792, and claimed that he had "unmasked himself' as a counter-revolutionary by pre- senting a petition against the levy of a paid Parisian army. The indict- ment concluded with a reference to one of Sade's more irritating habits.

... faisant continuellement dans ses conversations particulieres des com- paraisons tirees de l'histoire Grecque et Romaine pour prouver l'impossibi- lite d'etablir un Gouvemement democratique et republicain en France. (Cited by Lely, 2:402)8

Sade was condemned to death under the 22 Prairial law, but through bureaucratic error missed execution on the 9 Thermidor. He was liber- ated a few months after the fall of Robespierre. In 1801 he would again be arrested and placed in detention for the remainder of his life, not as a refractory libertine or a counter-revolutionary, but as the author of Justine.

Before examining the opuscules, let us take a look at some of the constructions that have been put on his other work. Progressivism, reactionism, and indecision all color parts of Sade's political life, and all have been read into Aline et Valcour. In this "philosophical novel,"

7On the structure and activities of the Parisian sections during this period, see Al- bert Soboul, Les Sans-culottes parisiens en l'an II (Paris: Seuil, 1962). This period of Sade's life is amply documented in Lely's biography (vols 1-2 of the Oeuvres), 2:283-422.

8 [ ... constantly in his private conversations making comparisons drawn from Greek and Roman history in order to prove the impossibility of establishing a democratic republic in France.]

9 Michelet uses the occasion (and does some violence to chronology) to characterize the Thermidorean Reaction: "Personne ne se contraignait plus. De Sade sortit de prison le 10 thermidor." Histoire de la re'volution francaise, ed. G. Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) 1:516.




Sade claims to have predicted the Revolution; he also undertakes to demonstrate a number of political and ethical systems to the reader. The novel is best known for the long episode contrasting the despotic kingdom of "Butua" with the paternalist paradise of "Tamoe'."

While some attempt has been made to cast the Butua/Tamoe section as a political tract, most critics now emphasize the problems inherent in such a move. Aline is a work which constantly calls attention to the plurality of its ideologies; its fictional editor warns against judging only a part of the work instead of considering it as a whole. The novel's narrative complexity also prevents one from reading it as a coherent manifesto. Stories accumulate within stories in an apparently gratuitous fashion; Tamoe and Butua are separated from the reader through interpolated narrators retelling one another's words.'0 Like the heroines hiding in their country retreat, the reader is kept at bay, distanced from the action. The reader's closest textual coun- terpart is the hero Valcour, who usually must content himself with reading about events rather than participating in them. His correspon- dent Deterville notes the situation in the novel's opening lines "Ton absence fut pour nous une enigme" (4:1) ["Your absence was a mys- tery to us"] -and so it remains throughout.

Such non-engagement and incoherence point toward what Michel Delon calls the "unutterable cynicism" of Sade's later years," but it might also result from the divided loyalties of the man of letters in 1790. Sade's writing dramatizes the collision between what Habermas describes as the two basic models of the Old Regime: on the one hand, a "vertical axis" or hierarchical order based on exclusion, domina- tion, and innate value; on the other, a "horizontal axis" or a complex network of open exchanges and contingent value.'2 Vice, virtue, and the will to power do not have predetermined class affiliations in Sade's novels; the hierarchical principle predominates to the point of absur- dity in the proliferation of rule-bound libertine societies, but they pro- duce no other meaning than the arbitrariness they seemingly want to suppress.

10 For discussion of the complexities to which Sade submits the epistolary form see B. Fink's "Narrative Techniques and Utopian Structures in Sade's Aline et Valcour," Science Fiction Studies 7 (1980): 73-79; and Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 184-200.

1 J Delon, 114. 12 Jiurgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).




The pamphlets also betray certain internal contradictions, but they do not seek a solution in "cynicism." They rather reveal the extent to which Sade's confusion is part of a larger cultural problematic. Recent historical scholarship on French society at the end of the Old Regime points not so much to the formation of positive class aware- ness, as to a deepening breakdown of social categories.'3 The hetero- geneity of social groups parallels a similar discursive diversity and ambiguity. Sade's texts portray the collision and confusion of models, but whereas the novels pit hierarchical structures against systems of exchange, the political pieces attempt to obliterate the dichotomy in a moment of revolutionary "transparency.''l4

Two things result from reading the pamphlets in this light. It becomes impossible to divorce them, however conveniently, from the rest of Sade's literary productions, with which they share a number of concerns. Furthermore, they render equally impossible the clean break between the obsessions of the "execrable scelerat," as his denouncers termed him, and the most idealistic moments of the Revo- lution. By clarifying the connections between Sade and the Revolu- tion, the pamphlets help us to see both in a new light.

Lely's disclaimers notwithstanding, the pamphlets are recogniz- ably Sade's. One finds there a typical quirk in the pedantic footnoting of a passionate text, as well as Sade's ongoing concern with the nature of power: what is it? can it be delegated? There is a certain pedagogical quality: how may the Revolution be communicated? And there is the recurring theme of "transparency": immediacy, publicity, radiant virtue, freedom from plots. Here is how Sade expresses it:"... que nos pensees, nos ames, et nos coeurs n'en fassent plus qu'un; que l'unite de la Republique soit l'unite de notre bonheur, et que ce bon-

I3 Among others, Francois Furet, Penser la re'volutionfrancaise (Paris, Gallimard, 1978); Colin Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution," Past and Present 60 (1973): 84-86; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 7-40; Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), pp. 1-16.

14 Cultural historians have become increasingly interested in the Revolution's desire for "transparency," whether in terms of the representation of power, or more broadly: "transparence de la societe 'a elle-meme, transparence de l'instituant 'a l'intitue, de l'idee au reel, du projet 'a sa concretisation, de la volonte 'a ce qu'elle vise, de la liberte 'a son destin .. . " [Marc Richir, "Revolution et transparence sociale," Intro. to Fichte, Con- siderations sur la revolution francaise, trans. J. Barni (Paris: Payot, 1974), p. 10]. See also Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, pp. 44-45ff.




heur se fasse ressentir, s'il est possible, chez tous les peuples de la terre!" (11:116).15 These are all concerns shared by other revolutionaries of the day. Here as elsewhere, transparency is both the key and the trap - not only the solution sought through pedagogy but also the presupposed state of things, hence obviating the need for pedagogy. The quest for "l'unite de notre bonheur" implies the collapse of both hierarchies and systems, but the consummation will be called into question.

Let us begin by examining the most apparently peripheral element of the texts that is reminiscent of Sade's other writings, their use of footnotes. One note is appended to the " Adresse au roi," and three can be found in the speech on the "Idee sur le mode de la sanction des lois." Although they do not attain the disjunctive violence that fascinated Barthes in Justine's notes,'6 they too represent a rupture of sorts insofar as their punctilious concern for correct detail intrudes upon the more emotional tone of the main text. Pedanticism is an oft-overlooked quality of much of Sade's writing, where the display of knowledge is frequently a form of aggression implying the inferi- ority of the listener.

Je ne concois pas par quelle absurde ignorance on veut absolument que le bonnet de la liberte soit rouge: le blanc etait la seule couleur consacree chez les Grecs et chez les Romains 'a la deesse de la Libert6, connue et reveree sous le nom d'Eleutherie. (11:85n.)'7

One cannot help remembering the impatience with Sade's annoying allusions to antiquity that was expressed in the arrest form: his denouncers were actually rather astute readers of his text, where pedanticism, power, and aggression are inextricably linked. Pedanticism carries other problems. Unlike La Philosophie dans le boudoir and

15 [" . . . may our thoughts, our souls, and our hearts henceforth be one; may the unity of the Republic be the unity of our happiness, and may that happiness make itself felt, if possible, among all the peoples on earth!"]

16 Speaking of the normative contrasts offered by the text and footnotes of La Nou- velle Justine, Barthes observes that "les deux instances, celle du 'reel' et celle du discours, ne se rejoignent jamais: aucune dialectique ne les lie, ne les pourvoit d'un sens commun, articule.. .. [Le Texte] s'accomplit dans un defi logique, une contradiction chaude." Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 170.

17 ["I cannot conceive by what absurd ignorance the liberty cap is held to be red: white was the only color consecrated by the Greeks and Romans to the goddess of Lib- erty, known and revered under the name Eleutheria."]




the novels, where, as Jane Gallop observes, "some disorderly specific . . . exceeds the systematizing discourse,"'8 the process works in re- verse in the pamphlets. The highly emotional (in the novels, orgiastic) passage requires a systematizing clarification, justification, or explanation which refuses to be dissociated from the text but does not really interact with it, either. So we see at the beginning of a speech:

HOMMES DU DIX AOUT, vous n'avez pas redout6 d'arracher le despote de l'orgueilleux palais oiu les tyrans, pour la seconde fois, allaient verser le sang du peuple! [Sade's note: "On sait que des memes fenetres, 'a quelque distance pres, Charles IX tira sur les protestants."] (11:83)19

Counting ("pour la seconde fois") - a particular penchant of Sade's - requires accountability and explanation. It indicates the need for the printed word to encroach upon the expressive prerogatives of the spoken, since the rupture in tone would argue against the footnote's being read aloud to the assembly. The text hovers between harangue and disquisition. Neither mode suffices alone to convey Sade's meaning, but each subtly questions the other.

Sade seeks to resolve the matter in the same sphere as many other revolutionaries of the day, in "transparency. The search for transparency creates the epistemological framework for the two "pedagogical" pieces, the petition for a properly republican re-use of the churches and the plan for new street names. Other forces are at work as well, of course- Sade's anticlerical bent is certainly a motivating factor. His remarks on the effects of replacing each Christian effigy with "the emblem of a moral virtue" are illuminating.

Si 1'homme moral est l'homme de la nature, si, d'une autre part, le gou- vernement republicain est celui de la nature, il faut que, par un enchaine- ment necessaire, les vertus morales deviennent les ressorts du caractere d'un republicain; et pour nous penetrer de ces vertus, legislateurs, consentons 'a leur offrir un culte.... [Q]ue chaque citoyen, en sortant de ces ceremonies . . . en fasse sentir 'a son epouse . . . a ses enfants, et le bonheur et l'utilite. (11:130-31)20

18 Jane Gallop, "The Immoral Teachers," Yale French Studies 63 (1982): 122. '9 ["MEN OF THE TENTH OF AUGUST, you did not fear to tear the despot from

the proud palace where, for the second time, the tyrants were about to shed the blood of the people." Sade's note: "We know that from those same windows, or nearby, Charles IX fired on the protestants'"]

20 ["If moral man is the natural man; if, on the other hand, the republican govern-




Hymns, incense, ceremony, and embkmes penetrate the subject through all senses, inculcating not only the appropriate lesson, but also the ability to transmit what has been learned. The appeal to a Rousseauist or revolutionary fete is explicit, but one should note certain differ- ences. Rousseau's model is one of reflection and identification ("que chacun se voie et s'aime dans les autres"'21); Sade's, one of sensation and penetration. Rousseau imagined a fete with no object ("Qu'y montrera-t-on? Rien, si l'on veut," 233), while Sade stages the par- ticipant's displacement and re-formation by "moral virtues." Sade's ceremony is imagined with its limits, with the perspective of "going away" already in view. The limits are thrown into relief by the reference to those who were excluded from the experience: women and children. Once away from the moving spectacle, will it be possible to "faire sentir" its truths to someone else? The answer depends on an uneasy syllogism, whose double premise is not proved. Were the premises axiomatic, then the fete, for all its educative value, would not be necessary. The tension between transparency and didacticism remains unresolved.

The issues appear in another form when one takes a walk through the newly-named streets in Sade's neighborhood. Following the general impetus to replace arbitrary and monarchical names with politically correct ones, Sade's "Projet tendant 'a changer le nom des rues" envi- sions a city reborn. The rue Saint-Honore has become rue de la Con- vention and the rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, the rue de Lycurgue. Bronislaw Baczko, in his illuminating study of urban projects under- taken during the Revolution, speaks of the movement to rename streets as a sign of a "verbe conquerant.?22 Indeed, Sade's list of names and laconic rationales follow upon the multiple sensory experiences of the new churches like a footnote appended to an emotional exhorta- tion. The eloquent urban spaces in Sade's system speak in a different syntax, however, from that suggested in proposals by the abbe Gregoire and others.

ment is nature's government, then by a necessary link it is imperative that moral virtues become the mainspring of the republican character; and in order to penetrate ourselves with these virtues, legislators, let us consent to worship them. . . . may each citizen, coming out of these ceremonies .... make their joy and utility felt in his wife and children."]

21 Rousseau, Lettre a M. dAlembert, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), p. 234.

22 Bronislaw Baczko, Lumieres de l'utopie (Paris: Payot, 1978), p. 364.




Gregoire's plan, to take a well-known example, is actually a com- pendium of several plans, which have in common an insistence on rapports and logical connections03 Each city could name its streets for all French communes, according to one suggestion, thus providing an "abrege de la France" in which travellers could instantly orient themselves. Or names might be based upon "invariable" relations: a Place de lAgriculture could be the intersection of streets named "la charrue, le versoir, la herse, le fle'au, le rouleau, la gerbe, etc." (12). More abstract relations furnish material as well. " A la place de la Justice aboutiront les rues de la Sev&rite, de l'Impartialite, de la Loi, etc." (13). Other streets could form an "abrege historique" by evoking the events of the Revolution itself.

Pourquoi la place des Piques ne seroit-elle pas avoisinee par les rues du patriotisme, du courage, du 10 aout, du jeu de paume, etc.? N'est-il pas naturel que de la place de la Revolution on aborde la rue de la Constitution qui conduiroit 'a celle du Bonheur? (14)24

Gregoire's system eschews "un systeme exclusif," promotes regional diversity, and leaves room for change (unnamed streets offer an invi- tation for citizens to emulate exploits of the past).

In contrast, Sade's proposal looks extremely terse. His street names place us in the familiar revolutionary mode of antiquity reborn; but most are given little other justification than the simple reminder that Cato, Spartacus, Cornelia, and the others were exemplary individ- uals worthy of emulation. The few allusions to contemporary persons and institutions (rue des Citoyennes francaises, rue du Peuple souverain, etc.) are seen as requiring scarcely any commentary at all. Interestingly, there is little attempt to link the streets in the sort of meaningful arrangement proposed by the abbe Gregoire. When Sade imagines links, they are likely to be material and reductionistic: "Les rues Neuve-Sainte-Croix et Thiroux n'6tant qu'une prolongation de la rue Caumartin, nous avons designe ces trois rues sous le nom de: Rue du Peuple souverain" (11:139). ["Since the streets Neuve-Sainte- Croix and Thiroux are only a prolongation of Rue Caumartin, we

23 Gregoire. Systeme de denominations topographiques pour les places, rues, quais, etc. de toutes les communes de la Republique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, [nivose, An II]).

24 ["Why should the Place of Pikes not be close to streets named Patriotism, Courage, August 10, Tennis Court etc.? Is it not natural that from Revolution Square one would take a street named Constitution leading to one called Happiness?"]




have designated the three together under the name: Street of the Sover- eign People;'] One name is motivated by its location (the rue des Champs-de-la-Gloire is on the outskirts of town); one by its prox- imity to another-the rue des Gracques runs into the rue de Cornelie, mother of the Gracchi. Expediency preempts poetry, and for the most part the sixteen new names are presented as sufficient in themselves, having little or no need of external relations or rapports. Three names, however, are reactions to former names. In one case, Sade renames the "cour dite d'Henri IV" and adds, "nous avons desire que le nom de JUNIUS BRUTUS, qui chassa les rois de Rome, fit oublier ceux de Paris" (11:140). ["We desired that the name JUNIUS BRUTUS, who put the kings of Rome to flight, would make us forget those of Paris."] Compared to the poetic coherency of Gregoire's ideas, Sade's syntax is broken. Either elements are seen in isolation, or they are tainted by an aberrant paradigm through the implicit reference to (and reminder of) that which the new name sought to obliterate. The transparency that would render pedagogy efficacious is thus damaged: the fullness of sensory experience needs language to become explicit, but language's networks of meaning, both syntaxic and paradigmatic, fail to provide the immediacy of an experience redolent with univocal signification.

In the pamphlets, the meditation on power manifests the same thirst for transparency as the reflection on pedagogy. This drive is evident in the discussion of the passage of constitutional law, "Idee sur le mode de la sanction des lois." Sade gave this speech in November, 1792, two months after the fall of the monarchy, during the earliest stages of the debate over a new constitution.

Sade's position is not easy to place on the ideological map of the day. The people's sovereignty is in danger, he argues, from being delegated to a group of representatives. "La souverainet6 est une, indivisible, inalienable, vous la d6truisez en la partageant, vous la perdez en la transmettant" (11:84). ["The sovereign is one, indivisible, and inalienable; you destroy it by sharing it, and you lose it by transmit- ting it."] The republique une et indivisible was the order of the day, but whereas the Jacobin notion of indivisibility sought to quell dis- sent in the provinces and make Paris the radiant center of a transparent State, Sade's argument leads in the opposite direction by elevating popular vote and all but eliminating the Convention. He calls for ratification of the articles of the constitution by direct




referendum; cantonal meetings and rapid couriers will make the process work. The Jacobins, too, were mistrustful of parliamentary government, but Sade goes further than they in minimizing the Con- vention's role. Its members are never more than the "mandataires du' peuple"' leading Sade to ask "comment un mandataire public peut imaginer que le seul titre de representant du souverain puisse lui donner le meme droit possede par ce souverain?" (11:86). [" . . . how a public servant could imagine that the title of representative of the sovereign could give him the same rights possesed by the sovereign."]

Power is presence. It is inhibited, even nullified, by the inter- vention of intermediaries, especially paid or "professional" intermediaries who function as so many obstacles to transparency. The complaint can be found in nearly all Sade's political texts. The "Ob- servations" regarding the hospitals, for example, complain that the desired result, reform, cannot be achieved until certain untrustworthy professionals (i.e., doctors), tainted by their association with former abuses, are replaced on the hospital board by disinterested members of the Section. Sade suggests that he would disqualify doctors regard- less of their previous association (or lack of it) with the hospital board. Training inauthenticates opinions and interferes with judgment.

Similar reasoning underlies the petition regarding the army, passed by the Section in June 1793. The document exists in two versions, a fiery "Projet de petition" and a considerably toned-down final version. Both texts reflect a strong mistrust of the Convention, whose members are addressed in the "Projet" as mandataires du peuple and in the Petition with the more neutral expression, representants du peuple. Provocative phrases in the draft ("nous osons vous le dire," "Votre decret est injuste," 11:95) ["we dare to tell you"... "Your decree is unjust"] are softened ("nous devons vous le dire," "Votre decret parait injuste" 11:101), ["we must tell you". . . "Your decree seems unjust"]. In both, the Section des Piques makes use of the current obsession with plots ("le secret est le moyen du crime" 11:103) to de- mand a greater role in the defense of the city, and greater autonomy in defending itself. Given that the petition was voted in the year of the Great Levy, it can hardly have received much sympathy at the Convention, and one is not surprised that it should be mentioned at the time of Sade's later arrest.

The Petition's mistrust of intermediaries extends beyond the rivalry between Section and Convention to the soldiers themselves. Again,




it is a problem of "professionalism." No one must come between the patriots and their city. "Paris a cree la R6volution, Paris saura la main- tenir" (11:96, 102). There is no need for outsiders, and there is certainly no need to pay them. The "Projet" claims proudly that

la cite majesteuse, imposante . . . [n'a pas besoin de soudoyer des mercenaires, qui, par cela meme qu'ils seraient payes, devriendraient indignes de la defendre] 25 (11:97) (the majestic, imposing city ... [has no need of bribing mercenaries, who by the very act of being paid, would become un- worthy of its defense]).

The revisions would seem to indicate that Sade was more deeply per- turbed by the idea of paying soldiers than were other members of his Section, a difference of opinion which would take on consider- able political significance.

One of the clearest instances of the search for transparency is to be found in the earliest of the opuscules, the "Adresse au roi des Franqais" written upon Louis XVI's return from Varennes. The text, which aims at repairing the damaged relationship between Louis and his people, unfolds with a vivid series of static oppositions (nouslvous, Paris/Versailles, coeurlrespect, lumieresltenebres, France/pays etranger) whose cumulative effect is to increase tension and heighten the desire for reconciliation. Sensibility, combined with what even Sade seems to recognize as the classic disculpation of monarchs ("Le bien est l'ouvrage de son coeur, le mal est celui de ses ministres" 11:70 ["The good is the work of his heart, the ill is that of his ministers"]) shows the way toward transparency and exchange, a new pact between ruler and ruled. Louis is a victim. "[C]ette fuite est l'ouvrage de vos pretres et de vos courtisans; vous avez ete seduit" (11:73). ["This flight is the work of your priests and courtiers; you have been seduced."] Through his present suffering, which will allow him better to understand the sufferings of his people under the Old Regime, and by repudiating courtiers, priests, and his foreign wife, Louis can regain "l'amour des Franqais."

The "Adresse au roi" is not without its problematic elements. Sade denounces belief in the divine right of kings as "faiblesse" in one passage (11:72), but elsewhere retains references to the king's special

25 The final version deletes "majestueuse, imposante" and replaces the bracketed words with "suffit 'a sa propre defense" (11:103).




responsibilities before God. Although Sade reminds Louis that his position is due only to the "accident" of his birth, there are numerous allusions to the king's lineage as requiring a certain standard of con- duct. "Henri, du fond de son tombeau, vous euit crie: Perfide, voila ton ouvrage!" (11:73). ["Henri IV would have cried out from his tomb, 'Perfidious one, this is your work!"']

In each of the texts - the "Idee sur le mode de la sanction des lois"', the "Observations" on the hospitals, the "petition" regarding the army- one finds the same structure of frustrated transparency that charac- terizes the proposals for the churches and the street names. In every case, the hoped-for goal, whether popular sovereignty, reform, or state security, is shown to be attainable only if the people can banish all intermediaries and establish immediate contact in a revolutionary plenitude.

Seen in this light, the "Discours aux manes de Marat et de Le Pelle- tier" is the most utopic of the pamphlets. It is a ceremonial speech constructed on a series of apostrophes, first to the citoyens present and progressing to the two sublimes martyrs de la libert, the sexe timide et doux,26 ames douces et sensibles, Le Pelletier as Ami de 1'enfance et des hommes and Severe ennemi des tyrans, and finally Unique deesse des Francais, sainte et divine Liberte. In a paroxysm of sensibility and plenitude, the speaker announces the heroes' presence: "je les apercois . .. je les vois sourire . .. je les entends" (11:122). ["I perceive them . .. I see them smile . .. I hear them."] In a final vision, France becomes the radiant model for a regenerated world.

Intermediaries, strangers, factions, and plots are recurring features of the Revolution's discourse of increasingly frustrated transparency; they present a striking example of the extent to which the revolutionaries consciously and unconsciously relived the tensions inscribed in Rousseau's writing. Sade's texts manifest the same traits as many others in this respect. His meditation on the indivisibility and inalien- ability of the sovereign seems clearly inspired by Rousseau, and the dilemmas arising therefrom mirror Rousseau as well. Rousseau's sovereign admitted no factionalism to cloud the limpid expression of the

26 In the speech's only critical note, Sade denounces the romanticized portrayals of Charlotte Corday on the Parisian stage (11:121). See Marie-Helene Huet's analysis of the representations of Corday and Marat in Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793-1797, trans. R. Hurley (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982), pp. 71-97.




general will: Sade, as he concurs with contemporary fears of con- spiracy and equates the delegation of power with its abrogation, posits a similar organically unified society. But just as Rousseau's picture contains the complicating element of a foreign Legislator who will "institute" the society yet somehow remain untouched by it, so Sade's hopeful world contains undercurrents of contradiction and even alienation.

The problem is reflected in the shifting speaker's voice in the texts. The various motions and petitions are, not surprisingly, spoken by the highly conventionalized nous of the Section. The speeches and the "Adresse au roi," on the other hand, put into play a speaker, je, whose status is rather more ambiguous. In the "Adresse," the speaker repeatedly claims to represent "the wish of all the French" (11: 69) and becomes indistinguishable from nous until the final paragraph. Significantly, at the moment of denouncing kingly authority as mere "pouvoir confie,"je suddenly stops purporting to speak with the authority of all, as if he too had lost that "entrusted" voice. Nonethe- less, the shift from nous toje represents not a loss, but a recuperation of power, since it permits the speaker to valorize his own identity and to speak to Louis as individual to individual. The "Adresse" en- joining the king to forget himself and to listen to the voice of the many thus ends with the paradoxical affirmation of the one.

The speaker of the "Idee sur le mode de la sanction des lois" is less surreptitious about his prerogatives. He addresses his interlo- cutors as the heroic "Hommes du dix aout," but his subsequent evoca- tion of them is in the less flattering terms of their lenteur, insouci- ance, and idees captives: "vous vous endormez en paix" (11:83). Sade is both passionate and irritatingly pedantic, just as he was in the liberty cap footnote. Having presented his salutory ideas for the constitutional referendum, however, je speaks in more conciliatory terms, claiming, "Je n'ai d'orgueil ici que celui de ma sensibilite" ["My only pride is in the depth of my feelings"] and requesting that others com- municate to him their lumieres. His modesty does not, however, dispel the powerful, paternalistje of the preceding paragraph, theje whose "desir le plus vehement [est] de vous voir conserver une liberte qui vous cou'te si cher et qui vous est si bien due . . . je sais jusqu'ou va l'abus du pouvoir; je demele toutes les ruses du despotisme; j'ai etudie les hommes et je les connais" (11:91). ["6 . .. most vehement desire is to see you preserve a liberty that costs you so dearly and




that you deserve so much.... I know how far the abuse of power can go; I untangle the ruses of despotism; I have studied men and I understand them." The split betweenje and vous is total; je's superi- ority, quite clear.

The "Discours aux manes de Marat et de Le Pelletier" presents a different rhetorical strategy, one aiming to stir the emotions, not to dictate reason. Here, vous is a collectivity of tu's: citizens, mar- tyred heroes, and Liberty. The actual audience quickly disappears as Marat and Le Pelletier come closer and closer. The insistence on apostrophe, while it is a classical device entirely appropriate to the occasion, also has the effect here (as in certain of Sade's personal letters27) of removing the speaker and endowing him with power. His is the important voice; it is he who possesses the sorcellerie evocatoire, the ability to name.

In short, the revolutionary reach for transparency, already perceived as threatened by intermediaries, is further undercut by an insistent difference betweenje and vous and the inability ofje to dissolve within the nous; the political program that Sade outlines in the pamphlets remains equivocal. On the one hand, his dismissal of intermediaries and "professionals" can be read as a push for the sentimental egalitar- ianism current in the political discourse of his contemporaries. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the attack on bureaucrats and professionals ("gens du me6tier") is not the unique property of sans-culottes and populists: it is also characteristic of the traditional "aristocratic" mentality. The pamphlets present a society of peers who are either autonomous or governed by a benign monarch dependent on them for support and advice. All are free from "le despotisme ministeriel," Sade's preferred phrase for stigmatizing the abuses of the Old Regime. The feudal myth still glimmers in the controversial proposition regarding the army; there is something of the nobleman and former officer in Sade's outrage over the government's need to "soudoyer des mercenaires" in order to defend itself.

One finds curious juxtapositions in the opuscules. Sade would try to override the dilemma of being an aristocrat and a democrat by col- lapsing everything in the transparent plenum, but his enterprise is

27 See, for example, the "Letter of Apostrophes" written to Mme de Sade in 1783 (12:412-417), which for all its wit and literary beauty has the effect of crushing the recip- ient under a barrage of startling, fanciful, and stylized epithets.




doomed from the start. The call for "l'unite de notre bonheur" is in- variably subverted by some alienating intermediary, if not by je himself. At the same time, Sade's political writings were certainly not deliberately counter-revolutionary, any more than that they masked an attempt to ingratiate their author with the radicals. He was a recal- citrant during the Great Levy, a moderate during the purges, an un- abashed atheist during the cult of the Supreme Being. Sade's posi- tions were not slavish deferrals to new authorities, as his eventual arrest confirmed. He was not playing it safe.

It is also difficult to discount the enthusiasm present in all the texts, the sense that real business is being accomplished, that the Revolu- tion is the dawn of a new era. Sade speaks like any ardent philosophe.

Les abus ne peuvent subsister quand la raison s'6pure; ... le flambeau de la philosophie etincelle-t-il, ils s'6clipsent . . . (11:71)

['Abuses cannot persist when reason is purified; . .. whenever the torch of phi- losophy shines, they disappear . . ."]

The texts reveal both effusion and reservation; inter-connectedness and equality as well as separateness and dependency. At the same time, the presence of enlightened discourse here serves as a reminder of transparency's ambiguity. The Jacobins, whom Sade so distrusted, would encounter similar obstacles in their pursuit of transparency. And far from signifying a break with the works for which he is better known, Sade's pamphlets instead reflect another side, a different ap- proach, to the same problems he confronted in his major productions. The point is not to stigmatize the radicals as "sadists," but to underscore the degree to which the problems inherent in revolutionary rhetoric permeated the discourse of both Sade and those whom he opposed. Succeeding regimes would better understand-and refine- the repressive uses to be made of the denial of "politics" in the name of "clarity" or "unity."28

Sade's equivocations are also the sign of a profound unease regarding the status of univocal discourse. His writing resists being bent to positive categories and instead floats from one ideological or sentimental mode to another, eventually undercutting them all. One should not,

28 Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: leconomie des echanges linguistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 154-55.




however, discount the optimism in his efforts to engage the public political discourse, to take stands, to attempt to sway opinion. That he failed had its effect. "The mobility in my opinions" he spoke of to Gaufridy echoes another of his reflections on his own writing, the passage where he attributes the "caractere sophistique que l'on me reproche dans mes ouvrages" (15:26) to his prison experience. Sophistry and mobility are both terms for Sade's refusal of the cate- gorical, the clear, the positivist. If Sade's prison experience set him on this route, it is worth considering to what extent the collapse of social models and the disquieting plurality of revolutionary politics contributed to his progress.

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