A blog dedicated to philosophy, history, politics, literature
Friday, 30 April 2021
The Dilemma of Existence: Is There a Question?
Be the Unbeliever and not the True Believer
Thursday, 29 April 2021
The Ephemerality of Capitalism
The Birth of the Woke Mouse
Nightmares and Dreams
Wednesday, 28 April 2021
America: The Coffin of Capitalism
On Aristotle’s Influence in Europe
Tuesday, 27 April 2021
The Paradox of Liberty, Prosperity, and Happiness
The Desert Grows
Monday, 26 April 2021
The Desire to be God
Citizen Sade: Eroticism, violence, and the revolutionary imagination
The very name Marquis de Sade has passed into language as “sadism,” a word that evokes cruelty, excess, and the intoxication of domination. Yet Sade was not merely a libertine or an author of obscene works; he was, paradoxically, both a powerful intellectual and a volatile political actor during the French Revolution—a figure whose life and ideas straddled the line between philosophical radicalism and moral abyss.
In his provocative essay Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre, and the French Revolution, Austrian political thinker Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn examines Sade’s political legacy with a mixture of disdain and reluctant acknowledgment. His account strips away the romantic veneer often attached to revolutionary heroes and lays bare the violent perversities at the Revolution’s core.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes that beneath Sade’s “endless pornographic and extremely boring writings” lay long political digressions in which he revealed himself as “a rabid, left-wing, materialist atheist.” Ironically, Sade’s notoriety in revolutionary history owes less to his literary productions than to his role in the events surrounding the storming of the Bastille. Imprisoned there at the request of his mother-in-law—thanks to a royal lettre de cachet—Sade found himself among an odd assortment of counterfeiters, swindlers, lunatics, and debtors. From his cell, he shouted incendiary appeals through a makeshift megaphone, urging the local populace to rise up and liberate the prisoners.
The Bastille’s governor, De Launay, found himself powerless—unwilling to silence Sade through confinement or physical restraint, yet desperate to be rid of him. On July 4, 1789, Sade was removed to the Charenton asylum for the criminally insane, only to be released in 1791. Almost immediately, he immersed himself in revolutionary politics, becoming chairman of the Section des Piques, where “Citizen Sade” played the role of a fervent Jacobin until he fell out with Robespierre. Once again, political conflict ended with his recommitment to Charenton.
Kuehnelt-Leddihn places Sade, alongside Rousseau, as a “true renewer of democracy in our time”—though the description is laced with irony. Rousseau, he reminds us, penned pedagogical treatises while consigning his own children to orphanages; Sade, for his part, gave democracy a grotesque theatricality, suffusing revolutionary fervor with cruelty and eroticized violence.
This intertwining of politics and sadism was not, in Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s view, a mere metaphor. The Revolution’s atrocities often mirrored the excesses described in Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. In Arras, for example, decapitated corpses—many of them women—were stripped and bound in obscene tableaux, as if the Revolution itself had become a theatre of cruelty. These acts were not the incidental savagery of war, but deliberate performances of domination. Women, and often their children, were principal victims, subjected to a level of sadistic misogyny that “reached unbelievable proportions.”
Kuehnelt-Leddihn concludes with a grim meditation on human credulity and the cyclical nature of collective violence:
“In the French Revolution the scum of France succumbed to blood lust and opened the door to evil. In our day of electronic stultification, it's a sure bet that now, 200 years later, this monstrosity will be the focus of orgiastic celebrations. The average man always clings despairingly to clichés. If one takes them away from him, he has to do his own research, his own thinking and deciding and has to begin anew. One can't really expect this sort of elitist behavior from such poor folks. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first rob of their reason.”
Here, the French Revolution becomes more than a historical episode; it is a parable of modern politics. Sade’s story, as filtered through Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s lens, reminds us that revolutions are not purely engines of liberty—they can also be carnivals of cruelty, where the rhetoric of freedom masks a theatre of humiliation and destruction. It forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that democracy itself, when unmoored from moral restraint, can become a stage for the very vices it claims to overthrow.