Marquis de Sade’s French Revolution

The name Marquis de Sade brings the word “sadism” to mind. A powerful intellectual and a firebrand social activist, he played a pivotal role in the French Revolution. In his essay “Operation Parricide: Sade, Robespierre, and The French Revolution,” Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn gives an account of Sade’s leftwing political legacy. Here’s an except:  

“In his [Marquis de Sade’s] endless pornographic and extremely boring writings, there are long philosophical and political passages in which he reveals himself as a rabid, leftwing, materialist atheist. He was primarily responsible for the storming of the Bastille because at the request of his mother-in-law he was—thanks to a lettre de cachet—held prisoner in the Bastille along with seven counterfeiters, cardsharps, fools, and people in debt. From the Bastille, Sade incited the people of the quartier through his makeshift megaphone into coming to their assistance and liberating them. De Launay, the governor of the Bastille, was helpless. He didn't dare put the prisoner in a straitjacket (or in a dungeon) but instead asked the king to deliver him from this prisoner. As a result Sade was transferred on July 4, 1789 to the hospital for the criminally insane at Charenton and released in 1791. He then became chairman of the revolutionary Section des Piques in which "Citizen Sade" was active as a radical Jacobin until he quarreled with Robespierre and was once again committed to the hospital for the criminally insane. Sade, along with the masochistic neurotic Rousseau, who wrote pedagogic novels and committed his children to orphanages, is the true renewer of democracy in our time and naturally also a hero of our left-wing intellectuals.” 

Much of the killings, Kuehnelt-Leddihn notes, happened in a sadistic fashion. “Even in Arras… the decapitated corpses of men and women were undressed and then bound together in obscene poses as batteries nationales maniacs out of Sade's 120 Nights of Sodom… Quite naturally the main victims of these male-perpetrated atrocities were women (as well as their children, often murdered before their eyes.) The sadistic misogyny of the Revolution reached unbelievable proportions.”

Kuehnelt-Leddihn ends his essay with these lines: “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 hundred years later, this monstrosity will be the focus of orgiastic celebrations. The average man always clings despairingly to cliches. 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.”