The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

by Marquis de Sade

  At times the atheism which is affected by the libertine conscience, and the wrong which it projects doing, are meant to be provocations addressed to the absent God, as though scandalous provocations were a way of forcing that God to manifest his existence:

  If there were a God and if that God possessed power, would he allow the virtue which honors him to be sacrificed to vice as you intend to do; would this all-powerful God allow a weak creature like myself who, compared to him, is as the mite in the eye of the elephant, would he, I ask, allow this feeble creature to insult him, scoff at him, stand up to him, and offend him as I take pleasure in doing at every moment of the day?

  This kind of impunity adds to the delight of the libertine conscience: the greater the punishment merited by his action, the greater the value which he attributes to crime. His conscience is always activated by remorse; indeed, the remorse seems to provide the energy for his crimes. The debauched libertine does not seek to commit actions which have been rendered indifferent by perpetual motion, as the atheist philosophers claim. What he seeks to commit is evil; the pursuit of evil will be essential to the extension of his sphere of enjoyment: “What animates us is not the object of libertinage, but rather the idea of evil.” As a result, the object of libertinage holds no interest unless it leads to the doing of greater evil. Nor does he exclude the possibility of doing evil well; on the contrary, in that possibility he finds the whole value of crime. The conscience of the debauched Sadean keeps its claim on free will and uses its moral categories, all the while maintaining a belief in its ability to do evil. The conscience of the debauched libertine, according to Sade’s description, not only appears to be in complete opposition to atheism but also has a relationship with the analysis of evil for evil’s sake which we find in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.

  Such a conscience is consequently susceptible to elaborating an entire destructive theology centered about the religion of a Supreme Being of Wickedness, the only Supreme Being that Saint-Fond, the exemplar of the great libertine and debauched lord, is willing to profess. This religion of evil is not yet ready to deny crime as the philosophy of perpetual motion does, but prefers to admit it as an outflow from the existence of an infernal God. Nor is it the refutation of the dogma found in the first version of Justine, that the innocent must be sacrificed for the salvation of the guilty. It is only the other side of that doctrine; it exalts the necessity of injustice existing in God. In fact, confronted with the mystery of Revelation, the astonished reason—if it wishes to articulate the dogma in language which also conveys its sense of scandal—is obliged to substitute the material of blasphemy for the revealed matter. In that way it gives an exact expression to the impression made by the mystery on a reasoning faculty which has been abandoned to its own resources. From that point on, when confronted with crime and suffering, it will see in orthodoxy an attempt to legitimate the crimes of the guilty party through a theory of expiation based on the expiatory virtue of the sufferings of the innocent. Actually, orthodoxy attributes crime to man’s freedom to sin, and attributes the expiatory virtue earned by the innocent party’s suffering to the innocent party’s account. What the scandalized reason is imputing to orthodoxy is precisely what reason itself wishes to proclaim as its own doctrine—a doctrine which, though its conclusions go in a quite contrary direction, will have the appearance of seeking to set up its meritorious terms on the basis of a supernatural origin for sin. All the ills with which God afflicts man can thus be considered as the ransom God exacts before he allows man the right to inflict suffering and to be unlimitedly vicious. To the extent that God can be viewed as the original guilty party who attacked man before man could attack him, to that extent man has acquired the right and the strength to attack his neighbor. And if this divine aggression has been of vast proportions, it has thereby legitimized for all time the impunity of the guilty party and the sacrifice of the innocent.

  If the evils which overwhelm me from the day of my birth to the day of my death prove God’s indifference to me, then I may very well be mistaken about what I call evil. What I characterize as evil where I am concerned is apparently a very great good where the being who has brought me into the world is concerned. And if I receive evil from others, I enjoy the right of returning it, and even the facility of delivering evil to them first; once I become aware of this, evil becomes good for me as it is for the being who has created me in his dealings with me, and I am pleased by the evil I do to others as God is pleased by the evil he has done to me. . . .

  Evil “which is a moral being and not a created being, an eternal being which existed before the world and which formed the monstrous and execrable being who created so bizarre a world,” can only sustain that world through evil, can only perpetuate it for evil, and allow other creatures to exist only if they are impregnated with evil:

  This mode which is the very soul of the creator is also that of the creature who is shaped by it. It will exist even after the soul’s demise. Everything has to be wicked, barbarous, inhuman—as your God is—and these are the vices which must be adopted if one wishes to please him; not that there is much hope of succeeding, since that evil which always does harm, the evil which is God’s essence, could not possibly be susceptible either to love or gratitude. If this God who is the center of evil and ferocity torments man, and has Nature and other men torment him throughout his existence, what reason is there to doubt that he acts in the same way, and perhaps even involuntarily, on this wisp which survives after man and which. . . is nothing other than evil? . . . No matter what his conduct in this world may be, no man can escape this frightful fate because everything which has been brought to life in the womb of evil must return there. That is the law of the universe. Thus the hateful elements of the wicked man are absorbed into the center of the wickedness which is God in order to return and animate still other beings who will be born to similar corruption because they are the fruit of corruption.

  What will happen to the good creature?

  The man you call virtuous is not good, or if he is good toward you, he certainly is not toward God, who is nothing other than evil, who desires nothing but evil, who seeks nothing but evil. The man you speak of is simply weak, and weakness is an evil. Such a man, since he is weaker than the absolutely vicious being, . . . will suffer all the more. . . . [But] the more man shall have manifested vices and failures in this world, the closer shall he come to his unchanging goal which is wickedness, and the less will he have to suffer consequently when he is reunited in the home of wickedness which I consider to be the prime matter of the world’s formation.

  Thus “far from denying God, as the atheist does, or of pardoning Him all his wrongs, as deists do,” the conscience of the debauched libertine agrees to admit God with all his vices. The existence of evil in the world affords him the chance to blackmail God, whom he considers the eternal Guilty Party because he is the original Aggressor. To accomplish this goal, the libertine constantly has recourse to traditional moral categories as though to a pact which God has violated. Suffering becomes a promissory note drawn on God.

  The libertine conscience also needs to establish an equally negative relationship with its neighbor: “I am pleased with the evil I do to others as God is pleased with the evil he does to me.” The libertine’s enjoyment comes from the fact of the continuous opposition between this idea and the notion of love for one’s neighbor. He makes use of this opposition in establishing his theory of pleasure through comparison. One of the four debauchees in The 120 Days of Sodom says:

  Only one essential is missing from our happiness—pleasure through comparison, a pleasure which can only be born from the sight of the unhappy, and we see none of that breed here. It’s at the sight of the man who isn’t enjoying what I have and who is suffering that I know the charm of being able to say: I am happier than he is. Wherever men are equal and where differences do not exist, happiness will never exist; it’s quite like the situation of the man who doesn’t appreciate the price of goo
d health until he has been ill.

  How then are the unfortunate to be comforted?

  The pleasure which comes to me from this pleasant comparison of their state with mine would not exist if I were to comfort them. By withdrawing them from their misery, I would allow them to taste a moment of happiness which, since it draws them closer to me, would remove the whole joy of comparison. . . . In order to establish more firmly this essential difference in happiness, it would be preferable to aggravate their condition. . . .

  Thus the conscience of the debauched libertine, though it turns them upside down, is content to remain with those moral categories which the atheist conscience will condemn as structures forged by the weak. But, out of their need for comparisons, the strong put their own strength on trial. By making a comparison of his condition with that of the unfortunate, the fortunate man makes a fatal identification with him. In tormenting the object of his lust in order to derive pleasure from his suffering, and by seeing in the suffering of another his own suffering, he will also see his own punishment. Saint-Fond, after having mistreated a family of poor people outrageously, supposedly has himself assailed by two men whom he has ordered to whip him. This staged whipping is carried off so well that the fear which he inspires in the weak becomes, in this exhibition of strength, his own fear: “I love to make them undergo the sort of thing which troubles and overwhelms my existence so cruelly. . . .” At this stage, his conscience remains riveted to the reality of the others; he hopes to deny that reality but only intensifies it by the love-hatred which he avows for others. The debauched man remains attached to the victim of his lust and to the individuality of that victim whose sufferings he would like to prolong “beyond the bounds of eternity—if eternity has any.” The true atheist, to the degree that he really exists, attaches himself to no object; caught in Nature’s perpetual motion, he obeys his impulses, looking upon others as no more than Nature’s slag. The conscience of the debauched libertine cannot give up its all too human aspirations; perhaps only the stoic atheist would be capable of doing so. The libertine’s conscience remains obsessed not only by his neighbor as victim, but also by death. He cannot give up the singular hope of a future and infernal life which amounts to saying that he cannot consent to the annihilation of his “sinning body” precisely because of his senseless desire to work out his fury on the same victim throughout eternity.

  In this phase, his conscience none the less betrays a murky need for expiation—an expiation which, if his need could be elucidated, would have no other direction than that of self-liquidation, a freeing of the self by the self. These are the positive particulars of his conscience. The degree to which he seeks expiation is the degree to which his conscience represents one of the moments of Sade’s own conscience. His need for expiation seeks satisfaction in his willingness to risk eternal damnation—in order, without doubt, to nourish the sufferings of his victim; but his willingness also implies a continued desire to share that suffering.

  Saint-Fond reveals still another characteristic trait of the libertine conscience: pride in his situation, scorn for his fellow man, and, finally, a hatred, mixed with fear, of “that vile low life known as the people.” All the elements of this haughty attitude go hand in glove with the exercise of humiliating debaucheries, most of which are planned to deliver a shock to popular morality: “Only minds organized like ours know how well the humiliation imposed by certain wanton acts serves as pride’s nourishment.” In effect, what the popular or, better, the bourgeois mentality would be incapable either of admitting or of understanding is that those who are supposed to be the guardians of the social order should, by their voluntary degradation, challenge that order and, in so doing, overturn all social values. But in this humiliation—even though it is only a fiction for the Sadean libertine—there is also manifest a desire for voluntary debasement and, in that need, an indication of the libertine’s belief that his superior social position gives him special rights. Chief among these rights is his right to revise the notion of what man is. It is an experimental right, one which could not be extended to the common run of mortals without danger. It is precisely the exercise of this right to conduct forbidden experiments which, born from the libertine conscience, will form one of the fundamental commitments of the Sadean conscience.

  Sade’s materialistic atheism, when expressed in works published a decade after the Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man, has lost all the serenity characteristic of that pamphlet. The materialists and Encyclopedists, who were Sade’s contemporaries, when they admit matter considered as perpetual motion to the role of the universal agent which excludes any need for God’s existence, imply that knowledge of the laws governing this matter may allow for a better individual and social morality, as well as an unlimited rational exploitation of Nature by man. Still, the arguments of La Mettrie, Helvétius, and Holbach undergo an unexpected development when they come into contact with Sadean thought. For Sade the substitution of Nature in a state of perpetual motion for God signifies, not the arrival of a happier era for humanity, but only the beginning of tragedy—the tragedy being man’s open and conscious acceptance of the change. Here we can detect the Nietzschean theme which opposes to the sufferings of the innocent a consciousness which agrees to endure its guilt because the guilt is the price of feeling alive. This is the hidden sense of the atheism which differentiates Sade so clearly from his contemporaries. To admit matter considered as perpetual motion as the one and only universal agent is equivalent to agreeing to live as an individual in a state of perpetual motion.

  As soon as a body appears to have lost motion by its passage from the state of life to what is improperly called death, it tends, from that very moment, toward dissolution; yet dissolution is a very great state of motion. There is, therefore, no moment when the body of the animal is at rest; it never dies; but because it no longer exists for us, we believe that it no longer exists at all. Bodies are transmuted . . . metamorphosed, but they are never inert. Inertia is absolutely impossible for matter whether matter is organized or not. Weigh these truths carefully and you will see where they lead and what a twist they give to human morality.

  Once arrived at this observation, finding himself on the threshold of the unknown, his thought turning back on itself, he withdraws still further, scandalized by the sheer inevitability of his conclusions. Then he takes hold of himself and accepts his discoveries. As a result, the atheistic and materialistic speeches of some of his characters strike us as just so many moments in his thought’s effort to get away from moral categories; this is what gives the speeches their quite special dramatic flavor. Matter, which is perpetually in motion and which trembles with pleasure without being able to obtain any pleasure on this side of destruction or dissolution, seems to be neither blind nor without will. Isn’t there some purpose in this universal agent?

  We become the public at a strange spectacle where Sade insults Nature as he used to insult God; he discovers in Nature the traits of that God who created the greatest number of men with the aim of making them run the risk of eternal tortures “even though it would have conformed more with goodness and with reason and justice to create only stones and plants rather than to shape men whose conduct could only bring endless chastisements.” But what a frightful state Nature puts us in,

  since disgust with life becomes so strong in the soul that there is not a single man who would want to live again, even if such an offer were made on the day of his death. . . yes, I abhor Nature; and I detest her because I know her well. Aware of her frightful secrets, I have fallen back on myself and I have felt. . . I have experienced a kind of pleasure in copying her foul deeds. What a contemptible and odious being to make me see the daylight only in order to have me find pleasure in everything that does harm to my fellow men. Eh quoi! I had hardly been born. . . I had hardly quit my cradle when she drew me toward the very horrors which are her delight! This goes beyond corruption. . . it is an inclination, a penchant. Her barbarous hand can only nourish evil;
evil is her entertainment. Should I love such a mother? No; but I will imitate her, all the while detesting her. I shall copy her, as she wishes, but I shall curse her unceasingly. . . .

  These are the words of the chemist, Almani, a character whose psychology reflects marvelously well one of the positions set forth in Sade’s thought. Like the debauched libertine, Almani is still evolving within the sphere of moral categories. Evil strikes him as being Nature’s unique element, as it was the unique element of the God who was absent to the debauched libertine. And this criminal chemist also believes that the solution to the problem of evil is to be evil. Sade’s thought here offers a further attitude of purely human revolt, a revolt which has no hope other than to remain revolt. The reproach directed against Nature, even more than the reproach directed against God, is clearly destined to remain without answer and even without any psychic benefit, since it is addressed to a situation whose very corruption excludes any idea of justification. The atheist mind which launched the anathema against Nature, had wanted its effort to render absurd the reproach which he cannot repress and which escapes from him in spite of himself. His conscience, though it accepts Nature as the supreme instance, has not yet given up the mechanism of moral categories which, in his struggle against God, has been found to be useful and necessary. In God his conscience found vengeance. But once God has been rejected, his maneuver is undone by the discovery of perpetual motion. Since the notion of movement absorbs all idea of annihilation that goes beyond a simple modification of matter’s forms, man can no longer reply by outrage to what he considers Nature’s outrage; man feels he is unavenged.

  We see another factor developing in Almani’s statement. Its effect is to show us that evil appears in his speech only as a simple term adequate for translating the effect of the natural dynamism with which the scientist’s mind hopes to identify itself. What we see in Almani’s resolve to copy the “foul deeds” of Nature is an effort at reconciliation with universal order or, better, with universal disorder. As his indignation expresses its astonishment, curiosity and the desire to know become manifest; the mind tends more and more toward considering itself as an integral part of Nature, which has now become the domain of its investigations. If mind discovers in natural phenomena, not only blind and necessary laws, but also its own purpose—and thereby a coincidence of its purpose with those natural phenomena—then those phenomena will belong to it as so many suggestions which mind must bring into reality.