Sade moraliste: Le Dévoilement de la pensée sadienne à la lumière de la réforme pénale au XVIIIe siècle (review)

Albert Camus wrote in his 1951 essay, L'Homme révolté, that Sade was more moral than his contemporaries, an opinion repeated on a number of occasions since, notably by Simone de Beauvoir, and more recently by Michel Brix. The argument of Jean-Baptiste Jeangè ne Vilmer's magisterial work is therefore not entirely original, although he pursues it doggedly and in some respects repetitively over 500 pages. His aim is to show that, far from being immoral, Sade distances himself from all forms of immorality, and encourages us to identify, not with the libertine criminals of his anonymous fictions, but with their hapless victims. Ignoring the possibility that authorial claims to virtuous intentions in prefaces and letters may have been rhetoric designed to impress Sade's companion, Constance, as well as fool the censor, Vilmer reads these fictions as instructed by the author-narrator of Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu, who assures readers that vice is painted in all its horrors in order to deter them from emulating it. Vilmer has little to say of works, such as La Philosophie dans le boudoir, that do not serve his purposes. The puritanical Madame de Mistival, horribly maltreated by the libertines, is even less likeable than her tormentors, but as an incarnation of Sade's accursed mother-in-law, this character was never intended to engage our sympathies. An introductory chapter is devoted to exposing the deficiencies of existing Sade criticism, most of which is, for Vilmer's taste, too 'literary' in approach. From the structuralist to the psychoanalytical, literary-theoretical approaches are berated for ripping Sade from his historical, political and social context. The sadean text, the author avers, must be read at the level, not only of textual meaning, but also of the referent. With this in mind, he conducts an extremely meticulous and well-researched survey of the views on punishment expressed in Sade's fictions in the context of the French penal system as it evolved from 1740 to 1814 (Sade's lifetime), persuasively demonstrating that these are remarkably similar to those of the Enlightenment's leading penal reformer, Cesare Beccaria. Reading this account does make it clear how the physical abuse of the innocent in Sade's libertine works is inspired to a considerable degree by his own treatment at the hands of the justice systems of the ancien régime and the Terror. Vilmer rightly draws attention to the way in which magistrates, for instance, are frequently allocated villainous roles. The research underpinning this survey is original and represents an important contribution to Sade studies, but the argument surrounding it is weakened by a reluctance to question paratextual pronouncements, and an unwillingness to take the power of the transgressive impulse into account, power to which readers are equally susceptible. Sade, like most authors, writes for a complexity of reasons, among them, desire for revenge and reforming zeal, certainly, but also, exorcism of his own demons. The insistence in the text of sexual violence and the excess of its representation beyond reasonable levels remain intractable problems which this book never satisfactorily addresses. Vilmer's readers thus have no alternative but to share with Justine what Philip Roth has called 'the ecstasy of sanctimony'.