Thinking with Demons: Flaubert and de Sade

In this article we are invited to observe that eighteenth century demon, the Marquis de Sade, as he dwells in the mind of that eminently lucid nineteenth century dreamer, Gustave Flaubert. The emergent bourgeois soul, shackled by strict new imperatives of moral propriety, engenders an imaginary aristrocrat to act out its sullen and undemocratic fantasies of supreme power, material luxury and sexual pleasure. The subsequent contortions are hideously and instructively comic.