Sade dans l'histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps par Michèle Vallenthini (review)

Over the past fifty years, few writers have undergone as radical a resurgence of interest as the Marquis de Sade. The publication of his works in the Pléiade edition, which began in earnest during the early 1990s, and commemorations such as the bicentenary of his death in 2014, have all served to further widen his readership—especially regarding his still controversial libertine narratives, many of which precede the Revolution. This study focuses mainly on three so-called "romans historiques" which appeared during the Napoleonic era, works which have thus far garnered much less critical attention because, in relative terms, they are perceived as much less radical and far more conventional than their libertine predecessors. One of Vallenthini's goals is to examine why this change in narrative focus and approach took place. The relationship between history and fiction has long been a preoccupation of both literary critics and creative writers, and the first part of Vallenthini's study focuses on this question before moving on to examine Sade's troubled and complex life, with a special concentration on his later years in the asylum at Charenton, where he produced the works which form the centerpiece of this study: La marquise de Gange, Adélaïde de Brunswick, princesse de Saxe, and the Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, reine de France. Although Vallenthini also examines how the notion of time plays out in Sade's earlier, more studied libertine narratives, her clear focus lies with these three historical novels and, in the fourth section of her study entitled "À la fiction du temps," she makes a convincing case for both their originality and their individuality as important elements of Sade's oeuvre. For Vallenthini, an understanding of the times during which these novels were written is essential to their appreciation and the idea of the post-Revolutionary turn of the century looms large in this study. She views 1800 as a pivotal year for the relation between the novel and history—and a key moment when Sade chooses to concentrate his literary focus on historical figures. She shows a Sade who, in spite of his incarceration, was still caught up in the social, political, and aesthetic crises of his time and sees him neither as an eighteenth- nor a nineteenth-century writer and thinker, but rather as an "auteur du tournant des Lumières" (15–16). Vallenthini also focuses on what would, thanks to the later success of Walter Scott, become celebrated as the golden era of the historical novel. As Sade's reputation as a literary figure has grown, it makes sense for studies to venture into the less-celebrated and less-studied parts of his oeuvre—and so Vallenthini's book would certainly be of value to scholars wishing to delve into some of Sade's more neglected works.