by Tammyjo Eckhart

Created on: May 11, 2009

The very question that drives this essay spins my head. Moralist versus pornographer? I'm not either fits into the categories of the 18th and early 19th centuries of his lifetime.

Pornographer implies that he created or sold materials for money that were designed to cause sexual arousal in his readers. We would have to know why he wrote what he did and determine if he made money from it. His work was published, that is true, and it led to one of his later arrests and incarnations but the details are difficult to piece together. That others labeled what he wrote pornography only speaks to their own judgments and that others made money from his work only declared them to be the pornographers.

Is he a moralist? Isn't a moralist someone who makes a judgment about how life should be lived and preaches this or teaches this to others? What evidence beyond his writing which I'll touch upon below, suggests that he was attempting to lead others in his path? It's been argued that he was a philosopher and practiced hedonism both for personal pleasure and supposedly for philosophical reasons. But philosophy is not the same as morality. A better question is: Was de Sade a philosopher or a criminal?

His "philosophy" wasn't unique he just expressed it in extreme fashion in his writing. In fact, given that the earliest charges against him had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with assaults against others, it has always seemed to me that this idea of "philosophy" might really be a cover for his own desires and pursuits. Again this is speculation because we lack a lot of evidence and what we do have is very biased either by himself or those who were arresting and charging him with crimes.

Ultimately I think that de Sade wasn't doing anything all that unusual in a feudal system. He just lived during the time that system was decaying and when the peasantry and lower ranking aristocrats were feeling empowered enough to try and do something about their treatment by those in positions above them.

Judging him by his time, we can say that he was committing crimes against the rising masses and was foolish enough to not curb his desires more. His writing may or may not be a legitimate attempt at waxing philosophically on what he enjoyed but it was interesting enough that it found a ready audience for generations since it's publication. To learn more about the man and his work, check here.

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