🔒 The Marquis de Sade’s guide to "Cancel Culture"

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Cancel culture aims for oblivion but rarely ensures permanent erasure.
The Marquis de Sade’s infamy has outlived generations of outrage.
Even the most reviled figures can be reclaimed by history and culture.

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By Howard Chua-Eoan ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

In theology, being condemned to perdition may sound a lot like going to hell, but it’s much worse than spending eternity amid fire and brimstone. Those who believe in the survival of the soul after death shudder at the gravity of perdition: the total dissolution of one’s existence even in spiritual form. In our increasingly soulless secular age, there’s an attempt at a similar punishment: We call it cancellation.

The concept derives from television — that which befalls series and shows with bad ratings, yanked by broadcast networks, never to be seen again. Its first use in popular culture in that sense may have been in the lyrics of Your Love Is Cancelled, by the disco-funk group Chic (“Well I saw it on TV ‘bout someone like me…”). The song’s from 1981, but cancellation as we know it really got going this century. Today, it’s a pile-on of blaming and shaming in our social media public squares that often leads to the target’s commercial or career oblivion. The courts can also get involved to mete out justice. The vitriol makes it much more hellish than old-fashioned consumer boycotts.

Some of the most spectacular examples involve fans turning against their idols. The most recent is graphic novel icon Neil Gaiman, who has received massive condemnation after lurid stories emerged alleging sexual assault and harassment on his part (a particularly explicit account can be found here; read with caution). He has denied the allegations and there are no criminal charges filed against him. Nevertheless, the furor has convinced publishers to avoid or drop Gaiman, who has become a multimillionaire from his oeuvre of close to 50 novels and comic books. HarperCollins and W.W. Norton, which have successfully published his books before, said they have no plans with the British author. In late January, Dark Horse Comics announced it wouldn’t release the last volume of its illustrated version of his 2005 fantasy novel Anansi Boys.
On Friday, Variety reported that Netflix Inc.’s adaptation of The Sandman, based on Gaiman’s bestselling comic books, will end after the second season later this year.

Does such collective vengeance result in permanent perdition? The history of one offender may hold some lessons.

If any literary figure should be up for perpetual cancellation, it’s Donatien Alphonse François de Sade — the Marquis de Sade, pornographer, philosopher, poisoner, prisoner, the prophet of sexual excess and cruelty, the inspiration for the word “sadism.”

It’s not as if no one tried to erase the French nobleman from memory before. Beset by episode after episode of his violent sexual exploits and blasphemous outbursts, his status-conscious mother-in-law had him thrown into prison for more than 12 years, including a dramatic turn in the infamous Bastille just before it was stormed by the mobs of the French Revolution on July 14, 1789. He was condemned to be executed twice — the first time for sodomy and for poisoning prostitutes he’d hired for orgies in Marseille (the women fell ill after ingesting pastilles probably laced with the aphrodisiac Spanish fly). But he and an accomplice fled to Italy and were burned in effigy instead. When he was out of the Bastille, the chaos of the French Revolution saved him in the nick of time from the nick of the guillotine. Ironically, one of the charges was for being a political moderate in the reign of terror of Maximilien Robespierre, whose overthrow the same day, 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) likely saved Sade’s life.

Sade was a byword for excess and violence even before he began publishing his books, which he didn’t really get to until the 1790s. Justine and Juliette are companion novels (their subtitles are The Misfortunes of Virtue and Vice Amply Rewarded, respectively). The title characters are sisters with opposite views of morality on whom Sade then proceeds to inflict a series of lurid and humiliating assaults till they both end up in nunneries. Juliette so scandalized Napoleon Bonaparte that, in 1801, he ordered Sade consigned to the insane asylum of Charenton for the rest of his life. Sade’s final wish was to be buried in a corner of what remained of his estate. As he wrote in his last will and testament: “My grave, once covered over, shall then have acorns strewn over it, in order that the spot become green again, and the copse grown back thick over it, so that any trace of my grave will disappear from the face of the earth, just as I trust the memory of me will fade from the minds of everyone.”

His relatives disassociated themselves from Sade but he hasn’t been forgotten. Justine and Juliette were put on the index of books forbidden to Catholics but were somehow taken off the banned list in 1835, two decades after his death. The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing coined the word “sadism” in 1886 to describe sexual gratification resulting from the inflicting of pain and humiliation. The beginning of the 20th century saw the reemergence of the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage, which Sade wrote secretly and hid in the Bastille and believed was destroyed when the prison-fortress was demolished. Its unrelenting litany of sex crimes and murders was first published in 1904. It was the basis of poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. The movie isn’t set in the last days of the reign of Louis XIV, as Sade conceived it, but during the final throes of Benito Mussolini’s Republic of Salò.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote a defense of the marquis in 1951 entitled “Must We Burn Sade?” One academic in 2022 said it was consistent with the feminism of the French social critic’s magisterial The Second Sex : “In his writings is revealed sexuality’s potential to subvert patriarchal norms and mystifications, and perhaps, in the end, even gender itself.” Meanwhile, therapists have prescribed S&M for people suffering from sexual trauma — the S standing for sadism. In 2022 The novelist Pierre Guyotat — whose own novels were once banned in France — said that “Sade, that extraordinary hero, is in a way, the French Shakespeare.” And if not the Bard of Avon, then a homebody? In 1998, Francine du Plessix Gray published At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, a fictional account of the two women who defined him — his maleficent mother-in-law and her daughter, his devoted and enabling wife (who endured Sade’s affair with her younger sister, a canoness).

This extended afterlife for a convicted pornographer hasn’t gone undenounced. In 1981, feminist writer Andrea Dworkin hectored Sade devotees, declaring that “the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.” But death — and his own final wishes — haven’t obliterated him. His books continue to circulate; and every decade or so, a new Sadean fervor wells up. For some “canceled” people, you can still separate the inspirational artist from the failure of a human being (though I will always cringe a little before I dance to Michael Jackson). But Sade’s life was at the heart of his art — and his life was despicable. Ick.

Generations of haters haven’t been able to dislodge him from our cultural imagination — or bookshelves or movies, though it’s been a quarter century since the last major motion picture about him. Even Sade’s real family has come around to their forebear’s infamy: One descendant began marketing a line of champagnes bearing his name in the late 1980s. It’s a caution to those of us who feel that outrage that’s expressed publicly and vociferously enough can pulverize a reputation forever. Perhaps it can send an author or celebrity to limbo. But that’s not perdition — and is no guarantee that the target won’t return as Sade has, again and again.

There is one thing that can be done. When I told my colleagues I was writing a column about the Marquis de Sade, there was one almost universal response: sniggering. I smiled back. As Thomas More said, “The devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Sade’s a joke. Laugh his ghost out of the room.

What should go without saying — but I’ll type anyway — is the prerequisite for the cancelled who are hoping for Sade-style resurrection: You’ve got to be dead first.

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