His immortality may be of a scandalous variety, but the fascination still exerted by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) is evidenced in this, the third biography of the man to appear in a scant six months. Francine du Plessix Gray (At Home with the Marquis de Sade) and Laurence Bongie (Sade: A Biographical Essay) take arguably more original approaches, but American academic Neil Schaeffer's thorough, carefully researched and argued book is more likely to appeal to the general reader who knows little of Sade beyond the perversion to which he gave his name. In fact, Schaeffer contends, the marquis was hardly a textbook sadist: he liked to be beaten at least as much as he enjoyed inflicting pain, which was a pastime he pursued primarily in his books' scatological fantasies. The author generally attempts to temper Sade's dreadful reputation, placing his escapades with prostitutes and menservants in the European tradition of aristocratic libertinism and pointing up the witty irony as well as the obscenities in works like The 120 Days of Sodom ("the most radical novel ever written"). It's not exactly a pretty picture, but Schaeffer makes a plausible case that the man imprisoned by both royal and revolutionary regimes posed more danger through his unfettered imaginings than through anything he actually did. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
The '90s have been a banner decade for "the Divine Marquis": six biographies, an A&E film and an upcoming book of previously unpublished letters all seek to illuminate the man after whom "sadism" was named. Hence, Brooklyn College professor Shaeffer will suffer for his timing. Several years ago, Maurice Lever was hailed for offering an exhaustive and balanced view in Sade: A Biography. He was followed, last fall, by Francine du Plessix Gray, whose engaging At Home with the Marquis de Sade took on the previously neglected, but dramatic, relationships Sade had with his loyal wife and his vengeful mother-in-law. Then came Laurence Bongie's Sade: A Biographical Essay, a hearty attempt to undercut the growing Sade myth. Schaeffer does take a somewhat different approach, defending the marquis as a man of his time. Using somewhat old-fashioned Freudian theory to excuse, or at least explain, his subject's "outr?" behavior, Schaeffer finds that Sade had a "sweet" side and "yearned for the embrace of a mother." Schaeffer is far more successful in recounting Sade's adventures. He does so with great relish and facility, and his book is often as riveting as a tightly drawn historical novel. Sade's first arrest, for accidentally poisoning a prostitute, began with a lengthy manhunt; once captured, the marquis managed to escape from prison. He was subsequently arrested many times, for writing pornography and for political reasons, and committed to a madhouse. In a stroke of bad luck, he was transferredAfor poor behaviorAfrom the Bastille only 10 days before it was liberated. Though well researched and accessible, Schaeffer's uneven effort to distill the man from the myth is unlikely to make much of a dent in the growing body of Sade studies already available. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Schaeffers new biography of the Marquis de Sade is unlucky in its timing, following in the wake of those of Francine du Plessix Gray (LJ 9/15/98) and Laurence L. Bongie (LJ 11/1/98). It is a substantial work of scholarship, drawing heavily on Sades letters and other writings, many never before translated. Schaeffer (English, Brooklyn Coll.) also offers extended readings of Sades novels. Unlike Bongies Sade, Schaeffers is a more sympathetic and romantic figure. While Bongie finds the novels derivative and unoriginal, Schaeffer argues for a great literary imagination. As a matter of narrative, du Plessix Grays book is both more concise and more fluent and should be the first choice. While Schaeffers efforts are solid and can be recommended for major academic collections, they add nothing new.T.L. Cookey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Schaeffer (English/Brooklyn Coll.) is an unlucky fellow. Not only is the Marquis de Sade's life already thoroughly published, no fewer than two North American writers have brought out major biographies in the last few months. When one comes to such a topic so late, it is customary to stake out some special perspective, aspect, or agenda. In November of last year Francine du Plessix Gray crossed the finish line first with her excellent At Home with the Marquis de Sade. In it she emphasizes Sade's married life and domestic arrangements. Then in December a sober-minded Canadian scholar of French literature, Laurence Bongie, offered a full-scale assault against sadolatry in his fine Sade: A Biographical Essay; Bongie sees it as his mission to deflate the odious Sade's overblown prestige. And just when we thought enough of Sade was enough, we get Schaeffer's version of the life. Disappointingly, it does not markedly differ from any of the other lives that you might care to pick up and read. Schaeffer has not bothered to make a distinctive argument about Sade or his writing. Orthodox Freudian explanations resolve Sade's perversions, and Schaeffer blandly accepts Sade as the major writer that many modernists proclaimed. Though Schaeffer does not state his views with great clarity, he gives the impression that Sade's greatness resides in his unblinking gaze at the worst to be found in us. Freud also underpins Schaeffer's reading of Sade's appeal (if that is the right word): ``Since sexual perversity is a common feature of everyone's mental life . . . there is in every reader extremely powerful motives to respond to Sade's imagination on this subjectwhether through identification, laughter, titillation, horror, anger, or disgusted rejection.'' The logic of this thought might not stand up under severe scrutiny, but we get the idea that Sade, like other great writers, is universal. This life of Sade is a respectable biography, but not likely to stand out in the crowd. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Against a backdrop of 18th-century France, Neil Schaeffer reconstructs the almost incredible adventures of Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade. When he was a young man, married off against his wishes to a middle-class heiress, his insatiable sexual appetites and disdain for all forms of convention drew him into a series of scandals, first with prostitutes and then with his sister-in-law. His enraged, social-climbing mother-in-law conspired with the authorities, and the result was Sade's thirteen-year imprisonment without trial. Later, freed by the Revolution, the brilliantly protean Marquis became a revolutionary leader himself and then narrowly escaped the guillotine. But with the publication of the novels he wrote behind bars, books denounced as lewd and blasphemous, he was again imprisoned. Under Napoleon, Sade spent almost twelve years in an insane asylum, where he died at the age of seventy-four following a final dalliance with a teenage girl. Schaeffer reveals the surprisingly unsadistic Sade: his capacity for deep romantic love, his passionate adherence to Enlightenment principles, his inexhaustible charm, his delusional paranoia. And through a reading of his novels, including the notorious masterpiece 120 Days of Sodom, he argues powerfully for Sade as one of the great literary imaginations of the 18th century, one who maintained a lifelong, ultimately self-destructive argument against the limitations of authority and morality.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Bernstein

...[A] welcome addition to the literature....sophisticated and hardheaded about Sade....[This is] a...biography...that does not stint on Sade's most amazing egotismhis monstrous and self-destructive heedlessness of others....[Schaeffer] leaves it up to the reader to judge....[I]t is the strength of [his] biography that makes Sade not just a notorious figure but a credibly heroic one... —The New York Times

Mim Udovitch - The New York Times Book Review

Sade's staunchest supporters usually offer a sort of cosi fan tutti defense, and Schaeffer does likewise....Schaeffer...writes that Sade's "sexual life would find a modern equivalent among a great many film and rock stars"....Cosi fan tutti, and, actually, plus ca change.

Book Magazine

How elegantly ironic that the Age of Reason should produce a most seemingly unreasonable man as the Marquis de Sade. How chillingly prophetic that he should write, imprisoned in the infamous Bastille on the eve of the modern age, a work of arguably greater infamy—a work that is not just an outcry but a demonstration of man's desire to dismember nature and dislocate the universe. How poetically just or tragic (depending on one's point of view) that a libertine who sought to be the champion of intellectual liberty should die in the confines of an insane asylum.

The Marquis de Sade is one of those figures on whom we can project our desires and fears. To some he is a frightening demon of filth and violence. To others he is a witty and brazen destroyer of convention. In either case it is the extreme in him that fascinates or repels. With insightful and often surprising detail, Neil Schaeffer has created a history of Sade that is clear, compelling and provocative. A novel by Samuel Richardson is not full of as much tempted virtue, thwarted ambition, virulent scheming, daring escapes and criminal debauchery. But the extraordinary achievement here is that Schaeffer succeeds in not casting Sade in the extreme—not using him as an extension of some moral argument. With the help of Sade's large extant correspondence, Schaeffer allows this individual of great complexity to present himself in all his divine, demonic and ultimately human contradictions. On the occasions when Schaeffer does intrude it is only to allow us a breath and an opportunity to gauge and question our own reactions.

This was not a life half-lived.

Sade was born in the splendor of theCondé Palace in Paris, but the greater part of his life would be spent in prison cells. For most of his childhood and early adolescence he lived on the family estates in Provence as an exile of his parents' carelessness and ambition, in the charge of various uncles and aunts. He joined an elite royal regiment and fought without distinction in the Seven Years War. At twenty-three, his father arranged a marriage of convenience to a rather plain daughter of the upstart de Montreuil family. That marriage was to be his downfall.

Mme de Montreuil, his mother-in-law, was at first charmed by Sade and did everything she could to rescue him from various little scrapes and scandals—almost to the point of complicity. These incidents—tame and frankly juvenile by contemporary standards—were followed with great concern and curiosity by a police inspector named Marais, whose fate would become strangely bound to Sade's. But when Mme de Montreuil turned on Sade, scandal followed scandal with increasing consequence. In Schaeffer's telling, the pious wife Renée emerges from the shadows of her mother to become her husband's greatest defender, accomplice and dupe. In prison Sade does nothing but write and explore the philosophy of his fantasy. The Revolution comes and the Marquis de Sade becomes Citizen Sade. He tastes freedom after twelve years but laments what he thinks is the loss of his greatest literary achievement, 120 Days of Sodom, in the storming of the Bastille.

In the chaos of the Revolution and Terror, he sees his homicidal fantasies made very real. Freedom is short lived for Sade in the Age of Liberty. Soon he is thought so dangerous that he must be insane and is committed by order of the Directory and kept at the asylum of Charenton by Napoleon himself. There he charms Parisian society by putting on plays with the inmates.

All the details of these events have been extraordinarily well-researched. Schaeffer does an especially good job in maneuvering with ease and confidence the labyrinth of Revolutionary politics. Schaeffer uses the details to illuminate and nowhere is this used to greater effect than in the relationship between Sade and his wife, Renée. During his confinement in the Bastille Sade sends her on almost daily errands. For Renée these errands range from the merely fatiguing to the deeply humiliating. And, while she does each and every thing asked of her at the expense of her reputation, she must endure Sade's blind rages that alternate with morbid—sometimes salacious—declarations of love and forgiveness. This is an act of Sadism that equals all the psycho-sexual scenarios that the Marquis can invent. When Renée makes a definitive choice about her husband after his release it is both surprising and inevitable.

The book presents all the people involved with great care and even-handedness, and Sade's reactions to his long imprisonments and desires to explore the boundaries of existence are handled with intelligence and compassion. About Sade's writing, Schaeffer leads us to wonder what might have been a physical act and what was a philosophical stance. He helps us to understand that we can never be certain with Sade.

Ultimately, in Schaeffer's book, we are presented with a man—beguiling and repellent—as fascinating as the myth. —Christopher Cartmill

Library Journal

Schaeffers new biography of the Marquis de Sade is unlucky in its timing, following in the wake of those of Francine du Plessix Gray (LJ 9/15/98) and Laurence L. Bongie (LJ 11/1/98). It is a substantial work of scholarship, drawing heavily on Sades letters and other writings, many never before translated. Schaeffer (English, Brooklyn Coll.) also offers extended readings of Sades novels. Unlike Bongies Sade, Schaeffers is a more sympathetic and romantic figure. While Bongie finds the novels derivative and unoriginal, Schaeffer argues for a great literary imagination. As a matter of narrative, du Plessix Grays book is both more concise and more fluent and should be the first choice. While Schaeffers efforts are solid and can be recommended for major academic collections, they add nothing new.T.L. Cookey, Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah, GA

Richard Bernstein - The New York Times