Are we all Sadists -- Perhaps?

"Politics, which teach men to deceive their equals without being deceived themselves, that science born of falseness and ambition, which the statesman calls  a virtue, the social man a duty, and the honest man a vice. . . " Marquise de Sade

Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, or the Marquis De Sade, (1740-1814) had no illusions about the natural goodness of man, but he believed that with complete economic and sexual equality human conditions  could be greatly bettered. He went far beyond the “advanced” social thinkers of his time and even of the present day.

 Society is divided into two antagonistic  classes,  the haves and the have-nots. This point is so
fundamental for de Sade that he stresses it in every book.  In Aline et Valcour the good king Zam begins his  description of his visit to Europe by saying:

"Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery...; I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would lose by it..."

He defines his conception of these classes very exactly "Don't think that I mean by the people the caste called  the tiers-etat [bourgeoisie in the limited sense]; no, I  mean by the people .... those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat”
This is the beginning of a  treatise on the class-war by the extremely savage  Bishop of Grenoble who goes on "That is the class that I would abandon to perpetual chains and humiliation .... all  others ought to join together against this abject class ....to fasten chains upon them, since they in their turn will  be enchained if they relax."



Besides contractual relations there are also emotional connections between the haves and have-nots. The  feelings of the rich for the poor can be divided into two  groups dislike and fear on the one hand, pity and charity on the other. The former are the commoner.

De Sade has some extremely moving passages in which  he describes the life of the poor. "The unhappy man  waters his bread with tears; a day's hard work hardly gives him enough to bring back in the evening to his  family the wherewithal to preserve life; the taxes he is obliged to pay take away the greater part of his thin  savings; his naked and illiterate children dispute with  the beasts of the forest the vilest food, while his wife's  breasts, dried up by want, cannot give to the nursling  that first part of nourishment which will give him the  strength to go, to get the rest, to share that of the wolves; till finally, bowed down under the weight of years, ill- treatment and grief, always under the hand of misfortune,  he sees the end of his career coming, without the star of  heaven having for one instant shone pure and serene on  his humbled head."

De Sade  defined property as "a crime committed by the rich  against the poor."  But he examined this institution  more closely." Going back to the origin of the right of  property' he writes, "we come necessarily to usurpation.  But theft is only punished because it attacks the right of property; but that right is in origin itself a theft, so that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft.  As long as there is no property legitimately established (which is impossible) it will be very difficult to prove theft a crime."

 These remarks on property come at the beginning of "Juliette” and are obviously intended to act as guide to the  motives of the politicians, kings, and financiers who  people the six volumes of this work:
 "When laws were made and the weak consented to lose some of his  liberty to preserve the rest, the continued and peaceful  enjoyment of his possessions was undoubtedly the first  thing he desired, and the first object of the restraints he  asked for. The stronger consented to laws he knew he  could wriggle out of, and they were made. It was pronounced that every man should possess his heritage in  peace, and anyone troubling it should be punished. But  that was not the work of Nature but of man, henceforth  divided into two classes; the first who gave up a quarter  of its rights to possess the rest in peace ; the second who,  profiting by this quarter and seeing it could have the  other three portions when it wanted consented to prevent,  not his class despoiling the weak, but the weak despoiling  one another, so that it alone could despoil them at its ease. So theft .... was not banished from the earth  but changed its form; people robbed legally. Magis-trates robbed in having themselves paid for a justice they  should give gratuitously. The priest robbed in having himself paid for acting as a mediator between man and  his God. The merchant robbed by profiteering, by having his goods paid at a third more than their real  intrinsic value. Sovereigns robbed in imposing on their  subjects arbitrary taxes and imposts, etc. All these  thievings were permitted and authorised under the  specious name of 'rights,' and action was only taken  against the most natural, that is to say against the man who lacked money and tried to get it from those whom he  suspected to be richer than him, without considering that  the first thieves, to whom not a word was said, were the  unique cause of the crimes of the second. . . . When  the miserable peasant, reduced to charity by the enormous  taxes you impose upon him, leaves his plough, takes arms  and goes to await you on the highroad you commit an
infamous action if you punish him ; it is not he who is  in fault. . . ."

"We are frightened' he says, "of a revolution in the kingdom shortly; we see its germ in a too numerous population. The greater the extension  of the masses, the greater the danger ; the more enlightened  they are the more they are to be feared. First of all  we are going to suppress all the free schools whose lessons,  propagating too rapidly, give us painters, poets and philosophers where we only want labourers. What need have people like that of talents, and what use is there in  giving them to them? Let us rather diminish their number; France has need of a vigorous bleeding, and it  is the shameful parts we must attack. To attain this aim we are first of all going to attack the unemployed with  the greatest rigour; it is almost always from that class that  agitators appear; we are going to destroy the hospitals  and refuges; we don't want to leave the masses a single  asylum which can encourage their insolence. Bound  under chains a thousand times heavier than those they  bear in Asia, we want them to crawl like slaves, and we will  spare no means to accomplish this aim.
'These proceedings will be long,' said Clairwil 'and if you want to  act quickly you want speedier ones: war, famine, plague.'
'The first is certain,' replied Saint-Fond, 'We are shortly going to have a war. We don't want the third for we might be among the victims. As for famine, the corner  in grain at which we're working, will firstly cover us with riches and will soon reduce the masses to eating one  another. The Cabinet has decided on it because it is prompt, infallible, and will cover us with gold.'"

[We should recall the present austerity cuts on the principle of free higher
education and scholarships; lowering benefits, sending up the prices by VAT rises and bailing out the banks financing wars.)

Saint-Fond then continues his speech with an exaltation of the State which many dictators could
improve on:
" 'For a long time,' continued the minister, ‘penetrated as I am with the principles of Machiavelli,
I have been completely persuaded that individuals are of  no account in politics. Secondary machines of government, men should work for the prosperity of the government, and not the government for the prosperity of men.  Governments occupied with the individual are weak, the
only vigorous one is that which counts itself for everything, and men for nothing; the greater or lesser number of slaves in the State is indifferent, what is essential is  that the chains weigh heavily on the people, and that the  sovereign should be despotic. While Rome was a  democracy she was weak and feeble; when tyrants took  authority she was mistress of the earth. All force should  be concentrated in the sovereign, and since that force is  only moral, since physically the masses are the more  powerful, it can only be by an uninterrupted series of despotic actions that the government can acquire the  physical force it lacks; otherwise it will only exist in ideal. When we wish to impose on others we must accustom them little by little to see in us what really  doesn't exist, otherwise they will see us as we are and we will infallibly lose.'
'I have always believed’ said Clairwil ‘that the art of governing men is the one which  demands the maximum of hypocrisy’
'That is true’replied Saint-Fond, 'and the reason is obvious; you can  only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him  of enlightenment to lead him as we want, and that can  only be done by hypocrisy. . , . The government must  have more energy than the governed ; well, if that of the  governed is mixed with crimes, how can you expect the  government itself not to be criminal ? Are the punishments used against men anything except crimes ? What excuses them? State necessity '"

Elsewhere Saint-Fond develops his ideas for a plutocratic oligarchy with a slave basis. De Sade’s Juliette is one of the most  thorough  analysis of a  society ruled by money. Noirceuil, one of Juliette's earlier lovers, gives her as a  present an income of a thousand crowns with the remark
that it was intended for the hospitals: "The sick will have  a few soups less and you a few more fal-lals."

Opium of the People

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.” Marquis de Sade

When Juliette is talking to Ferdinand of  Naples, she says,"You keep the people in ignorance and superstition .... because you fear them if they are enlightened ; you drug them with opium .... so that they  shall not realise the way you oppress them." the fact that it may be a consolation to some is not a sufficient reason for it.
"I cannot see that the desire  to appease a few fools," says the Mother Superior to Juliette, "is worth the poisoning of millions of honest folk; and anyhow is it reasonable to make one's desires a  measure of the truth?"

The most savage  reactionary in De Sade’s works is the Bishop of Grenoble. Continually, too, he stresses the political reasons which  allowed the Church to emerge and which account for its  continual support. The statesman Saint-Fond is made to say "The force of the sceptre depends on that of the thurible; these two authorities have the greatest interest in mutual help and it is only by dividing them that the  masses will shake off the yoke. Nothing makes people so abject as religious fears; it is right that they should fear  eternal punishment if they revolt against their king;  that is why the European powers are always on good terms with Rome."

De Sade attacks the Church as an economic racket. "Unquestionably priests had their motives in inventing the  ridiculous fable of the soul's immortality; could they otherwise have made moribunds contribute?"

"When the strong wished to enslave the weak he persuaded him that a god had sanctified the chains with which he loaded him, and the latter, stupefied by misery, believed all he was told."

De Sade and Politics 

“What is more immoral than war?" Marquis de Sade

Politics and finance are succinctly summed up:  "The financier taught me about the  raising of taxes the atrocious system of enriching one-self alone at the expense of many unfortunates . . .  without thereby helping the State."
[A reminder of the motives behind tax havens and tax cuts for the corporations and the rich]

War is simply public and authorised murder, in which  hiredmen slaughter one another in the interests of tyrants.  It proves nothing except the ambition of the people  promoting it. "The sword is the weapon of him who is  in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and
stupidity'  It is merely imperial brigandage."
“When  Bras-de-fer and his companions join together to rob a  coach, are they any different to two sovereigns who join  together to despoil a third ? Yet the latter expect laurels  and immortality for crimes unnecessarily committed,  while the former will only get contempt, shame and the  gibbet for crimes authorised by hunger, the most  imperious of laws."

 The inconsistency of governments is laughed at when "they teach publicly the art of murder,
and reward him who is most successful in practising it,  and yet punish the man who gets rid of his enemy for a  private reason."

De Sade  had no patience with the notion of  honour whether it concerned private duels or war. "It  is pride, not necessity, which makes tyrants order their  generals to destroy other nations." About duels, he says, "Honour is an illusion born of human conventions  and customs, which are merely based on absurdity; it is  equally untrue that a man gains honour by assassinating  his country's enemies and that he loses it by assassinating his own."

The object of colonial expansion is to acquire cheap labour and raw materials according to the Marquis: "As long as a State's riches is  counted in gold, the mineral being in the bowels of the earth, labour is necessary to get it up, therefore slavery is necessary and the subjugation of negroes by the  whites "

We are shown colonial expansion at work, in the person of a kindly and honourable Portuguese delegate employing every form of lying, bribery  and treachery for the aims of State ; when he is acting for  his prince he can commit crimes which would make him  tremble if they were personal.  Understandably the  great fear of the people of Tamoe in the South Seas is European colonisation.

 De Sade describing the English  penetration of  Sweden writes:  "The English are always ready to serve those they think they can swallow up one day, after having disturbed their trade or weakened their power by means of their usurious loans."

 He also prophesies a great future for the United States: "The Republic of  Washington will grow little by little, like that of Romulus,  and will first subjugate America, and then make the rest
of the world tremble.''

Perhaps not quite the socialist as we understand the term to mean today but certainly worthy of the description proto-socialist. He brings a new meaning to the word sadism.

“Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain." Marquis de Sade 

AJJ