Marquis de Sade
Critical reception

Contemporary critics were generally hostile to Sade's works. When his play Oxtiern premiered in 1791, the critic for the Moniteur stated, "there is interest and energy in the play, but the role of Oxtiern is a revolting atrocity." The anonymous Justine and Juliette were seen as obscene works. A review of Justine in the Journal Général de France stated that although Sade displayed "a rich and brilliant" imagination, "It is difficult to not often close the book out of disgust and indignation." There were rumours that Danton and Robespierre used Justine as an aid to masturbation and to inflame their lust for blood. Rétif de la Bretonne published an Anti-Justine in 1798. By 1800, numerous authors were attributing Justine to Sade. One reviewer called Sade's Crimes of Love, "a detestable book written by a man suspected of having written a yet more horrible one."

The mostly hostile reception continued throughout the 19th century. The French historian Jules Michelet called Sade the "professor emeritus of crime." Although writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Byron and Poe expressed admiration for Sade's work, Swinburne found them unintentionally funny and Anatole France said, "their most dangerous ingredient is a fatal dose of boredom." In 1886, the sexologist Kraft-Ebbing treated Sade's work as a compendium of sexual pathologies and gave the term sadism its clinical definition.

Interest in Sade increased in the 20th century. His biographer Laurence Louis Bongie writes, "Many different Sades have been invented over the years, and nearly always with passionate hostility towards opposing or even complementary definitions of the man." In 1909, Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed". André Breton called him "a surrealist in Sadism" committed to "total liberation, both social and moral." Others see him as a precursor to Nietzsche and Freud. Writing soon after World War II, Raymond Queneau argued that Sade's moral universe prefigured National-Socialism.

Simone de Beauvoir in her essay "Must we burn Sade?" (published in 1951–52) argued that although Sade is a writer of the second rank and "unreadable," his value is making us rethink "the true nature of man's relationship to man."

After Sade's work became freely available in unexpurgated editions in France, the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1960s, critical interest in Sade accelerated. In 1971, Roland Barthes published an influential textual analysis, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, which largely resisted psychological, social and biographical interpretations of his work.

A number of prominent female commentators have praised Sade. Angela Carter, writing in 1978, argued that Sade put pornography in the service of women by claiming rights of free sexuality for them and depicting them in positions of power. Camille Paglia, writing in 1990, presented Sade as a rigorous philosopher of power relationships and sexuality who was undervalued in American academia because his emphasis on violence was difficult to accept. She argued that Sade could be best understood as a satirist, responding "point by point" to Rousseau's claims that society inhibits and corrupts mankind's innate goodness. Annie Le Brun has praised Sade for his emphasis on sexuality and the body, and has argued that Sade should be read as poetry and has been best appreciated by poets.

In contrast, Andrea Dworkin writes that in Sade's fiction women are naturally prostitutes and men have a natural right to rape women. The female libertines only enjoy power as the male libertines conceive it and only as long as they adopt violent male sexuality.

In 1990, Sade was published in the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series, which Roger Shattuck calls "an honor which corresponds to an artist being admitted into the Louvre." In 2014, French novelist Pierre Guyotat said, "Sade is, in a way, our Shakespeare. He has the same sense of tragedy, the same sweeping grandeur."

Andrea Dworkin, writing in 1981, condemned the veneration of Sade as a veneration of violence against women. Roger Shattuck, writing in 1996, argued that writers who try to rehabilitate Sade place too much emphasis on abstract notions of transgression, linguistic play and irony and marginalize the sexual violence at the core of his life and work. He stated that Sade's works are likely to be harmful to the young and "unformed minds." French intellectual Michel Onfray states, "it is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero... Even according to his most hero-worshipping biographers, this man was a sexual delinquent".
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