Marquis de Sade as a Key Figure of Enlightenment

The Marquis de Sade as a Key Figure of Enlightenment: How His Crystal Genius Still Speaks to Today’s World and Its Major Problems discusses how the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) stretched the dimensions of reputation and notoriety nearly obscuring his mastery in literature and philosophy while braving the Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France’s «age of iron [hell]» with unheard-of determination to be read and taken seriously as not just a writer and a contributing citizen but as an engaged educator, a committed philosopher, and an uncompromisingly fierce moralist. Sade has been a strange combination of what society dreads and what it needs most for its salvation: mature enlightenment that is not afraid to see and face real problems so that there can be solutions. This book stresses how the literary and intellectual public needs to reconnect with the moral gems of this demon(ized) man, nowadays more so than ever, to explain our most critical issues and to reiterate the long-standing solutions Sade professed from the 1780s through the early nineteenth century. This work not only reestablishes the creative, literary, and intellectual Sade, it critically stages and highlights the philosophical Marquis as a world citizen trapped between theories of social classes and a loose-fitting messianism. It is evident throughout the work how Sade’s deep concerns for humanity flatly contradict the popular rhetoric (of wickedness and perversion) recycled and amplified since his first writing days. The Marquis de Sade as a Key Figure of Enlightenment offers a new perspective on this complex writer and on the intimate workings of our human world. It is a valuable resource for courses on French literature, eighteenth-century studies, the Enlightenment, literary criticism, and gender and sexuality studies.

Moussa Traoré earned a PhD in French studies at the University of Minnesota, after studying English and civilization in his native Burkina Faso. He has taught at the University of Minnesota and at Century College, and he is the author of One Story of Academia: Race Lines and the Rhetoric of Distinction through the Académie française (Peter Lang, 2010).