Donald Thomas
Related: Marquis de Sade -
The Marquis De Sade: A New Biography (1992) - Donald Thomas
The Marquis De Sade: A New Biography (1992) - Donald Thomas [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Product Description:
Donatien-Alphonse-Francois, Marquis de Sade 1740-1814, remains a man whose name is instantly recognized but whose life is obscure. Born close to royalty in the age of aristocratic decadence, he precipitated sexual scandals in the grand manner. Alleged poisoning and unnatural practices with a group of girls in Marseilles earned him a death sentence. While hunted by the law he contrived a winter of pleasures that led to further accusations of sexual crimes.
Imprisoned on six separate occasions, De Sade spent twenty seven years under detention, escaping the guillotine while within sight of it. and spending his last years in the dubious comfort of the asylum of Charenton. For a brief period after the revolution De Sade also became a judge, opposed the death penalty, and saved some of his sworn enemies from prison or execution. He was loved to the end by women who knew the worst of him, and he was fearless in his defiance of injustice.
What manner of paradox was this man? Was he a monster or was he a man of his time, driven to excess and persecuted by his contemporaries? De Sade, an aristocrat, lived through the waning days of Louis XVI, the Revolution, the Terror and the early years of Napoleon's reign. His literary. output fills a library shelf, and even now a English-language edition of his complete writings is in the planning stages.
In this illuminating and dramatic biography, Donald Thomas puts De Sade in perspective, unraveling his complex life and thought against the turbulent background of revolutionary France and considers his legacy in the context of our own time. What manner of man could have written Juliet, Justine and 120 Days of Sodom? This book offers a key. --Amazon.com
Notes to self on this book:
Janin, Jules: Le marquis de Sade In: Revue de Paris, 1834. --http://www.cab.u-szeged.hu/local/gondolatjel/93/bibl.html [Feb 2005]
Geoffrey Wall (auteur de Flaubert: A Life, Faber 2001) serait reconnaissant à celle ou à celui qui pourrait lui donner des informations concernant l'article de Jules Janin sur le marquis de Sade, publié dans la Revue de Paris en novembre 1834. (Nous savons que Flaubert a découvert Sade en 1839 par Janin.) --http://www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert/14bullet/bulle60.htm [Feb 2005]
Du Deffand, Marie-Anne de Vichy-Chamrond marquise: letters of 12-4-1768 and 13-4-1768 in Lettres de la marquise du Deffand à Horace Walpole, Paris: 1812.
Letters written by marquise Du Deffand to Horace Walpole tell the story of Rose Keller.
Published in the 1920s in Victorian England, Havelock Ellis’s case-study "Florrie," narrates the life of a suffragette who pursued feminism in public life and begged for chastisement and confinement in private life. Ellis as an early emancipated psycho-analyst taught Florrie how to accept her fantasies and gradually encouraged her to have her first orgasm through flagellation. --http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/Katrien_Jacobs/articles/masochism/masochism.html [Feb 2004]
On Thursday May 19, 1977, 20-year-old Carol Smith (not her real name) left Eugene, Oregon to visit a friend in the Northern California town of Westwood, almost 400 miles away She had no car or money for a bus, but she was used to getting around with her thumb, so she hitchhiked. --http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/sex_slave/index.html?sect=19 [Feb 2005]
The case of Neville George Clevely Heath was one of a series of famous post-1945 murder cases that occurred in the UK. --http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/neville_heath.htm [Feb 2005]
Thaw was a cocaine addict, or at least showed signs of drug abuse which caused him to have a wild-eyed stare most of the time. His drug abuse also seems to have fueled in him a kind of sadism that he took out mostly on women -- beating them with dog whips (as he did to Evelyn) and scalding them with boiling water in hotel bathtubs. --http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/century/sfeature/sf_interview.html [Feb 2005]
Myra Hindley (July 23, 1942-November 15, 2002), known as the "Moors Murderess", was born in Crumpshall in the English city of Manchester. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra_Hindley [Feb 2005]
At the office Christmas party, Brady, relaxed by a few drinks, asked Hindley for their first date. It was to be the beginning of her initiation into his secret world. That first night he took her to see The Nuremberg Trials. As the weeks went by, he played her records of Hitler's marching songs and encouraged her to read some of his favourite books - Mein Kampf, and Crime and Punishment, and de Sade's works [actually, two works: The Life and Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1934) by Geoffrey Gorer and a heavily expurgated version of Justine, for sale over the counter at W.H. Smith] --http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/moors/feather_4.html?sect=2 [Feb 2005]
In addition, readers should look at Heine's important scholarship: Maurice Heine. Le Marquis de Sade. Edited by Gilbert Lely. Paris, 1950. --http://neilschaeffer.com/sade/bibliography/ [Feb 2005]
On returning to England, he [Swinburne] met Richard Monckton Milnes, who introduced him to Richard Burton and (in 1862) to the works of the Marquis de Sade. Though Swinburne laughed at Sade's literary style, he was evidently liberated by finding that it was possible to write explicitly about the connections between pain and pleasure. Swinburne's poetry at this point becomes more daring and confident; but it also becomes more deeply informed by grief, love, loss and anger. --http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5111 [Feb 2005]
Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (June 19, 1809 - August 11, 1885) was an English poet and politician. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Monckton_Milnes%2C_1st_Baron_Houghton [Feb 2005]
[H]ankey also supplies sado-masochistic erotica to Swinburne, Richard Burton and Richard Monckton Milnes. --http://www.eroticabibliophile.com/people19.html [Sept 2004]
The brothels of 1875 - - Mary Jeffries ran the most exclusive brothel in the Victorian Era. Her chief assistant was a Mrs. Travers. She kidnapped children by offering to watch them while the parents went to gather luggage or buy tickets. Jeifries catered to nobility. "There was no form of sexual vice for which this murderess did not cater" (Terrot, 1960, p.91). Stead (Tenot, 1960, p.54), writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, described one of her houses,
"Flogging or birching goes on in brothels to a much greater degree than is generally believed. One of Mrs. Jeffrles' rooms was fitted up like a torture chamber... There were rings in the ceiling for hanging women and children up by the wrists, ladders for strapping them down at any angle, as well as the ordinary stretcher to which the victim is fastened so as to be unable to move. The instruments of flagellation included the ordinary birch, whips, holly branches and wire-thonged cat-o'-nine-tails."
Every once in a while the plight of child prostitutes catches and mo-mentarily holds the public awareness and consciousness. The Victorians were captured by reporters like Stead (Rush, 1980), and books such as Trafficking in Young Girls or War on the White Slave Trade (Sims, 1910) and Traffic in Girls and Florence Crittenton Missions (Edholm, 1893). Ennew 1986) pointed out that during the Victorian era the upswell of public sentiment/awareness for the sexual plight of children, coexisting with their exploitation, supports the contention that the present level of con-cern and activity regarding child prostitution is not unprecedented. However, left unsaid about these waves of consciousness is the entire ocean of blame for the victim surging behind it. --http://home.pacbell.net/tonyprey/burning/ [Feb 2005]