Sade animates Newtonian virtue :: French Literature Papers

Sade animates Newtonian virtue Sade integrated 18th degree centigrade French materialism into his draw at a such an elemental level that it is no exaggeration to say, as we will show here, that his pornography dramatises it directly. I will further argue that there is a strongly moral tone to his materialism that characters are expected to practise what they preach, and to believe in their note value system. The last part of my paper will look at how the opposing value system, Christianity, is satirised through the figure of Justine and that of the passive victims in general. Sade was an atheist, a Lockean sensationist and a materialist he avidly read Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopdie and the writings of the philosophes dHolbach, Robinet, Condillac, La Mettrie and Buffon. He littered his works with references both tacit and expressed to the philosophes and passionately espoused what he saw as their cause. Their thinking was crucial to the construction of his own uvre, and as he commented himself on his writing practice, que veux-tu quon fasse sans livres ? Il faut en tre entour pour travailler, sinon on ne peut faire que des contes de fes, et je nai pas cet esprit-l. what am I supposed to do without books ? You have to be surrounded with them to work, differently you can only do fairy-stories, and Im not that way inclined. I hope to show here just how close his own work was to the materialism of the philosophes. The Encyclopdie itself advocated a close expository relationship between science and literature. The article Lettres explains that les lettres et les sciences proprement dites, ont entrelles lenchainement, les liaisons, et les rapports les plus etroits cest dans lEncyclopdie quil importe de le demontrer. literature and science are linked by the closest contact and relationship it is up to the Encyclopdie to show that this is the case. This assertion is of course based on the belief that science and literature are or should be about the same thing, that is to say, they are about life and nature. Life and nature, in the Encyclopdie, mean military issue in all its various forms. Matter was defined by the Encyclopdie as a substance tendue, solide, divisible, mobile et passible, le premier principe de