"No kind of sensation is keener or more active than that of pain." wrote Count Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, who chose to call himself the Marquis de Sade. "It is simply a matter of jangling all our nerves with the most violent possible shock." Born in 1740 to titled parents, then educated in the spirit of the libertine by his uncle, a profligate Benedictine abbot, the Marquis came to believe in the right of the individual to abuse and exploit any privilege, without regard to moral or legal restrictions. "Crime is the soul of lust," he hypothesized. "It is not the object of debauchery that excites us but, rather, the idea of evil." Consequently, from 1763 to the French Revolution, his life was plagued by an almost uninterrupted series of arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations for offenses ranging from flogging and sodomy to aphrodisiac poisoning. His bizarre compulsions also inspired the seduction of his wife's sister and a number of household orgies with a bisexual harem of servants. While in prison in 1782, he turned to writing, for want of other diversions: the wildly imaginative sexual atrocities that fill his works are testimony to his bestial appetites. "Every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates," he claimed. But while he favored all forms of personal violence, he was repelled by the impersonal mass cruelty of the Revolution. Ironically, it was not his sensational sexuality but his criticisms of Napoleon that finally confined him to an asylum in 1803, where he remained until his death in 1814. Now, in De Sade, an American International film starring Keir Dullea, director Cy Endfield offers a surrealistic chronicle of the personal excesses and public disgraces of the man who gave sadism a bad name: his own.
