Sade animates Newtonian virtue :: French Literature Papers

Sade animates Newtonian virtuousness Sade integrated 18th century French philistinism into his add at a such an elemental level that it is no travesty to say, as we will show here(predicate), that his pornography dramatises it directly. I will hike up 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 jimmy system. The weather 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 Encyclop elapse and the literary productions of the philosophes dHolbach, Robinet, Condillac, La Mettrie and Buffon. He littered his works with references both still and explicit to the philosophes and passionately espoused what he saw as their cause. Their thinking was pivotal to the constr uction 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 deal to be surrounded with them to work, otherwise 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 accomplishment 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 whimsy that science an d literature are or should be about the corresponding thing, that is to say, they are about life and nature. Life and nature, in the Encyclopdie, mean take in all its various forms. Matter was defined by the Encyclopdie as a substance tendue, solide, divisible, mobile et passible, le premier principe de