Marquis de Sade - a rebel, a perversion, a rapist ... a hero?

Marquis de Sade is a lot of things - a rapist, a pedophile, and a sweet-faced literary apologist of sexual cruelty. For his admirer, Donation Alfonse François de Sade is also a revolutionary, one of the first writers and thinkers, to explore the most elusive labyrinths of the human soul. For the judiciary, however, it is beyond doubt that the marquis was a sadist in the modern sense of the word. Among his many incarnations, including a prisoner for about 30 years in three regimes - royal, republican and imperial, de Sade never touched on painting. Therefore, it seems perverse that the Orsay Museum in Paris celebrates its 200th anniversary with an exhibition dedicated to the Marquis, the Guardian wrote. The exhibition "Sade Attacks the Sun" aims to prove that his writings, although officially banned in France until 1950, had a tremendous impact on the art of the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibition at the Impressionist Museum follows - where convincingly, where not so much - Sad's influence on the work of Eugene Delacroix, Francisco Goya, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Picasso, and surrealists.Sade was rediscovered and supported by the poet Guillaume Apolliner in 1909. Some of the Marquis fans of that time raised him alongside Rousseau or Voltaire as one of the great 18th-century iconoclasts in France who "killed the Lord" and broke the matrix of conventional thinking create modernity.

The first page of Sade's Justine

Somehow Sade is our Shakespeare. He has the same sense of tragedy, the same undermining of grandeur. The delight of strange sufferings is not the most important part of his writings. His irony bites, author of erotic literature. Many intellectuals, however, are annoyed by the claims that Sade is more a humanist and a fighter for social freedoms than a pervert. In his new book "Passion for Lawlessness," the philosopher Michel Onfreh puts the critique of Sade among the French leftist intellectuals and avant-garde artists on an ugly criticism. "It's strange to be called a hero," he says. "Even according to his worshipers, this person was a sexual criminal." Myth, according to Onfre, is also the claim that Sade was a libertarian, anarchist and revolutionary, even a feminist: "He is an arrogant aristocrat who believes he has the right to torture and abuse sexually with servants and wanderers. Among his "exploits" are described kidnappings and sexual torture of prostitutes. "For him, cruelty is genetically embedded in man and inseparable from sexual desire.Sadianism, not Sadism, has had a tremendous impact on the minds of men. The Marquis's reasoning was spread secretly by authors such as Gustave Flaubert and Friedrich Nietzsche because they supported his claims that the physical senses were the true driving forces of creation. This has a tremendous impact on the artists of Modernism - from Cezan to surrealists.