Father of sadism is recast as 'humane' maverick

Can the Marquis de Sade rescue the French cinema from a summer beating? A gentle, rather poetic movie about the French aristocrat whose name is synonymous with pleasure-through-the-infliction-of-pain appeared in cinemas throughout France last week. It immediately went to a creditable number four in the French movie charts, at the end of a summer in which a score of much-hyped French movies collapsed in the face of Hollywood opposition.

Can the Marquis de Sade rescue the French cinema from a summer beating? A gentle, rather poetic movie about the French aristocrat whose name is synonymous with pleasure-through-the-infliction-of-pain appeared in cinemas throughout France last week. It immediately went to a creditable number four in the French movie charts, at the end of a summer in which a score of much-hyped French movies collapsed in the face of Hollywood opposition.

Sade, directed by Benoît Jacquot and starring the all-purpose French male lead of the moment, Daniel Auteuil, has received generally good reviews (with one exception).

It presents a brief episode in the life of the naughty Marquis, when he is installed in a kind of luxurious holding camp for "aristocrats with connections" at the height of the Terror following the French Revolution in 1794.

All the violence in the film, all the "sadism", comes from Robespierre's priggish revolutionaries, slicing off hundreds of innocent heads in the name of "purity", "humanity" and "reason". The Marquis, the man who preached and practised extreme forms of "vice", is presented as a kind of exhausted maverick, part libertine, part libertarian.

The fiftysomething Sade is more sane, and more humane, after his exploration of the darkest recesses of the psyche, than the rationalists working double shifts on the guillotine to create a new age of "virtue".

The film also stars an emerging French actress, Isild Le Besco, as Emilie, an 18-year-old noblewoman who is helped to understand her sexuality by Sade. The movie has no scenes of sexual torture; no sexual brutality or bestiality. It has only one, rather innocent, sex scene when the thoughtful Marquis arranges for Emilie and a young gardener to lose their virginity together.

An obvious question arises. Can this really be the man whose oeuvre includes 120 Days of Sodom and Justine or the Pains of Virtue and several other works which examine, and even condone, torture and murder as forms of sexual pleasure and human fulfilment?

The publication of Sade's works was banned in France until the 1950s and they were not readily available until the early 1990s. The movie's director admits that he first read the author - a great French stylist, despite everything - in English.

Partly in order to annoy the bourgeoisie, the Marquis has always had a following among French left-wing intellectuals. It is chic to call him the "divine marquis" and regard him as a literary genius and misunderstood, if extreme, advocate of human freedom. There has been an attempt to rehabilitate him in recent years, with works pointing out - quite rightly - that what Sade did and what Sade wrote were two different things.

Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 into a declining aristocratic family from Provence. By the time he was 20, he was notorious as a dissolute gambler, seducer of young women and client of prostitutes (in other words a typical young aristocrat of the day).

He was persecuted first by a law-and-order government and then by his own in-laws, accused of indulging in blasphemous, sexual escapades, modelled on the Black Mass.

He was twice imprisoned. The aristocratic Sade was, in fact, one of the handful of people freed from the Bastille when it was stormed by the Paris mob in July 1789. It was during his many years in jail that he wrote his most celebrated works, which also include a kind of obsessive diary of masturbation, which he calls "prestiges" (6,536 recorded between 1777 and 1780 alone).

Although freed by the Revolution, he was re-arrested as a rather obvious challenge to the new, worldwide era of virtue ordained by the odious Robespierre. He was saved by Robes- pierre's own execution; wrote a lot of Mills-and-Boony, mawkish, non-sadistic, unsuccessful plays; was arrested again under Napoleon, and died in an asylum in 1814, aged 74. There is nothing in the considerable record of Sade's life to suggest that he indulged in the sexual tortures and murders described in his works. On the other hand, it is difficult to accept a man so evidently troubled and such a monomaniac as a literary genius (whatever the beauties of his style).

The new film, partly through the talent of the actors, is moving in its own right. Obsession with abstract virtue - with the perfectibility of man - is more destructive, more wicked, more sadistic, it suggests, than the acceptance and exploration of human sinfulness. Robespierre, the apostle of "virtue", is shown as a precursor of Hitler and Stalin - something, which, even 200 years later, the French usually have difficulty in accepting.