‘The revolution,’ Baudelaire wrote in his notes on Les Liaisons dangereuses, ‘was made by voluptuaries.’ He was drawing attention to two paradoxes. One was the role that France’s free-thinking, pleasure-loving aristocrats – the real-life versions of Laclos’s characters – played in instigating this upheaval, undermining the system that upheld...
Dolmancé, the male libertine in Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, sees humanity as material for the libertine’s desires, even – or perhaps especially – when they bring harm to their objects. Cruelty towards one’s lovers, he declares, is ‘a virtue and not a vice’, because it provides an outlet for the libertine’s superior mental and physical energies. Here again the works of Sade and Laclos converge: love, like God, is dismissed in both as a ‘disgusting chimaera’, a mawkish delusion.