‘Cet esprit le plus libre qui ait encore existé’: Sade and the Spiritual Libertines
2008; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00119.x
ISSN1754-0208
Autores Tópico(s)European Political History Analysis
ResumoIn view of Sade's reputation as an atheist, it is surprising to find that many of his readers have written of the religious quality of his work. Some have elevated his books to the status of sacred texts. In 1946 Jean Paulhan claimed of Sade's work: ‘Il fait songer aux livres sacrés des grandes religions.’1 The cover of the Arrow edition of Juliette (1991) carried a quotation from a New York Times review saying that ‘The Marquis is a missionary. He has written a new religion. Juliette is one of the holy books.’ In his Mélanges bibliographiques Paul Lacroix wrote that in 1800 ‘cet abominable homme préparait [...] une édition illustrée de ce qu’il appelait son évangile: Justine et Juliette’, suggesting Sade's own sensitivity to the religious atmosphere of his writing.2 Taking things a step further, others have professed religious devotion to the work of the ‘divine Marquis’. In mid-Victorian England, Algernon Swinburne described Sade as the ‘apostle of perfection’ and declared himself a disciple of the ‘mystic pages of the martyred Marquis de Sade’.3 In his De l’érotisme (1923) Robert Desnos offered himself up as a willing martyr for the values of Sade's work, according the author a place ‘au rang des fondateurs de religions’.4 At the Sade colloquium held in Aix-en-Provence in 1966 André Bouër proclaimed to his audience: ‘La Bible aide les Israéliens à mieux fouiller. Ma Bible à moi, ce sont Les Cent Vingt Journées.’5 Others still have described the generative psychology of Sade's work as religious. In their diary entry of 9 April 1861 the Goncourts reported Gustave Flaubert's description of Sade's work as the logical culmination of a Catholic hatred of the human body.6 Swinburne, after his first reading of Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, voiced a similar idea, apostrophising Sade as follows: ‘You are a Christian ascetic bent on earning the salvation of the soul through the mortification of the flesh. You are one of the family of St Simeon Stylites.’7 In 1881 Emile Zola claimed that Sade, haunted by the Catholic obsessions with which he was raised, maintained the essence of his religious belief in an inverted form by debasing all that the Church held to be most sacred.8 In A Rebours (1884) J.-K. Huysmans echoed Zola's assertion, interpreting the virulence of Sade's blasphemy as a failure to renounce Christianity.9 In the twentieth century Pierre Klossowski, in Sade, mon prochain (1947), examined parallels between Sade's work and the principal characteristics of Gnosticism.10 Maurice Blanchot, in Lautréamont et Sade (1949), described similarities between mysticism and Sade's psychological paradigm of transcendent desire.11 In ‘Sade et l’homme normal’ (1950) Georges Bataille equated the extremities of evil embodied in Sade's work with the extremities of religious sanctity, opposing both to the means by which social productivity is protected.12 And at Jean-Jacques Pauvert's trial in 1956 for publishing works by Sade, André Breton concluded his statement for the defence by invoking the Gnostics and the Cathars as Sade's intellectual antecedents.13 These writers have all testified to the religious character of Sade's work, and if their comments appear paradoxical, seeing that many critics currently contextualise Sade in the intellectual milieu of the Enlightenment, then the sweeping association of fiction and religion that Sade himself proposed in ‘Idée sur les romans’ (1800) seems equally so. Published as a preface to the stories collected in Les Crimes de l’amour, Sade opened this important essay by considering the historical and psychological genesis of the novel, which he associated with the birth of religious belief: ‘N’en doutons point,’ he wrote, ‘ce fut dans les contrées qui, les premières, reconnurent des Dieux que les romans prirent leur source.’14 Developing the link between the two, he proceeded to relate fiction and religion to naturally occurring psychological instincts common to all human beings; dismissing the need for an accurate geographical and historical genealogy of the novel, he stated: ‘Il est des modes, des usages, des goûts qui ne se transmettent point; inhérents à tous les hommes, ils naissent naturellement avec eux: partout où ils existent, se retrouvent des traces inévitables de ces goûts, de ces usages et de ces modes.’15 As he saw it, novel-writing responds to universal compulsions; regardless of the time and place of birth, sexual and religious instincts are invariably manifested in human endeavours, particularly in the creation of prose fiction: ‘Partout il faut qu’il prie, partout il faut qu’il aime; et voilà la base de tous les romans.’16 By implication, Sade understood the importance of religious desire to be equal to that of sexual desire in understanding human nature and its realisation in the novel. Given the centrality of sex in the psychology of his own fiction, it is clearly important to consider the ways in which his intellectual mode of operation could be described as religious. The remainder of this essay will develop a religious context in which to consider Sade's work. Taking as a point of departure the word ‘libertin’– the name that Sade gave to his criminal protagonists and, more generally, the designation of the genre of the libertine novel in which he wrote – it will compare Sade's work with the heresy of the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines. These movements flourished between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, dying out some two centuries before Sade began to write, and it is therefore necessary to make some preliminary comments about the objectives and limitations of what is to follow. The Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines were not literary movements, and they are principally known not by what they wrote but by what has been written about them. It is not my intention to claim that they had any direct textual influence on Sade's literature. Yet the following analysis is not intended simply to reveal similarities between Sade's thought and a Christian heresy from which he was chronologically detached. The last part of the essay shows how the influence of the Spiritual Libertines developed into the eighteenth century and suggests how this might affect our consideration of Sade's work. Tracing the course of this development will involve some comment on the libertines of the seventeenth century – the libertins érudits, as they have come to be known. It may seem that a consideration of Sade's work under the rubric of libertinism would be more pertinently based on contextualisation with this later movement. The reasons for choosing to do otherwise will become clear in the following pages. In his introduction to Les Libertins au XVIIe siècle (1964) Antoine Adam observed that by the end of the seventeenth century the epithet libertin had come to apply in the broadest sense to anyone with a predilection for freedom.17 Through the eighteenth century several editions of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux defined the word with reference to disobedient children, monks on unauthorised leave from the monastery, pleasure-seekers and anyone considered to be strong-willed and averse to discipline. A further significant application was to sceptics, atheists and anyone lacking in respect for religious authority, which is one of the meanings of the word popularised by René Pintard's Le Libertinage érudit en France dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (1943). Pintard's work preceded a body of research into the work of seventeenth-century poets, scholars and philosophers, including Théophile Viau, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pierre Gassendi, François de la Mothe Vayer and Charles Sorel – the libertins érudits– with whom the concept of libertinage is now commonly associated. A further use of the word, with which we will be presently concerned, passed from the Dictionnaire de Trévoux into the Encyclopédie, where Boucher d’Argis provided the following definition in his article ‘Libertins’: Fanatiques qui s’éleverent en Hollande vers l’an 1528, dont la croyance est qu’il n’y a qu’un seul esprit de Dieu répandu par-tout, qui est & qui vit dans toutes les créatures; que notre ame n’est autre chose que cet esprit de Dieu; qu’elle meurt avec le corps; que le péché n’est rien, & qu’il ne consiste que dans l’opinion, puisque c’est Dieu qui fait tout le bien & tout le mal: que le paradis est une illusion, & l’enfer un phantome inventé par les Théologiens. Ils disent enfin, que les politiques ont inventé la religion pour contenir les peuples dans l’obéissance de leurs lois; que la régénération spirituelle ne consistoit qu’àétouffer les remords de la conscience; la pénitence à soutenir qu’on n’avait fait aucun mal; qu’il était licite & même expédient de feindre en matiere de religion, & de s’accommoder à toutes les sectes.18 The article describes a group of heretics known as the Spiritual Libertines, who came to prominence during the years of religious unrest that surrounded the Reformation. Frequent use of nineteenth-century sources in the present text will reflect the fact that little has been said about the Spiritual Libertines in recent studies of libertinism in French literature, the influence of Pintard's work having been to focus enquiries mainly on works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Typically, they are now mentioned as part of an etymological background that includes reference to the Latin root of the word libertin, a translation of the Bible published in 1477 that, until recently, was thought to contain the first use of the word in French, and Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui se nomment Spirituels (1545), in which Jean Calvin denounced the movement described by Boucher d’Argis.19 It is often supposed that little is known about the Spiritual Libertines: Raymond Trousson, in his introduction to Romans libertins du XVIIIe siècle (1993), demonstrates a preponderant attitude among writers on libertinism in French literature by describing them as ‘des dissidents anabaptistes [...] dont on ne sait à peu près rien’.20 Yet the movement of the Spiritual Libertines did not lack momentum or influence. Simon Cheyron, in his Etude sur les libertins spirituels au temps de la Réforme (1858), stated of their proportions: ‘Le mal fut si grand que des Eglises entières furent menacées dans leur existence par l’invasion de cette secte.’21 In his Histoire du panthéisme populaire au moyen âge et au seizième siècle (1875) Auguste Jundt included an extract from a letter written by Martin Bucer in 1538 to warn Marguerite de Navarre of the gathering threat posed by the Spiritual Libertines, in which he stated: ‘Sans doute vous ignorez combien ils sont nombreux ceux que cette contagion a atteints.’22 This did little to prevent the official reception of Quintin Thierry and Antoine Pocques, Spiritual Libertines from Lille, at the court of Marguerite de Navarre in 1543, sixty years or so before the rise of the first libertins érudits. It is also misleading to say that almost nothing is known about the Spiritual Libertines. While the precise details of how the movement came into being are unclear, they have been the subject of a number of scholarly works and their beliefs can be summarised as follows. Considering God to inhere throughout the natural world, they took their own actions to be the manifestation of divine will. Recognising no source of authority other than that provided by their own senses, they opposed organised religion, which they saw as an instrument of social repression, and considered themselves to be absolved of the restraint of moral law. Indeed, some believed that violation of the law was incumbent on them as an affirmation of their own divinity. They promoted community of property and sexual freedom and, in their more extreme pronouncements, justified acts of theft, incest and murder. They rejected the notion of an afterlife, claiming heaven and hell to be states of mind, the former produced by acquiescence to God's will and the latter by resistance. Cheyron succinctly summarised these beliefs in two words: ‘panthéisme antinomien’.23 To account for the appearance of the Spiritual Libertines it is necessary to acknowledge the heresy of the Free Spirit, which developed some three centuries earlier. While a precise explanation of the appearance of the heresy of the Spiritual Libertines in the 1530s has remained elusive, historians have concurred in placing their doctrine in a religious lineage dating back to this earlier movement, which was inspired by two religious thinkers from Paris. The first was David de Dinant, who worked in the retinue of Pope Innocent III until his death some time after 1215. Although his only work, Quaternuli, has been lost, the essence of his thought was recorded by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. David, as described by Gabriel Théry in David de Dinant: Etude sur son panthéisme matérialiste (1925), was a philosopher whose dialectical materialism led him to a doctrine of pantheism and the assertion that reality resided only in the indivisible and identical categories of God, spirit and matter. Following David's death, his thought was given a mystical slant by Amaury de Bène, who combined the ideas of Quaternuli with the ninth-century mystical pantheism of Scot Eriguena's De Divisione naturae. Yet neither David nor Amaury proposed a specifically antinomian interpretation of their pantheistic beliefs. It was Amaury's followers who did so: Raoul Vaneigem reports in his La Résistance au christianisme (1993) that of the eighty heretics who were tried and burned in Strasbourg in 1215 for propagating Amaury's ideas: ‘Il s’est trouvé mêlés aux vaudois et cathares quelques accusés pour affirmer que “les péchés les plus grossiers sont permis et conformes à la nature”.’24 Although it was too late to place Amaury on trial, as he had been dead for several years, his body was exhumed, his remains fed to dogs and his bones cast onto unconsecrated ground. The work of both David and Amaury was condemned by Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but their influence could not be contained and was carried beyond the borders of France and through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Free Spirit, whose doctrine, recorded by Albert the Great in the Anonyme de Passau, included the beliefs that all beings are emanations of God and that the spiritually enlightened, themselves elevated to the status of Gods, can commit mortal sin with impunity.25 While the legacy of clandestine heretical movements is often difficult to chart, it is commonly agreed that the heresy of the Spiritual Libertines developed continuously from that of the Free Spirit, as the similarity of the names of the two movements suggests. In 1776 Johan Mosheim wrote that the pronouncements of the Spiritual Libertines ‘ressemblent si fort à celles des Beghards, ou Frères du libre esprit, que je ne doute point que ces Libertins ou Spirituels [...] ne fussent un reste de cette ancienne Secte’.26 Cheyron devoted a chapter of his short book to the similarities between the pronouncements of the two movements, concluding that: ‘Il nous est bien difficile de ne pas admettre que les premiers [the Spiritual Libertines] ont été engendrés par les seconds [the Free Spirit].’27 Raoul Allier and Jundt both referred to the Spiritual Libertines as ‘héritiers directs’ of the Free Spirit.28 And in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) Norman Cohn stated: ‘In the sixteenth century during the Reformation the Low Countries and northern France witnessed the spread of a doctrine which was called Spiritual Liberty but which in all essentials was still the old doctrine of the Free Spirit.’29 These writers have integrated the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines into a single religious movement spanning three and a half centuries, and the following analysis will examine Sade's work against the background of the two considered as a whole. A number of objections can be made to comparing Sade's philosophy with any form of religious thought. Persistent declarations of atheism run throughout his work, which is well known for its borrowings from the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment. His libertine philosophers are unrelentingly hostile to the concept of God and the afterlife, and extended diatribes attacking the philosophical justification of both are a dominant feature of all his major novels. Similarly, he creates numerous opportunities to submit scriptural and ecclesiastical authorities to the most excoriating ridicule. These aspects of his work imply a mode of thought that is quintessentially non-religious. Do they not militate against comparing his work to any form of religious belief, even heretical? The first point to make here is that the heresy we are dealing with was concerned with knowledge and the process of life on earth, rather than with preparation for the afterlife, distinguishing its interests from those of orthodox Christianity. Herbert Grundmann, in Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (1994), wrote that the Free Spirit ‘did not deny their philosophical origins’, stating that they recognised ‘knowledge alone’ as ‘the sole factor of salvation as well as the very goal of salvation’.30 Rejecting Christian teleology and the heavenly graces of faith and hope, the Free Spirit sought to demonstrate this knowledge, which they equated with union with God, through the realisation of desire. This led Henri Delacroix to write of their beliefs: ‘Suivre ses passions, les imposer comme une loi supérieure aux créatures moins fortes, s’enivrer de l’orgueil de soi-même et de se chanter sa propre louange, voilà la sagesse.’31 They believed that the successful realisation of this knowledge produced heaven on earth, while failure led to hell. Enlightenment could be achieved only in totality or not at all, separating humanity into two groups. Again Henri Delacroix wrote of the heresy: ‘Il restait deux principes en présence, l’Esprit et ce qui est irréductible à l’Esprit, la résistance, le non-être, la passivité; le mouvement de l’Univers vient du conflit de ces deux principes.’32 Sade's libertines, similarly, are concerned with knowledge, but not the empirical, partial knowledge with which science concerns itself. Rather, they seek enlightenment that is produced by submission to the will of nature, a form of knowledge of which Mme Delbène, Juliette's tutor in vice, declares: ‘Une seule résistance [...] te ferait perdre tout le fruit des dernières chutes; tu ne connaîtras rien si tu n’as pas tout connu, et si tu es assez timide pour t’arrêter avec elle, elle t’échappera pour jamais.’33 Those who are able to receive this knowledge are elevated to the status of gods, while those who resist it are condemned to the constantly renewed torments suffered by Justine. The opposition thus created between libertines and victims embodies a universal principle ‘essentiel au maintient des astres, à la végétation, et sans lequel tout serait à l’instant détruit’.34 Like the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines, Sade described a separation of the initiated from the uninitiated based on enlightenment. The concern common to all was a type of knowledge demonstrated through the realisation of desire. On this basis it is possible to establish a first point of comparison between Sade's thought and the heresy of the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines. But what of the more particular problems mentioned above, concerning Sade's hostility to organised religion, his materialism and his atheism? Cheyron described the philosophical underpinning of the heresy of the Spiritual Libertines as follows: ‘Le prétendu spiritualisme des Libertins n’était qu’un honteux et grossier matérialisme.’35 The materialism of their philosophy led them to consider the human senses as the only legitimate source of information and to reject ecclesiastical authority. Yet it was not the case that the Spiritual Libertines or the Free Spirit were ignorant of the scriptures. As Jundt observed, rather than considering the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible to be irrelevant, the Free Spirit often attacked it with virulent pronouncements of blasphemy: ‘Le matérialisme le plus grossier, revêtu de formes de langage blasphématoires, paraît avoir régné dans la secte du libre esprit.’36 Delacroix, paraphrasing Jean de Dürbheim's condemnation of the Free Spirit written in 1317, stated: ‘Ils n’ont point de respect pour l’hostie et la blasphèment. Ils méprisent les promesses évangéliques et refusent à l’homme de bien le droit d’espérer une récompense à sa vertu.’37 Calvin, in his Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins, reported Quintin's last words as he was burned at the stake to have been an exhortation to those in attendance to avoid the scriptures: ‘Etant venu sur l’échafaud [...] il exhorta deux fois le peuple de se bien garder de lire la sainte Ecriture, qu’il n’y avait rien de pire, de plus pernicieux pour les simples gens.’38 Sade's materialism, blasphemy and hostility to ecclesiastical authority, then, do not necessarily invalidate the relationship that we are developing, as they were also characteristic of the Spiritual Libertines and the Free Spirit. But does his atheism not invalidate a comparison of his work with the beliefs of a religious sect? The doctrine of pantheism is incompatible with the Christian concept of God, and the name of the Spiritual Libertines quickly became synonymous with atheism.39 Yet the materialism of their heresy did not imply their abandonment of the concept of divinity. Their beliefs proposed no difference between God and the natural world, which, rather than undermining a comparison with Sade's work, draws their thought into closer congruence with it. Sade laid the pantheistic basis of his philosophy in Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond, written in 1782. The dying man of the title opposes the priest's Christian belief with a cosmological vision that situates human beings in a direct, subservient relationship to nature. While denying God's existence, he describes nature as a purposive power, claiming that man's duty on earth is to accomplish its design by submitting to the desires that it has created in him: Créé par la nature avec des goûts très vifs, avec des passions très fortes; uniquement placé dans ce monde pour m’y livrer et pour les satisfaire, et ces effets de ma création n’étant que des nécessités relatives aux premières vues de la nature ou, si tu l’aimes mieux, que des dérivaisons essentielles à ses projets sur moi, tous en raison de ses lois, je ne me repens que de n’avoir pas assez reconnu sa toute-puissance, et mes uniques remords ne portent que sur le médiocre usage que j’ai fait des facultés (criminelles selon toi, toutes simples selon moi) qu’elle m’avait données pour la servir.40 The dying man fuses the creative principle of God with nature, and the priest responds to his declaration by stating: ‘Vous prêtez à la chose créée toute la puissance du Créateur, et ces malheureux penchants qui vous ont égaré, vous ne voyez pas qu’ils ne sont que des effets de cette nature corrompue à laquelle vous attribuez la toute-puissance.’41 This pantheistic tone, which runs throughout Sade's libertine novels, is subsequently most evident in Histoire de Juliette, in which declarations such as La Durand's ‘Dieu n’est que la nature, et tout égal à la nature’ stand out amid a plural insistence on nature as a unified material and metaphysical entity.42 Just as David de Dinant asserted matter to be one of three indivisible categories, so Sade's assertion of the falseness of the apparent multiplicity of things is typically pantheistic: ‘A cet instant que nous appelons mort, tout paraît se dissoudre; nous le croyons, par l’excessive différence qui se trouve alors, entre cette portion de matière, qui ne paraît plus animée; mais cette mort n’est qu’imaginaire, elle n’existe que figurativement et sans aucune réalité.’43 Surpassing a simple assertion of philosophical materialism, Sade integrated such statements into what Michel Delon described in his introduction to Histoire de Juliette as ‘une théologie ou [...] une contre-théologie de l’Etre suprême en méchanceté’.44 He combined declarations of the material unity of nature with an assertion of its metaphysical essence, leading Juliette to declaim at the novel's conclusion: ‘Nous lui obéissons donc en nous livrant au mal.’45 This idea of the moral precedent of nature prompts a final point of comparison between Sade's work and the heresy of the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines. The Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines often asserted antinomianism as the corollary of their pantheism. As they believed God's spirit to inhere throughout nature, they saw their own acts as the manifestation of God's will, transgression of the moral law becoming the necessary assertion of their union with God. Calvin's Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins contains the following report concerning the Spiritual Libertine Quintin de Thierry: Cette grosse touasse de Quintin se trouva une fois en une rue où on avait tué un homme. Il y avait là d’aventure quelque fidèle qui dit: ‘Hélas, qui a fait ce méchant acte?’ Incontinent, il répondit en son picard: ‘Puisque tu le veux savoir, cha esté mi’. L’autre, comme tout étonné, lui dit: ‘Comment seriez-vous bien si lâche?’ A quoi il répliqua: ‘Che ne suis-je mie. Ch’est Dieu.’‘Comment, dit l’autre, faut-il imputer à Dieu les crimes qu’il commande être punis? Adonc, ce pouacre dégorge plus fort son venin, disant: ‘Oui, ch’est ti, ch’est my, ch’est Dieu. Car ce que ti nou mi fesons, chet Dieu qui le fait, et che que Dieu fait nous le faisons, pourche qu’il est en nous.’46 The Spiritual Libertines believed in a single force of nature that transcends the distinction of individuality; the individual, therefore, cannot be held accountable for his acts, including the crime of murder, as he is simply a vessel of divine will. As we have seen, there was no perceived difference between God and nature in the heresy of the Spiritual Libertines, and by changing the word ‘Dieu’ to ‘nature’ Quintin's statement is brought into line with the standard justification of crime proposed by Sade's libertines. The creed of the Société des amis du crime, for example, asserts the synonymity of libertinism and the will of a superior being, stating: Pleinement convaincue que les hommes ne sont pas libres, et qu’enchaînés par les lois de la nature, ils sont tous esclaves de ces lois premières, elle approuve tout, elle légitime tout, et regarde comme ses plus zélés sectateurs, ceux qui sans aucun remords se seront livrés à un plus grand nombre de ces actions vigoureuses, que les sots ont la faiblesse de nommer crimes, parce qu’elle est persuadée qu’on sert la nature en se livrant à ces actions, qu’elle sont dictées par elle, et que ce qui caractériserait vraiment un crime, serait la résistance que l’homme apporterait à se livrer à toutes les inspirations de la nature, de telle espèce qu’elle puisse être.47 In Sade's philosophy, as in the heresy of the Spiritual Libertines, crime is the affirmation of the libertine's relationship with nature, and it is worth pointing out in passing that this weakens an important tenet of his association with the Enlightenment, which concerns the rejection of metaphysics and the pursuit of physical pleasure. Sade's libertine philosophy, in Histoire de Juliette at least, is primarily guided by the metaphysical paradigm of nature rather than by concerns of pleasure: crime exalts the will of nature and affirms spiritual emancipation from legal and religious jurisdiction. Clairwil and Saint-Fond evince the hierarchy of crime and pleasure as they discuss Juliette's assimilation of the principles of libertinism: ‘C’est au flambeau du crime qu’il faut allumer celui de ses passions, tandis que ce n’est qu’à celui des passions que je la soupçonne d’allumer celui du crime. – La différence est fort grande, dit Saint-Fond, car le crime alors n’est que l’accessoire, et il doit toujours être le principal.’48 The point is reinforced by frequent declarations of the importance of committing crime in cold blood or at the moment immediately after orgasm, when the potential for sensory pleasure is at its lowest ebb, distinguishing Sade's thought from, say, La Mettrie's Anti-Sénèque (1750) or Diderot's description in Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) of a community in which carnal pleasure is pursued without moral categorisation. The preceding comparison of Sade's work with the doctrine of the Free Spirit and the Spiritual Libertines is based on three points: a common attitude to knowledge, a pantheistic view of nature and a corollary assertion of antinomianism. It may now reasonably be asked what relevance there is in associating Sade's work with religious heretics who had disappeared over 200 years before he began to write. There are two possible approaches to answering this question. The first is to trace the influence of the Spiritual Libertines forward through the movement of seventeenth-century libertinism and onwards to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As we saw earlier, the relationship between the Spiritual Libertines and the libertins érudits has previously been somewhat overlooked in studies of French literature. When it has been mentioned, a clear distinction between the two movements has typically been implied. Françoise Charles-Daubert, for example, writes of the libertins érudits: ‘Il convient, en effet, de les distinguer de ceux que Calvin appelait au XVIe siècle les “libertins spirituels”[...].’49 The dissociation of the two movements is long-standing and no doubt partly due to the unacceptable and extreme quality of the beliefs of the Spiritual Libertines. Indeed, J.-P. Seguin, in ‘Le Mot “libertin” dans le dictionnaire de l’Académie, ou comment une société manipule son lexique’ (1
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