Jul

4

Bad Words.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 4, 2008 |

On July 2nd, 1789, a man in the Bastille leaned out his window and yelled to passersby that the prisoners were being murdered and that the people should rise up and charge the building. Twelve days later the people did exactly that, destroying the infamous prison and starting the French Revolution. The prisoner who yelled out his window probably didn’t have anything to do with that, and, by the time the prison was stormed, he’d been transferred to an asylum in the town of Charenton. He was the Marquis de Sade.

In college I had a short-lived but intense fascination with the Marquis de Sade. I read every one of his works and every available biography I could get my hands on. As part of a senior class I delivered a paper entitled The Dark Side Of The Age Of Reason to members of the Evansville Samuel Johnson Society. My point in the paper was that, while authors like Voltaire and Rousseau had pushed the idea of reason as the ultimate good, Sade took it to its extreme, essentially making reason ridiculous and challenging the notion that simply following our nature would make the world a wonderful place. Although I eventually came to realize his works were repetitive and philosophically shallow, Sade is still an intriguing character. He’s most famous because the psychologist Krafft-Ebbing, inspired by the Marquis’ reputation, coined the word sadism. The Marquis de Sade also wrote books, though, most of them during the years he spent in prison. His major work, The 120 Days of Sodom, is so unrelentingly brutal I felt physically numb for three hours after I finished it. While it’s not a work I’d recommend to anyone, I can’t and won’t prevent anyone from reading either. Like any pornography, it raises serious questions about the power of speech and the power of words. It challenges the freedom of speech by pushing speech to an extreme that could be considered dangerous.

Any question today about whether the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects pornography has to take the works of the Marquis de Sade into consideration, at least when trying to understand the intentions of the Constitution’s original authors. Although it’s not his most graphic novel, Justine, Sade’s first book to be published, was published in 1791, the same year the Bill of Rights was introduced as a series of amendments to the Constitution. And Sade was not the first author to write pornography. His literary career may have been at least partly inspired by works his uncle, the Abbe de Sade, kept in a private library. There are, in fact, passages that are suggestive if not outright explicit in works of literature ranging from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and even The Bible.

Language is exceptionally powerful. It has to be used responsibly, and treated with respect, but it can’t be limited either. Although it’s the second clause, after religion, in the First Amendment, all other freedoms are derived from freedom of speech. It’s freedom of speech that allows us to debate issues including the very nature of speech itself, and whether all speech should be freely allowed. Are the works of the Marquis de Sade a warning, an example that stands as a reason for regulated speech, or are they a celebration of freedom? The beauty of freedom of speech, and the reason it’s so necessary, is that we have to have the right to be able to ask that question in the first place.


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