ABSTRACT
Marquis de Sade's liberation from more than twelve years of continuous incarceration was a consequence of the National Assembly's abolition, on 16 March 1790, of the sealed orders of summary arrest and imprisonment known as lettres de cachet. Sade is specifically critical of his wife's indifference, as he sees it, in retrieving his manuscripts from the Bastille after his removal to Charenton and before his former cell was overrun by the insurgent masses. Examining the Marquise's evolving political rhetoric, it is noticed that she is sensitive to the Revolution's particular vocabulary but more importantly, she opposes to it a number of key terms equally charged with political significance. She aims to establish the primacy of her universal moral principles over the relativist dynamic of laws and crimes in Sade's work, declaring boldly: 'Sodomy is a crime against nature, as it stops reproduction; theft is a crime because it takes away what belongs to others'.
