ABSTRACT
Malthus and the Marquis de Sade make strange bedfellows. But the same reproductive anxieties haunt their writing. The numbers of babies abandoned to the Enfants trouvés, or foundling hospitals, by the poor of late eighteenth-century France during the decades leading up to the French Revolution—years when the population was rising, although not so sharply as in England—gave poignant and controversial visibility to population growth during Sade’s own lifetime. But on the psychic level, the issue is the survival of the libertine self. By proximity at least, serial sex is linked with the psychic onslaught enacted by the serial murderer against his love objects; abandoned and betrayed, he rages at maternal absence and avenges himself on surrogate maternal bodies. This may explain why, of all the murders envisaged by Sade’s libertine educators, the idea of matricide is the one that recurs most obsessively.
