ABSTRACT
De Sade felt blind rage at his wife's failure to save his manuscripts while there was time before the storming of the Bastille. Yet if radical, even revolutionary, there needs to be some initial sense of caution at describing De Sade and Fourier as 'modern'. Their negative response to those two great catalysts of ‘modernity’, the French and the Industrial Revolution, raise doubts on this score, though their radical vision have been one which took them beyond the class limitations of the dual revolution. This chapter suggests that De Sade definitely, but Fourier also to some considerable extent, hark back to earlier aristocratic sexual mores and that theirs was in many ways a flight from modernity; Arcadians rather than Utopians. A brief sketch of De Sade’s life and writings might usefully precede a more detailed analysis of the constituents of his story: family background and his own family, his ‘crimes’, his own sex life, his personality, and to sexual morality.
