Sade shaped the French avant-garde’s quest for the sublime in the subversive

Evidence

In France, since 1930, the Marquis de Sade has become one of the favored authors of the literary avant-garde. Jean Paulhan, in his Introduction to a new edition of Sade’s Les Infortunes de la Vertu, Paris, 1946, remarks: “When I see so many writers today consciously trying to deny artifice and the literary game for the sake of the inexpressible [un évènement indicible] …, anxiously looking for the sublime in the infamous, for the great in the subversive …, I ask myself …if our modern literature, in those parts which appear to us most vital—or at any rate most aggressive—has not turned entirely toward the past, and if it was not precisely Sade who determined it.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2589