The erotic influence of the Marquis de Sade according to André Malraux. 1969.

André MALRAUX (1901.1976)

Autograph manuscript - The black triangle. 1969.

Fourteen pages in-4 ° with cutouts and montages.

We join the corrected carcritical (eight pages), with many autograph corrections and additions, and collage reshuffles.

"The fact remains that all sadism-and Sade itself shows it better than Laclos-seems to be the delusional will of an impossible possession. »»

Remarkable manuscript, first of all, constituting the preface to his work Le Triangle Noir , published by Gallimard in 1970, and taking up three texts published in 1939, 1947 and 1954, on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Francisco de Goya and Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just.

Malraux puts into perspective the fate of these three figures from the 18th to the yardstick of what, according to him, brings them together: the eroticism and the influence of the Divine Marquis de Sade.

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“ Is the end of the 18th century one of the periods that holds my attention? It doesn't seem to me. Nevertheless, in thirty years, chance and friendship have made me reflect on three very different figures who shed their divergent light on the most obscure crisis of the individual that Europe has known before the one that is imposed on us.

Laclos only poses the problem. As with so many works of our time – not only literary ones – the reader of Liaisons could have said: "It can't go on like this." This is what Goya responds, by making the human condition the object of a fundamental accusation , to which he refuses to respond with transcendence; this is what Saint-Just responds, by appealing to the quasi-transcendence that the Nation is in his eyes. And after so many events, so many deaths, so many hopes, we find ourselves faced with what Goya and Saint-Just responded to Laclos.

[…] Behind Saint-Just, it seems that the shadow of Napoleon rises. We will see that we can doubt it. In front of Goya, the shadow of Sade stretches . There is a 18th century that goes from the great English and the great French to Napoleon; And an end of the half -clandestine century, which is not going anywhere but which calls the man in question. […] Perhaps Léonard was a master of the Renaissance before being a painter (and he was not only a painter); Goya is certainly a painter before being a man of the 18th century. And what 18th century? From that of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, the reason he proclaims?

As foreign as these three men are to each other, they have an essential area in Laclos, bizarrely accidental in Goya and Saint-Just in common, and which would not have gathered their predecessors: eroticism. This eroticism so foreign to the joyful lubricity of the Renaissance, battle of police and very flesh, this intruding eroticism in the austere destiny of Saint-Just, quite sadistic in the links , many engravings of Goya, in His Maja Desnuda in the process of rape ...

Inheritance of libertine literature? Often she was not herself without sadism : when she was, what's in common between her and Goya? This eroticism would not be worth that we stop there, if it was only the rest of the fellow; But it is the eroticism of which Sade will write the rhetorical epic, maniac, and which has had no precedent. However, eroticism poses to the individual the questions posed by any intoxication; And this particular eroticism poses those which, in Sade, call namely an eternal questioning of God, therefore of man.

Sexuality is an area that is too deep for a whole era, in almost whole Europe, links it in vain to cruelty, or at least to constraint. Sade's efforts to legitimize eroticism by reason are comical and curious ; Those of Goya to legitimize her nocturnal world by her are not comical, but they are certainly singular. The fact remains that all sadism-and Sade itself shows it better than Laclos-seems to be the delusional will of an impossible possession.

[…] If General de Laclos is ambitious in his own way, Goya finds wilder fish to fry; and Saint-Just is ambitious only like Mahomet. It is beneath the vast net of ambition that the late 18th century extends its tentacles. It will never completely cover them, neither in Napoleon nor even in Balzac. The French Revolution, the wars of the Empire, the birth of “social individualism,” have covered many creations of the end of the century (not only in France) as if the witches of Goya, or even that of Laclos, prophesied Austerlitz and the Council of State; But Romanticism will find these witches again, and a century later, literary history will rediscover Sade.

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We also join 7 autograph work notes: “The departure of the preface to the black triangle is undoubtedly: a civilization which does not want to survive as a civilization is condemned to death. Goya and Laclos as witnesses, Saint-Just as desperate attempt (what?) ”.

Bibliography: Complete works (Pléiade), t. VI, p. 525-529.