15 h 28 minAudiobook7 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What lies behind a name that becomes a word for cruelty?
In The Marquis de Sade and His Time, Iwan Bloch looks beyond scandal to examine Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. He places the French nobleman in the rich, deeply unequal world of eighteenth-century France, then follows a life marked by repeated arrests and long confinement under the monarchy, the Revolution and the regime that follows.
Bloch, a German physician and an early researcher in sexual science, treats Sade's writings as evidence. Novels, tales and philosophical dialogues become material for questions about desire, history and medicine. Justine, Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom enter a study that asks what the sources can show, rather than what a notorious reputation suggests.
What you’ll discover
- An age of inequality See how Bloch places Sade within the wealth and power of the French aristocracy.
- Between prison and freedom Follow repeated arrests and long confinements across changing regimes in France.
- Fiction examined as evidence Explore how Bloch reads Sade's novels and dialogues for clues about desire and his age.
- Sexual science takes shape Encounter an early medical attempt to describe sexual behaviour through the case of Sade.
- Beyond a notorious name Consider the distance between legend, strong feelings and what the sources can support.
Who will love it
You will enjoy this if you love eighteenth century France, the French Revolution, the history of medicine and ideas, or the story of how scholars first tried to study forbidden books.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Understand Sade through his century, not alone
- The eighteenth century made pleasure into a system
- Kings, nobles and priests set the example
- Paris supplied the models for his brothels and clubs
- Cruelty was public, and the Terror made it common
- The life: scandal, flight and decades behind walls
- The books: Justine, Juliette and a philosophy of vice
- Sadism, defined more widely than before
- The verdict: not mad, but formed by his world and by imitation
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Il Marchese de Sade e il suo tempo in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Il Marchese de Sade e il suo tempo
by Iwan Bloch · 1900
A physician of 1899 reads the Marquis de Sade as a mirror of his age, from royal brothels to the guillotine.
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In short
How does a doctor explain a man whose name became a word? In 1899 Iwan Bloch, a Berlin physician, set out to understand the Marquis de Sade, and he did it by studying the whole century around him.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Understand Sade through his century, not alone
Bloch opens with a method. A person, he says, is the summit of a long social process, so a scholar must study the place and decade before judging the man. He calls this the social-psychological approach and contrasts it with the verdict of medicine alone.
He builds on Hegel. In his introduction he treats love as three problems: a physical one, a historical one and a metaphysical one. Physical love is where life begins, history shows how law, religion and manners shape it, and the highest stage, following Plato, turns toward knowledge and freedom.
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What is The Marquis de Sade and His Time about?
It is a scholarly study by Iwan Bloch of Sade's life, his novels and the France of the ancien regime and Revolution that shaped them, with a later section on the history of sadism.
Was the Marquis de Sade really insane according to Bloch?
No. Bloch concludes that Sade was not mentally ill. He sees a gifted, perhaps nervous man formed by a corrupt age, by habit and by many years of imprisonment.
Who wrote this book and when?
Iwan Bloch, a Berlin physician, wrote it in 1899, calling it the first scholarly original work on Sade in a living European language. He died in 1922.
The author
Iwan Bloch
1872–1922 · German dermatologist and sexologist
Iwan Bloch was a German dermatologist and sexologist. He was born in Delmenhorst in 1872 and died in Berlin in 1922. He worked as a physician in Berlin. His writings included The Marquis de Sade and His Time and The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization.
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