Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.
Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-il brûler Sade? is a long essay on the Marquis de Sade that ran in two parts in Les Temps modernes in December 1951 and January 1952. She collected it four years later in the volume Privilèges (Gallimard, 1955), together with two other essays — 'La pensée de droite, aujourd'hui' (Right-Wing Thought Today) and 'Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme' (Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism). The Sade essay is the piece most read now: Beauvoir's argument that the eighteenth-century French writer Donatien Alphonse François de Sade should be taken seriously as a philosopher rather than shelved with the pornographers. She does not excuse the violence in his fiction, and she does not dismiss the work because of it. She reads him.
Beauvoir wrote 'Faut-il brûler Sade?' in the autumn of 1951 for the December 1951 – January 1952 issues of Les Temps modernes, the journal she co-edited with Sartre. The essay was picked up in book form in 1955 by Gallimard as the anchor of the collection Privilèges, alongside 'La pensée de droite, aujourd'hui' (a longer piece on postwar French right-wing intellectual thought) and 'Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme' (Beauvoir's reply to Merleau-Ponty's 1955 attack on Sartre in Les Aventures de la dialectique). The English translation of the Sade essay appeared in a 1953 Grove Press edition of Sade's own selected writings introduced by Paul Dinnage and Beauvoir; Kim Allen Gleed's later complete translation appears in Feminist Writings (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
The Sade essay is important because it inaugurated the serious postwar French rereading of the Marquis de Sade — a rereading that would continue through Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, and Philippe Sollers over the next twenty years and would culminate in the 1990 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Sade edition and the 2003 Pompidou Centre exhibition. Beauvoir is not the first postwar reader to treat Sade philosophically (Klossowski's Sade mon prochain had appeared in 1947), but her essay is the one that moved the argument from a small avant-garde into Les Temps modernes and, through it, into the general Paris literary conversation.
The English-language reception of the essay is complicated because different English selections translate different sub-sets of Privilèges. A reader in English needs to check the table of contents. The title 'Must We Burn Sade?' has been applied to a stand-alone essay, a paired essay-plus-Sade-selection volume, and a two- or three-essay Beauvoir collection at different points. The Kim Allen Gleed translation in Feminist Writings (2015) is the most complete and reliable English text of the Sade essay itself.
'Faut-il brûler Sade?' has two parts, following the split between the two Les Temps modernes issues. Part I is a biographical sketch: Sade's aristocratic upbringing, the arrest of 1768, the twenty-seven years he would spend across the Bastille, Vincennes, and Charenton, the writing that produced Justine and Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom in prison. Part II is Beauvoir's philosophical reading: the question of what Sade's fiction demands of a reader who takes it as anything other than pornography, and the argument that Sade's writing exposes a specific moral problem — the fantasy of sovereign freedom bought at the price of another person's reduction — that most literature evades.
The collection's two other essays are less-read. 'La pensée de droite, aujourd'hui' is Beauvoir's book-length essay (about a hundred and fifty pages) on postwar French right-wing intellectuals — she reads Raymond Aron, Thierry Maulnier, and the small circle of postwar-Occupation right-wing writers together. 'Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme' is Beauvoir's answer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1955 book Les Aventures de la dialectique, which had attacked Sartre; the essay defends Sartre and marks the end of Merleau-Ponty's association with Les Temps modernes.
The unifying question of the three essays, and of the volume's title Privilèges, is how a person or a class can claim absolute freedom — moral, sexual, political — while the freedom of others is the direct cost. The Sade essay makes the case in its sexual form; the right-wing essay makes it in its political form.
Beauvoir opens by rejecting both the erasure of Sade and his elevation into a misunderstood genius. Her interest lies instead in how he turns particular desires into a system meant to justify them. This distinction changes the reader's task: taking the argument seriously means examining that transformation, not accepting its conclusions. His attempt to communicate an intensely private experience also makes his isolation contradictory. The writer who insists on his separateness still addresses other people and seeks a place in the community he challenges.
In Beauvoir's account, confinement redirects Sade's energies toward literature, making writing an imaginative resource when action is restricted. Yet the manuscript has a precarious existence outside its author's control: he believes The 120 Days of Sodom has been destroyed, although its hidden roll survives. Read beside the prison illustration, this episode separates the power to invent a fictional world from the power to secure a work's future. The essay's biographical detail thus complicates the image of an absolutely sovereign author, showing how vulnerable his literary project remains.
It demonstrates Beauvoir's method as a literary critic: historical context, philosophical argument, and moral judgment held together.
Read it after The Ethics of Ambiguity, whose account of freedom provides the clearest terms for the title essay.
Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.
The eighteenth-century French writer (1740–1814) whose fiction — Justine, Juliette, The 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Bedroom — Beauvoir's title essay reads as a serious philosophical proposition rather than as pornography or scandal. Spent twenty-seven of his seventy-four years in prison across the Bastille, Vincennes, and Charenton.
The French sociologist and postwar liberal philosopher (1905–1983), Sartre's École Normale classmate and Les Temps modernes co-founder. Beauvoir's essay 'La pensée de droite, aujourd'hui' reads Aron as the most representative of the postwar French right-wing intellectuals.
The French phenomenologist (1908–1961) and Sartre's Les Temps modernes co-founder. His 1955 book Les Aventures de la dialectique attacked Sartre's Marxism; Beauvoir's essay 'Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme' is her answer, and marks the effective end of Merleau-Ponty's association with the journal.
1947
Pierre Klossowski's Sade mon prochain begins the serious postwar French philosophical rereading of Sade.
Autumn 1951
Beauvoir writes 'Faut-il brûler Sade?' for Les Temps modernes.
December 1951 – January 1952
The essay runs in two parts in Les Temps modernes.
1953
Grove Press publishes an English edition of Sade's selected writings, with an introduction by Beauvoir and Paul Dinnage.
1955
Gallimard publishes the collected volume Privilèges, with 'Faut-il brûler Sade?' alongside two other essays.
1990
The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Sade edition — the culmination of the serious philosophical rereading Beauvoir's essay had helped launch — is published by Gallimard.
2015
Kim Allen Gleed's complete English translation of 'Must We Burn Sade?' appears in Feminist Writings (University of Illinois Press).
Beauvoir's 1947 essay giving existentialism the ethics Sartre never got around to writing — the philosophical statement of the argument She Came to Stay had put in a novel and The Second Sex would put in a thousand pages two years later.
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Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.
Read our takeIt is Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the eighteenth-century French writer the Marquis de Sade. Beauvoir argues that Sade should be read seriously as a philosopher rather than dismissed as a pornographer. She does not excuse the violence in his fiction, but she reads what he was arguing philosophically about sovereign freedom, other people's reduction, and the specific moral problem his work exposes.
'Faut-il brûler Sade?' first appeared as a two-part essay in Les Temps modernes in December 1951 and January 1952. Gallimard collected it in book form in the 1955 volume Privilèges, alongside two other Beauvoir essays. The English text appears in various selections; Kim Allen Gleed's complete translation is in Feminist Writings (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
The 1955 Gallimard volume in which Beauvoir collected 'Must We Burn Sade?' together with 'Right-Wing Thought Today' (a hundred-and-fifty-page essay on postwar French right-wing intellectuals, especially Raymond Aron) and 'Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism' (a reply to Merleau-Ponty's 1955 attack on Sartre). The three essays share the volume's title question: how a person or class can claim absolute freedom while the cost is another person's freedom.
It moved the philosophical rereading of Sade — which Pierre Klossowski's Sade mon prochain had begun in 1947 in a small avant-garde — into Les Temps modernes and, through it, into the general Paris literary conversation. The postwar French serious rereading of Sade that would run through Bataille, Barthes, Sollers, and Pasolini can be traced back to the moment Beauvoir's essay published Sade under the sign of Les Temps modernes.
Beauvoir does not excuse it and does not dismiss the work because of it. Her argument is that Sade's fantasy of sovereign freedom is bought at the specific price of reducing another person to an object, and that this makes his fiction a philosophical case study of a real moral problem — the exact problem The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) had made discursively as the account of the passionate man who denies the freedom of the person his desire attaches to.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Must We Burn Sade? and Other Essays, its publication, and its place in literary history.
Publisher-hosted primary excerpt of Beauvoir's title essay, Part I; supports both additions, not a new collation of the complete Privilèges collection.
Publisher record used to verify the 2015 Feminist Writings hardcover edition, ISBN, and collection details.
Scholarly chapter record used to verify Kim Allen Gleed's English translation of “Must We Burn Sade?”.
Used to place Must We Burn Sade? and Other Essays within Simone de Beauvoir's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
Used for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Simone de Beauvoir's career and the period in which Must We Burn Sade? and Other Essays appeared.
Used to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Simone de Beauvoir's wider catalogue.
Used to verify Simone de Beauvoir's bibliography and place Must We Burn Sade? and Other Essays within the broader chronology of Simone de Beauvoir's career.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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