The idea of doing a profile on one of history's most sadistic sexual figures was not on the top of my "to do list" this season. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a flurry of interest in the Divine Marquis. Last year two new films about de Sade's final years were released within months of each other. These films had a tendency to glorify and soften de Sade's complex relationship to sex and power.

"Certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others."
-Philosophy in the Bedroom

People have long associated the Marquis only with perversity and cruelty. What often gets lost is the fact that he was also a philosopher, investigating the nature of morality in a Godless universe. Long before Nietzche wrote "God is dead" de Sade drew out the implications of the fact that God does not exist and that "everything is permitted, everything is natural."

"Impervious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."
-From the Marquis de Sade's Last Will and Testament

Pedro Orrego
Associate Producer, SEXTV