Letter from Dr. Royer-Collard, medical supervisor of the Charenton asylum to his Excellency, the Imperial Minister of Police in 1808 (extract), in D.A.F. Marquis de Sade, by Maurice Lever (Fayard):

“There is a man at Charenton whose audacious immorality has unfortunately rendered him all too infamous, and whose presence in the asylum presents a number of most grave inconveniences; I’m thinking of the author of Justine. This man is lucid. His sole desire is for vice…Anyone thus afflicted must be subject to the most severe restrictions…It so happens that we rather unwisely decided to set up a theatre in this establishment with the idea of producing plays for the inmates, without thinking of the unfortunate effects that such a tumultuous institution must needs have on their imaginations. M. de Sade is the director of this theatre. It is he who chooses the plays, assigns the roles and supervises the rehearsals…The inmates who are in daily contact with this abominable man – won’t they also be marked by the stamp of his profound turpitude? And how can we expect the moral component of our treatment of the patients’ illnesses to reconcile with these actions?” 

Letter from M. Montalivet, the Minister of the Interior to Monsieur de Coulmier, the Director of the Charenton Asylum in 1813 (extract), in D.A.F. Marquis de Sade, Maurice Lever (Fayard):
“I have decided, based on the account given me, that the balls and shows mounted in the Charenton institution for the benefit of the inmates may have an effect more deleterious than useful, in stimulating their senses and provoking their spirits, and I am therefore suspending, provisionally, these events.” 

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“Sade […] held his theatre dearer than anything he’d produced previously,” his biographer Maurice Lever tells us. Of all his work, it is thus to these twenty-something plays that the author of Justine was most attached. When his family destroyed all the compromising documents left by the unconscionable Marquis upon his death, they fortunately retained these notebooks, carefully copied out during his last years at Charenton, which bear testimony to what seemed to be the only decent passion of the black sheep of the family.

All the documents that escaped the bonfire lay forgotten in a sealed box for almost a century and a half in a disused room of the Château de Condé, and only came to light in the second half of the 20th century, collected and edited thanks to the Surrealist Gilbert Lély and the publisher Pauvert.  

Nonetheless, though all Sade’s novels have since been published in numerous different editions, his plays, after a first edition in 1970, with their apparent lack of connection to his major works, suffered from the neglect of the Marquis’ new readers; the strange fate of a man whose life and work were marked by an arbitrary and endless schism between good and evil, madness and sanity, freedom and imprisonment, publication and censorship, fantasy and reality, the known and unknown, the philosopher and the hedonist, the novelist and the dramaturge.

With his complex personality and disconcerting work, Sade once faced incomprehension and rejection for the darkness of his writing. Isn’t that still the case today, in the rather perverse attitude that relegates anything by him that isn’t “Sadean” to the dust-heap of literature?
However, if we look at him in a more holistic way, we should certainly bring his theatrical work to the foreground, as he himself did. In it, we can see the profound intellectual and literary unity of a man whose “vice” - so often decried - was nothing but the most easily visible part of a hedonism that is both profound and intellectually very accomplished. 
“Sade loved the theatre to distraction, in all its forms. As actor, head of a company, set designer, director and even prompter when the need arose, the theatre would accompany him throughout his life” (Maurice Lever).

Born, no doubt, in the Collège Louis-le-Grand – which was famous for its theatrical productions put on by the Jesuits – this passion took a particular form in each stage of the Marquis’ life. At first, this was regimental cabarets (when he wrote his first play) for the actresses he had picked up – more or less discreetly – as a young bridegroom, going so far as having one of them play his wife at the Château Lacoste. From 1763, he began to act and direct, later taking on the running of the theatre company at the Château d’évry. In between episodes of libertinage, he would have his wife and mother-in-law act in plays by Voltaire, before writing his own plays and having a sizeable theatre (with 120 seats) built in his castle, the Château Lacoste. It was around this time that the Marquis first started getting in trouble with the law.

As with his inflammatory novels, Sade wrote most of his plays in prison; what’s more, he wrote both at the same time, as Sylvie Dangeville tells us in her impressive essay on Sade’s plays. Dangeville also notes that “these juxtapositions are testimony of his capacity to produce works rooted in complex but distinct networks of meaning.”

When Sade writes to the Abbé Amblet in April 1784: “As for the rest, my dear friend, I find it impossible to resist my talent – it pulls me to this profession despite myself and, try as they might, they’ll never turn me from it,” it is – beneath the ambiguous terminology – his dramatic flair to which he refers and which he contrasts to his other, “dark”, talent. “This will take up a good deal of my time and energy [having his plays produced in Paris] and will keep me from the rest. I could even go so far as to say that this is the only thing that can – the reason being physical: a strong force needs an even stronger one to counterbalance it.”

Each time he was released from prison, it was his theatrical activities that occupied Sade’s public life, while at the same time – during the course of his clandestine debauches – “the form of expression always reverted to a theatrical process where protocol and ritual naturally imposed themselves on pure pleasure-seeking. Thus, erotic and theatrical pleasure are but two sides of the same mode of behavior because the subversive undermining of cultural and social codes always implied a balance of these two approaches” (in S. Dangeville, Le théâtre change et représente : lecture critique des œuvres dramatiques du Marquis de Sade).

This important link between his criminal acts of libertinage and intense periods of theatrical activity has also been the subject of analysis by Annie Lebrun: 
“His writing of plays overlaps, in Sade, with a set of behaviors which all lead back to the stage as a meeting place of the real and imaginary, the unique and commonplace, the spectacular and the secret…As if something in the theatrical, proving insufficient, had the dual function of both holding back and making more intense the necessity of taking action, while at the same time showing us openly the illusory theatricality behind which there was always “something else” going on” (in Un théâtre dressé sur notre abîme).

She also refers to Sade’s extraordinary self-reflection when he writes in his Charenton diary: “21st. For three weeks, I’ve suffered from terrible insomnia; on the night of the 20th to the 21st [of August 1807], I realized that plays have always played a role in my destiny, right from the start.”
The final years of his life, spent at Charenton, were also the years in which his theatrical work came into its own.

Thanks to the intelligent complicity of the Director of the Asylum, Sade was able to maintain an intense theatrical activity, whose notoriety spread far beyond the walls of the asylum. He had a new auditorium built in the asylum, for which he wrote numerous pieces to be played by the inmates, as well as organizing public productions, to which the cream of Parisian society flocked, drawn principally by the delicate balance of acting and insanity on the part of the players.
It was also at this time that he had his fellow inmates copy out his entire theatrical work, from the very beginnings to his latest output. This set of notebooks, written out by improvised scribes and corrected by hand by Sade constitute, for the most part, the only manuscript trace of the Marquis’ theatrical oeuvre.
This endeavor by Sade was more than just a re-copying by the mature artist of the works of his youth – it was a rewriting and a restructuring of his dramatic works. This is another sign of the importance he accorded to this form of artistic expression and the individual plays, whose final versions he would approve with a note and by methodically assigning them a number within the corpus of the twenty plays thus brought together, with a view to the publication of his complete dramatic works.
Brilliantly analyzed by Sylvie Dangeville, the relationship between Sade’s theatre and his public and secret lives, his erotic and philosophical writings, his literary influences and “the irreducible originality of his thinking” remains to this day an inexhaustible mine of information “on the textual circulation of the whole of Sade’s work.” But beyond intertextuality, the very physical conception of the theatre that Sade brings to his plays bears witness to a phantasmagorical relationship with the body, which proves far broader than the Sadean “stagesets” of his novels.
It is hardly surprising that this facet of Sade’s work, hardly touched by scholars, should today be the subject of intense artistic reflection.  In 2008, with her piece Sade, le théâtre des fous, the choreographer Marie-Claude Pietragalla took over Sade’s theatre at Charenton to explore his thinking as it is “intimately, viscerally and erotically tied to the body: I am therefore I think, and not vice versa.”