Cheap Quills

Coulmier was also a Catholic friar, the caretaker of an insane asylum widely acclaimed for its humane practices. So Kaufman made the movie version of Coulmier a raving necrophiliac whose primary psychiatric technique is cutting out his patients’ tongues and joining the even more cruel Dr. Royer-Collard in tormenting the hero of Quills, that fine and noble figure, the Marquis de Sade.

So, of course, the accolades have come pouring in. Quills won the National Board of Review award for best picture, snagged two Golden Globe nominations, and is pegged as a heavy favorite for the Oscars. Kaufman has been in the spotlight before. He first came to fame by directing the 1978 remake of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and, in 1990, he made Henry & June, the first movie given the new NC-17 rating for sex.

Quills begins in the first moments of the French Revolution with the Marquis de Sade (played by a jagged Geoffrey Rush) anachronistically watching the work of the guillotine from his jail cell. After Kaufman shows a young woman being beheaded, we then fast-forward to the time of Sade’s imprisonment in the asylum at Charenton, roughly 1803. Napoleon, scandalized by Sade’s novel Justine, sends Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to see that the marquis publishes no more. Arriving at Charenton, Royer-Collard joins forces with the asylum’s director, the Abbe Coulmier, to silence Sade’s pen. Mayhem ensues. At Charenton the marquis works overtime. He writes plays and naughty stories, to the delight of his chambermaid-girlfriend, Madeleine (Kate Winslet). But he’s more bark than bite, a sort of ancien regime Larry Flynt. He loves Madeleine so much that they never consummate their relationship. He tells the abbe that he writes dark tales because he has seen firsthand the darkness of which man is capable.

Kaufman, in other words, gives us the Marquis de Sade as a victim of post-traumatic stress syndrome. And the authorities will stop at nothing to repress him. They take away his paper, and he writes on his clothes. They take his clothes, and he dictates to a scribe. So the abbe cuts out his tongue. But the plucky marquis writes by smearing his own feces on the walls. His spirit is indomitable until the final frames, when he chokes to death on the crucifix he has swallowed in defiance.

Does it matter that the real Marquis de Sade was a serial sex criminal who happened to dabble in philosophy? His sexual tastes ran to rape, pedophilia, and blasphemy. A police report in 1763 notes that in the course of raping one Jeanne Testard, “he took down two of the ivory statues of Christ, one of which he trampled underfoot, and upon the other masturbated himself; and, remarking the evident shock and horror shown by the witness, he told her that she had to trample on the crucifix, pointing out to her two pistols on the table and putting his hand upon his sword, ready to draw it from its scabbard, and threatening to run her through.” In 1768, a French beggar reported that Sade had tied her down, whipped her, and stabbed her. In 1772, a group of prostitutes in Marseilles were poisoned by Sade. In each case he adhered to a ritual. He would first ask his prey if she believed in God. Then he would threaten death if she did not comply. Then he would move through a methodical set of activities that Neil Schaeffer in The Marquis de Sade: A Life calls his “stations of the cross.”

In 1774, Sade’s wife hired seven or eight young girls as servants. Sade abused, raped, and tortured them. When parents of five of the girls tried to have the police investigate, Sade and his wife locked up the girls to keep them from testifying. One, Nanon, pregnant with Sade’s child, was imprisoned for two and a half years, until the marquis was satisfied she would keep quiet. Another, Marie, died of fever while sequestered in one of Sade’s chateaux.

To read the writing that followed his crimes is to face a relentless catalogue of blasphemies. His stream of sodomy and religious haranguing is without end. Justine and Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom are so neurotically ceaseless, they quickly stop being either erotic or shocking. In fact, to find Sade’s deepest evil, one must look not to his fiction, but to his philosophy. Nearly a century before Nietzsche declared the death of God, Sade was shouting it from the rooftops. And with the end of God comes the end of morality. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, Sade argues that murder “is a horror, but frequently necessary, never criminal.” Incest, he says, “should be the law of every government whose basis is fraternity.” He defends rape, as a matter of course. And he concludes with a defense of infanticide: The ancient Greeks, he says admiringly, “did not think it was necessary to build richly endowed charitable institutions to preserve this vile scum of human nature.”

It goes without saying that the forces of authority in Quills are the true perverts. Coulmier is a repressive hypocrite and, by the end, a torturer and madman. Oppressed by his religious vows of chastity, he turns to necrophilia before going crazy. Royer-Collard is presented in turn as a pedophile who violently rapes his underage wife.

Is it worth mentioning that the greatest obscenity of Quills is its slander against these men? The real Coulmier was something of a marvel, one of the first to treat the insane as patients rather than criminals; in his 1806 A Treatise on Insanity, Philippe Pinel described him as “a gentleman of great intelligence and of pure and disinterested philanthropy.” And he showed Sade far more kindness than he deserved, housing the marquis not in a dungeon cell but a third-floor apartment and encouraging him to write plays, which the inmates performed. They often had dinner together, and Coulmier lent Sade money and looked the other way at his affair with his chambermaid, Magdeleine Leclerc. (Sade’s relations with Magdeleine were far from platonic; he kept a detailed account in his journal.)

The real-life Royer-Collard, too, though not friendly to Sade, was no monster. He disapproved of the lenient treatment the marquis received, but he did no more than lobby the French minister of the interior to have Coulmier replaced at Charenton and to cut back on some of Sade’s privileges.

So why, you may ask, did Kaufman feel it necessary to indulge such vicious slanders of Coulmier and Royer-Collard? The answer, interestingly enough, is to exonerate Bill Clinton. In an interview in Sight and Sound magazine Kaufman admitted, “Certainly Royer-Collard bears some distant resemblance to Ken Starr.” Though it raids the eighteenth century for scenery, Quills actually exists to further a pair of twentieth-century ideas. The first is that old Hollywood standby of sexual Manicheanism: The proponents of free sex are the enlightened forces of truth and happiness, while the opponents are the repressed forces of darkness and misery. And the second is the equally old Hollywood standby of First Amendment absolutism: Censoring any writing — objecting to any behavior — is the moral equivalent of murder and torture.

“It was during the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal,” Kaufman explained to another interviewer, “and for me there were resonances. . . . Those who would repress freedom of speech oppress not only the marquis, but the asylum itself — the asylum being a metaphor for society.” And if, to make these hackneyed points, Quills has to make a hash of history and a heroic martyr of the Marquis de Sade, well, that’s a small price for teaching a lesson to a darkening world that contains such dangerous figures as Kenneth Starr.

Jonathan V. Last is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.