Résumé

It is no longer necessary to demonstrate that Donatien Alphonse François de Sade is a major writer of the Enlightenment in the same way as Marivaux, Diderot or Voltaire. If yesterday, his work divided the academic critics, today it is unanimous in our time characterized by a liberation of morals and passions punished. To use the title of Gonzague Saint-Bris on Sade, “the angel of the shadow” of French literature appears here as a visionary who announces since the eighteenth century, the failure of human morality, the decadence of a world on the edge of the cliff. It is approached in this study under the angle of the literary postmodernism which authorizes a deconstruction of the tutelary speeches, which breaks the illusion of stability announced within the Belles Lettres. We saw it with the idea of mixture which characterizes Les Infortunes de la vertu. By its generic intemperance which passes among others by the presence of the picaresque, the satire, the novel, the text of Sade postulates an aesthetic which is attached to the literary postmodernism. Beyond this intergenericity characteristic of Sade’swriting, there is that the literary postmodernism is rooted in The Misfortunes of Virtue by the writing of the outrageousness, which passes by the transgression of the accepted common morality. We see it well by the cynical speech and the bestiary which seem to justify the outrageous behaviors of its beings of paper.