Face-To-Face with the Dying Priest: Dialogue Between a Libertine and a Pope in Histoire De Juliette

摘要

During the last years before the Revolution, Sade published a short pamphlet titled Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond (1782) in line with Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1771). With this early publication, he exposed with clarity the lines of what he perceived to be the future of all spiritualities: materialist atheism, a philosophy he hoped would do away with centuries of Catholicism. After the experience of the Terror, however, the monumental Histoire de Juliette (1801) became his greatest collection of philosophical dialogues included within a greater travel narrative. The dialogue between its libertine protagonist Juliette and Pope Pius VI reflected Sade’s paradoxical perception of the Revolution.