The French Revolution sought to start over on new bases, even if in order to do so it might prove necessary to “purge even the heart,” as a man called Billaud-Varennes demanded in the month of Floreal of Year III.⁴ Doing violence to nature, taking the scalpel even to our innermost code, had been the ambition of all reformers for the past two centuries: regenerating love and regenerating true love. Stripping it of the veils that made it ugly in order to restore it to its first function: making the human race a single, passionately united family. Here we are in the register of the radiant promise that Rousseau often made when he predicted happy days for mothers who agreed to nurse their children:

In the latter half of the twentieth century, this will to re-create man and society from top to bottom gained the aid of sexuality, which some regarded as a complementary remedy, and others as a substitute remedy. That is where we are today: for the past two centuries, Western culture has sought to build “a repair workshop for humanity” (Francis Ponge) and to restore to love its true face, to make it the basis for a society of brothers and lovers. Here we will recount the episodes of this mad attempt.

The aspiration to develop a new education of the human race by combining hygiene, pleasure, and inclination then emerged: the goal was to free the body from control by the church and by capital, to shield it from the depressing sermons of the priests, from the exhausting pace set by the bosses, from the tyranny of the clock. Here again it was a question of moving “the borderline between the possible and the impossible” (Mona Ozouf) and reestablishing nudity in its prelapsarian innocence. According to the early Christians, sexuality was an animal that had to be chained up; now it is a fabulous animal that has to be freed. At the foundation of this aspiration, which extends from certain religious heresies to the feminist and socialist movements, there is a certitude that desire is good, that it alone is capable of stripping society of its ugly aspects. It was of course with Freud, who revealed the carnal foundation of our civilizations, with Herbert Marcuse, who went to teach in the United States, and especially with Wilhelm Reich, a physician who rebelled against psychoanalysis and the German Communist Party and died in the United States in 1957, that this militant effort of Promethean reconstruction reached its apogee. Refusing to distinguish between social revolution and personal revolution, maintaining that “sexual life is not a private matter,”⁸ Reich, a victim of both Nazism and Stalinism, sought throughout his life the best way of escaping from “the human servile structure.” Only a full aptitude for pleasure makes it possible to reconcile humans with themselves and allows them to rid themselves of the infantile derivatives constituted by pornography, detective novels, horror stories, and especially submission to the leader, all of which are connected with fear, that is, with frustration. “Authoritarian, mechanistic civilization,” religious mysticism, and bourgeois repression build up around every individual an “emotional armor” that kills joy in life and stunts people. Since relief from tensions in the erotic convulsion is the very formula of the living being (the Aurora Borealis is nothing other than a cosmic orgasm), it alone should put an end “to blind obedience to the Fuhrer,” and lead to the gradual disappearance of possessiveness, cancer, dictatorship, and violence.

Properly understood, the sexual revolution is not an alleviation of sexual problems: it inserts a historical break that causes us to move, as Marxists would say, from prehistory to history. With Wilhelm Reich, we are dealing with a biological utilitarianism based on a metaphysics of salvation: like grace for the Calvinists, the orgasm is the narrow gate to redemption. The liquidating power it implies constitutes the panacea that is supposed to protect us from all political or physical epidemics: “the people’s sexual happiness is the best guarantee of the security of society as a whole.”⁹ Since our bodies are our only homeland, and since they are inseparable, as they were among the Greeks, from the cosmos and from climatic changes, a fundamental game is played out in the bellies of men and women. It is up to you to make the body a garden of delights or a hell of repression: because the bioenergy that runs through us in spasms is exactly the same as the one that animates living matter and the movement of the stars. (Reich, exiled to America at the end of his life, where he was persecuted by the FBI, constructed strange machines for capturing “orgonic” radiations, including a device for breaking up clouds that succeeded in producing rain in the desert.) Depending on whether or not you have an orgasm, the Earth will slip into harmony or into discord: Fourier had already drawn an analogy between human copulation and that of the planets, and saw in the Milky Way an immense deposit of luminous semen. If humans made love more enthusiastically, they would give birth to a multitude of galaxies that would illuminate the planet a giorno and would solve the lighting problem at small expense. Sade himself compared orgasm to a volcanic eruption and the apathy of the libertine to cold blocks of lava after the explosion.

In the 1960s, which rediscovered these authors (along with the inspiration of certain millenarian sects), sex became demonstrative, assigned a messianic status: what speaks through it in a confused way is neither more nor less than the human enigma. The disturbances of Eros cannot be reduced to a surge of shameless behavior, as the prudish claimed; they corresponded to an “uprising in the soul,” as the great historian Denis de Rougemont had already noted in 1961. The goal was to re-create paradise using the instruments of decline itself, to fabricate a new Eve, a new Adam. Our ancestors murmured what we are finally saying clearly; the best among them were precursors, and we are now entering into the kingdom, into maturity of humanity. Our shameful parts have now become our glorious parts, but also our warlike parts. An erection is an insurrection, the body in emotional turmoil overthrows the diktats issued by the established order, desire is profoundly moral. There is no need to resort to the old Freudian concept of sublimation, the instincts are sublime in themselves and include the totality of the human condition; since evil had its origins in psychological drives, we were going to become good by making love. Coitus is simultaneously a rebellion against society and the culmination of human nature. This claim made by the prophets of liberation, that they were acting at the very source of sentiment, explains both their excitement and their belligerent tone.

This period revived the suspicion, which had already been aroused by the Enlightenment, that love is only a mask for desire, a lie that people tell each other in order to disguise their lust. “Love no longer exists,” Robert Musil had already said, “all that remains is sexuality and comradeship.” For their part, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari pointed to “the ignoble desire to be loved.” Indicted, sentiment would be acquitted by desire on the condition that it give up its preeminence and be content with a small role in the new scenario that was being written. Thus the ancient expression “I love you” had to be banned and the only authentic one—“I want you”—substituted for it. Praise for the naked human being reduced to itself, to its most precious possession: the body, the only reality in a materialism properly understood. Since repression provokes neuroses and pathologies, license can never be sufficiently licentious. No excess committed by the children of May 1968 could compare in ugliness with the hideous restrictions imposed by their parents. Whence the tolerance of those years with regard to all forms of attraction, including incest and pedophilia, and the certitude that children also have a right to sexuality, even with adults. The irenicism of childish speech concealed practices that were less irenic. In the same breath an attempt was made to wrench love away from domestic imprisonment and reshape the family and education. Anyone who found ancient customs charming was accused of treachery. No doubt was permitted: the age had found the solution to emotional suffering and secondarily to social suffering.

The 1960s and 1970s were a sententious revolution, like the libertine novels of the eighteenth century: in them, the various forms of eroticism and perversion were transformed into revolutionary ideas, directed against the established order. The quasi-religious ambition of this period has been underestimated; it sought both to make outmoded the pitiful sentimental comedy found in Racine or Proust, and to embark upon an adventure unlike any other. Regarding the Paris commune and May 1968, André Malraux spoke of a “fanatical idyllism,” a will to reconcile people with one another even at the price of violence. In fact, after those days we emerged into the era of “everything is political” and the comical habit, which is still alive today, of bringing the distinction between left and right even into the bedroom: the missionary position and prostitution are rightwing, sodomy and civil unions are left-wing! The central belief of this period persuaded of its superiority was that there is no tragedy, there are only bad social constructions. (Ideological constructivism is the very gospel of Western thought, perceptible today in the theory of genders.) The 1960s and 1970s were marked by the worship of the idealism of Eros, magnificent, and necessarily magnificent as soon as it ceased to be stifled by censorship, priests, political commissars, and the bourgeoisie. Thus we find praise for “the libidinal economy” (Jean-François Lyotard) and “desiring machines” (Deleuze, Guattari) in which everyone seeks her truth. A fundamental reversal: sexual pleasure, which was suspect, becomes obligatory, and anyone who escapes it is suspected of being seriously ill. A new terrorism of the orgasm replaces the old prohibitions.¹⁰ For the ancients, Eros was a God; we moderns expect Eros to make us gods.

A certain qualification is needed, however. An unbiased reading of the Marquis de Sade, whose works were finally published in extenso during those years, might have tempered the ardor of our zealots: that fallen aristocrat, that incorrigible rake who, from the Old Regime to the Napoleonic Empire, spent twenty-seven years of his life in prison, never ceased in all his novels to show emancipated desire tending irresistibly toward arbitrariness, brutality, and mass crime. The true scandal of Sade, that great black pennant affixed to the Enlightenment’s flag, is not his mad lubricity, it is his pessimism, his baleful way of confirming what religion has always said, namely that sex, far from being neutral, leads straight to cruelty. “There is no man who does not want to become a despot when he gets a hard-on,” says a character in The Philosopher in the Boudoir. Sade alone seems to have understood the injunction “enjoy without fetters” as it should be understood: enjoy to the point of annihilating the other. In Europe, it is with Sade that sex became legislative, associating erotic license with political anarchy, but in his case it is a legislation put in the service of the strong in order to crush the weak and to allow the former to make use of the latter as they saw fit until they were exterminated. In thrall to its euphoria, the 1960s, not heeding the work of writers like Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, produced nothing but pious readings of the “divine marquis,” promoted to the rank of a subtle arranger of baroque syntactical periods or a precious precursor of the nice longhaired people who copulated amid smoke from joints and the vibrations of intoxicating music.