 “Must we Burn Sade?” identifies the Marquis’s decision to write as an existential project, an authentic ethics and a politics of rebellion. Beauvoir credits Sade with uncovering the despotic secrets of the patriarchal political machine. She is sympathetic to his utopian appeal to freedom. She finds, however, that Sade perverted the meaning of freedom. Thus Beauvoir identifies Sade as a great moralist who endorsed an unsatisfactory ethics.