Sade's preface Reflections on the Novel in which he states the gothic is “the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded.”
Idées sur Les Romans. edited by Jean Glatier. Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970.
“Uncertainties about nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominated Gothic Fiction. They are linked to wider threats of disintegration manifested forcefully in political revolution. The decade of the French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was most popular” (Fred Botting. Gothic. London, Routledge, 1996. p.5)
“… it is important to register that terror had, and continues to have, direct connections with the social political realm. It is, of course, no accident that the roots of Gothic fiction in a time of European revolution, one of those manifestations was the French ‘reign of terror’, established ‘terror’ as a term that you could look outward as well as inward…” (David Punter. “Terror”. IN: The handbook to Gothic Literature. NY: NYU, 1998. p. 235)
“Locked in our distant modern view, the genre [irony, he does not believe it is a genre] looks all too unified, but the fiction market of the 1790s was polarised by a range of contradictory social and political factors …. For writers like Clara Reeve, the Gothick motifs, drawn from the age of chivalry, could used to redress the leveling tendencies that followed in the wake of the French revolution… . In 1800 the Marquis de Sade revealed an equally political interest in the gothick novel, reading ann Radcliffe and Lewis as a partially unconscious response to the upheavals that had recently shaken Europe." (Victor Sage. The Gothick Novel. McMillan, 1990. p. 13).
