Did Marquis de Sade's son do the right thing by burning his unpublished works?
Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) was a French Nobleman mostly known for his books depicting acts of sexual and moral depravity, likely inspired by his numerous real life sex crimes; 120 Days of Sodom is his most known work. He spent most of his adult life in prison, where he wrote many of his works. Eventually he was put in an insane asylum and died there. The term "Sadism" is derived from his name based on both him and the deranged content of his work.
What I find interesting, though, is that a lot of his unpublished works were destroyed by his son who was ashamed of his father's art. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade#Posthumous_evaluation :
>His surviving son, Claude-Armand, had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burnt, including Les Journées de Florbelle.
Given what this man wrote, was this a good thing to do? The books destroyed probably consisted of the same depraved topics as his other published books. Was it a loss to the fields of philosophy and literature that these works are gone or would they have poisoned the discourse surrounding them and made them worse? I know his son burnt them for personal/emotional reasons but I'm talking in the general historical/artistic sense.