Marquis de Sade - The 120 Days of Sodom

DONATIEN ALPHONSE FRANOIS, MARQUIS DE SADE, was born in Paris in 1740 into a distinguished Provenal family. Educated at the Louis-le-Grand Jesuit school and a military academy in Versailles, he fought in the Seven Years War with some distinction. In May 1763 he married Rene-Plagie de Montreuil but in October of the same year was briefly incarcerated for committing sacrilegious acts with a prostitute. Further scandals followed, including an assault on a woman named Rose Keller in 1768 and an orgy with prostitutes in Marseille in 1772 which led to him being burned in effigy for poisoning and sodomy; he evaded the sentence by fleeing to Italy with his sister-in-law, with whom he was having an affair. Two years later, Sade and his wife spent the winter closeted away in his chteau in Lacoste with several female servants, giving rise to the so-called little girls affair. At the behest of his mother-in-law, he was arrested in 1777 and spent the next thirteen years in prison reading voraciously and writing several plays, short stories and novels, including The 120 Days of Sodom. After his wife divorced him upon his release in 1790, Sade began a relationship with a former actress, Marie-Constance Quesnet, that would last until his death. An active participant in revolutionary politics, Sade narrowly escaped the guillotine. Most of his major works were published in the 1790s, including Justine, Philosophy in the Boudoir and the History of Juliette. Wrongly suspected by Napoleon of writing an anti-Josphine pamphlet, Sade was arrested in 1801 and later incarcerated at the mental asylum in Charenton, where he spent the rest of his life. He continued to write novels and plays, and organized the asylums popular theatrical productions. He died in 1814 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

WILL MCMORRAN is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London.

THOMAS WYNN is Reader in French in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University.

On 3 July 1789, eleven days before the storming of the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade is taken from his cell in the prisons Liberty tower in the middle of the night. Earlier that day, he had been caught shouting to the crowd outside through an improvised megaphone that the prisoners throats were being cut. He is transported to Charenton, outside Paris, and obliged to leave all his personal effects behind. Among these is a copper cylinder, hidden in a crevice in the wall; it apparently remains there, untouched, for the next ten days. On the morning of 14 July, Madame de Sade heads to the Bastille to collect her husbands belongings, but is unable to get close to the prison the Revolution has beaten her to it, and there is no more she can do. Sade is devastated, and it is the loss of the cylinder that grieves him most it would lead him, he later said, to weep tears of blood. Inside was a scroll, twelve metres long and eleven centimetres wide, covered on both sides in tiny but perfectly neat handwriting: the manuscript of a novel entitled The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage.

Although Sade would never see his novel again, it had not been destroyed in the sacking of the Bastille: it had instead been taken by a young man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who would subsequently sell it to a Provenal aristocrat, the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans, in whose family it would remain in peaceful obscurity for three generations. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, whispers began to emerge of a privately held manuscript of a previously unknown work by the

When the scroll was sold by the Villeneuve-Trans family to a German collector at the turn of the twentieth century, the pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch was granted access. In 1904, under the pseudonym Eugne Dhren, he published a private subscription edition of the text in Berlin, proclaiming it to be a great work of sexology. The scroll remained in Germany until 1929, when Sades descendants, the Nouailles family, dispatched the leading Sade scholar, Maurice Heine, to reacquire it and bring it home to France. He did so, and in return was allowed the time and access required to produce a more rigorous edition of the text, which he published in another private subscription edition from 1931 to 1935. Heine would be the last of the novels editors to see the original scroll, and all subsequent editions of the text are based on his transcription. The scroll itself stayed with the Nouailles family until, in 1982, they entrusted it to a family friend and publisher, Jean Grouet, who offered to have it valued. Grouet, however, smuggled the scroll over the border to Switzerland and sold it to a private collector, Grard Nordmann. Despite decades of legal wrangling, it remained in Switzerland until 2014 (the bicentennial of Sades death), when it was bought at a cost of 7 million by a private foundation and repatriated to France. The story of the scroll does not end there, however: its exhibition in Paris was cut short in December 2014 when the director of the foundation that had acquired the manuscript was charged with fraud. The scroll, which started its life in prison, is currently under lock and key once again, waiting for the courts to decide the next instalment of its turbulent history. It seems likely, however, that the French government will declare the scroll a national treasure to ensure it never leaves the country again.

As the final words on the scroll make clear, Sade began The 120 Days of Sodom on 22 October 1785 and finished thirty-seven days later. Although he wrote it in the Bastille, it was conceived a few years earlier in another prison, the Chteau de Vincennes. Sades letters like his cell were subject to constant inspection, so generally give away little about his writing activities; his correspondence with his wife, however, does offer a few hints of the novels beginnings. A letter from Madame de Sade dated 28 November 1782 reveals, for example, that some of her husbands manuscripts and notebooks have been confiscated, including some apparently compromising material: I dont know what you wrote in the papers that have been taken from you, she writes, but it gives a bad impression of you, it seems to me, from what Ive been told. Her warning apparently falls on deaf ears, for in May the following year she tells him again, what you are writing is doing you a great wrong.

While we cannot know for certain what Sade was writing, a letter railing against the political elite, which he sent on 26 April 1783 to his dear friend, Milli de Rousset, seems to anticipate the tone and rhetoric of the opening paragraph of the 120 Days:

By what right does this pack of leeches which laps up the peoples misfortunes, and which by its outrageous monopolies plunges this unfortunate class (whose sole crime is to be weak and poor) into the cruel necessity of losing either its honour or its life, and in the case of the latter leaving it no other choice than to lose it through poverty or on the scaffold what right, I ask you, do these monsters have to demand virtues?

In June of the same year, Sade tells his wife of a great novelistic labour that will keep him occupied for the whole of the coming autumn, while in November he offers her a taster of this new work: Here, my dear friend, is a small sample of a work I have spoken to you about; I have gathered almost two hundred similar character traits, all of which I have portrayed and arranged like the one Im sending, so you can judge the whole thing. He compares his project to a book he had recently acquired: the Abb Bertouxs little-known compendium of