The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage is an unfinished novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, written in 1785 and published in 1904 after its manuscript was rediscovered. It describes the activities of four wealthy libertine Frenchmen who spend four months seeking the ultimate sexual gratification through orgies, sealing themselves in an inaccessible castle in the heart of the Black Forest with 12 accomplices, 20 designated victims and 10 servants. Four aging prostitutes relate stories of their most memorable clients whose sexual practices involved 600 "passions" including coprophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, and child sexual abuse. The stories inspire the libertines to engage in acts of increasing violence leading to the torture and murder of their victims, most of whom are adolescents and young women.
The role of sadism and masochism in fiction has attracted serious scholarly attention. Anthony Storr has commented that the volume of sadomasochist pornography shows that sadomasochistic interest is widespread in Western society; John Kucich has noted the importance of masochism in late-19th-century British colonial fiction. This article presents appearances of sadomasochism in literature and works of fiction in the various media.
A libertine is a person questioning and challenging most moral principles, such as responsibility or sexual restraints, and will often declare these traits as unnecessary, undesirable or evil. A libertine is especially someone who ignores or even spurns accepted morals and forms of behaviour observed by the larger society. The values and practices of libertines are known collectively as libertinism or libertinage and are described as an extreme form of hedonism or liberalism. Libertines put value on physical pleasures, meaning those experienced through the senses. As a philosophy, libertinism gained new-found adherents in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, particularly in France and Great Britain. Notable among these were John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, and the Marquis de Sade.
Juliette is a novel written by the Marquis de Sade and published 1797–1801, accompanying de Sade's 1797 version of his novel Justine. While Justine, Juliette's sister, was a virtuous woman who consequently encountered nothing but despair and abuse, Juliette is an amoral nymphomaniac murderer who is successful and happy. The full title of the novel in the original French is L'Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, and the English title is "Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded". As many other of his works, Juliette follows a pattern of violently pornographic scenes followed by long treatises on a broad range of philosophical topics, including theology, morality, aesthetics, naturalism and also Sade's dark, fatalistic view of world metaphysics.
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue is a 1791 novel by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. Justine is set just before the French Revolution in France and tells the story of a young girl who goes under the name of Thérèse. Her story is recounted to Madame de Lorsagne while defending herself for her crimes, en route to punishment and death. She explains the series of misfortunes that led to her present situation.
Rachilde was the pen name and preferred identity of novelist and playwright Marguerite Vallette-Eymery. Born near Périgueux, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France during the Second French Empire, Rachilde went on to become a Symbolist author and one of the most prominent women in literature associated with the Decadent movement of fin de siècle France.
Thérèse Philosophe is a 1748 French novel ascribed to Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens, or, according to a minority opinion, Denis Diderot and others. It has been chiefly regarded as a pornographic novel, which accounts for its massive sales in 18th-century France. The novel represents a public conveyance for some ideas of the Philosophes.
Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man is a dialogue written by the Marquis de Sade while incarcerated at the Château de Vincennes in 1782. It is one of the earliest known written works from de Sade to be dated with certainty, and was first published in 1926 together with an edition of Historiettes, Contes et Fabliaux. It was subsequently published in English in 1927 by Pascal Covici in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 650 copies.
Eugénie is the French version of the female given name Eugenia.
There have been many and varied references to the Marquis de Sade in popular culture, including fictional works, biographies and more minor references. The namesake of the psychological and subcultural term sadism, his name is used variously to evoke sexual violence, licentiousness and freedom of speech. In modern culture his works are simultaneously viewed as masterful analyses of how power and economics work, and as erotica. Sade's sexually explicit works were a medium for the articulation of the corrupt and hypocritical values of the elite in his society, which caused him to become imprisoned. He thus became a symbol of the artist's struggle with the censor. Sade's use of pornographic devices to create provocative works that subvert the prevailing moral values of his time inspired many other artists in a variety of media. The cruelties depicted in his works gave rise to the concept of sadism. Sade's works have to this day been kept alive by artists and intellectuals because they espouse a philosophy of extreme individualism that became reality in the economic liberalism of the following centuries.
Richard Mique was a neoclassical French architect born in Lorraine. He is most remembered for his picturesque hamlet, the Hameau de la Reine — not particularly characteristic of his working style — for Marie Antoinette in the Petit Trianon gardens within the estate of Palace of Versailles.
Pegging is an anal sex act in which a woman penetrates a man's anus with a strap-on dildo.
Madame de Sade is a 1965 play written by Yukio Mishima. It was first published in English, translated by Donald Keene by Grove Press and is currently out of print.
Marquis de Sade: Justine is a 1969 erotic period drama film directed by Jesús Franco, written and produced by Harry Alan Towers, and based on the 1791 novel Justine by the Marquis de Sade. It stars Romina Power as the title character, with Maria Rohm, Klaus Kinski, Akim Tamiroff, Harald Leipnitz, Rosemary Dexter, Horst Frank, Sylva Koscina and Mercedes McCambridge.
Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, best known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and author of philosophical and sadomasochistic novels exploring such controversial subjects as rape, bestiality and necrophilia. His works evidence a philosophical mind advocating a materialist philosophy in which Nature dictates absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law, with the pursuit of personal pleasure as its foremost principle. Besides novels, he wrote philosophical tracts, novellas, short stories, and a number of plays. Publication, dissemination, and translation of his works have long been hindered by censorship: not until 1983 were his works allowed unfettered distribution in the UK, for instance.
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French writer, libertine, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.
The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography is the American title of a 1978 non-fiction book by Angela Carter, an English writer who primarily wrote fiction novels. British publication was delayed until 1979, when the book appeared as The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History.
Incest is an important thematic element and plot device in literature, with famous early examples such as Sophocles' classic Oedipus Rex, a tragedy in which the title character unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. It occurs in medieval literature, both explicitly, as related by denizens of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and winkingly, as between Pandarus and Criseyde in Chaucer's Troilus. The Marquis de Sade was famously fascinated with "perverse" sex acts such as incest, which recurs frequently in his works, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797).
Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion is a 1970 British sexploitation horror film directed by Jesús Franco, and starring Maria Rohm, Marie Liljedahl, Jack Taylor, and Christopher Lee. A modern-day adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's book Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), the film follows a teenage girl who, after accepting an invitation to vacation on an island with a woman and her brother, instead finds herself at the center of a series of disturbing sexual experiments.
Eugenie de Sade is a softcore film adaptation and modern-day update of the Marquis de Sade's short story "Eugénie de Franval" (1800) directed by Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco in 1970 and released in 1973. It has often been confused with his earlier Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (1970), an adaptation of de Sade's book Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), as both films are often referred to simply as Eugenie.
