Sadism in the Bastille

come back next week. Revolution was brewing in Paris. There were mobs in the city streets, and on July one, seventeen eighty nine, if anyone in those mobs happened to look up at the Bastille, they would have seen a man, a prisoner, standing in the window of his cell on the sixth floor, shouting down at them. Save the prisoners. The man yelled, their throats are being slack, they're being murdered. You must help. They were dramatic words, words that the

prisoner was hoping would incite action. In actuality, the prison was nearly empty. The man shouting down from his window was the only prisoner remaining in his tower. He was short and wide, raggedly dressed as you might expect. If the mob on the street had squinted, they might have seen that the prisoner was holding an object to his

mouth like a modern day megaphone, a metallic funnel. Even if they had seen the object, the people on the street probably would not have guessed that the funnel was a piece of the prisoner's urinal though of course, use of the urinal funnel to magnify his voice was entirely functional in this case. The fact that this man one happened to be holding an object associated with bodily waste up to his mouth is uniquely appropriate given who that

prisoner was. His name was Dunisian Alphonse Francois, but he is better known as the Marquis de Sade. He is among the most infamous writers known to literary and cultural history, and among the most controversial for good reason, for his writing depicting gruesome sexual tortures and violence that went as far as murder. His grisly sexual imagination is the origin of the word sadism. Though never quite as violent as his characters, his many stints in prison weren't just for

his ideas either. The man poisoned and beat sex workers, and was credibly acute used of kidnapping teenage girls. The Marquis de Sade has been widely censored throughout history, and is also published as a Penguin classic. He has been reconsidered, redeemed and villainized in the changing political winds of history by everyone from Apolloniere to Simone de Beauvoir. He was a writer, above all, known for his libertine works of sexual violence, less known for his political and esthetic writings.

And as the Marquis de Sade stood in the window of the Bastille the July that the French Revolution would reach its climax, shouting into the metallic funnel, he was also one more thing, perhaps surprisingly, a husband to a remarkably, even strangely devoted wife, a pious woman married to a man who had had endless affairs, mostly with sex workers, but also with her own sister. And yet she had stood by him throughout his many violent indiscretions, his many imprisonments,

his burnings in effigy. As the Marquis de Sade stood there in the sixth floor of his prison tower, screaming, he may have been able to guess that soon he would be removed by the armed guards. In fact, he was removed at one the next morning. He may not have been able to guess that he wouldn't be allowed to take with him his library of six hundred books ranging from Homer to Robinson Crusoe to Erotica, that his

wife had sent him by request. He may have had some sense that thirteen days later the Vestille would be stormed and the French Revolution would begin in o earnest, But surely Sod could not have known that he was on the immediate precipice of losing the two things in the world that surely he believed he would never be without, first the pages upon pages of his manuscripts, the scrawling writing that he had kept secret and hidden during his imprisonment,

and second, at last, his once devoted wife. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood, all right, listeners, Right off the bat, this is going to be an edgy one. Before diving into the story of Sod, let's start by acknowledging that sadism from the mind of the Marquis is not the now sex positive and consensual s that you

might know from the contemporary acronym BDSM. Some of it starts there, but Sod's imagination goes far beyond even the most transgressive sex positivity into disturbing depictions of extreme tortures so obscene and violent that I can't won't even suggest them on this podcast. Fifty Shades of Gray is like a nursery rhyme by comparison. Sod himself told his lawyers that his books were quote too immoral to send to a man as pious and as decent as you. I

needed money. My publisher asked me for something quite spicy, and I made him a book capable of corrupting the devil listeners. I can't give details of such works to someone as pious and decent as you, nor would I want to. What I can give is the story of the man behind those works. With that said, let's get into it. The Marquis de Sade was born on June two,

seventeen forty, in the house of his father's mistress. Don't get me wrong, the Marquis was a legitimate child of his married parents, but Sad's father, Jean Baptiste, only married his wife in the first place to get closer to another woman, the Princess of Conde. Jean Baptiste loved the princess, but settled for marrying her lady in waiting, Marie like his eventual son, Jean Baptiste, had also been arrested for his sexual exploits with men, and Marie, unsurprisingly was rather

absent from the household and from her son's childhood. In a sad little incident from the Marquis de Sad's early life, neither parent bothered to show up to his baptism, so a pair of servants baptized him with the wrong name. He was called Denisian Alphonse Francois, not Denisian al dunt Louise, as his absentee parents had originally intended. At age five, the young Sad moved in with his father's brother, who scandalously lived with a mother and daughter with whom he

was both sleeping with. Sad had access to his uncle's impressive library, which included Molieri, Hobbes, and books with titles like The Bordello or The Everyman Debauched and The Good and Bad Uses of Flagellation. In other words, this was a child who grew up surrounded by promiscuous sex, for whom the taboo was commonplace. This was the era after the licentious Regency period in France, when so called libertinism was common. The word libertine comes from the Latin root liber,

meaning free. A libertine was a person living without moral or religious restraint, particularly in the bedroom. When sod turned ten, his father sent him to a Jesuit school that disciplined boys by flogging them in front of their classmates. Accusations of sodomy also ran rampant at the school, which was a criminal act at the time. Usually, when covering a subject on noble blood, it's unnecessary to the story to either report or speculate on the specifics of the individual's

sexual proclivities. But in the Marquis de Sad's life, his own personal sexual activity is so inextricably linked to his work and also to his life that I find it actually does hold some relevance here. So whether or not s'd first encountered sodomi at his Jesuit school, we know that in both his personal life and in his writings, for him, it was the only type of physical sex that ever satisfied him, whether he was in prison or in his marital bed, whether he was with men or

with women. Young S'ad went on to fight in the Seven Years' War, where his sexual appetites were so well known that his honorable discharge papers called him deranged. By the time S'd was twenty two, his father was desperate to get him married off. Sad was therefore betrothed to

a respectable young woman, Renee Pelege Montcre. But six weeks before the wedding, Sada in Provence was writing letters to a different woman he wanted her instead, of course, while saying how much he loved her, he was also calling her an ungrateful wretch and blackmailing her regarding the gonorrhea that he also had likely given her. So, surprise, surprise,

his relationship with that woman didn't work out. Nonetheless, Sod refused to come back to Paris to marry the woman that his father chose for him, and the wedding date was approaching. Sod's father knew what a mess he was creating for the young Rene Pelage Montrell and her mother. I pity them, he wrote, for making such a bad purchase, capable of making all kinds of trouble. Finally, one day before the wedding, Sod arrived back in Paris carrying the

then traditional wedding delicacy of artichokes. He married Peleget, who stood four foot ten beside Sod's five foot two This was a time when five ' four would be considered average. But even so, sd was short. Make of that what you will, and shockingly, the Marquis and his new marquise actually seemed to really like each other like a lot.

Sod called her his beloved soul and dearest friend. Renee Pelget came to at least accept, maybe even enjoy Sod's particular predilections in the bedroom, which were, as I alluded to before, not the type that would risk pregnancy. Biographer Francine de Plusie Gray said that Renee Pelaget's utter adoration for her husband quote has a legendary mythical streak. It is akin to the devotion displayed by wives of Ogres

in European fairy tale. Of course, all of that love and devotion wasn't enough to restrain the Marquis de Sade. She had married the Marquis de Sade, after all, and he was untamable. Three weeks after the wedding, Renee Peleget was pregnant. Five months after the wedding, her husband was in jail for the first time. It was a relatively tame first charge. He had forcibly demanded that a sex worker whip him, and he threatened to whip her in turn, all of which was actually kind of common practice at

the time for a married male aristocrat. But under threat of violence, he had also forced this woman to speak blasphemies against God. It was actually S'd's wife and mother in law who worked to get him out of prison. He was only there for three weeks, but even still he considered his treatment massively unfair. Was a noble really going to get in such trouble for how he treated such lowly women. In August seventeen sixty seven, Sod's first

son was born. Eight months after that, Sod was in jail again, this time for seven months for the violent coerced whipping of a woman named Rose Keller. By seventeen seventy two, Sod and his wife had two sons and a daughter, and he was convicted for a third time. He had given sex workers a candy that contained a dangerously high dose of an aphrodisiac called Spanish fly, which left at least one girl hospitalized. Spanish Fly is not

a euphemism. It is literally a bug a beatle actually rumored at the time to increase arousal and even used as a treatment for various illnesses, including STIs at the time, but it was also incredibly toxic, sometimes even deadly in large doses. This time, Sod was sentenced to be burned and beheaded, in a practice common for nobles at the time. He was burned only in effigy, and the sentence was considered complete. In the meantime, Sod was off in Italy

with a very particular mistress. His devoted wife's sister, Anne Prosper, was nine years younger than her sister, and she was infatuated with the Marquis de Sad. Still, Sod's wife stuck by him. In seventeen seventy four, Sod had serious kidnapping allegations levied against him. Renee Pelge covered for him, knowing all along that he had in fact taken five young teenage girls and one young boy servants into the dungeon of his family chateau to have them act out depraved

scenes and orgies. Finally, in seventeen seventy seven, and with the help of his once loving mother in law, Sod was taken into custody. It would be the thirteen year long imprisonment that eventually led him to the Bastille. For a guy best known for his elaborate imaginations about torture and restraint, SD did not take well to imprisonment. He

was not initially held at the Bastillo fortress. He was first at a fortress called Vincenne cell eleven, with windows just barely high enough for him to see a sliver of sky above the fortress walls. The marquis wrote to his wife constantly requesting incredibly specific items herivens, hemorrhoid creams, face powder, toothpicks, cologne. She worked to send them, writing letters that professed ardent and passionate love. Sometimes he returned

her affections. He wrote about his intense desire for her, using euphemisms about his hem bow and arrow. He asked her to send him cylindrical objects shaped in very, very particular dimensions. But sometimes he turned on her. He blamed her mother, correctly as it turned out, for his imprisonment, calling her a venomous beast, an infernal monster, and other epithets that I cannot speak on this podcast. He sent his mother in law a letter written in his own blood.

In the height of irony, he accused Rene Pelaget's wife of wearing clothes that were too immodest. As a result, she went to live at a convent. It was Leap day of seventeen ninety four when Sod was transferred to the Bastille. Ironically, his tower was called the Tower of Liberty. He was in an octagonal cell that he plastered with flowers and portraits of his family, almost like a dorm room. By the end of his stay in the Tower of Liberty, he was on the sixth floor, surrounded by six hundred

books in a bookcase. His collection included Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Erotica, and the book Dangerous Liaisons, written right around the time of Sod's imprisonment. He also had dozens of pens and blank notebooks. His wife had sent him all of it because upon being imprisoned, Sod turned at last, in earnest to the thing that he would become most famous for writing. Sod turned his wife into his research assistant. He would ask her to find hotel names, streets, managers, and surrounding

settings in locations as distant as Lisbon and Madrid. Yet his letters also derided the writing abilities of the very woman who was sending him the books and research and strawberries and rosewater he requested to the Bastille. In one letter, he wrote, quote, you don't seem to have bathed today, for it is impossible to read anything drier than your letter. In another, he wrote, You've sent me three pages of idiotic ramblings, but it's in your manner to say stupidities

to have your reason go off track. Renee Peleget is generally considered uneducated. Her writing is misspelled, and she certainly didn't share her husband's famous linguistic dexterity. But she engaged him in complex questions of law and ethics, and she read and critiqued his manuscripts. She also probably accidentally misled

him in answer to some of his research questions. The descriptions of foreign nations in the Marquis de Sade's books are often wrong, and that's the evidence that the Marquis de Sade's prison writings were actually reliant on his long suffering wife. Of course, sod was still in prison when he began writing his first book in seventeen eighty five. He had to be secretive. He wrote in frenzied three hours from seven to ten pm. The night darkening outside

his window. As his hand trembled with excitement, he wrote on five inch pieces of paper in tiny handwriting. There are many tales about books being written in ridiculously short periods of time. Supposedly, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jacqueline Hyde in three days, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the First Sherlock Home Story in three weeks, and fasad it took thirty

seven days to produce forty nine feet of writing. His book was about two hundred and fifty thousand words, about one thousand pages, more than double the size that would make a modern agent or editor blanche if they got it in the mail. That book was The one hundred and twenty Days of Sodom, a catalog of every possible sexually violent act. I cannot name them here. You are welcome to look them up yourself. But if you are

imagining titillation, don't be surprised to find yourself repelled. During all this time, the seeds of the French Revolution were about to bloom. Revolutionaries were preparing their muskets and sharpening their swords. The Liberty Tower was emptied of all but one prisoner, Its most depraved and one day most famous the Marquis de Sade. He had been hearing the discontent of the revolutionaries down below, and he was feeling bored

and annoyed, denied his daily walks. So at noon on July one, seventeen eighty nine, he took the funnel that linked his urinal to the fortress, mote, put it to his mouth, stood at his window and yelled down to the people below. The prisoner's throats are being cut, he screamed down into the crowd. If the Marquis de Sad is anything, it's consistent and his desire to provoke people, to say scandalous things and get a reaction. Unsurprisingly, the

Bestille guards were not happy with him. At one am that night, they seized him in his cell and took him basically naked, to the convent of the Brothers of Charity. It was, in Sod's words, an insane asylum. Sod was desperate over the loss of his writings, which were still hidden in his cell in the Bastille. He gave the police commissioner the right to open his cell as long as his wife, Madame de Sad, was there. Sod assumed, of course, that his wife would take his writings to safety.

But the Marquise had been having a bit of a change of heart. We really don't know why. At long last, the wife, who had stuck with Sod through all of his troubles, finally changed her mind about him. What we know is that on July fourteenth, thirteen days after her husband screamed from the window of his cell and was removed to an insane asylum, the Bastille was stormed and

blood ran through the streets of Paris. We know that she was having mobility issues with her legs, and that she was forty eight years old and married to a man who had spent the better part of their lives together in prisons, and she was becoming more religious at the convent she lived at. And we know that on April first, seventeen ninety Sad was released. He was balding, nearly fifty, wearing a ratty woolen coat. We can only imagine the feeling of freedom after a thirteen year imprisonment.

He must have breathed in the fresh air exhaled, and he had only one There's one thing on his mind, his wife. Maybe he wanted to do to her. These sexual things that he had described in his letters over the years. Maybe he simply wanted to sit down together to a good meal at a table where they could stay for as long as they wanted. Man and wife reunited at last. He went immediately to seek her out and found her convent. He waited patiently for Renee Pelage

to come meet him. She never came. Your wife does not wish to see you ever again, a messenger told Sod. She wants a legal separation. Sad never again saw the manuscript that he left behind in the Bastille. But the bigger blow was the loss of his long suffering wife. As I said, we don't know for sure why Renee Pelaget changed her mind at last. It's not as though she had a shortage of But I will add one suggestion. It must have been much easier to have a husband

like the Marquis de Sade. When he was in prison. You could visit him and then leave him safely behind you, where you knew you would find him the next time. In prison, he could not be frequenting brothels and picking up yet another venereal disease to pass on to you. With him in prison, you had a modicum of control in your marriage to a man who had so abused and degraded you. For Rene Pelage, her husband's imprisonment must have been a freedom that she could not give up.

A certain streak of karma would have had Sad live out the rest of his days alone. But he quickly met a new woman, thirty three year old Constant Quesnay, who had a six year old son from previous marriage. She became yet another inexplicably devoted partner. I know a ton of amazing women who are still single today, and this guy finds endless devotes. Love is not fair. It was after Sad's stint in the Bastille, and after the loss of his wife, that he wrote the works for

which he would become best known in his lifetime. Philosophy in the Boudoir, Justine and Juliette were sexually explicit and violent books that shocked society's sensibilities. Sad was free for only eleven years before he was arrested again at his publisher's office in eighteen oh one, this time for the crime of obscenity. He spent another thirteen year stint in the insane Asylum, still receiving conjugal visits from at least two whims women until he died on December twond eighteen fourteen,

at age seventy four. He willed everything to his second partner, Constance. He stated in his will that I trust the memory of me shall fade out in the minds of all men. Of course, that's not what happened. The legacy of the Marquis de Sade is extremely complicated. At various points over the centuries, his reputation has been sanitized and resurrected as a figurehead against censorship. At other points, his work has been castigated for its misogynistic violence and censored all over again.

He is one of those lightning rod historical figures who is endlessly used for the political ends of whichever movement wants to evoke him. He has been revisited by everyone from Flaubert to Simone de Beauvoir. Mary Shelley may have named her case character Justine and Frankenstein, after Sad's character of the same name. The One hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was translated anew into English as a Penguin classic in twenty seventeen. It is complicated to consider Sod

in the contemporary moment. Do we defend his works on the basis of anti censorship and the virtue of sex positivity or at least open sexual expression. Or do we reject the works on the basis of opposition to misogyny and violence against women, opposition to the author the sexual coercion and violence, abduction and rape actually committed by the man himself. And how do we even read Sad if we do? Were his writings even meant to be erotic?

They may have been at least partly comedy, partly satire, partly political commentary amidst the beheadings and power upheavals of the French Revolution. Maybe Sad was an eighteenth century troll and his works were just meant to be provocative for the sake of provocation. Duplicit Gray writes that far from intending to arouse the reader, the quote repugnance of the one hundred and twenty days quote makes it far more

conducive to chastity. I have to be honest listener reading Sod's works for this episode, I was second by his treatment of his characters, especially the women, and I want to be very clear about my opinions here. Often, when researching a historical figure, I find myself ending with more empathy for them than when I began. But in this case I just feel disgusted and yet simoned. Above WHI our mother of second wave feminism, wrote an essay arguing that we should not burn Sod because he shows us

something important about the dark heart of humanity. In the end, I think there's a way to believe that Sod should not be jailed for obscenity in his writing, only for his actions, to think that his works should not be censored, and also to think that we need not celebrate in order not to censor. The heirs of Sod may feel the same. The line of Sod, which stretched back to medieval times, stopped using the title Marquis after his death

in eighteen fourteen. Out of embarrassment. The heirs began to call themselves compt instead, all the way until twenty fourteen, when one heir chose to reclaim marquis again. Who knows what time will bring whether future generations will once more renounce their claims to the infamous Libertine. That's the story

of the infamous Marquis de Sade. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about the fate of his most famous Bestille manuscript and how it actually became the one hundred and twenty Days of Sodom. The Marquis de Sade never saw his one hundred and twenty Days of Sodom again, and it was never published in his lifetime. He died believing that the manuscript was destroyed in the Bestille, But the fate of

the one hundred twenty Days was not so simple. Unbeknownst to the Marquis de Sade, it was discovered and removed by a Ciphilian two days before the storming of the Bastille. It wound up published for the first time in nineteen o four by a psychiatrist and sexologist based in Berlin, who published it under a pseudonym. The book was considered appropriate for medical and psychiatric use as a massive catalog

of sexual desire. In twenty fourteen, the original manuscript was purchased for seven million euros by a Frenchman who had literally won the lottery and was later arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. In twenty twenty one, the French government bought the manuscript for four point five million euros. The obscene scroll that started its life in the Bastille is now officially a French National treasure. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey.

Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Shworts, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zuick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.