How a Smut Writer Helped Kick Off the Storming of the Bastille
On July 14th, the people of France will celebrate the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789 by eating outside, setting things on fire and generally doing whatever they would otherwise do. Like many countries’ summer independence celebrations, it’s mostly an excuse to get drunk and blow things up, but it was a hugely important moment in French history that happened to have been helped along by one of the world’s most infamous filth peddlers.
If you’re familiar with the concept of sadism, you can thank or blame the Marquis de Sade. He was a French aristocrat most famous for his novels Justin, or Good Conduct Well-Chastised; Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded; The 120 Days of Sodom, or The School of Licentiousness; and Philosophy in the Bedroom. It’s not hard to parse his primary interest from those titles, but it’s safe to say your average BookToker wouldn’t find much to like in Sade’s eroticism. It was usually violent, often horrifically so, involving acts that would make Bret Easton Ellis say, “Okay, that’s over the line.”
Sade also practiced what he preached, so it’s not surprising he spent a fair amount of his life in prison, mostly for the practice but occasionally for the preaching. He was serving one such stint in 1789 at the Bastille, a notorious symbol of injustice often used to house political prisoners. You couldn’t wing a croissant in Paris at the time without hitting an injustice, so it was a topic weighing heavily on the minds of its citizens, though in Sade’s case, he was mostly pissed that he’d lost exercise privileges. That’s why, on July 2nd, he fashioned a megaphone, probably out of toothbrushes and ramen noodles, and shouted to the mobs in the streets, “They are massacring the prisoners; you must come and free them!”
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Of course, this wasn’t true. Historically, the Bastille was one of the better places you could be imprisoned in Paris, and at the time, it barely housed enough inmates to make a massacre plausible. But Sade never met a shit he couldn’t stir and was probably bored out of his mind, so if he could rile up the crowds and convince them to break him out, all the better. Less than two weeks later, as rumors swirled of the atrocities occurring inside — and definite truths about the huge stockpiles of gunpowder stored therein — revolutionaries surrounded the Bastille and fought their way inside.
What they found there was probably pretty disappointing; ironically, Sade had already been moved to a different facility a few days earlier, significantly reducing the prison’s population. In fact, the Bastille had been scheduled for demolition anyway, so the victory was largely symbolic, all that gunpowder notwithstanding (as well as the capture of the governor of the prison, and, well, the less said about what they did to him, the better).
What they did find was Sade’s lost manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, which was passed around to various wealthy collectors for the next few centuries until it was bought in 2021 by the French government for $5 million in what is surely one of the most expensive cases of lost and found.
