Episode #101 - WTDW The Marquis de Sade?
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Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I've done too bad, how are you?

I'm good. Happy New Year. This is our first recording of 2025. Yeah, Happy New Year everyone. It sounds very weird to say 2025. I've managed to write 2024 every single day. I'm honestly still convinced that it's only 2023. I mean, I was born in the 90s, so in my head it's still basically 2001. Yeah. And...

Everything beyond that is ridiculous. Yeah. You weren't born in the 90s. You were born in the 80s. I was born in the 80s. God, I'm so old. I'm a child of the 90s. See, my brain is going, that's how old I am. You first became conscious of the need to write down the date every day. Yeah, in about 1993. But...

It's a new year. It's 2025 and we've decided to make history fully sexy on History is Sexy by talking about the Marquis de Sade. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sexy is interesting. He thinks he's sexy.

I don't even know if he... I mean, he thinks he's sexy for him. Yeah. But I don't know... I don't even know that he's trying to be sexy. In fact, he's not trying to be sexy. He's trying to be obscene, which is different. It is. He's trying to be obscene and weirdly philosophical. Obviously, if you know anything about the Marquis de Sade, you will expect this to be a content warning heavy episode. If you do not know anything about the Marquis de Sade, don't...

It's awful. It's awful. We're going to be talking about rape. We're going to be talking about incest. We're going to be talking about child abuse. Don't, you know...

I completely understand not wanting to... Yeah, consider this a full content warning for all things. For all possible things. It's one of those things where my biggest question about the Marquis de Sade is like, why do we care about... Why do we talk about this man? Why do we talk about his work? What is there that like... We talk about his work because he did what he set out to do, which is to shock people.

Because his work is ultimately successful. Yeah. He invented essentially torture porn, right? Like he is the precursor to the films of Eli Roth. Yes, but Eli Roth's films have no further point beyond the shocking. Whereas the Marquis de Sade does have at least a philosophy of

And he has a philosophy that existed before him, that existed after him, that he is attempting to live and express. And his philosophy is fucking weird. And his philosophy is stupid. And he is like monomaniacal about it. But it is nonetheless an attempt at... It's not like just...

It is based on a belief about the world, about how the world is formed and what it means to be alive that I think most kind of torture porn stuff doesn't. And I disagree fundamentally with him. And I think... It's good to know. I will note that down. Yeah.

I don't disagree entirely. I'm also a materialist, although I think I'm becoming less materialist as I get older. But we'll talk about that later. Like the libertinism, I disagree with. But the fact that he wrote so many other things which are not libertine and are not obscenity are interesting.

is interesting to me that's kind of the most interesting part and it's the part that we forget about a lot and think that he only wrote 100 days of sodom a book that he didn't technically finish writing yeah so we can't really i think it's unfair to count it amongst his works yeah it is weird that it's the most famous one yes and it is the most famous one because it is the one that

was cited like 19th century when the German psychiatrists, so it's Kraft Eberg, basically cited 100 Days of Sodom when he created the concept of sadism. But it's very unfair because he did write like a bunch of historical novels, a bunch of philosophical works, like just a load of stuff which is

largely nothing to do with it yeah the problem is that he lived his life according to largely his libertine principles yeah and that made him a bastard also his books are boring even when they're talking about graphic torturous sex so i can't imagine how boring they are when he doesn't talk about that um

I mean, they're less boring, to be honest, because they are stuff other than just bum sex and whipping happens. And mostly his other books are just bum sex and whipping. So to shout out the person who asked this question, it was Christian Leonard who said, Mark, you decide what's the deal with that guy. Yeah.

And so we'll do a wee potted biography of him. Because he has quite an interesting life. He's alive during the period of the French Revolution. Yeah, I always forget this, even though I have read Marat Saad. You'd think just the existence of that play would make me remember that Marat Saad is a revolutionary figure, but I always forget. And I will say...

As I was reading books about de Sade, I was also reading A Place of Greater Safety, where he appears and is inexplicably the only character that Mantel forgets to drop his aristocratic titles. So he's just called the Marquis de Sade at all times, even though he should technically be called Citizen Sade for two thirds of the book.

And he's a little weirdo in that, which I suspect he probably was. But yeah, so he is around during the French Revolution because he's born in 1740. He is the son of the Comte de Sade from a Provençal family. His real name is Donatien Alphonse-Francois de Sade, which is classic French aristocrat. Pump as many names in there as you possibly can. I feel like the English try to do more than that, to be fair. He's only got three before his last name. It's not that bad.

It's true. Aristocrats love to put a million names on it, and the French are not kind of exempt from it. All of his sons have three names as well. I will say I found very recently that he still has living descendants. Yeah. Didn't one recently reclaim the title? I don't know about that, but one of them used to be the director of the Met.

That's incredible. Yeah, which is extremely delightful to me. So he still has quite a lot of descendants knocking about being relatively important French aristocrats who escaped all of it. Because what he did was he did all right under almost all of the regimes if he hadn't been such a pervert.

Then he was kind of politically very malleable. I'm playing both sides so that I always come out on top. So he grows up, he goes to a Jesuit school, which everybody's very into because apparently the Jesuits were quite into flogging and everyone thinks that this is why he's so into flogging. Although it's basically the same thing that they say about like...

that they all went to private school and that's why they're into whipping. Yeah. Because in boarding school, they associate capital punishment with sexy, with their puberty, and then they get stuck, which sounds very Freudian and therefore useless. So he grows up in Jesuit school. He is also the nephew of a notorious libertine advocate

So like technically a religious guy called Jacques-Francois de Soirde, who is openly living with a mother and daughter as mistresses and has loads of what's called libertine fiction and libertine writings. I'm going to say the word libertine like one million times because that is his philosophy. And it is.

initially meant a person who is a free thinker on religion so like free from thinking about religion and kind of is aligned with atheism but like very hard line atheism yeah like makes Richard Dawkins look like a big old softy atheist well I think it's like it like definitely by the time it gets to decide it's

If you want to be free of religion, you have to be free of any morality at all, that all morality is religious and therefore... Or any conventional morality, yes. Because all conventional morality...

either comes from, comes mostly from religion, which they hate, but also all kind of institutions. So the concept of aristocracy, the concept of a state and its laws, all of these things are human inventions that are preposterous. And the true freedom is to overthrow all human expectations of proper behavior and deprive

to be tearing down anything that humans have considered to be morality. It is essentially drawn to the extreme, the basic libertarian idea

ideal of like, I don't want to do anything I don't have to do. I don't want to have a responsibility to other people. It's like that push to the absolute extremes of behavior. Yeah. And then the point of Libertine writing is supposed to be that you are saying the worst thing that you possibly can, at the very least in order to force people to explain why it's the worst thing they've ever heard. Like,

Why is it so awful for me to do this? Why is it so awful for me to be having all of this weird sex? Explain to me why it's so awful. Without recourse to religion, without recourse to law, explain to me in a more objective way why it's so awful.

rape and murder and torture and eating shit are bad. And that, like, philosophically, that's what it is. It's to say outside of the human constructions of morality, why is it bad? I don't know that Donatien was smart enough to do that very well. LAUGHTER

Like, there's better stuff. Like, Lesley's own Stange Voice is libertine fiction in a way. It doesn't go anywhere near the extremes, but... But it also is, in the end, moralistic, right? They get punished for their behaviour in the end of Lesley's own Stange Voice. But he's not alone in what he's writing, is what I'm trying to say. And he's not writing it just necessarily...

For titillation purposes, which I think is the difference. He's writing it in order to shock people and then have them explain why they're shocked. So he grows up with this libertine uncle who he's well into. He spends ages. He joins the army at 14, which is insane. That is insane. Like, I don't want 14 year olds in the army. No, I don't think they do very well at it at all.

And then because he's a little aristocrat, he's basically like a commander by like 17. And this is what I understand from my beloved Sharpener, was Napoleon fixed. And the British didn't. But...

yeah so he spends like a decade in the army he fights throughout the seven years war and then when he gets out of the army he goes to Paris and is rich and kind of sexy and has nice clothes and is horny all the time and is

very into theatre and is just kind of running around shagging everybody and writing plays which nobody in his family thinks is good. So they force him to marry a woman called Renée Pagé de Montreux, who he doesn't want to marry at all, but they get on well enough. He does have an affair with her sister, which goes badly. Yeah.

But more importantly, he has got into acting out his libertine dreams and pushing them towards the edges of what French society will accept.

And this would be fine if his partners in this were willing, which sometimes they were, but they were not always willing. And he first came to the attention of French kind of wider society in 1763 when he picked up a sex worker called Jean Testard. And it is interesting reading books here how this incident is presented, depending on whether people want to...

Emphasize what they see as the importance of his literary contribution or whether they want to play up that he is a pervert. And so one, some sources like she was prostitute. So it does like, and the worst thing he ever did was mistreat a prostitute and who amongst us hasn't. So yeah.

Which was a bit much. And then another source, which was the most detailed about what happened, to be fair, but still did call her a whore and a harlot. Sure. As if it was therefore kind of fine. And then another source was like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is not okay. Yeah. But that one doesn't call her a sex worker. That one specifically says that she sometimes works as a sex worker, but also is a fan maker. And she's mostly a person who makes fans and therefore a respectable woman.

And that one was the most damning about what had happened to her. So none of them are able to get their heads around the fact that even if you've hired a sex worker... You do not get to mistreat that person. You don't just get to lock them in a room. No. And shout at them. Yeah.

So for a long time, nobody knew what happened. There was just this one letter from his father that was like, oh, Jesus fucking Christ, Dynastia, and it's being an embarrassment. And all they knew is that he had been arrested and that he had brought shame upon the family. But in the 1960s, someone found the deposition given by the girl, whose name is Jean Testard, and explains exactly in her own words what happened to her, which is very helpful. Mm-hmm.

Basically, she is a sex worker. She is picked up. He gives her 48 livres, which is a massive amount of money, to leave the kind of brothel that she was working in and to accompany her to his house. So this is what he does time and time again. He uses the fact that he has tons of money to push girls into going past boundaries that they would otherwise have. Yeah.

He takes her home, he locks her into a room and then asks her if she has religion. She says, "Yes, I'm a religious woman, I'm Catholic." And he then starts pouring out a stream of blasphemies and told her he would prove that God didn't exist.

Then masturbated into a chalice from which you would take communion, calling God a motherfucker and told her that he had recently put two communion wafers inside a girl's vagina while shouting, if thou art God, avenge thyself. Which honestly seems like hating God more than believing he doesn't exist. Yes. I mean, that's a whole issue. Yeah.

This freaked her out, as it would. And it kind of got worse. He then took her into a second room where he showed her all of his whips and five different sets of Cato Ninetales and a kind of display of crucifixes and obscene art. And he then made her heat up a Cato Ninetales made of iron until they were red hot and then beat him with it.

And then he said, if you want, I'll beat you. And she was like, no, no. He then took two crucifixes and stamped on one while masturbating with the other and then forced her to do the same. So forced her into a sex act that she did not want to go with. And finally, he held her at gunpoint until she said out loud, bugger God, I don't give a fuck about you.

and promised to go to a church, steal some communion hosts and use them as instruments of sexual pleasure. But at that point, her procuress, her madam, kind of came to pick her up. She got in the thing and was like, get me to the police. This guy's fucking wild. Immediately went to the police and he was arrested that night for blasphemy and incitement to sacrilege. Which, to be fair, is, I think, better than a lot of sex workers would experience now if they went to the police because a client...

sexually assaulted them. See, this is interesting and that was my first thought as well. And then I thought about it and I was like, it isn't the sexual assault. It's the blasphemy. If he had just, if he had forced her to masturbate with something else or if he had just done the whipping part or forced her into any other sexual content, then they would have said he paid you loads of money, what's the problem? Yeah. It is the fact that he was shouting about God in what is like a really puerile manner. Like it's so stupid. It's very silly.

This is very, very silly. Like he's gone. He doesn't care. He technically doesn't believe in him. He doesn't even believe in him.

It's not like... I feel like it would make more sense if he was shouting about priests. Yes. But he's not. He's specifically shouting about God. Anyway, so he's arrested for blasphemy and is kept in prison for a while. And his father goes to the king, who's Louis XVI, and says, like, look, my son's a bit of a prick. Just let him out. And he is allowed out. Throughout all of this, he's married. He has a child. But he cannot, like...

Every so often, basically, it's like it explodes out of him. Either it explodes out of him or he's constantly doing it and just every so often he crosses a line. Yeah, or he picks a person who is going to say something. Yeah. Because in 1768, he does probably the worst thing that he does in his entire life. And this is the thing that... It's unclear, I think, if he's doing this all the time and...

And just what happens is that he does terrible things to a girl and then he and his family bribe her into staying quiet. But in this one case, it kind of goes like gets out anyway. And whether he's doing that all the time and he is constantly raping women.

Or if he is mostly doing consensual sex, like consensual flogging sex, and just this one time he raped a woman and then never did it again because it was like, oh no, that was too much trouble or it just went wrong or whatever. I am more inclined to believe that he's doing it all the time because the barrier to communicating that something like that has happened to you is really high. Like even if you are purely a victim...

Especially, and this is still like full Catholic France, like having to describe what has been done to you when it involves nudity and sex is even now really difficult. So I think that it's really...

really likely that it was happening to a lot of people who just couldn't bring themselves to talk about it. And the effort that, and this happens several times, that his mother, his wife, and he go to shut things up in every case where this occurs. They will go and pay off the women and they pay them a lot of money in order to try and keep them quiet, which is something that abusers always do. Like we've seen Harvey Weinstein do it. We have just seen yesterday that came out with Neil Gaiman. We have like, this is what they do.

Yeah. And so this woman is called Rose Keller. She is destitute at the time this happens in 1768. She is begging on the side of the street and he picks her up and offers her a job. According to her deposition, he says,

Offered her a job as a chambermaid. Like said, come and work in my house. It's just housework. It'll be grand. He takes her to his house in Arcule because he has like five houses. Got back there. He strips her. This is really bad. I'm sorry about this one. You might want to skip like a minute if like incredibly nasty stories of rape are unpleasant for you, which they are for everybody. But just to warn you that this is a nasty bit. He locks her in a room. He strips her. He ties her up.

and whips her with a cat o' nine tails, stopping every so often to drip candle wax into her wounds until he came on her. He then locks her in another room and threatens to sodomize her. And she manages to escape by making a rope of not the sheets in the room and climbs out of the room

the window like a proper escape artist and runs into the village covered in blood. She is picked up by some women in the village and taken to hospital who then take her to the police. While she is lying in bed recovering from the ordeal, here's

Wife turns up and offers to bribe her, offers her several thousand francs in order to drop the investigation. And she agrees. But by the time she agrees to drop the investigation, the kind of news of what he's done has already got out. He is eventually arrested. It takes quite a while for him to be arrested, like decades.

the king tries to cover it up because they don't want this is why they had a revolution yeah the king tries to cover it up because they don't need to know like you know don't need aristocrats getting this bad publicity yeah and they try to really prevent there being any kind of police investigation into it and like most of like a significant portion of the apparatus of the French royal state tries to protect him over her and

But when he is eventually kind of forced by public opinion to have a trial, he basically says, I paid her. What's the fucking problem? And he says that repeatedly whenever he is caught for something like this. He's just like, I paid her money. I don't really know why we're mad at me. Yeah. Because for all of what he pretends to believe about the aristocracy, he fucking loves being an aristocrat. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it seems nice. You have whatever you want. You have five houses. You can pay off anyone who doesn't like you. Uh-huh. Yeah. And to the credit of the French society, this... Once it gets out that this has happened, it causes, like, a sensation in French newspapers. It's like the beginning of newspapers and booksellers, like, really selling the printed word and people, like, getting around in coffee houses and talking about philosophy. And everyone in France thinks he's the fucking dirt worst. He is...

imprisoned but not for a huge amount of time he's in prison for six months before his this time his mother-in-law gets him out and like basically this is just people going to the king and being like come on come on come on and the king is louis xvi so he's like i sure whatever what you can do about it he then has a couple of years of calming down a little bit or at least trying to keep it under wraps and

And then he has his like final big, I say final, there's like two final showdowns, one in 1772 where he has a consensual party or like a consensual orgy with his valet who he kind of loves and four young sex workers who are like 20, 21 years old. They're called Mariette, Marianne, Marionette and Rosette, incidentally, which is...

Very picturesque names. Yeah. So basically they go to the police afterwards, not because of the sex, but because he kept giving them sweeties and after the party they both got really ill. Like Marguerite and Marianne become very, very ill as a result of these sweets that he gives them. Marguerite is like throwing up black

vomit for days and gets like a horrible fever and they think that he has poisoned them. They basically think he's tried to murder them. What he has done is give them something called Spanish Fly which is like a folk remedy

Like a folk aphrodisiac. It's like having oysters or something as an aphrodisiac. And it's like, but it was believed to, yeah, believed to make sex better. But you're only really supposed to take like a tiny bit. And he kept giving it to them and being like, have another one, have another one. Possibly one theory is that he thought he's really into farts. He's like James Joyce. Yeah.

He thought it might make them fart or like shit horribly and he would love that. But what it does instead is make them very ill. And he is charged with sodomy and poisoning. Because the one thing that they all say is we also, he tried to have bum sex with us and we all saw him having sex with his valet, both of which are illegal. So he's charged with poisoning and sodomy and he flees to Italy and

and is tried in absentia in a trial that was revisited by the French several times. And even the French were like, this wasn't our finest moment because they found him guilty of both things and then burned an effigy of him. Yeah, that'll do it.

Because he wasn't around. Yeah. He also had run off to Italy with his sister-in-law, who was technically a nun. And this kind of upset everybody. Yeah. And it really turned the mother-in-law against him. It's kind of wild, to be honest, that the mother-in-law was on side before this. Yeah.

She seems to have been really into him because we have all of her letters. And for like years, she's like, oh, he's such a charming little idiot. Like he's a silly little kid. He's so fun. And then she's like, oh, he's like, you need to keep him under control, but I can do it. Like he's got quite a furious temper. But if you just you can talk him around and if you're just stern with him, then he'll come around. And she's like,

quite delighted by him for years and then she just gradually gets more and more like disillusioned with him and then eventually she fucking hates him after the final showdown so he

Spends years kind of going backwards and forwards from Italy and he lives in his big castle called Lacoste with his wife and loads of young women that they have hired. And nobody really knows what goes on in there, but it seems dodgy because in Italy,

Kind of early 1777, a father of one of these girls tries to shoot him for, like, ruining his daughter. He's called Catherine. He is furious that this guy tried to shoot him and he tries to, like, press charges. And there's this letter that he writes...

where he says he's gone to his lawyer and his lawyer has said, well, I don't know that anyone's going to take your side in this situation because you are fucking his daughter. And he writes this letter and he's like, I've suddenly realised that I could be murdered and people would think that I was in the wrong.

And it never occurred to him before. And at this point, his mother-in-law is just like over it. And so she gets what's called a lettre de cachet, which is one of the worst things about the end of the Jean regime, where the king could sign a warrant for arrest that was then sealed. And that person would be arrested without trial. And nobody except the king and the person who asked for it would ever know why they were arrested. Right.

That is pretty shady. And his mother-in-law goes to the king and gets that and is basically like, he's danger and he's bringing shame on everybody and we're just constantly having to clear up after him. I don't think that them having to clear up after him is the number one reason he should be arrested. It's not. But that is why he is arrested. Basically, he's just causing too much trouble and she hates him. And so he is imprisoned in the Bastille for no reason.

specific crime and with no trial for three years he is locked away he has no idea why he's there he well because he's an idiot like we know why he's there but he thinks that he has been arrested for no particularly good reason and he's locked away in the bastille and he's furious but what he does is he turns this into writing yeah

And he writes loads of stuff. Like he becomes monomaniacal about writing. And this is when he starts writing down his weird sex shit. Yeah. I will say that his letters, which I also read, are crackers. Some of them are quite kind of quite delightful. Uh-huh. Like about how much he loves his wife. But then there's also ones about like how often he is masturbating, which he's doing constantly. Yeah.

And there's a bit where he's like, I am obviously masturbating like for an hour in the morning and then for two hours in the evening. And I'm just kind of constantly coming like 17 times a day. And then he complains that he is struggling to cum, like cum.

he is not ejaculating. And so he asks his wife to have made some special custom anal dildos for him so that he can come better. This is the most understanding wife in the world. She does divorce him immediately as soon as he is arrested, but she is up to that point. Like, I think she's just fed up by that point. But

I don't think I ever want anybody to ever write to me about how much they're masturbating. No, I would really prefer not. But that's basically what he's doing. All he's doing is writing and wanking. He writes 20 plays, two volumes of novels, 16 novellas and several volumes of short stories, as well as a daily diary and what appear to be a billion letters. And one of the things that he writes is the famous book, 120 Days of Sodom. Yeah. Well,

Which he even thought was lost, I think, for a long time afterwards and had just been saved by some tricker. He never saw it again. So it's not finished. Yeah. This is the famous one that Sarlow, the film, is based on. It is the one if... Although I've found from telling people that I'm researching this that a lot of young people don't know who the Marquis de Sade is anymore because every single person under the age of 30 that I have said this to has looked at me as though I've said something...

that they've never heard before it's just never crossed their mind so apparently the kids aren't watching sarlo give it time though but i kind of resent this being the book that he is remembered for it is so deeply tedious as well like it's so it is the most the biggest thing i took away from it was like what a logistical nightmare i mean yeah he does he commits that

crime of you know how some science fiction writers are really keen to make sure that you understand that it's science fiction not fantasy so they try to explain the science a lot and all that does is make it less and less believable than if they just said don't worry about it it's basically magic he does this whole extended period about getting all of these people together and then trekking through the black forest and

He could have just said, like, they took all these people they'd kidnapped to do rape on into a secluded castle that they knew no one could get to. But no, he's like, they trick in single file up a mountain and then they cross a wide ravine with a bridge that they take down after they've crossed it and then they go and they shut the walls and it's really intense. It goes on for fucking pages. And then every day is like,

There was a light lunch, only four courses and many, many fresh, fresh fruits. And it's like, you're in the Black Forest in November. Where are you getting these fresh fruits from, dickhead? Yeah. He was a wordy man. All of his books are so fucking long. And this one, so I...

got a copy of 120 Days of Sodom and the translation from 2002 and it is completely unfinished but it would have been so long because part one is the only part that he wrote like in its entirety. Yeah. And he'd wrote a first draft and it is so drafty that it still contains like editorial notes to himself like at the beginning of...

day 10, it says, remember to be more guarded in the beginning here and to more gradually disclose what's happening. See, this is where I'd stopped reading because I'd gone through all of the preamble, which takes forever. And I was like, well, once they get to the 120 days, it will just be like a week at a time or a few, like a chunk. It's not, no, it's day one, day two, day three, day four. So I read like day one and I was like, I don't need it anymore. This is it. I get the idea. It is...

It is quite a complicated setup because the setup is that these four libertines during the reign of Louis XIV have got lots of money from war and they decide that they're going to have like three months of expressing their libertinism to the extreme. Hmm.

One represents a church, one represents a nobility, one represents the law, and one represents the bankers. Yeah. They're all kind of middle-aged weirdos. They're all physically freakish. They either have massive penises or tiny penises. Yeah, I really enjoy the pages he spins on. The first one is basically guest on, and he's got this giant and...

and virile and has a massive penis and then this one is old and decrepit and his butt cheeks hang to his knees and he's always coated in shit it's like really interesting representation of

Yeah. And then so they have taken a bunch of studs and virgins that they are going to debauch. And then they also have four very experienced elderly sex workers who are going to tell stories from their careers. And each one is then structured as...

a month's worth of the sex worker telling stories from their career around themes. So part one is Simple Passions, represented by Madame de Classe. So that's the one that is written and it is near enough 300 pages long in English. Yeah.

So if the rest of them would have been that long, this would have been like 1,200 page book. Part two is then sapphic and complex passions and does involve quite a lot of complexity. This is my favorite one because it, so this is just notes. This is just him describing like what the scene, like very detailed, like limited detail, what the scene is going to be. And he's also written a little note to self for this one.

So this is 89. 15 girls arrive in teams of three. One whips him, one sucks him, the other shits. Then she who shitted whips, she who sucked shits, she who whipped sucks. And so he proceeds until he has done with all 15. A procuress is in charge of the game. He renews this party six times a week.

This one is truly charming and has my infinite recommendation. The thing has to move very briskly along and each girl must bestow 25 strokes of the whip and it is between whipping that the first sucks and the third shits. If you would prefer 50 strokes from each girl, that will total up to 750, which is a very agreeable figure.

So that's complex passions. Then you have part three, which is criminal passions and sodomy. Although there is sodomy in just everything. And that is where he goes into the pederasty, incest, sex with geriatric people, and then the beginning of physical and psychological tortures, including one where he just eats an omelette off of a girl's bum. Sure.

I mean, that seems like one of the milder things that... It is. That they do. Yeah, it is. And then finally is part four, which is where all of the murders and really awful stuff happens, which has kind of the torture and taking people apart and cutting bits off and all the rest of it, and is the murderous passions. And he says at the beginning that this...

And so it's basically just a dispassionate list of tortures. Yeah. Which alternate between being horrific and quite funny. Yeah.

because there'll be like and then he cut off all her limbs and like made her watch her baby die and then the next one will be he ate an omelette off her bum and or and you're just like these things are not equivalent to Nassim there's loads of rimming loads of eating poo like it's loads of whipping it's just it is a

a bored bored man writing down like everything that he could think of by the feel of it yeah but he lost it when because he was in the Bastille when it was stormed 1789 and was one of the seven prisoners released interesting choice

Well, there were only seven in there, which was enormously disappointing to the revolutionaries because they thought there were thousands. But he was one of the seven guys. They let him out and he was like, oh, cool. And then he got quite into like revolutionary zeal, going around as Louis Sard, citizen Louis Sard, became president of his revolutionary section. This I find very delightful. At the start of the terror, he quit because he opposed the death penalty. It's fascinating. Yeah.

It is fascinating. Do you think he opposed the death penalty because he was worried someone would attempt to mete it out to him? Well, quite possibly, because that is low-key what happened. Yeah. But he seems to just be like, I mean, I like the writing about it and I like the thinking about it, but I'm not doing it. And he's very into bomb stuff, like very into bomb stuff. Yeah, all of his characters are basically...

basically sexually open more than I think it doesn't feel like a sexuality so much as just like

desperate to experience every possible sexual pleasure, but all of them prefer bum sex. All of them are obsessed with either receiving or giving anal. And smelling farts and licking bums. And it reminded me loads of bits of it. Like there's, there's one in 120 days of Sodom where one of the stories is that there's like a, a voyeur and an exhibitionist and the woman telling the story gets them both together. But there's,

All they want to do is just they want to bend over and show their buttholes. And then the voyeur is like, oh yeah, that's a good butthole. And then there's lots of fart smelling and things like that, which is very James Joyce. It just makes me think of James Joyce's letters. Another little sicko. Yeah. That's his main thing. But the killing in reality, real life Donatien, is not...

interested in killing people. No. He's interested in whipping them. He's interested in making them masturbate with a crucifix. But he would ideally like them to be at least pretending to be enthusiastically involved. He is imprisoned again.

in 1793 for counter-revolutionary activities but this is the terror and he's largely this is the point when being enthusiastically for executing everybody you can see is considered to be counter-revolutionary and being an aristocrat is very counter-revolutionary

But he avoids being guillotined just because he's sort of not important enough. Like he just languishes in prison and nobody ever gets around to signing his death warrant. And then Robespierre falls in 1794 and he is let out. So he is kind of, it comes very close. Like it's basically like bad admin that stops him from being guillotined. He's just not important enough to get guillotined faster. Yeah.

Yeah, and if he had been guillotined at that point, if he had been part of a faction or if he had been more important than just a local politician, then we would probably just remember... We wouldn't even remember him. He'd just be one of the many, many weird aristocrats who got guillotined. Yeah. But instead, he gets out of prison, but as a result of that incarceration, all of his lands have been confiscated. He has no lands, he has no income, and so he...

decides to write so he writes he's already written a bunch of novels he's written these historical romances and he wrote these like bawdy short stories which read so much like Apuleius to me or like Chaucer they're all like you know women tricking their husbands so they can have sex with somebody else and da da da yeah

And he claims that he was asked by his publisher to write something pornographic that people would buy. So the publisher asked me for something quite spicy and I made him something capable of corrupting the devil. Yeah.

And he wrote a book called... This is the book that I think you should probably judge him on because he wrote it three times. He wrote it once while he was imprisoned, rewrote it in 1791 after he was released and published it, and then went back to it for a third time and wrote it as The New Justine. And it is a... Basically a very... It's so fucking tedious. This is what...

reading a little life felt like to me because basically it's a girl who is so immoral and so good and so virtuous and so delightful and so sweet and is just a little born victim and she's so pretty and she's blonde and lovely but her parents die and she's has to try and make her way in the world and then literally every single person that she comes across in the whole world

brutalizes her rapes her there's a vampire at one point that drains all her blood she's framed for a crime she is like beaten and raped and near killed so many times that it does become like oh okay and then at the end she is split in two where the thunderbolt sure

And through the whole thing, she has repeatedly proven that man is naturally wicked, that there is no point to being virtuous, that all her virtue gets her is punishment, that anytime she trusts or engages with somebody or loves somebody, they're just going to hurt her in the most brutal way possible. And her virtue is stupid because man is kind of naturally evil.

And this goes on for hundreds and hundreds of pages. And then it is interspersed with guys, almost exclusively men, but not entirely, doing long speeches about libertinism and how great it is and saying things like...

The true libertine loves even the dishonor, the scars and the censures that are the desserts of his excretionable action. They are the delights to his perverse soul. Have we not seen the man who loves even the tortures that human vengeance prepares for him, who undergoes them joyfully, who regards a scaffold as a throne of glory unto which he would be most grieved not to perish, which with the same courage that has animated him into the loathsome exercise of his sins and outrages.

which in fairness is proto-camus. Like, that's the end of La Trois-Ges. Yeah. And then because he enjoyed writing that one so much, he wrote a companion piece about her sister called Juliet for the Prosperities of Vice. And Juliet's a wee slut who just...

who is the exact opposite. And she loves it. She loves it. So she is the exact opposite. She is an immoral girl who has a great time. Yeah. So Juliet is an immoral girl who has a great time and Justine is a good girl who has a terrible time. And she is worldly wise. She has dark hair. That's how you know she's not a naive little girl. It's a classic, the classic dichotomy. The evil one is brilliant and the good one is blonde. Yeah, exactly. Everyone knows this. Yeah.

And she travels around Europe with a desire for unfettered power and freedom, being a bisexual nightwear, having sex with everybody, fucking everybody from Catherine the Great to Pope Pius VII. Obviously loads of whipping and anal sex, loads of murders, loads of horrible incestuous nastiness and infidelity.

She gives most of the speeches. So she has a long conversation with absolutely every... This man loves dialogue like too much. You can tell that he started writing plays because dialogue is just absolute favorite thing. But she gives a big speech to everyone she meets. So this is a thousand pages long.

such a long section where she's talking to the Pope and like the first time that she does a murder she says so that's what murder is a little disorganized matter a few molecules shattered and flung back into the crucible of nature he's a he loves a long sentence who within a few days will give them back to the earth in a different form and what the harm in that are a woman and a child more dear to nature than flies or worms if I take a life away from one of them I give it back to the other so in what way am I doing wrong

And kind of insisting that people answer that question. And I'll be honest, that kind of undermines the pornography of it. But it's what separates it from just straight pornography. Yeah. Is that you can't be really getting off that hard unless you want to get off to somebody doing a fucking Ayn Rand speech every four pages. Sitting at his table with a change my mind sign. Yeah.

He also writes a bunch of other stuff. So he writes this epistolary novel called Aline and Valcor. He writes 20 separate plays. He writes philosophy. So he writes an argument between a priest and a dying man, which is a hilarious chat between a priest and a dying man where the guy's like, I refuse to reject sin. I just wish I'd done more of it. And then they all have an orgy. Yeah.

And he's writing those, but just causes, becomes like a cessation. It sells really well. It's going great guns. It's kind of making him some money. Julia is doing well. He seems to be doing okay. But by this time, Napoleon has come to power and Napoleon is very keen on the repressive state. And Napoleon has him arrested for obscenity. He is outed in a review of a different book. LAUGHTER

So he writes this book of literary criticism called The Crimes of Love.

And somebody in a French paper hates it so much that they say, obviously, the guy who wrote Justine would write this because he's a fucking bad writer. And that's what outs him. And he's arrested at his publisher's office and thrown into prison. He is thrown because we're back in kind of repressive dictatorship. There's again, no trial, really. He's just thrown into prison for obscenity. And then by this point, he is in a long term relationship with a woman called Mary Constance, who is

seems to be very into him and she pulls some strings and has him removed from prison and into the much cushier space of the asylum. So he says, can I have a trial, please? And Napoleon says, no.

you're going to stay in prison literally forever like you're just like like you we can't be having people like you out in the world which feels very unfair because this is the like he hasn't actually done anything for this one yeah this is just the writing this is not because i mean he may also have been doing rapes but we don't know that that's not what we're talking about no he seems to be mostly and he seems to have mary constance who seems very much into his thing and

And so Mary Constance and his two sons pull some strings and have him move to an asylum where he spends the next 13 years of his life writing non-libertine novels. He's putting on plays. She moves in with him for a while after he complains that she doesn't visit him enough. He writes three historical novels about Adelaide of Brunswick, one called The Secret History of Isabella of Bavaria, Queen of France, and one called The Marquise of Ganges.

And puts on plays. He's allowed to put on plays in the asylum and basically kind of tries to grope any woman that comes anywhere near him and writes relentlessly about how miserable a time he's having. And all of his letters from this period are like, oh, it's been like 96 hours since you visited me. How am I supposed to cope? Yeah.

And I need some more socks. Every letter is like, I need more socks. Bring me more socks. Bring me more socks. What are you doing to the socks? He's definitely wanking in the socks. Now I've said it out loud. 100%. I've been like, what's he doing with the socks? And now I've realized what he's doing with the socks. So he spends the rest of his life there. This is what the play Marat Saad is about. It's about the Marquis de Saad in an asylum putting on a play about Jean-Paul Marat and it falling apart because all of his actors are the other people in the asylum. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. So he's not technically insane. He is put there by a dictator and he is moved there because they know that... I don't know that anybody really wants him to get out because his sons want to live a normal life and want to be in with Napoleon and he's definitely going to ruin that. But they know he's going to have a chiller time there because this is also... The asylum is under the care of this Abbey who had very progressive ideas about rehabilitating

Insane people, basically. He wasn't believed in treating the people incarcerated with him with basic respect is, I think, the main thing, which was obviously unheard of at the time. And they can pay for him to have, like, nicer privileges as well. Yeah.

They can pay for him to put on his plays. They can pay for him to have his own, you know, he's got his own space. It's, you know, it's going to be incarceration, but it's incarceration that is kind of the best kind of incarceration for someone who hasn't technically done anything. Ebbe de Colmier, by the way, was the guy who ran this asylum. Yeah. The Carrington guy.

And then he dies in 1814. So he doesn't live to see the proper fall of Napoleon. He's 74, which...

I always feel like I imagine him as being quite young, but he has a hell of a life. Like he lives a long time and he really upset everybody during that time, both in his personal conduct and in his horrible writings. And he's kind of remembered. He's always remembered. Like, no, he never...

or anything, but he's remembered as a kind of weirdo philosopher, aristocrat guy, and people write about him in terms of philosophy until 1886 when German psychiatry starts to become a thing and a guy called Richard Frieder von Kraft-Ebbing wrote a book called The Psychopathia Sexualis, which is very fun to say. And...

Coins a bunch of terms about what he considers to be sexual pathologies. This is at the time when terms like homosexuality were being invented and sadism is invented as

as experiencing sexual pleasure from hurting other people and only being able to experience sexual pleasure in that way. And he specifically cites 120 Days of Sodom, which had been found by Desard's son and never officially published. It was like unofficially published after everybody was dead. And

And thus the kind of myth of Desard begins as someone who is like wildly insane and can't do anything except be spanked. Yeah. And it's not 100% wrong, but he is capable of doing other stuff. He's not a person who is like debilitated with this, like he can't do anything else. The only thing that he would like to be doing is sniffing a butt while being whipped. Yeah.

But he likes being whipped as much as he likes whipping other people. Yeah.

He's a wee freak. He is. And really the only problem with that is that he did not always ensure that his partners were consenting. I don't know that he cared that much about his... Yeah, which is the problem. Like, you should... I don't know how to tell you, Mark, you decided that you should care about whether or not people who you are having sex with want to be having sex with you. For someone who claims to not believe that there are, like, the worldly...

or worldly structures exist, to reject them all, he leans heavily on the fact that he believes himself to be better than everybody else. And he believes...

When he writes about the sex workers that he abuses or that he uses, he calls them terrible names and he's like, they're worthless. I don't even care. And has no particular... He genuinely doesn't care. He might argue that he doesn't care about anybody because he has this theory. It's not his theory, but it's the theory of isolism.

which is that all human beings are born isolated from one another and that have no actual need of one another. And there's no, all pleasure must be taken from others. It is inherently selfish and being pragmatic about that was the only true morality.

that the belief that you should take what you want, basically. And there is no connection between human beings, so it doesn't matter. And everybody else is just pretending you're the only person who's really honest. And so potentially he would have said that he doesn't really care about anybody at all, but notably none of his long-term partners or anybody else within the aristocracy ever complained about him. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like a weird way to live and act if you want to have people in your life, which he did. He did have plenty of people in his life. He did. And I think that it only, you know, the...

The, like, cliche of the échangement de France before the revolution is that, like, aristocrats would ride over children and then just throw a gold coin over their shoulder as they were going past. And he, for all his... He's not exactly, like, a massive revolutionary or anything, but all his anti-aristocracy stuff, that's literally what he does. Like, he rides over people and then he throws a gold coin and he kind of is that guy. He...

His philosophy, the ones books that I read about him that wanted to really like big him up, went hard on the philosophy and the philosophical parts of his books. But I think that when you look at what his philosophy was and then how he actually like lived his life, I think he only is half thought it through. Like nobody who hates philosophy

Like a god or like nobody who's that hard of an atheist thinks about god that much. Yeah. And people who believe that they're fundamentally isolated and can only take pleasure from others and it doesn't matter whether they enjoy it or not is spends like the majority of their time not doing that. Yeah. Like most of the time he's not doing that. It's just every so often he does it specifically to people who have no power to retaliate. Yeah.

So he is a weird little guy who I suspect believed wholeheartedly that he believed this stuff and could not see the contradictions in how he lived it. Yeah. Yeah. I think he was just a weird little guy who thought his imagination was cleverer than it was. Yes. And also, like, when he got into something, he got into something. I've just found the numbers. I knew I'd written them down somewhere.

He claims to be wanking eight times a day and grading his ejaculations from one to ten. A good hour in the morning for five ejaculations, a half hour in the evening for three more. He adds up that in 19 months he's been there, he has ejaculated through anal penetration 6,536 times. That's too much, man.

Get a job. It's too much. I mean, he is in prison. But he's doing that and also writing like a ton of books. Yeah. The output is impressive. You can't really argue with the productivity of

Yeah, but he is, yeah, he's an interesting weird little guy. He's a horrible little guy. Simone de Beauvoir said he basically just didn't care about anybody other than himself. He didn't really care what his philosophy looked like. He didn't really care about any part of anything except himself. And I think she was probably right about that. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that there is a whole school of small little men who want to

dress up their inherent selfishness as philosophical wisdom. And he found a way to, yeah, to do it. Yeah. But I kind of wish that his philosophy had moved on slightly at any point in the like 20 years that he was writing, not even 20 years, like 30 years that he was writing, but it is just bombs and incest. Yeah. For years. Yeah.

Thousands of pages of, yeah, bombs and incest. Anyway, that's the market aside. Yeah, that's what the deal was with that guy. If anything, he was the opposite of bored. No, I think the problem was that he was too bored. He had nothing of substance to do with his time, so he used it doing this instead. And I actually think this is often the problem with people who are too rich and do harm in the world. It's because they are inured from experiencing life with any real tension.

And so all they can do is fuck around with the rest of us. I will say that the point that he was probably the most well behaved was the point he was involved in revolutionary politics. Yeah.

think about apart from there wasn't himself you know he was a secretary and then the leader of his like revolutionary section he was going around making sure that everybody called themselves citizen and like enforcing all of the prices and whatever yeah and he was busy and then they threw him in prison for not wanting to kill people yeah yeah the brain craves occupation and when you don't have it you write very disturbing you write justine you write justine and

Which you shouldn't do. You shouldn't write Justine. Don't write Justine. I don't recommend that anybody read any of this, to be honest. No, I don't recommend it either. Just again, it is such a slog. Yeah. Anyway, what are we doing next time, Janina?

What are we doing next time? We are going to kind of thematically talk about the history of sex work. Yeah, we're going to go the other way. We're going to look away from people who abuse sex workers and look at sex workers themselves. So we have two people who asked the same question, which is very convenient for us. So Liliana Luque and Mistress Quinn both said, what's the history of sex work?

And Mistress Quinn, in order to guide this, and thank you for doing this, sent a bunch of follow-up questions. So we're going to use those to guide us about the global sex work, ancient sex work, religious sex work, and who the most badass sex worker in history is. Yeah. And hopefully that will be fun. We're keeping it sexy on History is Sexy. Yeah, because sometimes history actually is sexy. Sometimes history actually is sexy. Not the Marquis de Sade. Not the Marquis de Sade.

Unless I said, I mean, look, you might read this and be like, look, I love the bombs. And that's fine. I mean, if you are into it, then read James Joyce's letters. Those are very consensual and they're basically the same thing. And just remembering reading those aloud in my PhD research room and causing minor havoc.

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It keeps us in line. It keeps us in line. To be supported, keeps us accountable. And it also gives us a space to be able to do it. Because we're all kind of mostly freelance people. So being able to have a bit of space and not worry about eating is nice. It is very nice. And means we can do more. So that is good. And until next time, bye. Bye. Bye.