Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Depravity of the Marquis De Sade About this episode Sadism - the derivation of pleasure from inflicting pain, suffering and humiliation on others - is named after this man. So what exactly did he do?
Kate is joined by journalist and author Joel Warner to discuss the Marquis de Sade, an 18th Century French aristocrat who committed a multitude of crimes, yet survived three distinct political regimes and decades of imprisonment.
Joel is the author of ‘The Curse of the Marquis De Sade’, and managing editor at 'The Lever'.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the show where we look at the awful things people have done to each other and to, well, other things as well in the pursuit of pleasure. That's right, we root around in the pants of history for your entertainment. But before we can do any of that, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults, about adult things, and adults who wake up and go to adult subjects and need to be an adult too. If you feel safer, I feel safer. Right, let's do it.
1:07 Kate Lister? The 14th of July, 1789, and we are in revolutionary France. The Bastille is falling. The medieval fortress-turned-prison holds just a handful of prisoners as crowds of revolutionary storm in, searching for gunpowder. And one aristocrat who survives the Bastille because he was whisked away mere weeks before it all happened was the infamous Mackie de Saad. Yep, luck was with him, and he is now imprisoned elsewhere. But his most famous work, 120 Days of Sodom, written on small pieces of paper and glued together as a 39-foot scroll, remains hidden inside the wall of his former cell.
1:49 Kate Lister? When his wife comes to retrieve it, she finds the prison overrun, and Saad believes it'll be lost forever, and apparently he wept tears of blood over it. But the work was not lost, no, like a bad penny, it keeps turning up. And not only did it turn up, it found its way into the hands of a publisher as well, although many of you might wish that it hadn't been.
2:33 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Bitwix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. As a historian, people often ask me which historical figures I would invite to a dream dinner party. Hmm, who would I? I think Nell Gwynn would be fun to have and obviously Byron, just to ask him some serious questions. But what people don't ask is who would you absolutely not let in? Whose name would you not have on the list? And today's subject is surely one of those. The Marquis de Sade, the man who gave his name to sadism. Back in 18th century France, before the revolution, aristocrats had something of a free pass. It was one of the reasons they had the revolution in the first place.
3:16 Kate Lister? So what would you have to do as an aristocrat to be imprisoned for nearly half your lifetime? How bad did your behaviour have to be? He was first locked up at the age of 24 and then spent around 30 of his 74 years in jails and lunatic asylums. He was such a piece of work that his own mother-in-law requested his arrest on multiple occasions. Are you intrigued? Well, I know I am and I'm joined today by author and journalist Joel Warner to find out more about Sade and his infamous legacy. Deep breaths, everybody. Let's do this.
3:56 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Bitwix the Sheets. It's only Joel Warner. How are you doing?
4:02 Speaker 01 I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.
4:04 Kate Lister? I'm thrilled that you are here because I can't believe it's taken us so long to actually have an episode about this man, the Marquis de Sade. My, you have written a biography. Well, you've written about Sade and a lot of it was biographical. Do you remember when you first met this atrocious human being?
4:24 Speaker 01 Well, thankfully, I didn't actually meet him personally because I I feel like I I would probably not enjoy him in person.
4:33 Kate Lister? No, no.
4:34 Speaker 01 Probably not. So I think the average person, if you ask them about the Marquis de Sade, they probably would never have heard of him. I probably first heard about him thanks to the movie Quills.
4:47 Kate Lister? Oh, I love that film.
4:49 Speaker 01 Yes. So I think I think I probably saw that gosh, way back in high school. That's probably when I first heard of him.
4:57 Kate Lister? And for people listening who aren't sure who he is, can you give us a very quick overview? Who was the Marquis de Sade?
5:04 Speaker 01 Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat born in the eighteenth century in the lap of luxury in Paris, and he basically became obsessed with deriving his own self-pleasure from pain, both in his real life and in his writing.
5:28 Kate Lister? Where we get the word sadism from?
5:31 Speaker 01 Yes, yes, which I was thinking about this today. That's a bit of a misnomer.
5:35 Kate Lister? Okay.
5:35 Speaker 01 Today, I feel like, hopefully, sadism, when used in a healthful framing, connotes some mutual understanding, right? The idea of sadism, masochism, when practiced, I think it's all about trust.
5:52 Kate Lister? Yes, yeah, yeah.
5:54 Speaker 01 This was not at all what the Marquis de Sade was about. Marquis de Sade was about power and the power that he could exert over others and the points when he didn't feel power and acted like a very big baby.
6:09 Kate Lister? There's a very big difference between consensual kink, BDSM, sadism, power play, and what this guy was doing.
6:17 Speaker 01 Yes, one hundred percent.
6:19 Kate Lister? Okay, all right. So what was his full name? Where was he born? Let's get into his origin story.
6:26 Speaker 01 Oh, look at you asking me the hard questions, okay? And since I'm American, I'm not even gonna try to do it with a French accent, because that's just a bit atrocious. I mean. Donatien Alphonse-François, he was born in the heart of Paris to a noble family that could stretch its name back to, I think, like the 13th century France. So this was a true
6:47 Kate Lister? Blue-blooded.
6:48 Speaker 01 noble family.
6:48 Kate Lister? Yeah.
6:49 Speaker 01 In the Palace of Conde, which is an even more powerful French family. So as he even wrote, he was born in the lap of luxury, you know.
6:56 Kate Lister? Yeah.
6:56 Speaker 01 As fancy as it gets in pre-revolutionary France. Um, now he was also one step away. So I think he both was exposed to incredible luxury and also he saw the Prince of Conde at the next level. So he was both pampered and he also felt always a bit aggrieved, which, as you know, for white guys, that's a great combination right there.
7:23 Kate Lister? He is born into the lap of luxury. He seems to have every advantage from day dot. I mean, they don't know the revolution is coming, but he's got the title and he's got the goods and he's got the connections. Was it a happy childhood?
7:39 Speaker 01 Not as we would associate one today, right? His, um, his father, by all accounts, was a libertine himself.
7:48 Kate Lister? What do you mean by libertine for anyone who's listening? What's that mean?
7:51 Speaker 01 libertine in a way in terms of like bit of a sex fiend.
7:54 Kate Lister? Yeah. It's a nice way of putting it, isn't it?
7:56 Speaker 01 Yes, I think, I think there might be better terms. He was apparently caught by prison police for soliciting sex with a male sex worker. This was his father, his mother kind of locked herself away in a convent for most of his life. Uh, so he was kind of under the toolage of some pretty horrible aristocrats. This one guy who they said, and who knows how apocryphal is this, but apparently hunted peasants for fun. So.
8:24 Kate Lister? Oh, fuck. Wow. Okay.
8:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yeah. So then he went and spent some time with his, his uncle, the Abbey de Sade. And you would think, you know, as a man of the church, that this guy may be a little more of a positive role model, but apparently he was carrying on with both his servant as well as her daughter in the chateau. So like, so, so not a. A lot of great role models for our young Marquis de Sade here.
8:49 Kate Lister? No, this sounds quite dysfunctional, actually. This doesn't sound like a very happy environment. This is, this is somebody being raised with cruelty and abuse around him.
8:59 Speaker 01 Yes, that mixed with just this assumption that as part of the aristocracy.
9:04 Kate Lister? You can do what you like.
9:05 Speaker 01 Exactly, that you could operate with absolutely no repercussions.
9:08 Kate Lister? So thank God we don't do that anymore, eh?
9:10 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, it's so much better now.
9:13 Kate Lister? Okay, so we've got young, I keep wanting to call him Dotanion, you know, like the, after the Three Musketeers.
9:20 Speaker 01 I mean, you could be right, but I don't know, you're probably right.
9:22 Kate Lister? Probably not, but it's close enough. So Dotanion. So, right. But he does get married. When does he get, he get married? I mean, that's just pretty much the, the done thing at the time.
9:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, he got married fairly young. It was an arranged marriage.
9:36 Kate Lister? To another aristocrat?
9:38 Speaker 01 Yes. So this was a slightly younger aristocratic family, but they at this point had a lot more money.
9:45 Kate Lister? She brings the money.
9:46 Speaker 01 So the Sade family had the established noble title, while this other family had a lot more money at this point from like a mercantile type background. So it was an arranged marriage. Sade, who I'd proclaimed that he was only gonna marry for love, was not very happy about this arranged marriage at first. And he railed like the spoiled young person he was. But, you know, it seems that for at least some time the two got along well, if you could define it as such.
10:16 Kate Lister? Okay. And he was 23 when they married?
10:20 Speaker 01 Yes, about that. He'd served some time already as an officer in the Seven Years' War, where apparently he was pretty good because he, he apparently had a bit of bloodlust in him.
10:31 Kate Lister? Oh, really?
10:32 Speaker 01 Yes, so.
10:33 Kate Lister? Any, anything in those kind of teenage, young fella type of years to indicate the, the, the fetishes and the person that he would go on to become? Or was it all kind of smooth sailing?
10:46 Speaker 01 It wasn't fully smooth sailing. I mean, you know, there was, I mean, there were rumors of him going off with various women, various sex workers, and he wrote to his uncle saying how guilty he felt, but then he would go off and do it the next day. So there was a bit of that. But at that point, I mean, my assumption is it probably seemed more just as like wayward, spoiled aristocrat.
11:07 Kate Lister? Sowing his oats.
11:09 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:10 Kate Lister? I see. Okay. So the marriage, they're both young, she's rich, he's tired old, seems to be all right in the beginning.
11:18 Speaker 01 Well, for a few months.
11:20 Kate Lister? Oh, for a few months. Okay, okay.
11:23 Speaker 01 Honeymoon period. I mean, you know, by seventeen sixty-three, you know, uh, just a few months after the marriage, he apparently hired a sex worker named Jeanne Testard.
11:32 Kate Lister? Ah, the Testard affair.
11:34 Speaker 01 Yes, the Testard affair.
11:36 Kate Lister? Tell us what happens.
11:37 Speaker 01 Yes. Now, according to, uh, Testard's later testimony, he basically locked her up and asked her if she believed in God.
11:45 Kate Lister? See, that's not good, is it?
11:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, you know, it's not a great way to start a date, but you know, that's the way that Saad operated. And basically to kind of prove that there was no God, started, um, shouting obscenities involving Jesus Christ. Saad had either pleasured himself or had her pleasure herself using a crucifix. And, you know, while shouting more blasphemies, asked her to beat him with a cane, iron scourge. Um, she refused that part, basically threatened to kill her if she didn't trample on a crucifix. So this was basically him getting off on being like, I can force you to go against your beliefs, right?
12:23 Kate Lister? Right. Sounds very extreme, this. I mean, this can't have come out of nowhere. Was she just the first one? Like, how do we even know? Did she complain about this? Did she go to the, the police?
12:32 Speaker 01 Yes. So she ended up going to the police and reporting this. So as always, how many other incidents weren't reported?
12:41 Kate Lister? What did the police do? Because this sounds extraordinary, like this young woman is going to turn up and tell him that, that she, she met a client and that, I mean, for a sex worker to even go to the police at this point is quite risky. I think they had a legalized system, but even. So to report an aristocrat for doing these things, that must have been extraordinary.
13:00 Speaker 01 So the police ended up locking him for a bit, but because of Saad's aristocratic ties, he was released after.
13:08 Kate Lister? Like really quickly?
13:09 Speaker 01 Yes. So, you know, he was exiled to his in-laws, the Montrelles estates for a while in Normandy, hoping he would kind of shape up a bit. And at first he seemed like he was doing better. But then a few years later, in seventeen sixty eight, there was another quote unquote incident.
13:30 Kate Lister? Do we know what happened to Giann Testad? Did she turn up in the records again? She just?
13:35 Speaker 01 I mean, this was just one of those many, many women at this point in Paris, right? Who unfortunately, we don't have historical records of these people other than, you know, these kind of snippets from, say, police reports, which will be usually when bad things are happening. So, right, this was, this was, this was just part of the underclass. So it's really hard to know what happened to these individuals.
13:56 Kate Lister? Would his wife have known about this at the time? I mean, was this like a scandal that caught a lot of attention? Or is it just, was it like hushed up?
14:04 Speaker 01 It was attempted to be hushed up, but with the kind of circles of connections in the whole rumor industry that was surely thriving around Versailles at that point, you know, this was surely a poorly kept secret. Saad's wife was surely aware of all of this. I mean, he was literally locked up by the royal police.
14:22 Kate Lister? So they knew, so people know. Okay.
14:24 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
14:24 Kate Lister? What happens in seventeen sixty eight?
14:27 Speaker 01 So at this point, and this once again is based on the police reports afterward, right? So who knows if there are other things in between? This beggar woman named Rose Keller said that Saad essentially took her to his country residence and locked her up and tied her down, apparently whipped her with either a cane or a cat o' nine tails. According to her, he cut her with a penknife and poured hot wax into the wounds.
14:54 Kate Lister? God.
14:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, like threatened to kill her if she screamed. Eventually she managed to escape out a window and track down the local magistrate. So once again, Saad was locked up.
15:05 Kate Lister? Wow, that's horrendous abuse that's happening here. Where was this? Where did this happen? At his house, at his home?
15:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, he picked her up in Paris and took her to his kind of country residence outside of this city.
15:17 Kate Lister? So he's been reported for the second time. The police are involved for the second time. What happens to him now?
15:24 Speaker 01 Once again, he's locked up for this time of few more months. But once again, this is an aristocrat. It doesn't look good for high society if this guy stays locked in prison a whole long time at this point, right? They like to look after their own. By November, he was once again released on the condition that he go and occupy himself at Lacoste, which was his family estate in the south of France.
15:59 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Joel and Saad after this short break.
16:08 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
16:50 Kate Lister? Didn't his mother-in-law like pay the widow off, Rose Calera?
16:55 Speaker 01 So, yes, so what's interesting is one of the most fearsome characters nicknamed the Presidente.
17:02 Kate Lister? Yeah, you better tell us about his mother-in-law because that seems to have been a big influence on him. Who was she?
17:07 Speaker 01 She was buddies with the king. So she had the power in the Montrel family, which was the in-laws. And she was the one who at first wielded her power to get Saad out of trouble. So you say, hey, you know, we can lock this guy up for a bit, but then eventually we have to release him. But we just kind of have to keep him out of the limelight. And so at first.
17:33 Speaker 01 She was, she was helpful, but there was a point when she said, okay, this guy is way too much trouble and he's worth. And that's when Saad started to face the wrath of his mother-in-law.
17:44 Kate Lister? But in the beginning, she's paying witnesses off. He's having, is it letter de cachet written for him? What was that?
17:51 Speaker 01 So the letter de cachet is essentially that you are imprisoned at the whim of the king.
17:58 Kate Lister? Okay, no trial?
17:59 Speaker 01 Oh, no. The king gets to decide this stuff. No need to file for this sort of. So at this point, he was locked away for several months on a letter de cachet. And then eventually they kind of said, okay, we can wrap this up if you kind of get out of Paris. But the letter de cachet will actually, will actually come up again and not, in Saad's not too distant future because.
18:18 Kate Lister? Keeps kidnapping and beating people up.
18:19 Speaker 01 I mean, yeah, he can't, he can't seem to control himself. So just, I mean, he try, he apparently tries to occupy himself at his villa south of France. He tries to start like a theater festival, whatnot. But in seventeen seventy-two, him and his manservant uh kind of went on a jaunt to Marseille. And once again, apparently, you know, according to the testimonies afterwards, they hired a group of female sex workers.
18:45 Kate Lister? Not again.
18:46 Speaker 01 Yes. And then brought them this apartment and engaged them in an orgy involving flagellation, intercourse, uh, sodomy.
18:57 Kate Lister? Oh, is this, this the one where he poisoned everyone?
19:00 Speaker 01 Yes, but the issue was afterwards, after all of this, several of these women basically got really, really sick. Really sick. And they explained that, well, as part of this thing, Saad had fed them some candies because he said he wanted to savor the gastric aromas of it, which is just gross.
19:24 Kate Lister? He is gross, though. That's going to be a theme as we're going through this. He's unremittingly, with no depth to this gross.
19:31 Speaker 01 So then authorities came to the conclusion that he had fed them Spanish fly, which is still this known concept.
19:39 Kate Lister? What is Spanish fly? They thought it was an aphrodisiac, right?
19:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, but even then, there was assumption that people would kind of lose their will. But yes, it wasn't as seen as such a noxious or dangerous substance it was today. But but even then, it was like, wow, this guy's poisoning these women. So this was also part of the charges that were levied against Saad, both poisoning. And honestly, the thing that to the authorities was the most concerning about all of these accounts was the sodomy. It wasn't the blasphemy, right? It wasn't even hurting the women.
20:12 Kate Lister? Wasn't the poisoning?
20:13 Speaker 01 Yes, it was the sodomy.
20:15 Kate Lister? Okay, okay. So he's accused of sodomizing people, and that's a big deal. Okay.
20:20 Speaker 01 Or having people sodomize him. It was all bad.
20:22 Kate Lister? Okay. What happens to him this time? Does the mother-in-law intervene? Does she come sailing in?
20:26 Speaker 01 Well, at this point, I mean, he was actually sentenced to death.
20:29 Kate Lister? Finally, some results coming through.
20:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and they actually had, there was a public execution at this point.
20:36 Kate Lister? Jesus, wow.
20:37 Speaker 01 The issue is they couldn't find Saad or his manservant. So what they did, and they apparently, this was fairly common. They took effigies of Saad and his manservant and burned them to death, even though they were just effigies, and people would show up and this would still be an event. So they did that. But basically, Saad's on the run at this point. He ends up absconding to Italy for a while with his sister-in-law.
21:07 Kate Lister? Now, what's she doing that for? She must know.
21:10 Speaker 01 Yes, I mean, this was apparently, some more recent kind of letters were discovered. It sounds like this was a mutual thing where his sister-in-law, who was young and beautiful, of course, and had been studying in this high-class convent, had fallen for Saad as well, and so they went off for a bit. And amongst all this, at this point, the mother-in-law is like, okay, we have to get rid of this guy.
21:33 Kate Lister? Where's his wife? Where's Renee in all of this?
21:37 Speaker 01 That's a wonderful question. I mean, she's doing the typical aristocratic wife thing. She's still at the Saad family home in Lacoste, kind of holding down the fort.
21:47 Kate Lister? She must have been mortified.
21:49 Speaker 01 Yes. In most descriptions, she has been framed as this kind of fairly weak-willed, submissive individual. It's hard to know if that's really the case because it's like, how many accounts do we actually have from the honest voice of these women? So it's hard to know for sure. So this was not going well. Saad is on the run. There's a rumor that he's back at Lacoste and there's this massive raid with soldiers scaling the walls and whatnot. But Saad had been tipped off a few minutes early, so he'd escaped into the wilderness. So we get all these escapades, right?
22:24 Kate Lister? Properly on the run.
22:25 Speaker 01 Yes. So a few years later, he's back in Lacoste, still kind of dodging authorities, but he still can't seem to help himself.
22:32 Kate Lister? More incidences, more imprisoning people, more hurting people.
22:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. At this point, him and his wife, Renee Pelletier, went to local communities and gathered a bunch of servants for the winter to serve them.
22:46 Kate Lister? See, that sounds to me, like, I don't want to blame the woman, but like, that sounds like Renee's kind of in the thick of this.
22:52 Speaker 01 There is some interesting debate, right? There are points when she seems to be involved in terms of she herself, like a mother-in-law, having paid off certain victims. At one point, she apparently accused one of the women who accused Saad of abuse of stealing from the family and got her locked up and separated her from her child. I think the child died soon after. She did write certain letters to Saad railing against her own family and decrying her love for her husband. Now, with all these accounts, I think you have to factor in.
23:29 Speaker 01 How little autonomy and power women, even aristocratic women had at this time. Right. I'm not saying she's innocent, but for us to frame her as this kind of Bonnie and Clyde duo, where she had just as much authority, I don't think that would be fair.
23:44 Kate Lister? Okay, okay. Tell me about the, was it the Triolay affair?
23:49 Speaker 01 So they went and brought all these servants up to their chateau, locked them away for the winter. And not long after rumors of really sketchy things started emerging.
24:02 Kate Lister? Okay.
24:02 Speaker 01 In the local community and some women kind of ran away. There were later accounts of the bones of victims being buried in the garden.
24:13 Kate Lister? Wow.
24:13 Speaker 01 Of the chateau. So once again, it was as if Saad had almost expanded his abuse to, into almost theatrical proportions.
24:24 Kate Lister? Okay.
24:25 Speaker 01 Into this kind of coordinated event. And this will actually emerge back in his writing as well.
24:31 Kate Lister? It's really extreme stuff that he's imprisoning people, torturing people. And they must, like people around him and in the villages and stuff, they must have, they must have known that, you know, people keep being recruited there as servants and then coming back or vanishing and having these horrendous stories.
24:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, but who's going to do anything about this?
24:51 Kate Lister? Yeah. What are you going to do? Right. See, this, this is why the revolution happened. Not just because of Saad, but this system of aristocrats are protected at all costs. Right. And the poor people have absolutely no rights whatsoever.
25:05 Speaker 01 Oh, none, none.
25:07 Kate Lister? But he does eventually, well, ish, come a cropper because he does get locked up in the end. So tell me what brings him down.
25:15 Speaker 01 What brings him down is his mother.
25:17 Kate Lister? Fabulous. Yes, we like her.
25:19 Speaker 01 Where at this point she's like, okay, I'm done. I'm washing my hands.
25:23 Kate Lister? You'd love to know where the line was for her. Like, what was the incident? It was just like, right, that's it. Now, now we've gone too far.
25:29 Speaker 01 I have a feeling seducing his young, beautiful sister-in-law was probably part of the accusation.
25:34 Kate Lister? Yeah, that'll do it.
25:35 Speaker 01 Right. Um, that probably wasn't great. So she goes back to her friend, the king.
25:42 Speaker 01 And he's like, okay, I need you to work up another one of your, your letters de cachet. Because it wouldn't do well for us to have a big public trial on all of this. So I just want you to lock this guy up and throw away the key.
25:55 Kate Lister? Yep.
25:55 Speaker 01 Literally. Now, there were still some other escapades. Saad dodged bullets fired out his chest. He was captured and then escaped again. But eventually, he falls into his mother-in-law's trap and is lured back to Paris, where the authorities are waiting. He gets locked up and he is locked in the infamous Bastille prison in the heart of Paris.
26:17 Kate Lister? What year was this? Because we've got to remember that the revolution is looming.
26:21 Speaker 01 I think it's seventeen seventy-eight.
26:24 Kate Lister? Okay.
26:24 Speaker 01 So he's there, he's locked up in the Liberty Tower of the Bastille. And there he sits for a whole bunch of years. And this is when he begins to write.
26:34 Kate Lister? Okay. And what kind of things is he writing? Apology notes, I hope.
26:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, I, not, not likely. He had been writing before and been trying his hand at plays, a travelogue about his time in Italy with his, with his sister-in-law. But at this point, he has nothing left. I mean, he's in a cell. Well, he's allowed all sorts of accoutrements to decorate his cell because once again,
26:58 Kate Lister? Yep.
26:59 Speaker 01 as always aristocrat, that's what you get. Uh, but he's like, okay, I need, I need to do something. And he kind of pours his obsessions into writing. And this is when the most famous thing that he wrote was One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. And this is what I ended up focusing on in my book. And this was this theoretical novel about these four aristocrats that basically tracked down, kidnapped a bunch of young boys and girls and locked them in their castle.
27:31 Kate Lister? Okay.
27:32 Speaker 01 And have their way with them over a hundred and twenty days. So you can, so you can see the parallels here. Now, in One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, apparently the violets that Saad afflicts onto his victims reaches an entirely new level.
27:47 Kate Lister? Oh, it's it's an insane work. It's absolutely demented. I used to teach it to students and every year, every year I'd say to them before before they read it, I'd be like, look, I'm not just I'm warning you about this one is that this is gonna be, this is a rough fucking ride. This is not, this is really dark stuff. And every every year, they'd be like looking at me like, ha, come at me, old timey person, bring it on. And every week, they'd come back with this thousand yard stare in their eyes, like, holy hell. Like, I know, I know. It is just an encyclopedia of of awful things.
28:22 Speaker 01 And I think that's actually a really excellent kind of term to use, Kate, an encyclopedia, because, as you know, you know, it starts off with some of the normal kind of trappings of a novel where it's an account. But, you know, one hundred and twenty days, it's it's divided into four sections. And as the days go on, both the level of the depravity and crimes increase, and all trappings of of writerly niceties fall away. So it eventually, like, it becomes like a list of a list of torture.
28:54 Kate Lister? Yeah.
28:55 Speaker 01 Is what it becomes. And it's not interesting. It's not it's not fun to read. It's just grotesque. The violence reaches a level that it becomes almost cartoonish.
29:02 Kate Lister? Yeah.
29:03 Speaker 01 The things that are done to these, mostly women, but also young men, but mostly women, you know, horrible, horrible things.
29:09 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah. Did he publish it? Like, he's sitting in prison and he's writing this stuff, but like, how do we know about it? Like, who who looked at that and went, that's the one for me? Let's publish that?
29:23 Speaker 01 Well, here's the thing. I mean, this is this is how how I became interested was I was not interested in Saad, not really interested in his writing. I was interested in this particular bit of writing, because
29:33 Kate Lister? Yeah.
29:33 Speaker 01 basically, he wrote this on this, what probably looks like a roll of toilet paper, where he made this forty foot long scroll by by gluing pages end to end. And he wrote in miniscule writing on both sides of this thing, and then roll it up and hit it and hide it in the stones of his cell.
29:55 Kate Lister? Who did, do we know who did publish it? Like, how did he get it out? What do we know that? Like, what were his contacts?
30:00 Speaker 01 So what ended up happening was this is one of these kind of fantastical objects, right? That ends up kind of going on one of these incredible journeys all over Europe.
30:08 Kate Lister? Yeah.
30:08 Speaker 01 Where it was found by a worker after the fall of the Bastille, ended up changing hands, being obsession of these Victorian erotica collectors.
30:18 Kate Lister? Yeah.
30:19 Speaker 01 It eventually fell into the hands of this sex researcher in Berlin in the 1930s.
30:25 Kate Lister? Wow.
30:26 Speaker 01 And he published the first kind of a British version of it, basically framing it as a sex manual to show the diversity of.
30:35 Kate Lister? Surely not a sex manual.
30:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. Yes. It was framed as scientific.
30:40 Kate Lister? Was that Magnus Hirschfeld?
30:42 Speaker 01 It was a, it was this guy named Ivan Bloch, who was a colleague of Hirschfeld. He was a main colleague. And in some ways Bloch helped inspire Hirschfeld. And in many ways, in this book actually helped to transform Bloch's assumptions. Because for a long time, kind of Bloch saw homosexuality as a disease, as many people did at the time, that something that could be cured. And according to him at least, it was through his work, primarily on 120 Days of Sodom, that he, he came to see sexuality on a spectrum.
31:13 Kate Lister? Wow, okay.
31:15 Speaker 01 Now, that might be the most beneficial thing to ever come out of this god awful piece of literature. And he shifted his views and ended up saying, no, it's, you know, as I said, like sexuality really is a spectrum. Now, now, after that, it was bought by one of the great supporters of the surrealist movement in Paris. And have kind of fueled the surrealism movement. And then it was stolen, ended up in this kind of erotica collector in Switzerland for a while. So it ends up traveling all over Europe.
31:54 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Joel and Saad after this short break.
32:03 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there, and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
32:44 Kate Lister? So Saad is in the Bastille. Was he there when it was attacked by the revolutionaries? Because he lived through the revolution as well.
32:52 Speaker 01 He did.
32:54 Kate Lister? Which is kind of weird. You thought he would have been the first on the chopping block, the old marquis in prison.
32:59 Speaker 01 Well, he almost was. He was transferred out of the Bastille just a few days before the raising. I mean, he would have been, he surely would have been liberated. He would have been freed. He ended up not being liberated then, so he spent a few more years behind bars. But then, say what you will about this guy, he was wily. So at this point, he looks around, gets a lay of the land and is like, okay, I think I need to change my tune to save my hide. He has kids, his sons end up leaving France. Saad embraces the revolution, calls himself Citizen Saad. He becomes a major part of his local revolutionary department. And apparently, at one point, he was in charge of the local tribunal
33:43 Speaker 01 where his mother-in-law and his father-in-law are brought up to determine whether they should be executed.
33:51 Kate Lister? Oh, did he say, yes, they should be?
33:53 Speaker 01 He didn't. He wrote after he was like, I can't bury the idea of this sort of bloodshed and the death of my kids' grandparents. So you can see, okay, fine, maybe there is some humanity there. Now, I don't know if you should use that to say he was some misunderstood.
34:07 Kate Lister? No.
34:08 Speaker 01 Individual.
34:08 Kate Lister? Wait, where's his wife in all this? Her husband's in the Bastille.
34:13 Speaker 01 By the time he gets out of the Bastille, she has now washed her hands of him as well. She's off in a convent. She's like, okay, I'm done.
34:19 Kate Lister? Yeah.
34:20 Speaker 01 No, I'm not. I'm done with this.
34:21 Kate Lister? Okay, so we have Vive la Revolution. He reinvents himself as Citizen Saad.
34:27 Speaker 01 And that works for a while until he goes too far and gets on Ravi Spier's bad side.
34:32 Kate Lister? And he's still publishing at this point, still publishing his, his works?
34:37 Speaker 01 No, at this point, I think his main artistic creations are his kind of revolutionary zeal, right?
34:45 Kate Lister? Okay.
34:46 Speaker 01 Really being, I need to, so, you know, he really throws himself into this. He reaches a point where he starts like railing against religion in general. And at this point, Ravi Spier is like, okay, this guy's taken it too far. He's a liability. It's time for him to go. So he gets on the bad side of the architect of the terror, gets locked up. And eventually he is once again sentenced to death.
35:10 Kate Lister? Okay. How does he get out of it this time? Because I know he doesn't get executed.
35:14 Speaker 01 Well, that's the thing. Once again, you know, he's on the list. They gather up all the people for the day. They bring them to the guillotine, chop their heads off one at a time. But for whatever reason, Saad is actually not there among these people. It's unclear if the executioner somehow missed Saad when he was collecting the people.
35:34 Kate Lister? Wow.
35:34 Speaker 01 Or if somebody, if he was able to use whatever money he had left to pay off the right people. But on that day, he avoided death.
35:43 Speaker 01 And then the following day, before anyone could remedy the situation, Robespierre himself was executed.
35:49 Kate Lister? Guys, lucky this guy, ain't he?
35:51 Speaker 01 I know, I know. He basically avoids the reign of terror by like a single day.
35:58 Kate Lister? Wow.
35:58 Speaker 01 Okay, yeah.
36:00 Kate Lister? He doesn't get away with it completely though, because eventually Napoleon comes on the scene.
36:05 Speaker 01 So he gets out and now he's writing again. He's starting to get a bit of reputation. He's writing more horrific books. Justine or Juliet. But then eventually Napoleon, you know, Napoleon comes back and Napoleon's not too fond of this guy. So after some of the more calmer, more successful kind of years of his life, he's locked away again. This time it's more in the frame of of mental asylums.
36:31 Kate Lister? Hmm.
36:31 Speaker 01 And that's kind of where he spends the rest of his days. For a while, he ends up running the theatre department. At one of these, one of the asylums, which became the inspiration for Quills, right? Because because that's about him.
36:43 Kate Lister? It's where it's set, isn't it? In the lunatic asylum of, uh, Charente.
36:47 Speaker 01 Exactly. And so so apparently for a while, the cream of society would travel out of Paris to see these theatrical performances. Put on by people who were at that point considered certifiably insane.
37:00 Kate Lister? And he does. So he dies, dies of old age? What does he die of?
37:04 Speaker 01 Yes. Amazingly, he outlives the reign of the king and the reign of terror and even Napoleon's empire. And, you know, ends up passing away in eighteen fourteen. So talk about being a, an escape artist.
37:19 Kate Lister? Yeah. He dies when he's imprisoned in the, in the asylum, right?
37:24 Speaker 01 Yes.
37:25 Kate Lister? There's a weird story about him being dug up, his narrow skull or something?
37:29 Speaker 01 Yes. According to his written testament, he, he said he wanted his grave to be hidden away in the forest and have acorn scattered over it. So that his. All memory of him would be washed away. It's hard. I don't know. This guy had a very high esteem for himself. So I don't know how much of that was.
37:47 Kate Lister? Doesn't sound like something he'd do, does it?
37:49 Speaker 01 Yes. But of course, this doesn't happen. He's buried in the asylum cemetery. A few years later, his bones were dug up and the phrenologists got a hold of his skull and and made all sorts of completely varying pronouncements about what his skull suggested about him. And that was really the beginning of kind of the myth of Saad. There had already been insane rumors during his lifetime, but all of a sudden this individual began to really assume these larger than life reputations.
38:18 Kate Lister? So let's talk then, just to bring it home about what his legacy is, because this is something that's very complex about Saad, because you can't. His history, his personal history, the things that he did are beyond horrendous. If you can try and separate the art from the artist, and a lot of people have tried to do it, to try and understand this body of work that we've been left with. There are people that say that it's out and out just obscenities and that it's the worst kind of violent pornography and we should, it should just be burnt. And it was banned for a long time, but there have been people, quite notable people, that have tried to defend Saad as well.
38:54 Speaker 01 Yes, and I think that's part, I mean, I'm curious. Okay, when, when you've had your students have to read this, how many have actually been able to get through it?
39:04 Kate Lister? Not many.
39:05 Speaker 01 Exactly, right? So in some ways, I think a lot of his work, especially really horrible things like 120 Days of Sodom, which is this massive and really kind of taxing read, ends up becoming this kind of cipher, right? This kind of where, where it's almost more the reputation or, or people reading, taking bits and pieces and and then interpreting it in a way that serves them.
39:30 Kate Lister? Yeah.
39:31 Speaker 01 And that can be, that at times I think has been productive and constructive. As I said, like during the flourishing of the sexual revolution and really pioneering sex research in Berlin before the rise of the Nazis in the twenties and early thirties, I think some of Saad's work was actually productively used, as I said, to like illustrate, okay, like sexuality really does exist in a variety of forms.
39:58 Kate Lister? And always has.
39:59 Speaker 01 Yes, and surrealist, thanks in part to the scroll being kind of trotted out a lot of their their parties in Paris, kind of used it also as inspiration, this idea of the sheer nihilism of it to just help them to rail against and deconstruct all of the kind of societal structures that they were dead set on, on abolishing.
40:22 Kate Lister? Some prominent feminist scholars, you'd think they would be first in line to chuck it in the bin, wouldn't you? But Simone de Beauvoir wrote Must We Burn Sad? Angela Carter wrote The Sadian Woman. Both of them have defended his work.
40:36 Speaker 01 And I think one of the reasons is that in some of his works, in kind of Justine and Juliet, the protagonists, if you want to call them that, are women. And I think especially in some of his later writing, these women are just as corrupt and despicable as his male characters.
40:54 Kate Lister? Yeah.
40:55 Speaker 01 And yet they also have this level of power and autonomy, right? How, I mean, they were in his works engaging in black mass orgies at the Vatican, but at least they were making the choice to do it. And in some of his writings, he, he seems to even be supportive of the concept of abortion, right? Now, I think all of this has to be couched in kind of the overall framing of that. Like, when he was writing about the idea that abortion should be legal, the question is, was it more part of his extreme views of, of being
41:34 Speaker 01 able to abuse or hurt anyone he so chooses, rather than some kind of proto feminism? I mean, this stuff is so extreme that there's this natural tendency to try to explain it, try to give some reasoning, that there has to be some ulterior motive, that there has to be some larger theme driving this. Yeah.
41:55 Kate Lister? It's not porn, I don't think. I think I think you'd struggle to call that pornography. It doesn't operate as pornography. It's, I mean, you know, there might be like a handful of people out there that, you know, that's their thing. But I wouldn't have called that pornography.
42:08 Speaker 01 I think most people would assume it's pornography and at times, you know, it's been framed as like the original Fifty Shades of Grey, but that's a, but that is to me like, like a woeful misreading or, or not a misreading because
42:20 Kate Lister? Yeah.
42:21 Speaker 01 once again, clearly people aren't reading this stuff.
42:23 Kate Lister? Yeah.
42:23 Speaker 01 It is, to me, it's not about, as we talked about, it's not about, it's not really about pleasure. It is about power.
42:28 Kate Lister? Yeah, and excess.
42:29 Speaker 01 And if I may, I wrote this book a few years ago, so I haven't been engaged in it that much since, but it came up fairly recently for me in this kind of powerful way. And this comes back to this concept of power where I'm working at this investigative news outlet here in the States. It's called The Lever. And we focus on corruption, political as well as corporate corruption. And we, like many outlets here and in the UK, have been focused on the Epstein files.
42:57 Kate Lister? Yeah.
42:58 Speaker 01 There's millions of records and I've had some of my reporters spend time on it. One of them came back to me and essentially was, is just like, hey, I, I need a break. Just reading through these accounts, it's having an impact on me.
43:14 Kate Lister? Wow.
43:14 Speaker 01 And that reminded me, there is wonderful professor in London named Will McMoran, who did the most recent translation, One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. It's a part of, I think, the Oxford Classics where he wrote blogs about, about the experience as he was doing it. And there was a blog post he wrote where going through One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, which is this, as we talked about, this becomes this dry account of just rich people doing the worst things imaginable to defenseless young people, right? We're seeing the parallel where he wrote, at times I, I feel like instead of me working on the text, the text is working on me. So I saw this parallel, right, between the Epstein files, which no one would say that's sexy or romantic.
43:56 Speaker 01 That is a pure accounting of men in power.
44:00 Kate Lister? Yeah.
44:01 Speaker 01 Just having utter freedom to do whatever they want. And that's exactly what Sod wrote.
44:06 Kate Lister? Yeah, and what he did as well in several cases. Yeah.
44:13 Kate Lister? I mean, it's, you're right, the parallels there, that they're quite striking. It's that this is, this has been happening for a long time. Unfettered power, closed circles, acting with impunity, thinking that they can get away with whatever they want to. That's been, that's been documented for a very long time, and certainly in the work of Saad. Joel, you, I don't know if you've been fun to talk to, but you've certainly been incredible. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
44:42 Speaker 01 Like I said, I'm spending most of my time helping run this news outlet called The Lever, focused a lot on corruption here in this, here in the States. As I said, unfortunately, there are a lot of parallels between Saad's behaviour, a lot of the people in power here in this country right now. So I recommend people to check that out. The book that I wrote about this, The Curse of the Marquis de Saad, I tried to make it as engaging as possible. It's part a biography of Saad, it's part the kind of blow by blow of the incredible journey of this scroll. And then part is actually how it fell into the largest Ponzi scheme in French history just a few years ago. So the book's also an accounting of this, of this really incredible scam involving the rare book market in France.
45:24 Speaker 01 So hopefully it's more of a page turner than, say, reading 120 Days of Sodom. I can't say for sure, but I definitely tried to make it more engaging.
45:32 Kate Lister? Just give that one a skip, everyone. Honestly, it's not worth your time. Read Joel's book instead. You have been fabulous. Thank you so much for coming by to talk to us.
45:41 Speaker 01 Well, thank you for asking such wonderful questions. You, you put me on my toes. Like I said, it's been a few years. It's good to grill me on those things.
45:53 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much for joining me. And if you like what you heard, well, get help, that's what I would say. But also don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we're going to meet the legendary Greek poet Sappho and head inside the brothels of imperial Russia. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you're just wanting to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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