Noble Blood - Sadism in the Bastille

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

TRIGGER WARNING: this episode contains references to sexual content. The Marquis de Sade, the namesake of "sadism," is famous for his writings cataloguing the full extent of brutal and abusive sexual acts. Today, he's perhaps more famous as a concept than an actual living, breathing person, a man who wrote his most famous manuscript in prison, aided by a shockingly devoted wife. Sign up for Dana's history writing course! Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. A warning before we begin, this week's episode contains mentions of graphic sex and sexual violence. If that's not something you want to listen to or if you are a younger listener, I would encourage you to skip this episode maybe and come back next week. Revolution was brewing in Paris. There were mobs in the city streets, and on July 1st, 1789,

if anyone in those mobs happened to look up at the Bastille, they would have seen a man, a prisoner, standing in the window of his cell on the sixth floor, shouting down at them. Save the prisoners, the man yelled. Their throats are being slashed. They're being murdered. You must help. They were dramatic words, words that the prisoner was hoping would incite action.

In actuality, the prison was nearly empty. The man shouting down from his window was the only prisoner remaining in his tower. He was short and wide, raggedly dressed as you might expect. If the mob on the street had squinted, they might have seen that the prisoner was holding an object to his mouth like a modern-day megaphone, a metallic funnel. Even if they had seen the object, the people on the street probably would not have guessed

that the funnel was a piece of the prisoner's urinal. Though, of course, use of the urinal funnel to magnify his voice was entirely functional in this case, the fact that this man happened to be holding an object associated with bodily waist up to his mouth is uniquely appropriate given who that prisoner was. His name was Denetian Alphonse Francois, but he is better known as the Makit de Sade. He is among the most infamous writers known to literary and cultural history, and among the most controversial, for good reason, for his writing depicting gruesome sexual tortures and violence that went as far as murder. His grisly sexual imagination is the origin of the word sadism, though never quite as violent as his caricature. His many stints in prison weren't just for his ideas either.

The man poisoned and beat sex workers and was credibly accused of kidnapping teenage girls. The Marquis de Sade has been widely censored throughout history and is also published as a Penguin Classic. He has been reconsidered, redeemed, and villainized in the changing political winds of history by everyone from Apollonier to Simone de Beauvoir. He was a writer above all, known for his libertine works of sexual violence, less known for his political and aesthetic writings. And as the Marquis de Sade stood in the window of the Bastille, the July that the French Revolution would reach its climax, shouting into the metallic funnel, he was also one more thing. Perhaps, perhaps perhaps surprisingly, a husband, to a remarkably, even strangely devoted wife,

a pious woman married to a man who had had endless affairs, mostly with sex workers, but also with her own sister. And yet she had stood by him throughout his many violent indiscretions, his many imprisonments, his burnings in effigy. As the Marquis de Sade stood there in the sixth floor of his prison tower, screaming, he may have been able to guess that soon he would be removed by the armed guards. In fact, he was removed at one the next morning. He may not have been able to guess that he wouldn't be allowed to take with him his library of 600 books, ranging from Homer to Robinson Crusoe to erotica that his wife had sent him by request.

He may have had some sense that, 13 days later, the Bastille would be stormed and the French Revolution would begin in earnest. But surely, Sade could not have known that he was on the immediate precipice of losing the two things in the world that surely he believed he would never be without. First, the pages upon pages of his manuscripts, the scrawling writing that he had kept secret and hidden during his imprisonment. And second, at last, his once devoted wife. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. All right, listeners, right off the bat, this is going to be an edgy one.

Before diving into the story of Saad, let's start by acknowledging that sadism from the mind of the Marquis is not the now-sex-positive and consensual S that you might know from the contemporary acronym BDSM. Some of it starts there, but Saad's imagination goes far beyond even the most transgressive sex positivity into disturbing depictions of extreme tortures so obscene and violent that I can't, won't, even suggest them on this podcast. Fifty Shades of Gray is like a nursery rhyme by comparison. Sott himself told his lawyers that his books were, quote, too immoral to send to a man as pious and as decent as you.

I needed money. my publisher asked me for something quite spicy, and I made him a book capable of corrupting the devil. Listeners, I can't give details of such works to someone as pious and decent as you, nor would I want to. What I can give you is the story of the man behind those works. With that said, let's get into it. The Marquis de Sade was born on June 2nd,

1740, in the house of his father's mistress. Don't get me wrong, the Marquis was a legitimate child of his married parents. But Sade's father, Jean-Baptiste, only married his wife in the first place to get closer to another woman, the princess of Condé. Jean-Baptiste loved the princess, but settled for marrying her lady-in-waiting Marie. Like his eventual son, Jean-Baptiste had also been arrested for his sexual exploits with men, and Marie, unsurprisingly, was rather absent from the household and from her son's childhood. In a sad little incident from the Marquisadezad's early life,

neither parent bothered to show up to his baptism, so a pair of servants baptized him with the wrong name. He was called Denician Alphonse Francois, not Denetian-Al-Dinthe-Dont-Louise, as his absentee parents had originally intended. At age five, the young Sade moved in with his father's brother, who scandalously lived with a mother and daughter with whom he was both sleeping with. Saad had access to his uncle's impressive library, which included Moliere, Ha, and books with titles like De Bordello or The Every Man DeBotched and The Good and Bad Uses of Flajulation. In other words, this was a child who grew up surrounded by promiscuous sex, for whom the taboo was commonplace. This was the era right after the licentious regency period in France when so-called libertinism was common.

The word libertine comes from the Latin root, Lieber, meaning free. A libertine was a person living without moral or religious restraint, particularly in the bedroom. When Saad turned 10, his father sent him to a Jesuit school that disciplined boys by flogging them in front of their classmates. Accusations of sodomy also ran rampant at the school, which was a criminal. act at the time. Usually when covering a subject on Noble Blood, it's unnecessary to the story to either report or speculate on the specifics of the individual's sexual proclivities. But in the Marquis de Sade's life, his own personal sexual activity is so inextricably linked to his work

and also to his life, that I find it actually does hold some relevance here. So whether or not Saad first encountered Sodemy at his Jesuit school, we know that in both his personal life and in his writings, for him it was the only type of physical sex that ever satisfied him, whether he was in prison or in his marital bed, whether he was with men or with women. Young Saad went on to fight in the seven years' war, where his sexual appetites were so well known that his honorable discharge papers called him deranged. By the time Sade was 22, his father was desperate to get him married off. Sad was therefore betrothed to a respectable young woman, Rene Pellege Montcée. But six weeks before the wedding, Sade, away in Provence, was writing

letters to a different woman. He wanted her instead. Of course, while saying how much he loved her, he was also calling her an ungrateful wretch and blackmailing her regarding the gonorrhea that he also had likely given her. So, surprise, surprise, his relationship with that woman didn't work out. Nonetheless, Sade refused to come back to Paris to marry the woman that his father chose for him, and the wedding date was approaching. Sade's father knew what a mess he was creating for the young Rene Pelleget-Montrell and her mother. I pity them, he wrote,

for making such a bad purchase, capable of making all kinds of trouble. Finally, one day before the wedding, Sade arrived back in Paris, carrying the then-traditional wedding delicacy of artichokes. He married René Pelaget, who stood four, foot 10, besides Sade's 5 foot 2. This was a time when 5.4 would be considered average,

but even so, Sade was short. Make of that what you will. And shockingly, the Marquis and his new Marquise actually seemed to really like each other, like a lot. Sade called her his beloved soul and dearest friend. Rene Pellege came to at least accept, maybe even enjoy Sade's particular predilections in the bedroom, which were, as I alluded to before, not the type that would risk pregnancy. Biographer Francine de Pleissy Gray said that Rene Pellege's utter adoration for her husband, quote, has a legendary mythical streak. It is akin to the devotion displayed by wives of ogres in European fairy tales. Of course, all of the All of that love and devotion wasn't enough to restrain the Marquis de Sade.

She had married, the Marquis de Sade, after all, and he was untamable. Three weeks after the wedding, Rene Pellege was pregnant. Five months after the wedding, her husband was in jail for the first time. It was a relatively tame first charge. He had forcibly demanded that a sex worker whip him, and he threatened to whip her in turn, all of which was actually kind of common practice at the time for a married male aristocrat. But under threat of violence, he had also forced this woman to speak blasphemies against God. It was actually Saad's wife and mother-in-law who worked to get him out of prison.

He was only there for three weeks, but even since he was actually Sadd's wife and mother-in-law who worked to get him out of prison. three weeks, but even still, he considered his treatment massively unfair. Was a noble really going to get in such trouble for how he treated such lowly women? In August 1767, Sade's first son was born. Eight months after that, Sade was in jail again, this time for seven months, for the violent coerced whipping of a woman named Rose Keller. By 1772, Sade and his wife had two sons and a daughter, and he was convicted for a third time. He had given sex workers a candy that contained a dangerously high dose of an aphrodisiac called Spanish Fly, which left at least one girl hospitalized. Spanish Fly is not a euphemism. It is literally a bug, a beetle.

actually, rumored at the time to increase arousal, and even used as a treatment for various illnesses, including STIs at the time. But it was also incredibly toxic, sometimes even deadly in large doses. This time, Sade was sentenced to be burned and beheaded. In a practice common for nobles at the time, he was burned only in effigy,

and the sentence was considered complete. In the meantime, Sade was off in Italy with a very particular mistress, his devoted wife's sister. Anne Prosper was nine years younger than her sister, and she was infatuated with the Marquis de Sade. Still, Sade's wife stuck by him. In 1774, Sade had serious kidnapping allegations

levied against him. René Pelaget covered for him, knowing all along that he had, in fact, taken five young teenage girls and one young boy, servants, into the dungeon of his family chateau to have them act out depraved scenes and orgies. Finally, in 1777, and with the help of his once-loving mother-in-law, Saad was taken into curate. custody. It would be the 13-year-long imprisonment that eventually led him to the Bastille. For a guy best known for his elaborate imaginations about torture and restraint, Saad did not take well to imprisonment. He was not initially held at the Bastille Fortress. He was first at a fortress called Vincennes, Cell 11, with windows just barely high

enough for him to see a sliver of sky above the fortress walls. The Marquis wrote to his wife constantly, requesting incredibly specific items, heravans, hemorrhoid creams, face powder, toothpicks, cologne. She worked to send them, writing letters that professed ardent and passionate love. Sometimes he returned her affections. He wrote about his intense desire for, her using euphemisms about his hem, bow and arrow. He asked her to send him cylindrical objects, shaped in very, very particular dimensions. But sometimes he turned on her. He blamed her mother, correctly, as it turned out, for his imprisonment,

calling her a venomous beast, an infernal monster, and other epithets that I cannot speak on this podcast. He sent his mother-in-law a letter written in his own blood. In the height of irony, he accused René Pelaget's wife of wearing clothes that were too immodest. As a result, she went to live at a convent. It was leap day of 1794 when Sada was transferred to the Bastille. Ironically, his tower was called the Tower of Liberty.

He was in an octagonal cell that he plastered with flowers and portraits of his family, almost like a dorm room. By the end of his stay in the Tower of Liberty, he was on the sixth floor, surrounded by 600 books in a bookcase. His collection included Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, erotica, and the book, written right around the time of Saad's imprisonment. He also had dozens of pens and blank notebooks. His wife had sent him all of it, because upon being imprisoned, Saad turned at last in earnest to the thing that he would become most famous for, writing. Sad turned his wife

into his research assistant. He would ask her to find hotel-neutral. names, streets, managers, and surrounding settings in locations as distant as Lisbon and Madrid. Yet his letters also derided the writing abilities of the very woman who was sending him the books and research and strawberries and rosewater he requested to the Bastille. In one letter he wrote, quote, you don't seem to have bathed today, for it is impossible to read anything drier than your letter. In another, he wrote, You've sent me three pages of idiotic ramblings,

but it's in your manner to say stupidities, to have your reason go off track. Rene Pellaget is generally considered uneducated. Her writing is misspelled, and she certainly didn't share her husband's famous linguistic dexterity. But she engaged him in complex questions of law and ethics, and she read and critiqued his manuscripts. She also, probably accidentally, misled him in answer to some of his research questions.

The descriptions of foreign nations in the Marquis de Sade's books are often wrong, and that's the evidence that the Marquis de Sade's prison writings were actually reliant on his long-suffering wife. Of course, Sade was still in prison. When he began writing his first book in 1785, he had to be secretive. He wrote in frenzied three-hour spurts from 7 to 10 p.m. The night darkening outside his window as his hand trembled with excitement. He wrote on five-inch pieces of paper in tiny handwriting. There are many tales about books being written in ridiculously short periods.

of time. Supposedly, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Jekyll and Hyde in three days. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the first Sherlock home story in three weeks. And for Sade, it took 37 days to produce 49 feet of writing. His book was about 250,000 words, about a thousand pages, more than double the size that would make a modern agent or editor Blanche if they got it in the mail. That book was the 120 Days of Sodom, a catalog of every possible sexually violent act. I cannot name them here. You are welcome to look them up yourself, but if you're imagining titillation, don't be surprised to find yourself repelled. During all this time, the seeds of the French Revolution were about to bloom.

Revolutionaries were preparing their muskets and sharpening their swords. The Liberty Tower was emptied of all but one prisoner, its most depraved and one day most famous, the Marquis de Saad. He had been hearing the discontent of the revolutionaries down below, and he was feeling bored and annoyed, denied his daily walks. So at noon on July 1, 1789, he took the funnaries. that linked his urinal to the fortress moat, put it to his mouth, stood at his window, and yelled down to the people below.

The prisoner's throats are being cut, he screamed down into the crowd. If the Marquis de Sade is anything, it's consistent in his desire to provoke people, to say scandalous things and get a reaction. Unsurprisingly, the bestial guards were not happy with him. At 1 a.m. that night, they seized him. him in his cell and took him basically naked to the convent of the brothers of charity. It was, in Saad's words, an insane asylum. Sad was desperate over the loss of his writings, which were still hidden in his cell in the Bastille.

He gave the police commissioner the right to open his cell as long as his wife, Madame de Saad, was there. Saad assumed, of course, that his wife would take his writings to safety. But the Marquis had been having a bit of a change of heart. We really don't know why, at long last, the wife who had stuck with Sod through all of his troubles finally changed her mind about him. What we know is that on July 14th, 13 days after her husband screamed from the window of his cell

and was removed to an insane asylum, the Bastille was stormed, and blood ran through the streets of Paris. We know that she was having mobility issues with her legs, and that she was 48 years old and married to a man who had spent the better part of their lives together in prisons, and she was becoming more religious at the convent she lived at. And we know that on April 1, 1790, Sad was released.

He was balding, nearly 50, wearing a ratty woolen coat. We can only imagine the feeling of freedom after a 13-year imprisonment. He must have breathed in the fresh air, exhaled, and he had only one thing on his mind, his wife. Maybe he wanted to do to her the sexual things that he had described in his letters over the years.

Maybe he simply wanted to sit down together to a good meal at a table where they could stay for as long as they wanted, man and wife reunited at last. He went immediately to seek her out and found her convent. He waited patiently for René Pellege to come meet him. She never came. Your wife does not wish to see you ever again, a messenger told Sade. She wants a legal separation.

Sade never again saw the manuscript that he left behind in the Bastille. but the bigger blow was the loss of his long-suffering wife. As I said, we don't know for sure why Rene Pellige changed her mind at last. It's not as though she had a shortage of reasons. But I will add one suggestion. It must have been much easier to have a husband like the Marquis de Sade when he was in prison. You could visit him and then leave him safe. behind you, where you knew you would find him the next time. In prison, he could not be

frequenting brothels and picking up yet another venereal disease to pass on to you. With him in prison, you had a modicum of control in your marriage to a man who had so abused and degraded you. For René Pelaget, her husband's imprisonment must have been a freedom that she could not give up. streak of karma would have had Sadd live out the rest of his days alone, but he quickly met a new woman, 33-year-old Constance Cuisne, who had a six-year-old son from a previous marriage. She became yet another inexplicably devoted partner. I know a ton of amazing women who are still single today, and this guy finds endless devotees. Love is not fair. It was after Sad's stint in the Bastille and after the loss of his wife that he wrote the works for which he would become best known in his lifetime.

Philosophy in the Voudoir, Justine and Juliette were sexually explicit and violent books that shocked society's sensibilities. Saad was free for only 11 years before he was arrested again at his publisher's office in 1811.1.1. this time for the crime of obscenity. He spent another 13-year stint in the insane asylum, still receiving conjugal visits from at least two women, until he died on December 2, 1814, at age 74. He willed everything to his second partner, Constance. He stated in his will that,

I trust the memory of me shall fade out in the minds of all, men. Of course, that's not what happened. The legacy of the Marquis de Sade is extremely complicated. At various points over the centuries, his reputation has been sanitized and resurrected as a figurehead against censorship. At other points, his work has been castigated for its misogynistic violence and censored all over again. He is one of those lightning rod historical figures who is endlessly used for the political ends of whichever movement wants to evoke him. He has been revisited by everyone from Flaubert to Simone de Beauvoir. Mary Shelley may have named her character Justine in Frankenstein

after Sade's character of the same name. The 120 Days of Sodom was translated anew into English as a penguin classic in 2017. It is complicated to consider Sad in the contemporary moment. Do we defend his works on the basis of anti-censorship and the virtue of sex positivity, or at least open sexual expression? Or do we reject the works on the basis of opposition to misogyny and violence against women, opposition to the author, the sexual coercion and violence, abduction and rape, actually committed by the man himself.

And how do we even read, Sad, if we do? Were his writings even meant to be erotic? They may have been at least partly comedy, partly satire, partly political commentary amidst the beheadings and power upheavals of the French Revolution. Maybe Sad was an 18th century troll, and his works were just meant to be provocative, for the sake of provocation.

De Plissigre-Rae writes that, far from intending to arouse the reader, the, quote, repugnance of the 120 days, quote, makes it far more conducive to chastity. I have to be honest, listener, reading SAD's works for this episode, I was seconded by his treatment of his characters, especially the women,

and I want to be very clear about my opinions here. often when researching a historical figure, I find myself ending with more empathy for them than when I began. But in this case, I just feel disgusted. And yet, Simone de Beauvoir, mother of second wave feminism, wrote an essay arguing that we should not burn Sad because he shows us something important about the dark heart of humanity. In the end, I think that we should not burn Sadd,

there's a way to believe that Saad should not be jailed for obscenity in his writing, only for his actions, to think that his works should not be censored, and also to think that we need not celebrate in order not to censor. The heirs of Saad may feel the same. The line of Saad, which stretched back to medieval times, stopped using the title Marquis after his death in 1814. Out of embarrassment, the heirs began to call themselves comte instead, all the way until 2014 when one heir chose to reclaim Marquis again. Who knows what time will bring, whether future generations will once more renounce their claims to the infamous Libertine. That's the story of the infamous Marquis de Sade, but stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more

about the fate of his most famous Bastille manuscript and how it actually became the 120 days of Sodom. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give. this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up

through and I know it's a place that come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodam. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and The Big Money Play Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come, look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Marquis de Sade. never saw his 120 days of Sodom again, and it was never published in his lifetime. He died believing that the manuscript was destroyed in the Bastille. But the fate of the 120 days was not so simple. Unbeknownst to the Marquis de Saad, it was discovered and removed by a civilian two days before the storming of the Bastille.

It wound up published for the first time in 1904 by a psychiatrist and sexologist based in Berlin, who published it under a pseudonym. The book was considered appropriate for medical and psychiatric use as a massive catalog of sexual desire. In 2014, the original manuscript was purchased for 70s, million euros by a Frenchman who'd literally won the lottery and was later arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. In 2021, the French government bought the manuscript for 4.5 million euros. The obscene

scroll that started its life in the Bastille is now officially a French national treasure. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il-Ka Ali, with supervising producer Josh Thain, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone, I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun, anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on

a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.