You’ve probably heard the name Marquis de Sade thrown around in psych classes or seen it mentioned in those "top ten most disturbing movies" lists. Usually, people are talking about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film, which is a nightmare in its own right. But the source material, The 120 Days of Sodom, is something else entirely. It isn’t just a "naughty" book from the 1700s. It is a grueling, repetitive, and deeply clinical catalog of human depravity that was written on a single 39-foot long scroll of paper while Sade was locked in the Bastille.
It's a heavy read. Literally.
The history of the manuscript is arguably as insane as the content itself. Sade wrote it in tiny, microscopic script over the course of 37 days in 1785. He hid the scroll in a crack in his cell wall. When the Bastille was stormed during the French Revolution, Sade was moved out just days before, and he wept, believing his masterpiece was lost to the flames. He died thinking it was gone forever. It wasn't. A man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin found it, and it stayed in private collections for over a century before finally being published in 1904 by Iwan Bloch.
What Actually Happens in The 120 Days of Sodom
Basically, the plot is a math equation disguised as a horror story. Four wealthy, powerful French libertines—the Duke of Blangis, the Bishop of Agung, the Judge Curval, and the Banker Durcet—lock themselves away in the remote Silling Castle. They bring with them a "harem" of victims and four storytellers.
The structure is rigid.
The book is divided into four parts, corresponding to 150 "passions" each.
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- Simple Passions.
- Complex Passions.
- Criminal Passions.
- Murderous Passions.
The storytellers tell tales of their own debauched lives, and the libertines "act out" these scenarios on their captives. It starts with relatively mundane (for Sade) fetishes and escalates into a level of violence that most modern readers find genuinely nauseating. Sade was obsessed with symmetry. He wanted to document every possible permutation of human cruelty. It’s not "erotic" in any conventional sense; it’s an encyclopedia of the dark side of the Enlightenment.
The Philosophical Nightmare
Why do people still care about this? It’s not because they’re looking for a thrill. Intellectuals like Simone de Beauvoir and Camille Paglia have obsessed over Sade because he asks a terrifying question: If nature is cruel, and we are part of nature, why shouldn't we be cruel too?
Sade was a product of the Enlightenment. While Rousseau was talking about the "noble savage" and the inherent goodness of man, Sade was looking at the same biology and seeing a predator. He argued that since the "strong" in nature survive by destroying the "weak," the ultimate expression of human freedom is the total domination of others. It’s a pitch-black brand of atheism. He wasn't just trying to be edgy. He was trying to follow the logic of absolute individualism to its most violent conclusion.
Honestly, the book is boring.
That’s the secret no one tells you.
Because Sade never finished it—the last three sections are mostly just notes and bullet points—it becomes a repetitive list of atrocities. The "Simple Passions" take up most of the finished prose, but by the time you get to the "Murderous Passions," it reads like a grocery list of ways to end a life. This "boredom" is actually part of its power. It shows how desensitized the libertines become. They need more and more extreme acts just to feel a spark of life.
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The Legal Battle and Legacy
For years, you couldn't even buy this book in most countries. In the UK, it was part of the "obscene publications" crackdown for decades. Even today, its status is weird. In 2017, the French government declared the original manuscript a "national treasure" to stop it from being auctioned off and leaving the country. Think about that. A book that describes the most heinous acts imaginable is legally considered a pillar of French cultural heritage.
It’s an uncomfortable paradox.
You see the influence of The 120 Days of Sodom everywhere in "transgressive" art. Without Sade, you don't have Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. You don't have the "body horror" of David Cronenberg. You don't have the nihilism of modern horror cinema. Sade mapped the basement of the human psyche, and artists have been exploring it ever since.
Why It Still Matters (Sorta)
We live in an era where we think we've seen everything. The internet has made shock value a currency. But Sade still hits different because he removes the "safety" of the screen. He forces you to confront the idea that power, when left totally unchecked by morality or law, naturally bends toward cruelty.
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Silling Castle is a microcosm of a totalitarian state.
The four libertines represent the Church, the Law, the Aristocracy, and the Economy.
Sade was showing that these institutions don't protect people; they just provide a framework for the powerful to exploit the powerless behind closed doors. It's a cynical, ugly, and perhaps necessary warning about the nature of power.
How to Approach This Text Today
If you’re actually planning on reading it, don't expect a novel. Treat it like a historical document or a philosophical exercise. Most people find they can only handle it in small doses, and that’s probably healthy.
- Read the Prefaces First: Start with the essays by Simone de Beauvoir (Must We Burn Sade?) or Annie Le Brun. They provide the context needed to see beyond the shock value.
- Study the History: The story of the scroll's survival is genuinely more gripping than the fiction itself. Look into the "Sade Scroll" and how it was preserved through two centuries of wars and revolutions.
- Watch the Film with Caution: Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom updates the setting to Fascist Italy. It’s one of the few films that captures the clinical, cold atmosphere of the book, but it’s notoriously difficult to sit through.
- Recognize the Satire: Some scholars argue Sade was satirizing the very nobles who imprisoned him. By portraying them as monsters, he was exposing the rot of the Pre-Revolutionary French elite.
The 120 Days of Sodom remains the ultimate "unreadable" book. It’s a mirror held up to the darkest corners of human capability. You don't read it for fun; you read it to understand what happens when the human mind decides that nothing is sacred. It’s a brutal, exhausting, and singular piece of literature that, for better or worse, changed the way we think about the limits of freedom.
To understand the full impact of Sade's work, researchers suggest looking into the concept of "The Sadistic Impulse" in early 20th-century psychoanalysis, specifically how Freud and Krafft-Ebing used Sade's descriptions to categorize human behavior. You might also explore the 2014 exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, "Sade: Attacking the Sun," which visualized how his "criminal" imagination fueled the Romantic and Surrealist movements. Focusing on the intersection of his political imprisonment and his creative output offers the most balanced view of his legacy.