Erotica In Arts. Part 4: French Erotic Literature

Libertine Novel

Historically, the libertine novel is a literary phenomenon of the French 18th century. The earliest examples were inspired by the Regency (1715-23) but written and published under Louis XV, while the last ones were written during the French Revolution, notably by the Marquis de Sade. The end of Louis XIV's reign stood under the influence of the austere and religious Madame de Maintenon, and when the king died the court happily anticipated more joyous times, welcoming the Regency style. Free from Versailles etiquette and the centralized power wielded by the self-proclaimed Sun-King, the aristocracy flocked to Paris in search of renewed pleasures. The libertine novel signals this renewal of exuberant and frivolous attitudes, opposed to the strict morality enforced at Versailles after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The two main branches of the genre end with the French Revolution. The mondain libertine novel, an aristocratic genre par excellence, declined when French aristocrats were guillotined or went into exile. At the same time, erotic or obscene libertine novels became political, taking the shape of pro- or anti-revolutionary or anti-royalist pamphlets directed against Louis XVI or against the very unpopular Marie-Antoinette.

The English term "libertine" encompasses the French libertin (masculine) and libertine (feminine). The type and its associated thought and behaviour are not an 18th-century invention: there had been libertines in the previous century. However, some contemporary critics insist on a distinction between libertinage erudit (erudite libertinism) in the 17th century and libertinage des m?urs (libertinism of behaviour) in the 18th century. The erudite libertines were more explicitly anti-religious and more articulate in their philosophical views, although they were also condemned for their sexuality, most notably the practice of sodomy, and their general turpitude. The second-wave libertines appear less concerned with abstract philosophical systems and more directly interested in sexual freedom, but they did have newer systems of beliefs. Theirs was an age that claimed frivolity as a philosophical tenet: far from being avoided or hidden, frivolity was now claimed as a moral and philosophical principle. It was appreciated not only by novelists and writers of fairy tales but also by philosophers who saw in the frivolous an ideal means to practice one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment—didacticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, better known for his sentimental Julie; ou, La Nouvelle Heloise (1761; Julie; or, The New Eloise) and his political treatises, such as Du Contrat social; ou, Principes du droit politique (1762; Of the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Right) also wrote a fairy tale, La Reine fantasque (1758; The Whimsical Queen). Voltaire also wrote dozens of philosophical tales of oriental inspiration, and Denis Diderot, the coeditor of the Encyclopedie, wrote a libertine novel in the oriental vein, Les Bijoux indiscrets (2 vols, 1748; The Indiscreet Jewels). The libertine side of otherwise prestigious Enlightenment philosophers was often erased from official histories of French literature: The Indiscreet Jewels, a novel in which a sultan who possesses a magic ring can make women's sex ("the jewels") speak, was ignored for nearly two centuries. Diderot's writing a libertine novel has often been attributed to his dire financial situation, a myth created by the philosopher's daughter and by his friends after his death. It is now universally acknowledged that Diderot's libertine novel in fact makes an important contribution to his political and philosophical program. In his Histoire de la sexualite (1976; History of Sexuality) Michel Foucault analysed Diderot as a key witness to the sudden increase in discourses on sexuality in the 18th century, although it has now also been recognized that the sexual discourse provided by the jewels are highly biased, as no male "jewel" ever confessed in 18th-century libertine fiction.

But if libertinism is rife among 18th-century novelists and philosophers, there is no real consensus about what exactly constitutes the "libertine novel". The word libertine refers to a whole range of types: on the one hand the free-thinking spirit who claims an individual right to knowledge, advocates free inquiry, and refuses the precepts of the Church, and on the other a person who claims as inalienable the right to individual pleasure and sexual gratification outside the moral norms imposed by society. The expression "libertine novel" is just as problematic: to qualify, does the libertine novel have to be about libertins and libertines, or should the text itself he libertine? In other words, does its ideological program have to follow the precepts advocated by libertines themselves? Rather than reading this apparent confusion as a restriction, I will concentrate on the variety and richness of a genre that remains one of the most distinguishable features of a century that is mostly remembered as "philosophical" but that proudly claimed to be at once libertine and frivolous.

The libertine novel is polymorphous: it can be an epistolary novel, a memoir-novel, a novel in dialogue form, in the first or third person, and so on. The genre has often been split into two main categories: the mondain novel (also sometimes called the galant) and the erotic libertine novel. The mondain novel is often associated with the aristocracy, and it takes the form of confession-memoirs relating the coming of age of young male aristocrats. Prominent examples are Confessions du comte de *** (1741; The Confession of Count ***) by Charles Pinot-Duclos and Les Egarements du c?ur et de l'esprit (1736-38; The Wayward Head and Heart) by Crebillon fils (not to he confused with his father, Crebillon, a once-famous playwright now mainly forgotten). Other mondain or galant libertine novels include such epistolary novels as Claude-Joseph Dorat's Les Sacrifices de l'amour (1771; The Sacrifices of Love), "Les Malheurs" de l'inconstance (1772; The Sorrows of Fickleness), and the most popular 18th-century French novel, Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The epistolary genre was a favorite form of the libertine mondain novel as it allowed greater manipulation of characters, the plot unfolding at the same time as the writing of the letter. Better than any other genre, epistolary novels allow libertines to manipulate their preys by controlling not only what they do but ultimately what they read, write, and think. Writing thus becomes the epistolary libertines' lethal weapon but also the cause of their demise—the Marquise de Merteuil's downfall in Les Liaisons dangereuses is brought about by the very same letters that had empowered her.

Erotic libertine novels such as Crebillon fils's Le Sopha (1742; The Sopha), Diderot's Indiscreet Jewels, and La Morliere's Angola (1746; Angola: An Eastern Tale) include more or less thinly veiled sexual allusions. Because of Antoine Galland's translation of Les Mille et une nuits (The Arabian Nights) at the beginning of the 18th century, erotic libertine novels often draw on fashionable orientalist themes. They are often dialogues: a libertin reads an oriental and salacious tale to the countess he would like to seduce (as in Angola), or, in The Sopha, an oriental narrator tells a sultan and his sultana of his adventures when, transformed into a sofa, he was able to witness many libertine adventures. These pseudo-oriental novels are often satirical, and the erotic possibilities of the dialogue are never exploited. In fact, the tone is often amused or sarcastic: in Crebillon's novel, the stupidity of the male omnipotent sultan stands in contrast to the refinement of his sultana. La Morliere prefers not to give any clue as to the success of his libertine and leaves the novel unfinished (a libertine characteristic) by declaring that, unfortunately, the editor has not been given the last part of the manuscript.

Still ignored or rejected by some critics, the obscene libertine novel represents at once the most striking and popular genre of the 18th century. If some recent critics are still reluctant to attribute any value to these texts of the "second shelf" (as some French critics have referred to them), obscene novels better exemplify those definitions of the word libertine that include a philosophical dimension. As Robert Darnton has shown, these texts were "philosophical" at the time, and orders from the clandestine book trade included, side by side on the same list, works by philosophers (Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire) and obscene texts, all under the same category of "philosophical texts" (see Darnton, 1995). Even so, historians have preferred to ignore the erotic output to concentrate on the philosophical impact of the 18th century on contemporary France. Yet the proliferation of philosophical writings coincides, after 1740, with a sudden increase in obscene texts. The vast production and numerous reprintings of obscene libertine novels throughout the century attest to their undeniable popularity.

While the first obscene novels were usually dialogues L'Ecole des filles (The School for Girls) in 1655 and L'Academie des Dames (Women's Academy), first in Latin and in French in 1680—the 18th-century obscene libertine novel may also be epistolary, written in the first or third person, a memoir-novel, dialogues, or even very close to drama. The first obscene bestseller of the Enlightenment was Histoire de D[om Bougre], Portier des Chartreux (1740; History of Dom Bougre) by Gervaise de Latouche, a book which Adelaide, daughter of Louis XV, appreciated so much that she wanted to share it with her brother. Their father intervened. Dom Bougre even spawned an entire obscene dynasty: later in the century, his sister's raunchy confessions were also published as Memoires de Suzon, s?ur de Dom Bougre (1777; Memoirs of Suzon, Sister of Dom Bougre) as were his niece's memoirs, Histoire de Marguerite, fille de Suzon, niece de Dom Bougre (1784; History of Marguerite). The most popular obscene novel throughout the 18th century, published the same year as John Cleland's Fanny Hill, was Therese philosopbe (1748; The Philosophical Therese), attributed to Boyer d'Argens. It tackles the philosophical problems of human nature, temperament, and social organization and is written in an anti-clerical vein. It was reprinted throughout the century, and Sade even calls it the first truly immoral book in his "Juliette" (1797). Then came Fougeret de Monbron's Margot la ravaudeuse (1750; The Amorous Adventures of Margot), Andrea de Nerciat's Felicia; ou, Mes fredaines (1775; Felicia; or, My Mischief) and many other scantily dressed confessions.

Contrary to the first (mondain or galant) or even the second (erotic) libertinage, these obscene novels depict characters who either are not of aristocratic origin or do not function in the aristocratic world. And while libertinage mondain is interested in male rites of passage organized by more mature women, the obscene libertinage focuses mainly, although not exclusively, on female rites of passage (two exceptions include Dom Bougre and Le Libertin de qualite [1783; The Noble Libertine], attributed to Honore Gabriel de Mirabeau, whose young hero becomes a gigolo). In obscene libertinage, female protagonists either end up in prison or lead a happy life enlightened by philosophy, as is the case with Therese.

Whether the novels belong to what today we would call pornography (a word first used in the 19th century) or to the more prestigious genre of mondain boudoir pre-Sadean libertinism, they share with Enlightenment philosophers one common concern—pedagogy. All libertine novels are mainly about the education of young men and women and their entry into the world of conventional aristocracy. Consequently, the moral implications of the erotic component are not only indirect but also sly: working against the grain of morality, the libertine novel deals primarily with the non-oppositional integration of new members into a society whose rules are not to be changed. By its nature and its objective (as a Bildungsroman), the libertine novel is faced with a dilemma: how can novels pretend to be at once libertine (i.e., oppositional) and also portray the efforts of heroes and heroines (aristocrats or future prostitutes, male and female) to fit into that particular society? This contradiction is often reflected in the closure of libertine novels: libertine heroes and heroines either eventually find "true love" and live happily ever after, or else they end up disfigured like Laclos's Marquise de Merteuil. Similarly, the heroes and heroines of the obscene branch end up happily married or diseased, locked up or castrated. In other words, they are either completely rejected or just as completely adopted by a society that remains untainted by unruly, but temporary, sexual prowess and practices.

Undoubtedly the most notorious libertine author from the 18th century remains the Marquis de Sade, nicknamed the Divine Marquis. While locked up in the infamous Bastille (accused, among other things, of incest and numerous murders), Sade wrote among the most philosophical and most cruel of libertine novels. The libertine tradition culminates in Sade, who united in his work the old (and rather artificial) divide between the libertinism of credo and of behaviour: his works are at once philosophical (notably atheist) and they list with a sometimes suspicious complacency endless varieties of sexual practices that usually involve cruelty. In addition to being among the most prolific libertine authors, Sade is the 18th-century writer whose work has been the most analysed by members of the 20th-century French intelligentsia, from Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski to Jean Paulhan and Roland Barthes. Sade wrote in many genres, from short stories, Les Crimes de l'amour (1800; The Crimes of Love) to epistolary fiction, Aline et Valcour; ou, Le Roman philosophique, 1795. His most famous productions are Les 120 Journees de Sodome (written approximately 1785, published 1904/31-35; The 120 Days of Sodom), Justine; ou, "Les Malheurs" de la vertu (1791; Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue), Histoire de Juliette; ou, Les Prosperites du vice (1797; Juliette), and La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795; Philosophy in the Bedroom). Sade's novels, still banned in the 1950s, are now being edited for the prestigious Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, a literary Pantheon immortalizing the classics of French literature. After editions causing much publicized lawsuits leading to the condemnation in 1957 of publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, this collection, printed on a paper referred to as "Bible paper" because of its thinness, marks an ironically fitting fortune for the "Divine Marquis".

Ultimately, the libertines exemplify the paradoxical relationship between the Enlightenment and new forms of morality and sexual ethics. Both fiercely aristocratic and mondain, the libertine novel also found comfort in heroes and heroines who reacted against the strict norms imposed by the Church. Ultimately, however, libertines were not allowed to oppose the state apparatus that had allowed the French aristocracy to survive and dominate for so long. Everyone agreed that changes were necessary, but libertines who did not conform were expelled, imprisoned, or maimed. It is not clear, however, if the reason for such closures was strictly moral or if the power to eliminate opposition so drastically was a case of wishful thinking, the last respite of an arrogant and refined class that felt its power and authority were already undermined, as the 1789 revolution would soon confirm.

Marquis de Sade.

Born in Paris, 2 June 1740. Educated at College Louis-le-Grand, Paris, 1750-54; then attended a military school in 1754, becoming 2nd lieutenant in 1755. Served in the French army during the Seven Years War: Captain, 1759; resigned commission, 1763. Married Renee Pelagie Cordier de Launay de Montreuil in 1763 (separated 1790); two sons and one daughter. Succeeded to the title Comte, 1767; arrested and imprisoned briefly for sexual offences, but pardoned by the king, 1768; condemned to death for sex offences, 1772, but sentence commuted to imprisonment; held in Miolans, 1772-73 (escaped); convicted again and imprisoned in Vincennes, 1778-84, Bastille, Paris, 1784-89, and Charenton, 1789-90; liberated and joined Section des Picques, 1790: organized cavalry and served as hospital inspector; made a judge, 1793, but condemned for moderation and imprisoned, 1793-94; arrested for obscene work ("Justine") and imprisoned in Sainte-Pelagie, 1801, and confined again in Charenton, from 1803 until his death on 2 December 1814.

Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade (1740-1814) was the author of a large number of novels (many of which are perfectly respectable), of plays (all conventional in style and content), journals, letters, and a few essays, but those writings on which the Marquis's sulphurous reputation rests, and which have been of particular interest to critics as much as to the general reader are the four "libertine" novels composed over a 12-year period from 1785 to 1797. The essential interest of Sade's writing lies less in its literary qualities (although these are certainly not lacking), than in its transgressive power generating the relentless movement of the narrative towards excess that underpins all Sadean eroticism. The so-called "libertine" or "obscene" novels—The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, "Philosophy in the Boudoir" and "Juliette" — are among the most excessive works of erotic fiction ever composed. The novels explore the murkier depths of human sexuality, shunned by earlier writers of erotica: coprophilia, and of course, the practice of sexual sadism that bears his name, are probably the most extreme.

Sade's libertine fiction is on one important level the expression of his philosophy, a combination of atheistic materialism and the utopian vision of total sexual freedom. His atheism was heavily influenced by the work of two materialist philosophers of the Enlightenment: La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine, published in 1748, and d'Holbach's Systeme de la nature, which appeared in 1770. Materialism rejected belief in a soul or afterlife, reducing everything in the universe to the physical organization of matter. According to La Mettrie, scientific observation and experiment are the only means by which human beings can be defined, and this method tells us that Man is quite simply a machine, subject to the laws of motion like any mechanism of eighteenth century science. The sole purpose of existence, in this scheme of things, is pleasure—a doctrine espoused with relish by so many of Sade's libertine characters. Baron d'Holbach views the human being as a collection of atoms, so that even the conscience has a material origin, acquired from our education and experience. d'Holbach's system does not, therefore, allow for free will, since all our decisions are determined by our personal interest. For d'Holbach, then, all morality is a matter of social utility or pragmatism. Sade described Systeme de la nature as the true basis of his philosophy and a book he would be prepared to die for, and indeed, lifted whole passages from it practically verbatim to place in the mouths of his protagonists, as they railed against the various dogmas of religion.

Although these writers furnished Sade with the essentials of his thinking, and he certainly plagiarised from them liberally, it is also possible to identify features of his philosophy that are peculiarly his own. The most important of these is his conviction that every human being is utterly alone. This "isolisme" helps to explain the lack of expression in his work of any fraternal feeling: if we are fundamentally cut off from all others, then our only motivation can be self-interest. Sade wants to abolish the social, not merely in the form of the ancien regime society that he constantly attacks, but in the guise of any society worthy of that name, that is, one based on a code of ethics which protects the individual while observing what Rousseau called "the general will".

The self-interest at the heart of Sade's thinking, which makes possible the unfeeling exploitation of others, is justified because it is "natural". Since nature treats us all equally, and so does not allow for any special cases, we are free to dominate others; indeed, in doing so, we are conforming to nature's wishes, expressed in the universal "law of the jungle", according to which the strong survive at the expense of the weak. All laws are therefore inimical to nature's plan, since they are designed to protect the weak, and neither God nor morality has any meaning in a universe governed entirely by natural forces. Nature in fact needs crime in order to preserve a necessary balance (for instance, for the purposes of population control). Any absolute distinction between good and evil breaks down because the preservation of this natural equilibrium will have different requirements in different societies and at different times. There are thus no moral absolutes, only culturally and temporally relative values. On the shifting sands of Sade's moral universe, reason alone is Man's guide. As the seat of prejudice, emotion can never be trusted. On the other hand, reason can only operate on the basis of physical sensations. Taking materialism to its logical extreme, Sade locates reason in the body, and the Sadean body being entirely subordinated to sexual desires, only these desires make any sense.

The laws of Nature are the only laws to which we are subject, and these do not obey any ordering intelligence—Nature is blind. It is this dependency on forces that are arbitrary but also unpredictable that elicits an ambivalent response from the Sadean hero. While, on the one hand, Nature justifies all his crimes (which in fact cease to be crimes because they are simply necessary to the natural order), Nature completely lacks either rationale or compassion, either reason or emotion. In the psychoanalytic perspective of Melanie Klein, Nature is an absent mother, a "bad breast", stirring up feelings of longing but also of resentment and hatred, and prompting a power-struggle by the child against its parent. Like the Kleinian infant, Sadean Man thus experiences an intense desire to destroy the absent and yet all powerful and all nurturing maternal breast that Nature represents to him. But Nature is infinite, and if Man is to best Nature, then he too must achieve the power and status of infinity. This quest for infinity, for a transcendence that will challenge mother nature's monopoly on power is a dominant and recurring theme in the Sadean text, especially in the four libertine novels for which Sade is best known and which now deserve our close attention.

The 120 Days of Sodom

The "120 Days" is often considered as Sade's final work, as the peak of a steep curve of ever more pornographic writing. This impression is apparently confirmed by the Introduction to the work, in which the narrator proudly describes his narrative as "the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began". It was in fact Sade's first long work of fiction. Its unfinished nature perhaps fuels this particular misapprehension, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding its composition and eventual loss have also contributed to the creation of the work's mythical status.. Sade began it in prison on 22 October 1785, writing in microscopic handwriting on long narrow roles of paper that he glued together into a roll that was eventually 14.7 metres (49 feet) long, kept hidden in a hole in the wall of his cell in the Bastille. He wrote every evening after dinner for three hours or more in the paradoxically named Tower of Liberty where his cell was located, taking only 37 days to produce a novel-length draft of the first of four sections and detailed notes for the remaining three. When Sade was suddenly moved from the Bastille ten days before it was stormed during the Revolution of 1789, he became separated from this rudimentary manuscript and never saw it again. When the Bastille was taken, the work was discovered and found its way into the hands of the Villeneuve-Trans family, remaining in their possession until its sale in around 1900 to a German collector. In 1904, the German psychiatrist, Dr Iwan Bloch, published a limited edition of 180 copies under the pseudonym of Eugen Duhren. Maurice Heine, the father of modern Sade studies, acquired the manuscript in 1929 on behalf of Viscount Charles de Noailles, and provided a much revised version in the early 1930s—also in a limited print-run of fewer than 400 copies, reserved for the members of the Societe du Roman Philosophique. Both of these early editions were aimed at those doctors and scientists working in the new field of sexology who saw the novel as providing the first-known encyclopedia of sexual aberrations, predating the work of Freud and Krafft-Ebing by more than a century.

Sade's own admission that he wept tears of blood at the loss of the work has also probably helped to give the impression that this was his most important and therefore most mature undertaking. Although his first and not his last work, however, the 120 Days is for many, quite simply the foundation-stone of the Sadean edifice, containing many of the features that would become characteristic of his novel-writing: a passionate concern with order and categorization, a preoccupation with numbers, the uniquely Sadean rhythm of orgy following dissertation or narrative, of practice following theory, and above all, the encyclopedic mission to "say all" in the area of human sexuality. The work represents an audacious attempt to catalogue all known sexual perversions (or "passions", as Sade called them), and in both conception and form clearly seems inspired by Boccaccio's Decameron.

Four libertines have planned an orgy that is scheduled to last 120 days or four months, during which they will hear about and themselves enact 600 "passions" or perversions at the rate of 150 per month or five per day. These passions will be narrated by four story-tellers, one for each month and for a different class of perversion, which are to be illustrated by "case-histories" of an increasingly violent nature, from the "simple passions" of November via the "passions de seconde classe ou double" of December, and the "passions de troisieme classe ou criminelles" of January, to the "passions meurtieres ou de quatrieme classe" of February. Sade in fact only completed Part 1, but wrote detailed notes for the remaining three parts. Sade's aim was to cover all conceivable sexual manias, in other words, to produce a veritable encyclopedia of sex, in which incest, coprophilia, torture, and murder are given pride of place.

The work is set in the first decade of the 18th century during the last years of the reign of Louis XIV. The novel's four libertines are wealthy enough to embark on a murderous three-month orgy thanks to the huge profits they have made from Louis XIV's expansionist wars. As in all of Sade's narratives, the violence is framed by a violent historical context, one sufficiently long ago to be "just outside the collective memory of the writer's contemporaries", as Joan De Jean puts it, but nevertheless a past not too distant to suggest an underlying critique of the entire contemporary period, that is, of a century whose rulers all share some responsibility for the impoverishment and ruin of both the Sade family and the French nation. In a negative image of Rousseau's fraternal utopia, the libertines form a pact cemented by their wealth and influence. Right from the start, Sade distances himself from his characters, holding up a mirror to a corrupt society in which money is power. The four main characters and orchestrators of the four-month orgy, which forms the main subject-matter of the novel, represent the four sources of authority and power in 18th-century France (the nobility, the Church, the courts and high finance), and their largely negative portrayal reinforces the impression gained by the reader in the opening lines that one of Sade's aims is political satire. The book presents the reader with a gallery of social types as physically and morally unattractive as the four libertines: bankers, lawyers, magistrates, priests, courtiers, landowners, military officers, all old, rich and powerful, they represent a wide cross-section of the ruling classes, whom Sade had every reason to hate. In this work, if not in Sade's later novels, libertinage is certainly not painted in seductive colours.

The orgy takes place in a remote castle, the chateau of Silling, located on a high peak in the depths of the Black Forest. Sade emphasises Silling's total inaccessibility, "a remote and isolated retreat, as if silence, distance, and stillness were libertinage's potent vehicles". Silling offers no hope of rescue or survival to those unfortunates captive within its impenetrable walls, and womb-like security to their nefarious captors. Completely cut off from the outside world for the four winter months of their protracted orgy, the main characters realise a universal unconscious fantasy of unlimited power over others. In this more than any other of his works, Sade was creating the fantasy of total licence as an antidote to the restraint of his own circumstances. Writing in his cell in the Bastille each evening, Sade created an exaggerated libertine utopia in his unfettered imagination to make up for the physical freedom he had lost. This utopia of total sexual and ethical licence is indeed only possible in the imaginary world conceived in and framed by prison walls. In this sense, the 120 Days may be, in De Jean's words, "the ultimate work of prison literature".

Philosophy in the Boudoir

Unlike the "120 Days", "La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Philosophy in the Boudoir) was composed during Sade's extended period of freedom during the 1790s, and its upbeat tone reflects this. Published in 1795, the work fizzes with self-confidence, and is by far the most light-hearted (some have called it the least cruel) of his libertine works. The language is certainly obscene and there are moments of sadism, but these features are counterbalanced by a tongue-in-cheek and often self-reflexive humour that is both verbal and physical. The work also operates on a number of complex levels—dramatic dialogue, philosophical and political polemic, literary parody, Chaucerian farce—which make it Sade's most innovative and, at the same time, most accessible piece of writing.

At one important level, the work reads as a savagely ironic denunciation of Robespierre's "virtuous republic", founded on repression and the guillotine. Philosophy in the Boudoir was begun in 1794 during Sade's confinement in the Picpus sanitorium, in a room from which he could see the guillotine and its operations. (It had by now been moved from the Place de la Concorde because of complaints about the smell of blood). Its victims were even buried in the grounds of the sanatorium, "1,800 in thirty-five days", and Sade's letters leave little doubt that the horror of this spectacle marked him profoundly.

Not surprisingly, then, Philosophy in the Boudoir is strongly satirical in character and conception, in appearing to justify vice and, above all, murder, on the grounds that such things are good for a republic. Set sometime between 1789 and 1793, the work positions itself unambiguously in the middle of the French Revolution, and can be read as a powerful critique of its aims and methods. Francais, encore un effort, si vous voulez etre Republicains (Frenchmen, One More Effort if You Wish to Become Republicans), a polemical pamphlet intercalated in the middle of the work, is itself, on one level, a pastiche of the many political and philosophical "libelles" or underground pamphlets that circulated during the revolutionary period. But the work's main impact has always been as sexual pedagogy. Here, Sade was almost certainly influenced by two earlier models. The first of these was L'Ecole des Filles, produced by Michel Millot and Jean l'Ange in 1665. Published in England in 1688 as The School of Venus, this relatively innocent tale concerns the sexual education of a young girl by her older female cousin. The second, Nicolas Chorier's more sexually explicit L'Academie des dames of about 1660, consists of a number of dialogues in which one young woman instructs another in the art of love-making. The similarly dialogic form of Philosophy in the Boudoir is obviously a development of Chorier's technique.

The title itself seems to sum up the whole Sadean project, which is to bring the body, and in particular the female body, back into philosophy. The work's subtitle, "or the immoral teachers", reflects the author's growing boldness at this time, explicitly acknowledging its immoral content. Suggesting its status as possibly the first modern work of sex-education for young girls, the subtitle also implies the legitimization of bodily desires within an accepted framework of instruction—the school classroom—while the adjective "immoral" undermines this legitimacy, announcing with titular pride the illicit pleasures associated with the sexual corruption of innocence. The binarism of both title and subtitle, then, encapsulate the two dominant impulses in Sade: the intellectual and the erotic, the mind and the body, the proselytising and the transgressive.

The actors of this obscene tragicomedy are all fit, healthy and, above all, young—Dolmance at 36 is the eldest of the whole group. Eugenie, whose sexual initiation is the pretext for the party, is a delicious young virgin of 15. (Her father, himself a well-known libertine and one of the richest merchants of Paris, has given permission for all that both daughter and mother are to undergo.) The bisexual Madame de Saint-Ange, who will play a leading role in Eugenie's debauchery, is 26. Her brother, the Chevalier de Mirval, is at 20 the youngest of the libertines, and his youthful vigour seems emblematic of a sexual athleticism, which is also enhanced by the extraordinary size of his penis: "Oh, dearest friend, what a monstrous member!... I can scarcely get my hand around it!" cries Eugenie on seeing it for the first time. He prefers women, but can be persuaded to engage in sodomy with "an agreeable man" like Dolmance. In addition to these five principals, there are two minor characters: Augustin, a young gardener of "about eighteen or twenty", who is even more impressively endowed than the Chevalier, his member measuring 14 inches in length and having a circumference of eight and an half, and Lapierre, Dolmance's similarly well equipped but syphilitic valet.

Seven actors who, in the course of seven "dialogues" or scenes, will reenact Christianity's founding myth, inverting its central message, as the Eve-like Eugenie's rejection of God and her passage from sexual innocence to sexual knowledge are celebrated rather than lamented. It is Eugenie's pious mother, Madame de Mistival, not the sacrilegious and debauched daughter who is finally expelled from this perverse paradise of the body. Madame de Mistival's expulsion follows a gruesome scene of black comedy in which Eugenie is instrumental in punishing her mother for her prudishness by infecting her with venereal disease and sewing up her vagina.

A paradisiacal space of sexual freedom for women (if not for mothers) as well as for men, the boudoir becomes a kind of model state, and like all states, it has to have a constitution, embedded in philosophical thought: hence the pamphlet, Frenchmen, One More Effort if You Wish to Become Republicans, whose hundred or so pages form the centrepiece of the work. Dolmance, who just happens to have bought this pamphlet, hot off the press, at the Palais de l'Egalite, reads it out in response to a question from Eugenie about whether morals are necessary to government.

The pamphlet temporarily suspends the fiction of the dramatic dialogues and takes us outside the text, so to speak, and into the politics of the French Revolution. This part of Sade's text, at least, is firmly rooted in its historical context. In a sense, the insertion of the pamphlet into an anonymously published work of fiction provides a further protective barrier against discovery. Sade is thus able to express his views on topical ideas and events from a position of relative safety.

In spite of its final scene, Philosophy is probably the most optimistic of Sade's libertine works. Like its mythical model, the libertines' own Eden is a "delightful boudoir", a privileged and almost timeless space isolated from the outside world, but unlike the Christian version, the joys associated with it are physical, not spiritual. The only serpent is Augustin's delightfully monstrous penis and Eugenie and her mentors display an awareness of their nudity that is completely without shame.

Justine

There are no fewer than three separate versions of "Justine", which grew from a mere infant text of 138 pages, to mature some ten years later as a triple-X rated adult entertainment of more than a thousand. The original version, "Les Infortunes" de la vertu (The Misfortunes of Virtue), not so much a novel as a short story with satirical aims (critics describe it as a "conte philosophique" or "philosophical tale"), was composed in 15 days in the Bastille in 1787. Largely conventional in style, and lacking any characteristics that might now be termed obscene, this short, snappy novella could safely be recommended nowadays to most maiden aunts. Some critics have found this first draft of Sade's tale of virtue despoiled to contain an intensity and clarity of vision absent from the two subsequent versions, but it was destined never to reach the reading public in the author's lifetime. The unpublished conte was, nevertheless, to grow into the novel-length, "Justine"; ou, "Les Malheurs" de la vertu ("Justine"; or, Good Conduct Well Chastised ) which appeared in 1791, a year after the author's release from Charenton. Sade claimed that money problems and editorial pressure had forced him to write a "spicy" bestseller. The editor must have been delighted with the result. "Les Malheurs" was considerably more violent and sexually explicit than "Les Infortunes", and sold so well that five further editions had to be printed in the space of ten years. While the public's appetite for Sade's first published work was evidently insatiable, critical responses of the time were mixed. An article of 27 September 1792 praises the author's "rich and brilliant" imagination, while exhorting young people to "avoid this dangerous book" and advising even "more mature" men to read it "in order to see to what insanities human imagination can lead", but then to "throw it in the fire".

In spite of the popular success of "Les Malheurs", Sade's financial affairs remained in the doldrums. Maurice Lever tells us that "Justine" did not make its author any money, nor did any of his other books. It did however achieve a succes de scandale. This apparent success and the writer's continued impecuniousness doubtless provided sufficient incentive for the composition of the much extended and more openly obscene final version of Justine's adventures, entitled "La nouvelle Justine"; ou, "Les Malheurs" de la vertu ("The New Justine"), which appeared six years later in 1797 in a ten-volume edition that also included "L'Histoire de Juliette". "La nouvelle Justine" is, in a number of important respects, significantly different from the two earlier versions. According to Retif de la Bretonne and Sebastien Mercier, writing at the time, sales were brisk among the booksellers of the Palais Royal, and it was more than a year before the authorities began to seize copies. Gradually, however, the work and its author were systematically hunted down. Sade was accused of having written "l'infame Justine" in a press article that appeared in 1800, and despite his vigorous denials, he was eventually arrested the following year, together with his publisher, Nicolas Masse, for the authorship of these "dangerous" and "detestable" works, and detained without trial at the "maison de sante de Charenton" until his death in 1814.

In a sense, then, Sade fell victim to his own creation. Perhaps all along, as his narrative became increasingly bolder, more challenging to the censor, the Marquis was unconsciously driven to a point of coincidence with his fictional heroine, for both author and character are acutely aware of their own status as victim. After all, it was not Juliette, but Justine that preoccupied him for more than ten years of his own less than happy existence to the point of composing three separate versions of her woeful tale. Such, in fact, was the association of Sade with his less fortunate heroine that he would be known throughout the 19th century as the author, not of Juliette but of Justine. This identification of the writer with his ingenuous creation outside of the text can perhaps be explained by what some have seen as an unconscious authorial identification on psychological and emotional levels with the character herself. How justified are we in positing such an identification between author and character? In the first-person narratives of "Les Infortunes" and "Les Malheurs", the young woman often appears to speak with her creator's voice. Sade's appreciation of feminine beauty, for example, certainly shows itself in Justine's all too enthusiastic evocation of the beauty of other young women. There is, moreover, a marked discrepancy in the first two versions between the stereotypes of "Justine's" initial portrait and the more positive ways in which, through her own words and actions, she is subsequently portrayed.

From the outset, Justine appears to us as a passive creature, destined for martyrdom. A devout young girl of 12 at the beginning of her remarkable odyssey, her religious faith remains implausibly unshaken by the unending catalogue of disasters that befall her throughout her relatively short and miserable existence.

In a few lines at the start of the narrative, Sade deftly sketches the charm of this "delicious" young creature in terms of what we would now consider to be a stereotype of feminine beauty (big blue eyes, teeth of ivory, lovely blond hair). For the modern reader, the same physical features make up another stereotype—the dumb blond—which is reinforced here by character traits connoting "girlishness" and vulnerability (ingenuousness, sensitivity, naivety). Like her beauty, these traits can be also read on her physionymy, at the very surface of her body: modesty, delicacy, shyness, and above all, the "look of a virgin". In fact, in line with her creator's materialist thinking, physique and temperament become one in "Justine", naivety is graceful, vulnerability attractive, sexual innocence seductive. Justine is the first "girly girl", the young ingenue so beloved of 19th- and 20th-century theatre and film, a blond whose dumbness here means ignorance of sexuality, an essential prerequisite of the female victim. Justine's physical appearance immediately suggests that this is the part she will play: in Sade's terms, she is primed to be a victim of her own virtue (which will prevent her from enjoying the sexual attentions forced upon her, but which more importantly will determine the very nature of her attraction for the men and women who abuse her). She will also be the victim of the religious and social prejudices of a society that places a high value on the status of virginity, and in so doing, creates a taboo that cries out to be transgressed. Innocence, virtue, beauty are all synonymous in Justine, who initially at least is nothing more than a cluster of nouns and adjectives. She is simply, we are told, the embodiment of virginal innocence and sensibility, having a potentially erotic vulnerability, "an ingenuousness, a candor that were to cause her to tumble into not a few pitfalls" (Good Conduct, p. 459). A construct of Platonic ideals expressed unplatonically in physical terms, Justine exists in abstraction only, as an object promised to the reader's sexual curiosity - until the narrative brings her to life, that is.

When both parents die, Justine and her 15-year-old sister, Juliette are left penniless orphans. Juliette's only response is the pleasure of being free. Even if we had not already been told at the beginning of the narrative of the fortune her beauty will help her to amass, we would know from this display of lack of feeling that, far from being a victim, the insensitive and self-serving Juliette will be one of life's winners. Not so the "sad and miserable Justine".

"Justine's" narrative follows more or less the same pattern in all three versions, although in the second and especially the third versions events are narrated in considerably more detail and there are some new episodes and characters. For a thumb-nail sketch of "Justine's" tale up until her reunion with her sister, Juliette (or Madame de Lorsange, as she is known by then), the reader is referred to the young woman's own summary of her wretched life, told to her sister, Juliette and her lover, as she waits to be hanged for a crime she did not commit.

In the first two versions, when she finishes her sad tale, Justine is recognized by her sister Juliette, whose rich and powerful lover succeeds in rescuing her from the gallows, and she goes to live with them in their chateau. Fate, however, cruelly cuts short Justine's life and her new-found happiness. In a savage metaphor for the sheer perversity of providence, she is finally split asunder by a thunderbolt during a violent storm. The evolution of this scene and its repercussions in the narrative reflects both the increasingly transgressive sexualization of Justine from one version to the next and, perhaps also, the author's changing attitude to his heroine. In "Les Infortunes", the bolt enters her right breast and comes out through her mouth, whereas in "Les Malheurs" the bolt exits through her abdomen and in "La nouvelle Justine" through her vagina. Furthermore, in the final version, in which there is no happy reunion, Justine's horrific death is not so much an accident, as an event engineered by Juliette and her libertine friends, who sadistically drive her outside as the storm reaches its peak.

The common theme of all three narratives is that the heroine's unreasonable attachment to virtue (and in particular, to her virginity) attract nothing but misfortune, as she is exploited and abused physically and sexually by almost everyone she encounters, and is even framed for crimes of theft and murder. Like Voltaire's Candide, which Sade had almost certainly read, Justine was originally conceived as a satire, attacking the corruption of contemporary institutions, including the judiciary, banking, the bourgeois-dominated world of finances in general, and above all the Catholic Church, with divine providence the principal religious target. In these respects, Sade's conte is decidedly Voltairean, but where Voltaire never quite found a satisfactory solution to the problem of physical and moral evil, other than to posit the totally implausible concept of an indifferent God, Sade's libertines dismiss belief in a deity altogether, and draw somewhat different conclusions from the observation, familiar to Candide, that the virtuous perish while the wicked survive. Candide and his fellow truth-seekers do eventually find a kind of contentment in the simple virtue of hard work. In contrast, Justine is repeatedly reminded of what the author-narrator had told the reader on the very first page: that "in an entirely corrupted age, the safest course is to follow along after the others" (Good Conduct). Rousseau's idealistic faith in Man's natural goodness is directly challenged in a dissertation delivered to Justine by Roland the counterfeiter: the only truth is the law of the jungle according to which the strong not only survive but flourish at the expense of the weak. In the original version, even Justine herself comes to the conclusion on encountering the monstrous counterfeiter that "Man is naturally wicked". The note of optimism on which Candide ends is completely absent from the far bleaker vision of life and death that closes Justine.

The Story of Juliette

Sade's most violent and most shocking complete work, the marathon picaresque novel, The Story of Juliette was published between 1798 and 1801, following the appearance in 1797 of its companion, "The New Justine".

"Juliette" and "The New Justine" provide the reader with an unadulterated account of Man's inhumanity to Man, and in this sense are the cynical product of their author's personal and painful experience of the Terror and its evil. Geoffrey Gorer called Juliette "the final vomiting of de Sade's disgust and disappointment". As Gorer's observation implies, the novel represents a savage attack on the corruption of 18th-century French society, in which money is power, and power facilitates the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Juliette can also be read, of course, as the barely unconscious expression of a desire for such unfettered freedom—a utopian vision of power that is almost divine in its totality: "Oh, my love" cries the libertine, Saint-Fond to Juliette, "how delicious are our crimes when impunity veils them, when duty itself prescribes them. How divine it is to swim in gold and, as one reckons up one's wealth, to be able to say, here are the means to every black deed, to every pleasure; with this, all my wishes can be made to come true, all my fancies can be satisfied; no woman will resist me, none of my desires will fail of realization, my wealth will procure amendments in the law itself, and I'll be despot without let or hindrance."

Only the leisured upper classes could afford to use sex recreationally as well as procreationally, and only the political masters of a land could indulge with impunity in a perverse sexuality that favoured rape and murder, manipulating the justice system for their own ends. More generally, Juliette has been read as an implicit indictment of male sexuality as utterly selfish, intrinsically violent and fundamentally tyrannical, and yet, paradoxically (or so it seems), Sade chooses a female rather than a male character as the central focus of this sexual tyranny. Indeed, the novel is dominated by the activities of a number of violent and depraved femmes fatales.

Sade's longest novel is scandalously provocative with regard to the role and status of women, as well as to a whole range of moral and philosophical issues, and there is no doubt that many will continue to find both the ideas contained within its pages and its outright obscenity unpalatable. On the other hand, it is a work of breath-taking geographical and historical scope and of remarkable scholarship, replete with learned allusions and references and detailed philosophical arguments. But at the simple story level, too, the novel's sheer nervous energy carries the reader along with its heroine as she races through a Europe ruled by sexual deviants and ruthless megalomaniacs. Among its hundreds of characters, we encounter lascivious monarchs and psychotic politicians, atheistic clerics and man-hating lesbians, giants and sorcerers, vamps and virgins. The entirely fictional rub shoulders with the verifiably historical; the real blends with the surreal (a black mass at the Vatican, the giant Minski's "human" furniture) to produce a work of layered complexity. Sade's Juliette can be read on many levels: as an adult fairy-tale and a manual of sexology, as a political and philosophical satire and a Gothic horror, as an Italian travelogue and an 18th-century road movie, above all, perhaps, as a terrifying journey into the murkier depths of human eroticism. On all of these levels, "Juliette" goes much further than "Justine". The narrative moves faster, the crimes are greater, and the reader feels swept along from one location to another to encounter ever more extreme situations and behaviour.

Juliette, Justine's beautiful but wicked elder sister, is her opposite in every way. Like her sister Justine, her character and temperament are initially expressed in physical terms: not blond, but brunette, with eyes not credulously blue but dark and "prodigiously expressive"; not timid but spirited, not naive but incredulous, not innocent, but wordly wise thanks to the best possible education that a father's untimely ruin will deny her younger sister:

(...) she was brought up (...) in one of the best convents in Paris where, until the age of 15, she was never denied good counsel or teachers nor good books or talents.

("The Misfortunes of Virtue")

She has, in fact, much in common with Eugenie, the mother-hating apprentice libertine of Philosophy in the Boudoir. Fifteen years old when she and Justine are orphaned, she is Eugenie let out of the boudoir into the great, mad, bad world. Already awakened to the pleasures of the body as well as to its power by the mother superior of the convent where the two sisters had resided before their father's financial ruin, she immediately sets out to make her living as a prostitute, becoming the mistress of two extremely dangerous libertines, Noirceuil and Saint-Fond. The latter is a government minister who abuses his position to line his pockets and to evade the consequences of the rapes and lustmurders that he and his associates regularly commit. Under the protection of these two monsters, she embarks with her lesbian lover, the equally bloodthirsty Clairwil, on an epic tour of Europe, in particular Italy, encountering en route a series of libertines, each more depraved than the last, and leaving a trail of pillage, death and destruction in her wake. These libertines include a number of historical figures, such as Catherine the Great, the atheistic Pope Pius VI, and two of Marie-Antoinette's homicidal siblings, Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany and the wife of the King of Naples. Unsurprisingly given the revolutionary period in which the novel was written, Kings and Pontifs are seen as surpassing all others in their debauchery and corruption. Eventually, following many gruesome and often gratuitous crimes, which include the murder of her friend, Clairwil, Juliette returns to France considerably enriched. There she is reunited with Noirceuil, whose iniquities are seen to be rewarded when the King makes him prime minister, assuring him and his fellow criminals of a glorious future. With a note of self-referential irony, Noirceuil draws the obvious moral from their story:

Come, good friends, let us all rejoice together, from all this I see nothing but happiness accruing to all save only virtue - but we would perhaps not dare say so were it a novel we were writing.

In continuing ironic vein, "Juliette" adopts and defends the real author's point of view:

Why dread publishing it, said Juliette, when the truth itself, and the truth alone, lays bare the secrets of Nature, however mankind may tremble before those revelations. Philosophy must never shrink from speaking out.

So the novel ends with Juliette stepping out of the pages of her own story to take a cheeky swipe at the censor, who is implicitly positioned as the enemy of truth.

Sade's world is an interior world, a world of castles and dungeons and boudoirs and monasteries in which the reader can feel as trapped as Justine. The claustrophobic sexual arena of the Sadean imagination reflects the loss of physical and sexual freedom the author was forced to endure. Though stages for the mise-en-scene of the body, the interior spaces of the fiction are, at the same time, therefore, both representations and projections of the internal world of the mind. In the dissertations and footnotes and philosophical dialogues that alternate with and seek to justify the acts of extreme violence and sexual abuse conducted by his libertine anti-heroes, Sade invites us to rethink received wisdoms, and reinterpret long-standing values, challenging essentialist conceptions of morality and truth.

If Sade is now worthy of a place in the local bookstore and public library, as well as on university syllabuses, it is not only because of the enormous and undisputed influence of his writing and thought over the last two centuries, but also because, in so many regards, his work once again finds resonance with the current artistic climate: our suspicion of modern political credos, the fragmentation of our value-systems and the ubiquitous pursuit of sexual ecstasy and physical immortality. Although, like all writers and thinkers, undeniably a product of his own times, Sade raises moral, social and even political questions that are as relevant now and everywhere as they were in 18th-century France: the threat of religious fundamentalism, the repression and persecution of non-normative forms of sexuality, the obsession with physical perfection, the sexual motives underlying our fascination with violence, and the emergence of greater pluralism in the way we organize our societies, for example, are all important Sadean themes.

Sade deserves to be called a great erotic writer because of the extraordinary modernity of his thinking, because of the breadth of his vision and the novelty of his perspectives, because he alone dares say what others before him considered unmentionable, because he says it in a form of some artistic depth and complexity, and perhaps most of all, for the unambiguous warnings he so fearlessly and stubbornly sounds against the ever-present dangers of self-deception and ignorance:

I authorize the publication and sale of all libertine books and immoral works; for I esteem them most essential to human felicity and welfare, instrumental to the progress of philosophy, indispensable to the eradication of prejudices, and in every sense conducive to the increase of human knowledge and understanding. (Juliette)

Le Chateau de Cene, French novelist and poet

Born in 1930 in the French Aveyron. His first book of poetry, Extraits du corps, was published in 1958.

He has written several novels, plays, collections of poetry (for which he won the National Poetry Award in 1992), essays, and art criticism. He contributed to numerous literary magazines, and is currently editor-in-chief of the magazine Correspondances.

Bernard Noel's Le Chateau de Cene is a classic twentieth-century French erotic novel. First published in 1969 in Paris under the pseudonym of Urbain d'Orlhac, it was immediately banned by the authorities. In 1971 J.J. Pauvert reissued it under Noel's name. The second edition drove Noel back to court where, in 1973, he was found guilty of obscenity. This may have been one of the last instances of prohibitions of this nature during the Fifth Republic; soon after censorship was abolished in France. Free again to be printed and distributed, Le Chateau de Cene was published in 1977 in a paperback series (10-18). In 1985 another edition was released by Editions Nulle Part and the novel was published by Gallimard in 1990. It coincided with the novel's stage adaptation at the Bataclan in Paris starring Philippe Leotard.

Le Chateau de Cene is a short novel, but a disconcerting one that was obviously influenced by the Surrealist movement. Written in a highly poetic style, it stages an array of characters that are fascinated by the frightening and the unusual and are open to all sorts of excesses, including sadism and zoophilia. The story is about a special kind of apprenticeship, which takes place in two stages. In the first, the hero-narrator runs ashore on a remote island of the South Atlantic. For the local celebration of the equinox, he is chosen to deflower of a young woman, Emma, who represents the new moon. This ritual ceremony takes place in public and is similar in its general structure to the famous poetic suite Amers by Saint-John Perse, although the analogy stops there. Noel's hero must go through a series of physical suffering before he can make love to the young woman. When he does, he finds a moment of true happiness.

In the second stage, the hero learns that he was chosen for this initiation by a mysterious and extremely beautiful lady from a neighboring island, whom he saw nude during the moon ritual. He decides to go to the island and meet her. Guarded by dogs, Arabs and armed Black men, this island is dominated by Mona, a mythical countess who resembles the dangerous Hecatus. Before having access to his lady, the narrator is once again put to the test. He has to experience sex with two dogs who are mastered by a cruel Black man—this is one of the episodes for which the novel was censored. He also has to watch the atrocious execution of one of Mona's lovers, who is torn apart by a pack of dogs. Finally, he has to endure the unbearable spectacle of Emma, who is entwined with a snake within a glass prison.

Once he has passed these tests, the hero can have access to Mona, but he soon understands that his initiation is not over. He will still have to submit to the sadistic domination of the countess and her sexual fantasies, which include his being raped by a monkey.

Beyond this erotic calvary of the dark sides of sexuality, the hero will be happy to see the cruel Mona change into the sweet Ora. Further, for his great courage, he will be introduced to an exclusive secret society in which he will experience a new self and have the privilege of becoming the imagination of the group. There he will receive new powers including that of life and death over others.

The Cene (the Last Supper) of the title refers to his invitation to join this group and to the principles of sharing and reciprocity that govern the castle of Mona-Ora, a castle that is a hidden paradise of pleasures. The Cene also highlights the oral and digestive themes that dominate the sexual representation in the novel. This reaches its peak in an episode in which a black male is castrated and his erect phallus is thrown into a boiling bouillon.

This oneiric novel was followed by Le Chateau de Hors, a brief coprophagic narrative, which further explores the oral and digestive dimension of this universe.

The author also added two texts, L'Outrage aux mots and La Pornographie, which serve as commentaries on Le Chateau de Cene as well as reflecting on the creative writing. Among other things, Noel draws a political parallel between his novel and the Algerian war, an intellectual interpretation that may also be used as a means of justifying his discursive production of sex by "serious" discourse. This self-interpretation is similar to another major problem that Noel courageously confronts: self-censorship, which may be as important, if not more so, than dealing with official censors. In these texts the reader discovers that the writing of Le Chateau de Cene was a liberating experience for its author: this book was not written to sexually arouse the reader but to help the author master his own most intimate fears, thus helping to create the artist he ultimately became. Noel's first victory over his own censorship occurred with the publication of the second edition of the novel in 1971, when he decided to stop using a pseudonym: "[...] the pseudonym was making the censorship last, my signature was voiding it."

Bernard Noel goes even further by creating a new word, sensure ("sensorship") besides the usual censure (censorship). The sensure is for a new kind of repression in our modern cultures and refers to the deprivation of more than just speech, meaning itself (sens in French). The traditional censure acts against words, the new sensure acts on us with the words. With this in mind, he sees eroticism, when it is elitist and sectarian and has a defined set of rules, as the last resort of a moral order to sensor the body of its physical and organic dimensions. He uses the erotic genre against that eroticism as a subversive tool to fight the political blunder and as a means to subvert bourgeois values.

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