120 дней Содома, или Школа разврата

Unfinished 1785 erotic novel by the Marquis de Sade

The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage is an unfinished novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, written in 1785 and published in 1904 after its manuscript was rediscovered. It describes the activities of four wealthy libertine Frenchmen who spend four months seeking the ultimate sexual gratification through orgies, sealing themselves in an inaccessible castle in the heart of the Black Forest with 12 accomplices, 20 designated victims and 10 servants. Four aging prostitutes relate stories of their most memorable clients whose sexual practices involved 600 "passions" including coprophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, and child sexual abuse. The stories inspire the libertines to engage in acts of increasing violence leading to the torture and murder of their victims, most of whom are adolescents and young women. The novel only survives in draft form. Its introduction and first part were written according to Sade's detailed plan, but the subsequent three parts are mostly in the form of notes. Sade wrote it in secrecy while imprisoned in the Bastille. When the fortress was stormed by revolutionaries on 14 July 1789, Sade believed the manuscript had been lost. However, it had been found and preserved without his knowledge and was eventually published in a restricted edition in 1904 for its scientific interest to sexologists. The novel was banned as pornographic in France and English speaking countries before becoming more widely available in commercial editions in the 1960s. It was published in the prestigious French Pléiade edition in 1990 and a new English translation was published as a Penguin Classic in 2016. The novel attracted increasing critical interest after World War II. In 1957, Georges Bataille said it "towers above all other books in that it represents man's fundamental desire for freedom that he is obliged to contain and keep quiet." Critical opinion, however, remains divided. Neil Schaeffer calls it "one of the most radical, one of the most important novels ever written," whereas for Laurence Louis Bongie it is "an unending mire of permuted depravities."

Existing texts derive from an incomplete manuscript discovered after the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The novel consists of an introduction and four parts along with notes, supplements and addenda. Sade completed the introduction and first part in draft form. Parts Two to Four mainly consist of detailed notes. Sade did not revise and correct the draft he had completed and therefore there are some errors and inconsistencies.

The 120 Days of Sodom is set near the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Four wealthy libertines: the Duc de Blangis (representing the nobility), the Bishop of X*** (representing the clergy), the Président de Curval (representing the legal system) and Durcet (representing high finance) lock themselves in an isolated castle the Château de Sillingatop a mountain in the Black Forest along with a number of accomplices and victims. Their main accomplices are four middle aged women who have spent their lives in debauchery and will recount stories of libertinage, torture and murder for the pleasure and instruction of the male libertines who will then seek to emulate these crimes on selected victims. Eight male accomplices, called "fuckers," have been recruited for their large penises. The principal victims will be drawn from the four daughters of the libertines, three of whom have been given in marriage to the other libertines. The other victims will be drawn from a harem of girls and boys aged from 12 to 15. The libertines have also engaged a number of other servants including governesses, cooks and scullery maids. The orgy takes place from 1 November to 28 February and is organised according to a set of rules and a strict timetable to which each of the victims must adhere on pain of corporal punishment or execution. Sex sessions are scheduled before and after a session of storytelling each evening. Each storyteller is on duty for a month, and each evening she recounts a story from her life which illustrates five "passions" (perversions of the laws of nature and religion). Over the four months, therefore, there will be 120 stories illustrating 600 passions. These passions are separated into four categoriessimple, complex, criminal, and murderousescalating in complexity and savagery. The four libertines frequently interrupt these stories to indulge in the described passions with the victims and others. They also emulate the passions in orgies following the stories. Introduction. The background to the 120 day orgy is presented in detail along with character portraits of the four libertines and their daughters. Blangis opines that there is no god and that he is but a machine following the instincts given him by Nature. Virtue and vice are merely social conventions and the only universal good is personal pleasure. Given that vice gives him the most pleasure, he is obeying Nature's dictates by indulging his vices and passions. Part one: November, the simple passions. These anecdotes are written in detail. They are "simple" in the sense of not including sexual intercourse. The stories include acts of child sexual abuse, urine drinking, vomit drinking, coprophilia and necrophilia. Blangis opines that Nature teaches us to hate our mothers. He later adds that crime is in itself pleasurable and thus in accordance with Nature. However, after committing the two or three greatest crimes the pleasure palls. He would love to destroy the sun or use a star to burn the world. Part two: December, the complex passions. These anecdotes, written in note form, involve acts such as men who vaginally rape children as young as three and indulge in incest and flagellation. There are tales of men who indulge in sacrilegious activities such as having sex with prostitutes during Mass. The female children are raped vaginally during the evening orgies. Other elements of that month's storiessuch as whippingare sometimes enacted. Part three: January, the criminal passions. The notes outline tales of libertines who indulge in criminal activities, albeit stopping short of murder. They include men who sodomise girls as young as three, men who prostitute their daughters to others and watch the proceedings and others who mutilate women by tearing off their fingers or burning them with red hot pokers. During the month, the four libertines have anal sex with the sixteen male and female children who, along with the other victims, are treated more brutally as time goes on, with regular beatings, whippings and torture. Part four: February, the murderous passions. The final 150 anecdotes, mostly written in note form, involve murder. They include libertines who skin children alive, disembowel pregnant women, burn entire families alive and kill newborn babies in front of their mothers. The final tale is the only one written in detail since the simple passions of November. It features the "hell libertine" who is manually stimulated by servants while watching 15 teenage girls being simultaneously tortured to death. During this month, the libertines kill three of their four daughters along with four of the female children, two of the male ones, and one "fucker". The torture, murder and mutilation of one of the girls is described in detail. MarchSade provides a list of those who have been murdered during the 120 days. The libertines decide to spare 12 of the survivors and murder the rest. The ones spared are the four storytellers, four of the fuckers, the three cooks, and Julie. They draw up a schedule of executions, one to be carried out each day. Sade then presents a final tally: 10 were murdered in the course of the orgies, 20 were killed from 1 March, and 16 returned to Paris.

Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom over 37 days in 1785 while he was imprisoned in the Bastille. Being short of writing materials and fearing confiscation, he wrote it in tiny writing on a continuous roll of paper, made up of individual small pieces of paper smuggled into the prison and glued together. The result was a scroll long and wide that Sade would hide by rolling it tightly and placing it inside his cell wall. As revolutionary tension grew in Paris, Sade incited a riot among the people gathered outside the Bastille when he shouted to them that the guards were murdering inmates; as a result, two days later on 4 July 1789, he was transferred to the asylum at Charenton, "naked as a worm" and unable to retrieve the novel in progress. Sade believed the work was destroyed when the Bastille was stormed and looted on 14 July 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution. He was distraught over its loss and wrote that he "wept tears of blood" in his grief. However, the scroll was found and removed by a citizen named Arnoux de Saint Maximin two days before the storming. Viscount Charles de Noailles, whose wife Marie Laure was a direct descendant of Sade, bought the manuscript in 1929. It was inherited by their daughter Natalie, who kept it in a drawer on the family estate. She would occasionally bring it out and show it to guests, among them the writer Italo Calvino. The manuscripts were seized by French authorities and were due to be returned to their investors before going to auction. In December 2017, the French government recognised the original manuscript as a National Treasure giving the government time to raise funds to purchase it. The French Government acquired the manuscript in July 2021.

Academic John Phillips classifies The 120 Days of Sodom as a libertine novel. According to Phillips, Sade's intention was avowedly pornographic but he also intended the novel as social satire, a parody of the encyclopaedia and the scientific method, a didactic text expounding a theory of libertinage, and a fantasy of total power and sexual licence. The novel displays typical Sadeian themes including an obsession with categorisation, order and numbers; an alternating presentation of dissertations and orgies; and a desire to catalogue all sexual practices. Phillips links the novel's emphasis on order, categorisation, numbers and coprophilia with the Freudian anal phase of human sexuality. He also suggests that the novel's theme of mother hatred can be interpreted in Freudian terms as an unconscious erotic desire for the mother, with the château Silling as a womb symbol. Sade biographer Neil Schaeffer sees the main theme in the novel as rebellion against God, authority and sexual gender. Against these, Sade posits hedonism and an amoral, materialist view of nature. Biographer Francine du Plessix Gray sees the novel as a dystopia, calling it "the crudest, most repellent fictional dystopia ever limned."

The final scene of Luis Buñuel's film L'Age d'Or (1930) shows the Duc de Blangis emerging from the château de Seligny. Buñuel had read the 120 Days and had been deeply impressed by its anti clericalism and focus on sexuality. In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini made Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma). The setting is transposed from 18th century France to the last days of Benito Mussolini's regime in the Republic of Salò. Salò is commonly listed among the most controversial films ever made.