A Bastille Day Post (2023)

Man Ray: Portrait imaginaire de D.A.F. de Sade (1938) 

Oil on canvas with painted wood panel (61.6 × 46.7 cm) 

 

It's grey, wet and windy here in London this 14 juillet - La fête nationale française, or Bastille Day, as it is more commonly known in the English-speaking world where it is sometimes marked, but not particularly celebrated. 

For me, the storming of the Bastille on this date in 1789 - a key event of the French Revolution - primarily interests because that is the state prison where the libertine philosopher Sade wrote his most notorious work, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (1785), having being confined there the previous year for crimes of a sexual and blasphemous nature (despite never having been convicted of such crimes in a court of law).   

 

Famously, Sade wrote the manuscript in a miniscule hand on a long roll of paper that he kept hidden in a cell wall. Unfortunately, he was unable to finish his magnum opus before being transferred - against his will and naked as a worm - to the insane asylum at Charenton. 

 

This was on 4 July 1789; forty-eight hours after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there: They are murdering the prisoners! and ten days before the Bastille was stormed by the revolutionary mob looking for stores of gunpowder [1].

 

To his despair, Sade (mistakenly) believed that his manuscript was destroyed during the events of July 14; it had actually been discovered and preserved two days earlier. 

 

After his release from Charenton in 1790, Sade served in the new revolutionary government, although this was probably more from expediency rather than conviction and he was despised by many of his more radical (and bloodthirsty) new cohorts, not merely because of his aristocratic background, but due (ironically) to his modération [2]. 

 

Anyway, may I take this opportunity to wish all French readers - and all Sadeans - Joyeux quatorze juillet!

 

Notes

 

[1] It might be noted that by this date the Bastille was nearly empty, housing only seven prisoners. It was mostly kept open - despite the high financial cost of maintaining a garrisoned medieval fortress - to serve as a symbol of royal power.

 

[2] Readers interested in Sade's role in the French Revolution and the question of his politics might like to listen to a paper by the Michigan State University history professor Ronen Steinberg entitled 'Sex and the Bastille: the Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution' (2016): click here.