Director of the National Library of France, Bruno Racine, is fighting hard to convince the Foreign and Culture Ministries that the library should buy Marquis de Sade’s manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom.
The controversial manuscript has long divided critics, some who have come to the rescue of Sade and suggested that this work represents the very darkest side of humanity. Others have condemned the story as perverse and vile. Sade himself once referred to it as ‘the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began’.
The manuscript is certainly no fairy tale. It tells the story of four rich libertines who lock themselves into a medieval castle and proceed to abuse 46 victims, some of which are between the ages of 12 to 15. It features scenes of sexual abuse, pedophilia, necrophilia, incest, torture, rape, murder, infanticide, bestiality and violent anal and oral sex acts.
Although Racine acknowledges that the manuscript is ‘depraved’, he maintains that the work should be classified as a ‘national treasure’ and thus should be preserved in the National Library.
‘The document is Sade’s most atrocious, extreme, radical work,’ Racine told The New York Times. ‘But we make no moral judgment about it.’
The manuscript’s first draft was completed in 1785 in just 37 days while Sade was spending time in the Bastille for sexual mistreatment, sodomy and violence. Fearing that the work would be confiscated, he hid it in a stone wall in his cell but was transferred to a different prison before he had the chance to recover it.
The manuscript was later discovered and eventually published by a German doctor. The original was then passed on to a descendant of Sade’s who gave it to her daughter, Natalie de Noailles.
‘My mother showed me the manuscript when I was a boy,’ Carlo Perrone, Natalie de Noailles’s son, said. ‘I remember the handwriting was so small, and that there were no corrections. It gave you the impression that paper was very scarce and precious for him, and that he had to fill up every space.’
Natalie eventually entrusted the work to publisher Jean Grouet who swindled the family by selling it to Swiss collector Gérard Nordmann for $60,000. Following a lengthy legal case, a French court ruled that the work had to be returned to the de Noailles family, but as Switzerland had not yet signed the UNESCO convention that requires the country to return stolen cultural objects, Natalie de Noaille had to sue again. This time, the court did not rule in her favour, and so the manuscript was kept at a cultural foundation in Switzerland.
Last year, Nordmann’s heirs offered to sell the manuscript to a French collector but Perrone intervened.
‘Anyone who wants to buy the manuscript in France needs my consent,’ he said. ‘My mother had a very strong wish that one day the manuscript would be given to the Bibliothèque Nationale, which is my wish as well. It’s an important historical document, a piece of French history.’
Racine, who is renowned for getting important manuscripts classified as ‘national treasures’ in order to house them at the National Library is currently conversing with both Perrone and Nordmann’s heirs in an attempt to purchase the manuscript for over $5 million. The director hopes to display the manuscript along with Sade’s other works, where it will be presented in time for the 200th anniversary of Sade’s death.
