What Is the Literature of the Marquis de Sade? | Major Works, Style, and Why Sade Is Read as Literature

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Mention the literature of the Marquis de Sade, and what comes to mind first is extreme content: sex, violence, torture, crime. These are indeed central elements of Sade’s work, and there is no need to ignore their obscenity or cruelty in order to recast Sade as a “lofty thinker.” Yet the fact that Sade’s literature has been read for more than two hundred years, and became an object of criticism for Blanchot, Bataille, Beauvoir, Deleuze, Barthes, and others, cannot be explained simply by saying that he “wrote about cruel things.”

What makes Sade’s literature singular is that it repeats, enumerates, classifies, and quantifies sex and violence, and places them within rules and institutions. Bodies are detached from persons and turned into combinations of parts and functions, and in the middle of sexual acts long philosophical speeches on religion, nature, law, and crime are inserted. His fiction depicts debauchery yet is strangely orderly; it destroys existing morality, yet on the ruins it builds a new order for carrying out desire. This contradictory form is an important feature that makes Sade’s literature impossible to explain as merely cruel fiction or pornography[1].

Note that Sade did not write only novels. He also left many plays, short stories, essays on literature, letters, and political writings. This article focuses on his novels and narrative works, where the literary features of Sade’s writing appear most strongly. Sade’s life is covered in “Who Was Sade?”, and his thought is examined in detail in “Sade’s Philosophy”.

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What Is Sade’s Literature?

Put most simply, Sade’s literature is a literature that organizes sex, violence, crime, and desire not only through narrative but through classification, repetition, institutions, and argument. Obscene literature, cruel literature, and libertine literature certainly existed before Sade, and merely writing violent or sexual scenes is not unique to him. What makes Sade extreme is that he does not depict these as individual incidents one at a time; instead he multiplies them into hundreds of acts, arranges them by type, assigns them numbers of participants, times, places, and rules, and pushes them toward something close to a system.

Lucienne Frappier-Mazur analyzes Sade’s orgies not simply as “disorder” but in terms of protocol, hierarchy, repetition, power, and law. Marcel Hénaff likewise approaches the body in Sade through models of production, use, exchange, and expenditure[1].

In The 120 Days of Sodom, for example, desires are classified by stage; in Justine, a heroine who tries to preserve her virtue meets misfortune again and again, and each time her persecutors justify their crimes philosophically. In Juliette, conversely, a heroine who chooses vice goes from success to success. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, sexual activity itself is organized as education, interspersed with debates on religion, nature, law, and politics. In other words, in Sade’s literature the story of “what happens,” the argument about “why it is permitted,” and the classification of “how many kinds, how many times, and in what order it is done” are fused together.

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What Are Sade’s Major Works?

To understand Sade’s literature, the works to know first are The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, The New Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Aline and Valcour. These are not works of the same type; they show different aspects of Sade’s literature. Bibliographic details of the major works can be checked in the BnF’s work authority records and in the Pléiade edition edited by Michel Delon[2].

The 120 Days of Sodom

Its full title is The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage. It is an unfinished manuscript that Sade copied out in minute handwriting in 1785, while imprisoned in the Bastille, onto a scroll roughly 12 meters long made of 33 sheets of paper pasted together. Part One is written out in detail, but most of Parts Two through Four remain at the stage of outlines and lists, so describing it as “a four-part novel completed in 1785” is not accurate[3].

Four powerful men confine a large number of people in a castle cut off from the outside world and, over four months, carry out their desires in graduated stages. In the plan, four storytellers each take charge of one month, and 600 “passions” in total—five a day, 150 a month—are graded from simple ones to complex, criminal, and murderous ones. It is the work in which the classification, quantification, closed space, rank, timetables, arrangement of bodies, and institutionalization of Sade’s literature appear in their most extreme form.

Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue

Published in 1791. It is a paradoxical story in which Justine, who tries to preserve her virtue, repeatedly falls victim to criminals and the powerful precisely because of that virtue. In an ordinary moral tale, good deeds are rewarded and vice is punished; in Justine, that causal relationship is reversed. Each time the heroine suffers, the criminals justify their actions at length by appealing to nature, desire, power, atheism, and so on. It is also a work in which the combination of incident and philosophical speech appears clearly[2].

The New Justine

A greatly expanded and more extreme version of Justine; its title page bears the date 1797. Because it was published clandestinely, however, the year on the title page should not simply be equated with the actual date of publication and circulation. Compared with the earlier Justine, the sexual description, violence, crime, and philosophical speeches multiply enormously, and the work can be seen as a reconstruction of the same basic scheme into a far larger system of repetition[2].

Juliette

A massive novel whose heroine is Juliette, Justine’s sister. It is dated 1797, but its actual publication is thought most likely to have been in early 1801. Whereas Justine keeps her virtue and is made miserable, Juliette chooses vice and gains power, wealth, and pleasure. Here not only crimes themselves but speeches justifying crime, repetition, travel, and changes of characters follow one another on an enormous scale. Together with The New Justine, it shows how far Sade’s novels could swell[2].

Philosophy in the Bedroom

A work in seven dialogues published anonymously in 1795. Fifteen-year-old Eugénie is “educated” in libertine sex and thought in a boudoir. Its distinctive feature is that sexual activity and philosophical education take place in almost the same space: while bodies are actually in motion, the characters debate religion, nature, law, morality, and politics. The fifth dialogue contains an inserted political tract, “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans”[2].

Aline and Valcour

Published in 1795. An epistolary novel written in the Bastille between 1785 and 1788, it deals not only with love and sex but also with family, marriage, politics, social institutions, and ideal societies. Because it differs from the extreme repetitive form of The 120 Days of Sodom or Juliette, it is an important work for avoiding the view that Sade was “a writer who wrote only cruel sexual description”[2].

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Feature 1: Sex and Violence Are “Classified”

The first thing that strikes a reader of Sade is the staggering quantity of sexual acts and violence. But what matters in terms of literary form is less the “quantity” itself than the fact that the quantity is classified. In The 120 Days of Sodom in particular, desires are not lined up at random; they are sorted into categories, placed on a schedule, and raised in intensity step by step. Four storytellers recount several cases each day, and the powerful men in the castle put them into practice. Rather than a story moving forward, the work has a structure in which a catalogue of desires is processed item by item[3].

What is happening here is not simply an escalation of cruel description. Classification itself is linked to the rising intensity of violence. It was precisely this form of enumeration, classification, repetition, and combination that Roland Barthes, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, and others focused on. Frappier-Mazur’s study explicitly takes up such problems as “repetition and writing,” “the protocol of the orgy,” and “the hierarchy of the orgy”[1].

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Feature 2: The Body Turns from a “Person” into a “Combination”

In Sade’s works, characters’ bodies often cease to be treated as personal wholes. The body is broken down into parts, functions, positions, postures, and numbers of participants, and becomes something to be combined. Scenes recur in which what matters is not “who” a person is, but where they are placed, which parts are used, and with whom they are combined. As a result, the body comes close to being an interchangeable element.

Marcel Hénaff reads this Sadean body not only in terms of carnal sensuality but through models of production, use, exchange, and expenditure, analyzing the “libertine body” in Sade’s literature[1]. This feature shows how different Sade’s works are from psychological novels that probe the “inner life” of human beings. Rather than emotional complexity, what comes to the foreground is how bodies can be arranged, and characters are converted from psychological subjects into positions and functions for the execution of desire.

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Feature 3: Sexual Acts Alternate with Philosophical Speeches

What surprises readers who actually open Sade is not only the length of the sexual descriptions but the length of the speeches. In the middle of the action, characters begin to discuss for pages on end whether God exists, what nature is, why murder is wrong, and on what grounds the law punishes human beings. When the speech ends, the sex or the crime begins again.

In Sade, in other words, action and argument alternate. Philosophy is not placed there as the author’s commentary; it is spoken by criminals and libertines to justify their own deeds, and bodily practice follows immediately after the argument. That is why, even when reading Sade’s thought, the characters’ speeches cannot simply be treated as the author’s personal convictions. Conversely, when reading Sade as literature, the arrangement itself—“who argues, in what situation, and for what purpose”—becomes important.

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Feature 4: Closed Spaces and Institutions

Places cut off from the outside world appear frequently in Sade’s literature: the castle in The 120 Days of Sodom, the boudoir in Philosophy in the Bedroom, monasteries, mansions, and so on. What happens there looks at first like disorderly debauchery, but in fact it is minutely specified who gives orders, who obeys, who plays which role, what is done when, and how violations of the rules are punished. In The 120 Days of Sodom especially, rules, ranks, roles, timetables, and the sequence of acts are institutionalized from the very beginning[3].

Here lies a major paradox of Sade’s literature. Although the ordinary religious and moral order is destroyed, what appears beyond it is not a free, disorderly festive space. Instead, a colder and more artificial order is built for the execution of desire. In Présentation de Sacher-Masoch: Le froid et le cruel (1967; translated as Coldness and Cruelty), Gilles Deleuze compared Sade and Masoch not as merely complementary sexual inclinations but in terms of their different relations to law, institution, contract, and literary technique. However, the “institution” Deleuze discusses is a critical concept concerning the relationship to law and contract, and it is not a concept on the same level as the timetables and division of roles depicted in The 120 Days of Sodom.

In this respect, sex in Sade can be read as quite opposed to “carnival” in the Bakhtinian sense. In the carnival discussed by Mikhail Bakhtin, people temporarily step outside the rigid hierarchical order of the official world; rank and authority are inverted, the sacred is profaned, and free and familiar contact arises among people. Laughter, bodily excess, the overturning of high and low, and collectivity are its key features[4].

In Sade, by contrast, even when religious, moral, and sexual norms are transgressed, the hierarchy between libertines and victims, between those who command and those who are commanded, is not dissolved. On the contrary, that difference is sometimes fixed and reinforced by rules and institutions. A social and moral “inversion of values” occurs, but not a carnivalesque “temporary leveling of hierarchy.” Frappier-Mazur’s discussion of “protocol,” “hierarchy,” and “power and law” in Sade’s orgies also supports this contrast[4].

Accordingly—and this is this article’s own comparative formulation—if carnival is a festival that temporarily dissolves the ordinary order, Sadean debauchery destroys the existing moral order and then constructs, to excess, a different order for carrying out desire. Sex in Sade is less an “anything goes” chaos than a deviance so tightly managed that it permits no chaos.

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Why Are Sade’s Works So Long and Repetitive?

One of the most common reactions of people who read Sade is: “It’s long,” “The same thing happens over and over,” “I got tired halfway through.” This impression is not wrong. In The New Justine, Juliette, and The 120 Days of Sodom, similar crimes, sexual acts, and speeches are repeated in great quantity. Judged by narrative pace alone, these are very hard to read as modern novels.

But if this repetition is dismissed as “the author couldn’t cut his prose” or “he was a verbose writer,” one misses a defining feature of Sade’s literature. Viewed as a matter of the works’ structure, Sade’s repetition detaches desire from the single incident. An act does not happen once and end; it is carried out again and again with different characters, different arrangements, and different intensities. As a result, what comes to the foreground is not the individual incidents but the repeatable system itself behind them. Frappier-Mazur also treats repetition and writing as a problem in its own right[1].

This sheer length also has a particular effect on the reader. Descriptions that were stimulating at first become monotonous as they are repeated dozens and hundreds of times, producing fatigue and even disgust. It cannot be asserted that Sade himself clearly intended this “boredom” or “saturation,” but later criticism has paid attention to it as a structural effect that does more than simply arouse the reader. Sade’s literature arouses the reader and at the same time repeats so much that it wears arousal itself down.

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Why Is The 120 Days of Sodom Special?

If one work had to illustrate the form of Sade’s literature, The 120 Days of Sodom would be the clearest. Its setting is a castle almost completely cut off from the outside world; four powerful libertines hold a large number of people under their control, and four storytellers each day recount cases of desire they have seen or heard of in the past. What makes the work so strange is that sex and violence are not lined up as narrative incidents but are processed as items in a classification system designed in advance.

Moreover, the work is unfinished. Part One is written as a relatively detailed narrative, while the latter three parts gradually approach brief notes and lists. As a literary work left incomplete, this is a lack. Yet as a result, because the narrative gradually approaches a “blueprint,” how Sade was trying to classify desire becomes, if anything, all the more nakedly visible[3].

The 120 Days of Sodom was not published during Sade’s lifetime; its first edition appeared in 1904. The autograph scroll of 1785 is now held by the BnF, which acquired it in 2021 and has since restored and digitized it[5].

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Is Sade’s Literature Pornography?

There is no need to deny that Sade’s works have a pornographic character. Explicit sexual description exists in great quantity, and sexual stimulation and obscenity are important elements of the works. But the either/or of “Sade is therefore pornography, not literature” does not hold either.

In Sade’s works, sexual acts are bound up with philosophical debate, criticism of religion, politics, education, social institutions, the classification of bodies, and more. The sexual descriptions themselves are not a mere succession of stimuli either; they are organized through forms such as enumeration, repetition, quantification, rules, and escalation. Therefore, being pornography and having literary and intellectual form are compatible. Indeed, what makes Sade’s literature interesting is not that its obscenity can be erased so that it may be promoted to “literature,” but that the obscenity itself is inseparable from its literary form and its philosophical argument.

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Did Sade Write Only Cruel Works?

No. Besides novels, Sade wrote a wide range of texts, including short stories, plays, essays on literature, political writings, and letters. The 1800 story collection The Crimes of Love is prefaced by Reflections on the Novel (Idée sur les romans), in which Sade himself discusses the novel as a form. There are also epistolary novels such as Aline and Valcour, whose political and social content cannot be explained by sex alone. He also wrote many plays, some of which, such as Oxtiern, were published during his lifetime.

So if one thinks “Sade’s literature = torture and sex and nothing else,” a considerable part of his actual output disappears. It is also true, however, that Sade’s reputation today is determined by his extreme works such as Justine, Juliette, The 120 Days of Sodom, and Philosophy in the Bedroom. The point is not to defend him by claiming that he “didn’t write cruel works,” but to ask why a writer who worked in many genres created such an extreme literary form within them.

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Sade’s Literature and “Underground Literature”

It is not appropriate to slot Sade directly into the modern genre label of “underground literature writer.” The term “underground literature” (angura bungaku in Japanese) did not even exist in Sade’s time. In terms of the “distance” between a work and society, however, Sade’s literature is a very clear case for thinking about undergroundness.

Because of their obscenity, sexuality, violence, and anti-religious ideas, Sade’s works were long pushed out of official literary institutions and publishing channels, and some were read through anonymous publication, clandestine publication, and private or limited circulation. In the nineteenth century, while the name Sade became widely known as a byword for infamy and through the concept of “sadism,” public access to the texts themselves remained limited. This situation is better described not as complete oblivion but as semi-underground reception[5].

In this sense, Sade’s literature is not a simple example of “underground literature because its content is extreme.” Rather, it is a case in which one can observe the process by which literature is pushed underground through the relations among works, publishing institutions, regulation, circulation, and social norms, and is later reabsorbed into official literary institutions. At Viscera, we think of this distance from institutions, markets, circulation, regulation, and social norms as “undergroundness.” This is discussed in detail in “What Is Underground Literature? Tracing Japan’s ‘Underground Literature’ through Magazines, Self-Publishing, and the Internet”.

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Why Was Sade Reassessed as Literature in the Twentieth Century?

Sade did not become a “literary classic” immediately after his death in 1814. In the nineteenth century some of his works circulated underground or privately and were read by certain writers and intellectuals, but they stood far outside the center of official literary history. Meanwhile, the name “Sade” itself spread even more widely than the works, as a sign of obscenity, cruelty, crime, and abnormality.

In the twentieth century this situation changed from several directions. In 1904 The 120 Days of Sodom was published for the first time, and in 1909 Guillaume Apollinaire edited L’Œuvre du Marquis de Sade, adding a preface, bibliography, and notes and re-presenting Sade as an “author with a body of work.” The 1909 edition is recorded in the BnF catalogue and listed as available for viewing on Gallica[6].

Later, the Surrealists also read Sade as one of their precursors, and textual research and editing advanced through the work of Maurice Heine, Gilbert Lely, and others. Heine’s edition of The 120 Days of Sodom was published in 1931–35[5].

After the war the trend accelerated further. Klossowski, Blanchot, Beauvoir, Bataille, Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, and others reread Sade, each in a different way. What interested them was not merely the biographical curiosity of “Was Sade a deviant?” Sade came to be read as a text for thinking through problems such as negation, freedom, the other, taboo, law, language, repetition, classification, and institutions.

It is therefore not accurate to think that “some one person discovered Sade in the twentieth century.” The rediscovery and editing of the texts, the avant-garde, commercial publishing and trials, thought and criticism, and the institutional preservation and study of Sade by libraries and universities proceeded in parallel, and a writer once placed semi-underground was gradually transformed into a literary classic. Today the BnF’s preservation, restoration, and exhibition of the autograph scroll of The 120 Days of Sodom as part of the literary heritage symbolizes that change[5].

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What Did Sade’s Literature Leave to Later Generations?

Care is needed when discussing Sade’s influence on later generations. Not all violent literature, obscene literature, literature dealing with BDSM, or taboo-breaking literature can be called “Sade’s descendants.” For later writers, it is necessary to distinguish whether they actually read Sade, whether their works contain quotations or structural references, whether critics merely compared them, or whether the form is simply similar[7].

Even so, from the standpoint of literary form, what Sade demonstrated in extreme form is considerable. He turned desire into repeatable series, turned bodies into combinable arrangements, classified violence, built closed institutions, linked action and argument, and repeated the same structure up to the limit of what readers can endure. In this sense, limiting Sade’s literary legacy to “cruel description” is too narrow. What matters more, it can be argued, is that he carried to an extreme a literary form capable of systematizing desire, the body, and violence themselves.

How far later “sadistic literature” coincides with Sade’s own literature is discussed in detail in a separate article, “What Is the Literature of Sadism?”

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Which work by Sade should I read first?

The following is this article’s editorial reading guide; it is not a ranking of the works’ literary value or importance. The best entry point depends on what you want to know. For a relatively compact reading of the structure that joins thought and sexual acts, Philosophy in the Bedroom; to see the reversal of virtue and vice, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue; and to see the work in which the classification and institutionalization of Sade’s literature appear in their most extreme form, The 120 Days of Sodom. The New Justine and Juliette, on the other hand, let you experience Sadean repetition and philosophical speeches on a massive scale, but they are extremely long and can hardly be recommended to everyone as a first book.

Q. Is The 120 Days of Sodom a finished novel?

No. It was copied out onto a scroll about 12 meters long in the Bastille in 1785, but only Part One is fully developed as a novel; most of Parts Two through Four remain at the stage of outlines and lists[3]. Writing that it is “a four-part novel completed in 1785” is therefore inaccurate. That said, the way its unfinished state makes the latter half look like a “blueprint” of desire has itself come to be seen as a formally interesting feature.

Q. Are all of Sade’s works pornography?

Not all of them. Sade also wrote plays, short stories, essays on literature, and political writings. Among his novels, too, there are works such as Aline and Valcour whose political and social content cannot be explained by sex alone. On the other hand, it is a fact that major works such as Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and The 120 Days of Sodom contain explicit sexual content, and there is no need to deny this for the sake of their literary value.

Q. Why does Sade’s literature repeat the same descriptions over and over?

Viewed in terms of the works’ structure, repetition can be seen as transforming individual incidents from “one-time events” into “forms that can be replayed any number of times.” By repeating similar structures while varying the characters, bodies, arrangements, and acts, desire comes closer to a system than to a narrative incident. The repetition can also produce fatigue, monotony, and disgust in the reader. Such repetition, saturation, and overloading of the reader have become important issues in later Sade criticism as well[1].

Q. Is sex in Sade “free, chaotic sex”?

Not necessarily. In works such as The 120 Days of Sodom, ordinary morality and sexual norms are thoroughly transgressed, while desire itself is minutely managed through rank, command, timetables, rules, and the arrangement of bodies. This article therefore reads Sadean debauchery not as “chaos without order” but as something that, after destroying the existing moral order, constructs a different order for desire. This contrast with Bakhtinian carnival is not Sade’s own self-explanation but this article’s comparative reading[4].

Q. Is Sade’s literature the same as “sadistic literature”?

No. The word “sadism” itself came into being after Sade’s death and in the nineteenth century became a concept of sexology and psychiatry. “Sadistic literature” is therefore not a category that coincides exactly with the works of the historical Sade. Cruel literature, BDSM literature, transgressive literature, and Sadean literature are also distinct concepts. At Viscera, we treat “the literature of sadism” after distinguishing among Sade’s own literature, literature that directly received Sade, literature whose theme is cruelty and domination, and literature with a Sadean form.

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Summary: Sade’s Literature Is Not Defined by Cruelty Alone

There is no doubt that sex and violence are present in great quantity in Sade’s literature. But the explanation “Sade = a writer of cruel pornography” does not reveal its literary peculiarity. What makes Sade strange is that he did not merely depict desire and violence but repeated, enumerated, classified, and quantified them, combined bodies, and placed them within rules and institutions. Furthermore, he inserted philosophical speeches on religion, nature, law, crime, and politics in the midst of these acts, making bodily practice and intellectual argument circulate within the same work.

Moreover, that debauchery is not necessarily festive disorder. Ordinary morality and religion may be transgressed, but power relations themselves are not dissolved; rather, ranks, schedules, commands, and rules for carrying out desire are constructed to excess. It destroys norms while building another order. Here too lies the strangeness of Sade’s literature.

In The 120 Days of Sodom, that form comes close to a blueprint of desire. In Justine and Juliette, the ordinary causal relationship between virtue and vice is reversed. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, education, sex, and philosophy are concentrated into a single closed space. And although their extremity kept Sade’s works for a long time on the margins of, or beneath, official literary institutions, in the twentieth century—through editing, publishing, the avant-garde, thought, trials, and research institutions—Sade shifted from a semi-underground obscene writer to a classic of world literature.

The true strangeness of Sade’s literature lies not only in his having written cruel things. It lies in his having experimented, almost to the point of the unbearable, with how far human desire can be classified, institutionalized, and systematized through literature.

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About the Research for This Article

This article distinguishes between Sade’s own works and the “sadistic literature” that emerged later. It also separates the content of the works from their form, emphasizing not only the themes of violence, sex, and domination but also formal features such as repetition, classification, quantification, the combination of bodies, institutions, philosophical speeches, and the overloading of the reader.

The comparison with “carnival” does not mean that Sade himself discussed the Bakhtinian concept of carnival; it is this article’s comparative reading. We contrasted the inversion of hierarchy, free contact, and festive corporeality of carnival as discussed by Bakhtin with the fixing of rank, rules, commands, and bodily arrangement seen in Sade’s works. On Sade’s side, an important point of reference was Frappier-Mazur’s analysis of the orgy in terms of “protocol,” “hierarchy,” and “power and law.”

The 120 Days of Sodom is not treated as a completed four-part novel but as an unfinished manuscript in which only Part One is written out in detail and Parts Two through Four are mainly at the stage of plans and lists. For The New Justine and Juliette as well, the year on the title page is not simply equated with the actual period of circulation.

In addition, the nineteenth-century reception of Sade is not described as “complete oblivion” but as “semi-underground reception,” in which his notoriety and name spread while public access to the texts was limited. The twentieth-century reassessment is likewise treated not as a linear canonization by a single discoverer but as a complex process in which editing, publishing, the avant-garde, criticism and thought, trials, and libraries and research institutions proceeded in parallel.

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Notes

1. On repetition, classification, the hierarchy of the orgy, the body, and institutions in Sade’s literature, see Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Sade et l’écriture de l’orgie (1991; English translation Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade, 1996); Marcel Hénaff, Sade: L’invention du corps libertin (1978; English translation Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, 1999); and Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), among others. The table of contents of the English translation of Frappier-Mazur includes “An Ordered Indistinction: The Protocol of the Orgy and the Reduction of the Feminine,” “The Hierarchy of the Orgy: The Power and the Law,” and “Repetition and Writing.” Frappier-Mazur: University of Pennsylvania Press / DOI / Hénaff: University of Minnesota Press
2. For basic bibliographic information on the major works, see D.-A.-F. de Sade, Œuvres, éd. Michel Delon, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 3 vols., 1990–1998, and the BnF’s work authority records and bibliographic records. Sade’s works: BnF Catalogue général
3. The 120 Days of Sodom is an unfinished manuscript copied out in 1785 in the Bastille onto a scroll about 12 meters long made of 33 sheets of paper pasted together. Only Part One is written out in detail; Parts Two through Four are mainly at the stage of plans and lists. The plan envisages four months, 150 passions per month, 600 in total. BnF, “Le rouleau du Marquis de Sade : restauration d’un monument littéraire”. Because BnF sources differ on the total length of the scroll (roughly 11.85 m / 12.10 m), this article gives it as “about 12 meters.”
4. For the comparative criterion of carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. This article uses the inversion of hierarchy, the profanation of the sacred, free and familiar contact, bodily excess, and the like as carnivalesque features. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bakhtin Circle. On Sade’s side, Frappier-Mazur discusses the “protocol,” “hierarchy,” and “power and law” of the orgy. Frappier-Mazur. Accordingly, “Sade = anti-carnival” is not an established label in prior scholarship but this article’s comparative reading, placing the two side by side.
5. The 120 Days of Sodom was first published in 1904. Iwan Bloch published it under the name Eugen Dühren, and Maurice Heine published an edition based on the manuscript in 1931–35. The autograph scroll was acquired by the BnF in 2021 and restored and digitized. BnF, “Le Marquis de Sade : de l’œuvre cachée à l’écrivain surexposé” / Maurice Heine’s edition: BnF
6. L’Œuvre du Marquis de Sade, edited by Guillaume Apollinaire, was published in 1909 by the Bibliothèque des Curieux. With its preface, bibliography, and notes, it was an important intermediary that publicly re-presented Sade as an author with a body of work. The BnF catalogue lists it as available for viewing on Gallica. Note that Zoloé, included in this volume, is not regarded as Sade’s work in current scholarly editions, so the attribution judgments of 1909 must be distinguished from current attributions. BnF bibliographic record
7. Regarding Sade’s relationship to later literature, it is necessary to distinguish among “direct reception of Sade himself or his works,” “authorial documentation,” “intertext within the work,” “comparisons in the history of criticism,” “formal similarity,” and “sadism as a theme.” Cruel literature, BDSM literature, and transgressive fiction should not be equated directly with Sade’s literature. For an overview, see Will McMorran, “Sade and the Novel,” in Adam Watt, ed., The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. 237–254. Cambridge University Press

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References and Principal Sources

Sade’s Major Works and Scholarly Editions

• D. A. F. de Sade, Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome, ou l’École du libertinage.
• D. A. F. de Sade, Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, 1791.
• D. A. F. de Sade, La Nouvelle Justine.
• D. A. F. de Sade, Histoire de Juliette.
• D. A. F. de Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir, 1795.
• D. A. F. de Sade, Aline et Valcour, 1795.
• D. A. F. de Sade, Les Crimes de l’amour, 1800.
• D.-A.-F. de Sade, Œuvres, éd. Michel Delon, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 3 vols., 1990–1998.

Reception History and Criticism

• Guillaume Apollinaire, ed., L’Œuvre du Marquis de Sade, Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1909. BnF
• Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade, 1949.
• Simone de Beauvoir, “Faut-il brûler Sade?”, 1951–1952.
• Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal, 1957.
• Gilles Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch : Le froid et le cruel, 1967. Éditions de Minuit
• Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 1971.
• Marcel Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body. University of Minnesota Press
• Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, Writing the Orgy: Power and Parody in Sade. University of Pennsylvania Press / DOI
• Will McMorran, “Sade and the Novel”, in Adam Watt ed., The Cambridge History of the Novel in French, Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp.237–254. Cambridge University Press

The Concept of Carnival and Related Sources

• Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. For an overview of the concept of carnival, see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Bibliothèque nationale de France — “Le rouleau du Marquis de Sade : restauration d’un monument littéraire”
• Bibliothèque nationale de France — “Le Marquis de Sade : de l’œuvre cachée à l’écrivain surexposé”

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Translated from the Japanese original, “サドの文学とは？｜代表作・特徴・作風、なぜ文学として評価されるのかを解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.

*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.