The original scroll on which the infamous Marquis de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom, his novel on sexual depravity, pedophilia, cruelty and murder, has returned to France.
Sade’s book was written in tiny writing on a narrow 12m-long strip of parchment in just 37 days while he was imprisoned in the Bastille and hidden in his cell. It was found when the jail was stormed during the French Revolution.It has changed hands and been fought over several times in the centuries since, its ownership causing almost as much controversy as its contents.
Now the parchment, bought by a French manuscript dealer, will go on display at a private museum in Paris to mark the 200th anniversary of the author’s death.
Photo: AFP
Sade’s work details the depraved behavior of four wealthy French libertines who rape, torture and finally murder their victims, who are mostly teenage girls in a remote medieval castle, in order to experience extreme sexual gratification.
The story remained unpublished until 1904 when it was obtained by a German psychiatrist who regarded it having scientific importance.
It has since been translated into many languages, and frequently banned as obscene. Feminist writer Andrea Dworkin has condemned it as “vile pornography” and described Sade as the embodiment of misogyny.
In 1929, the scroll was bought by a member of the Noailles family who was a direct descendant of Sade. It was later stolen, smuggled into Switzerland and sold to a collector. A furious international legal wrangle ensued with a French court ordering it to be returned to the Noailles family, only to be overruled in 1998 by a Swiss court that declared it had been bought by the collector in good faith.
It was first put on display near Geneva in 2004. Gerard Lheritier, president and founder of Aristophil, a company specializing in rare manuscripts, who bought the scroll for 7 million euros (US$9.6 million), will put it on display at the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris, which he owns.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the