France dubs ‘120 Days of Sodom’ a national treasure to stop sale

The French government stepped in yesterday to declare the manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” a national treasure as it was about to be sold at auction in Paris. Officials ordered that the 18th-century erotic masterpiece be withdrawn from the sale, along with Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifestos”, banning their export from France, the Aguttes auction house told AFP. They were part of a vast sale of historic documents owned by the French investment firm Aristophil, which was shut down in scandal two years ago, taking ($1 billion) of its investors’ money with it. “120 Days of Sodom” was expected to go for up to six million euros, while Breton’s highly influential manifestos on modern art were estimated at around four million euros.

Sade wrote the controversial work about four rich libertines in search of the ultimate form of sexual gratification on a roll made from bits of parchment he had smuggled into his cell in the Bastille. When the Paris prison was stormed at the beginning of the French revolution on July 14, 1789, the famously dissolute aristocrat was freed, but he was swept out by the mob without his manuscript. Sade believed it had been lost to the looters and wept “tears of blood” over it, but the unfinished manuscript turned up decades later. Even so, the book languished unpublished for more than a century and was banned in Britain until the 1950s. — AFP

This photo taken at an undisclosed location shows manuscripts, historic letters, notes and musical scores of the Aristophile collection, before the collection is to be liquidated through a process of hundreds of auctions over at least the next six years.