Depraved: How the Marquis de Sade still reigns as the patron saint of sadomasochism on screen
As de Sade’s former chateau in Provence – now a luxury hotel – flings open its doors to offer ‘heritage tours’, Geoffrey Macnab looks at the French philosopher and writer’s lasting influence on filmmakers and tourists, despite a sordid life mired in scandal
A luxury hotel in France on the site of the old castle belonging to the Marquis de Sade has just flung open its doors to tourists for “Heritage Days” tours. The hotel, nestled in the heart of Provence in Mazan, just 20 miles by road from Avignon, has 31 rooms, a library, concealed passages, a sumptuous reception area, boudoirs, and immense gardens.
It looks lavish, but not out of the ordinary; pets are welcome and the wifi works. Reviews are complimentary. It’s only when you read the small print that you discover the secret history of The Château de Mazan. The hotel was the bolthole of the depraved De Sade when he wasn’t in Paris. He once organised a theatre festival in the gardens. Whether or not this turned into an orgy isn’t related but this is, indeed, as the hotel website trumpets – a “castle steeped in history”.
As French TV station France 3 noted last month: “If the walls could talk, they would have crisp stories to tell about the sulphurous nights of the marquis.” Built in 1715, the Château de Mazan was also the birthplace of De Sade’s father, as well as his uncle, Abbe de Sade, who educated the young De Sade for six years. During the Revolution, de Sade was branded “undesirable” in Mazan, and the chateau was damaged.
De Sade (1740-1814) lived a life mired in scandal. Accused of sexual debauchery and preying on woman and children, he spent much of his time locked up in prisons and lunatic asylums. Nonetheless, last month, the hotel had no qualms about offering tours of his family seat, which had previously been used both as a religious school and a retirement home.
The Marquis, then, has become prime bait for tourists. Yet 208 years after his death, he continues to divide opinion. To some, he remains a cruel and depraved libertine with monstrous appetites. To others, largely thanks to his writings in captivity – books like Justine, The 120 of Sodom and Philosophy in the Bedroom – he is a political visionary and a literary heavyweight. His influence can be felt in everything from the work of philosophers and academics from Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey books.
Filmmakers, meanwhile, can’t get enough of the Marquis. Many of his novels have been adapted for the screen. He has been the subject of biopics and documentaries as well as huge numbers of X-movies. He is the patron saint of sadomasochism on screen.
A huge range of actors and directors have flirted with De Sade. In the 1960s and 1970s alone, there were dozens of films adapted from the notorious French roué’s work.
Samuel Beckett’s favourite actor Patrick Magee starred as the Marquis in Peter Brook’s 1967 film Marat/Sade – a version of his celebrated RSC stage production of German writer, Peter Weiss’s play. This depicted De Sade very late in his life as the madman-in-chief, overseeing a group of inmates at the Charenton asylum, as they perform a play for an audience of bourgeois types about the murder of French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday, played by a very youthful Glenda Jackson.
Brook stuck very closely to the play and didn’t even try to open the story up for the screen. However, by placing the cinema audience in the middle of the asylum and showing them De Sade and his antic troupe in grotesque and terrifying close-up, he gave the movie an intensity that the stage version had lacked. It helped that the fault lines in 1808 France were remarkably similar to those across the US and Europe 160 years later. The references to revolutionary violence had extra weight in the late, helter-skelter 1960s, the era of the counterculture, Charles Manson, and the summer of love. Magee played De Sade as a glowering, malevolent figure who takes a perverse pleasure in the chaos he is unleashing.
In the wake of Marat/Sade, multiple adaptations of the Marquis’s work were made, taking advantage of a new permissiveness. Jess Franco’s adaptation of De Sade’s novel Justine (1969) had the mercurial, gimlet-eyed German Klaus Kinski playing the author in a romantic fashion, as a dreamer and poet.
Prince Andrew’s former girlfriend Koo Stark starred in Chris Boger’s 1977 ill-fated British adaptation of Justine. She played the innocent, virtuous ingenue drawn into a life of extreme vice and degradation. As she suffers, her wicked sister Juliette (Lydia Lisle) sails through life without facing any punishment regardless of her misdeeds.
“No woman suffered more…” the poster proclaimed, as if Justine’s ordeals were the chief selling point. The film showed in a double bill with another X-rated romp, Weekend Orgy, starring Nadine Perles.
Another version of the same novel, French director Claude Pierson’s The Violation of Justine (1974) stayed in UK cinemas for several years. Critics dismissed it as an “exceedingly dull porno version” in which “the pure-in-heart heroine, the strapping Alice Arno receives the most routine chastisements”. That didn’t stop punters buying tickets.
By then, De Sade adaptations were being churned out in big numbers. The irony, though, was that his work was essentially unfilmable. His books were so outrageous that anyone who attempted to adapt them faithfully would probably have ended up, just like him, behind bars. German sexologist and psychoanalyst Iwan Bloch (1872-1922) rediscovered and published De Sade’s unfinished novel 120 Days Of Sodom and is seen as a champion of his work. Bloch writes of De Sade’s “painstaking genius” and the philosophical richness of his novels. Nonetheless, he also argues that De Sade’s books are “still repugnant and repulsive and repellent to any person save the most degenerate libertine… I believe it would be difficult to find such an absolutely corrupt person that he would not shudder at some episode or person in Justine or Juliette”.
There is the practical element too. De Sade had a prodigiously warped imagination. It is very hard to depict some of the more extreme scenes from his novels on camera, for example, the characters who, as Bloch lists their misdeeds, “drink the blood and eat the testicles” of the boys they murder, feast on excrement, have sex with animals, corpses and even statues or stick burning candles into the openings of bodies. Filming such incidents would tax the ingenuity of the most resourceful cinematographers and special effects artists – and nobody would want to watch such revolting material anyway.
As for the philosophising, that also presents a huge challenge. In a 10-volume pornographic series like Justine and its companion piece Juliette, De Sade could take time out from his storytelling to offer views about science, literature, and politics that simply wouldn’t fit in a two-hour film.
Certain directors have tried to be true to the spirit of De Sade. Perhaps the most notable is Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in his film adaptation of Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, released posthumously in 1975 a few weeks after Pasolini had been murdered by a male prostitute. Pasolini set his film in 1940s Italy rather than pre-revolutionary France. However, his tale of fascists abusing and killing young captives in an incongruously elegant old chateau captured the full grotesquerie of De Sade’s vision. The film was refused a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) on the grounds of gross indecency. When it was shown uncut at a private cinema club in London, the police raided the premises and confiscated the print.
Ironically, the BBFC secretary James Ferman was an admirer of the movie. He believed that Pasolini was exposing “the atrocities of which human nature is capable when absolute power is wielded corruptly”. That may have been the case but it still took more than 20 years for the film to be given a certificate in the UK.
Another film that tried, for very different motives, to be as explicit as possible in its portrayal of the French renegade was the 1994 biopic, Marquis De Sade, directed by exploitation king Joe D’Amato and with Italian porn actor Rocco Siffredi starring. This, though, was a hardcore sex film with little interest in De Sade’s ideas. Those ideas remain crucial to the Marquis’s enduring reputation.
“Sade explored the line between the human and the inhuman in a unique fashion, and that’s always fascinated me,” said French director Benoît Jacquot who made the thoughtful, very earnest biopic Sade (2000) in which Daniel Auteuil played the imprisoned Marquis as if he was an elderly professor who had fallen foul of the university authorities because of his radical thinking.
Philip Kaufman’s Quills (2000) about the last years of De Sade’s incarceration in the Charenton asylum, starring Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis, Michael Caine as the doctor sent to the madhouse by Napoleon to break the Marquis, and Kate Winslet, as the prison maid who smuggles out his manuscripts, makes a very telling point. The film begins with a woman being guillotined in front of a baying mob. The violence and cruelty that detractors complained about in the Marquis’s books was endemic in French society of the time anyway, not something conjured up in De Sade’s overheated brain.
De Sade’s importance lies in the way he tests the limits of free speech and censorship. He remains a uniquely polarising figure. His books are still banned in several places. CNN recently reported that in South Korea, some of his work can still be sold only in plastic-sealed covers to adults 19 or over. In 2021, though, the French government spent over $5m acquiring the manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom for the National Library, describing the work as a “national treasure”.
It’s a reflection of the ambivalence with which he is still regarded that guided Heritage Days tours of his family home are now offered, even though he is still declared by many as the “most depraved man in history”. “Peace, tranquillity, luxury and charm” is what the hotel on the site of the old De Sade castle now offers to visitors. Of course, you won’t find any of that in the Marquis’s fiction or the many movies it has spawned.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments