Juliette (de Sade)

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Dutch print (around 1800) for de Sades Juliette or the benefits of vice .

Juliette or the advantages of vice ( French original title: L'Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice ) is the follow-up novel written by the writer Marquis de Sade in 1796 with the title Justine or the misfortune of virtue . In 1797 both novels appeared anonymously as a ten-volume edition with 4000 pages under the title Die neue Justine or the misfortune of virtue, as well as the story of Juliette, her sister (six volumes Juliette with 64 pornographic illustrations).

After the death of their parents, the poor sisters Justine and Juliette leave the convent school. The bisexual , cruel, and vicious Juliette becomes a prostitute , makes influential friends, commits a variety of crimes, and gains wealth and happiness. The virtuous Justine, on the other hand, experiences one misfortune after another and is tormented by the people and punished for her morality.

The novel contains a multitude of bizarre, sadomasochistic and murderous scenes, which are interrupted by ideological statements of the main characters.

Résumé

In contrast to Justine, Juliette is already spoiled in the convent school and celebrates her first orgy in the catacombs of the convent on the coffins of the deceased nuns. She makes a career as a prostitute and befriends the criminal libertine Noirceuil, whom she even admires for first ruining her parents and then poisoning them. Through Noirceuil she met the minister of state Saint-Fond, who constantly celebrates criminal sex and violence orgies at state expense with a vicious circle of like-minded people that kill 30 women every month. After she has committed her first murder of another woman who refuses to have sex with her, Juliette's minister assures himself that his adversaries are poisoned. Lady Clairwil, another person from the group of criminal lusts, becomes Juliette's best friend, and through this she gains access to the “Society of Friends of Crime”, who commit themselves according to their statutes to practice every imaginable kind of crime as a fun sport.

After Juliette hesitated to participate in a Saint-Fonds plan to starve two-thirds of the inhabitants of overpopulated France to clean up the state treasury, she had to flee Paris and lost her property. She marries the wealthy Count Lorsagne, whom she soon poisons, and then travels to Italy, where various criminal sensations from Italian social life are shown to her. In the Apennine Mountains , she made the acquaintance of the monstrous Minski, who served Juliette the meat of her slaughtered maid on the back of naked girls' bodies and then demonstrated an execution machine with which 16 people were put to death simultaneously in different ways. In Florence she experienced an orchestrated execution performance, where the heads of the condemned roll to the beat of the musical accompaniment. In Rome she met Princess Borghese as an arsonist who, with the help of the police, burned down a number of Roman hospitals. The Pope reads a black mass for her , in the course of which he rips the heart out of a boy's body and devours it. In Naples she meets her old friend Clairwil, who lives there with her brother Brisa-Testa, a notorious robber, in an incest relationship. The King of Naples gives grueling theatrical performances in which over a thousand people are killed per performance. In Venice, Juliette opens a brothel with the poisoner Durand, making a fortune. After quarreling with the Doge of Venice , she lost half of her money and went back to France, where her old friend Noirceuil had meanwhile eliminated the Minister Saint-Fond. After meeting her sister Justine again, who was then struck by lightning, Juliette lived another ten years in happiness and wealth.

Explanation of the content

"  Il envoya le roman dans les flammes  " (" He threw the novel into the flames ").
Napoleon , First Consul and Censor , gives a copy of the novel L'Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice to the fire.
This engraving n ° 105 comes from the anonymous book Le Marquis de Sade, ses aventures, ses œuvres, passions mystérieuses, folies érotiques , 1885, p. 833.

In describing the Italian events, De Sade was able to refer to real people and events, which he exaggerated. In addition to personal travel impressions, the work Secret and Critical Memoirs and Morals of the Larger States of Italy (1794) by Joseph Gorani was available for his descriptions . So was z. B. attributed a relationship with Lady Hamilton to the Queen of Naples, Marie-Karoline (Queen Charlotte, sister of Marie Antoinette ) , furthermore, she and her lover had usurped power by ousting her husband. Pope Pius VI z. B. was rumored to be extravagant and an incest relationship with his daughter. Sade's interest in Italy and above all in the papacy corresponds to a long tradition of his house , whose leading members have repeatedly served the Pope, some of whom have stayed in Italy for this purpose; Sade breaks this tradition by reversing the values ​​of his ancestors.

In addition, Sade was influenced by the new fashion of the horror novel spilling over from England , which explains the black romanticism of some episodes, e.g. As the eerie story with the monstrous ogre Minski.

In the form of his episode novel, de Sade introduced us to a pre-revolutionary predatory society of amoralists . Corruption , lust and greed ruled the ancien régime . But beyond this, de Sade's view includes a tendency towards anarchism , to drive the individualism of the subjects who follow their instinct to extremes. Even the despots can no longer be sure of their lives, because apart from natural law , as the law of the strongest, no organizing hand in the world is recognized. Any criminal can be eliminated at any time by a subsequent major villain. Just a little carelessness, when Juliette turns pale in a moment of shock at the proposal to decimate the population of France decisively and sustainably in order to rehabilitate the state budget , are enough for the Minister of State, Saint-Fond, to identify a fatal weakness in her that arouses his lust for murder. Even the masters must go down like flies in the struggle for existence. Noirceuil eliminates Saint-Fond because it has become too dangerous for him; The arsonist Princess Borghese is thrown into Vesuvius in a whim of Juliette because she does not seem evil enough to her. Clairwil, the best friend, is poisoned. Murder can also happen to l'art pour l'art , without any material purpose; no purposeful rationalism may stand above the supreme principle of natural evil that rules the human being.

Philosophical Influences

Some of the passages used in the work are taken from L'Enfer détruit ou Examen raisonné du dogme de l'éternité des peines and Théologie portative ou Dictionnaire abregé de la religion chrétienne by Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach .

reception

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno referred to Juliette in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment .

See also

literature

Primary literature

  • Marquis de Sade, Justine and Juliette , 10 volumes, Matthes & Seitz, Munich 1990–2002. - New translations with detailed comments.
  • Marquis de Sade, Juliette or the advantages of vice , ISBN 3-548-30221-1 , Ullstein, o.O. 1989.
  • Marquis de Sade, Selected Works I – III , undated, Hamburg 1962–1965.

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: L'histoire de Juliette  - Sources and full texts (French)

Footnotes

  1. ↑ This engraving, n ° 105, is entitled: "  Il envoya le roman dans les flammes  ". This title is a quote from p. 867 of the anonymous book Le Marquis de Sade, ses aventures, ses œuvres, passions mystérieuses, folies érotiques , published by A. Fayard in 1885, gravure n ° 105, p. 833. There, in the 5th Part, Chapter XXIX, Le dernier ouvrage de M. de Sade , tells that in 1801 Sade sent Napoleon a copy of his novel “Juliette” with a dedication, and how Bonaparte reacted: “He threw the novel into the flames “, Had all of Sade's books confiscated and the Marquis arrested. The engraving can be found on p. 833.
  2. ^ Gallica
  3. ^ Gallica
  4. ^ Hans Ulrich Seifert: Sade: readers and author , dissertation 1978–1982 (Romance seminar), University of Marburg 1982.