Paris: The French government intervened on Monday 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 an auction in Paris.
Officials ordered that the 18th-century erotic masterpiece be withdrawn from sale, along with Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifestos,” which banned their export from France, Aguttes’ auction house told AFP.
They were part of a major sale of historical documents owned by the French investment company Aristophil, which was shut down in scandal two years ago, taking $1 billion of its investors’ money.
“120 Days of Sodom” was expected to cost 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 wealthy libertines seeking the ultimate form of sexual satisfaction on a scroll made from scraps of parchment he smuggled into his cell in the Bastille.
When the Paris prison was stormed at the start of the French Revolution on July 14, 1789, the famously riotous aristocrat was released, but he was swept away 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 surfaced decades later.
Still, the book languished unpublished for more than a century and was banned in Britain until the 1950s.
Auctioneer Claude Aguttes, who is organizing the 300 sales distributing Aristophils’ vast collection of manuscripts, said the French culture ministry had promised to buy Sade and Breton’s works “at international market prices.”
French courts seized 130,000 historical documents that Aristophil bought for its investors in 2015 after police denounced the company as a huge “pyramid scheme”, alleging that its founder Gerard Lheritier was running a Ponzi operation similar to that of Wall Street fraudster Bernard Madoff.