Juliette

a fascinating book, perhaps not to every ones taste, perhaps not even mine. A book I had seen in a woman's boudoir some years ago in France. I thought then I would one day read the English edition. What took me so long? Hell I don't know, now read on...........

Best in class

Was required to read this as part of Uni course. Facinating insight to man's darker self. free expression and unfettered baseness. Makes you question man's moral compass.

This is as expected - long but with an intoxicating approach to relationships.

Very good. Thanks.

There is a clear divide between those who get completely swept away by this book, absorbing it, unable to put it down, and those who bounce off and do not understand.It is long, at over twelve hundred pages, and it is not long at all as when you are in it it is a film you wish would never end, a lush narrative you could follow on and on down in to the deepest parts of your mind.It is difficult to read as there a many philosophical arguments that run to several pages, which are sometimes inspired and sometimes pure drudgery. It is so easy to read as you get pulled in. Like sitting next to a professor at dinner, sometimes you listen and sometimes you stare into the candle flame and think about the glittering eyes of a woman.If you love sensual experience, and are not afraid of violence, then this book is pure and liquid magic. If you are a dissenter to logic and modernism then this book will say what you always wanted to but never could. If you dont really like reading and find passion disturbing and scary then don't buy this book. Get Kant instead.

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) was educated at a Jesuit lycée before becoming Colonel of a Dragoon regiment and fighting in the Seven Years' War. On his return his behaviour – accused of blasphemy and sexual assaulting girls as well as doping them with Spanish fly – he was imprisoned (five years of this time was spent in the Bastille). After gaining a political position during the Revolution he was arrested at the behest of Bonaparte and spent the rest of his life in prisons and finally at the asylum at Charenton. Of all of his licentious writings, Juliette is the most extreme. A wanton sadist, Juliette is introduced into the world of the orgy as a young teenager in a convent, then expands her appetite for crime and sexual sadism through meeting the brutal Clairwill and Saint-Fond. Do not expect to find a titillating Fanny Hill here; the book was banned for a reason and it packed with scenes of coprophagia, necrophilia, sadism, incest, paedophilia and every perversion you could name as atrocities pile on atrocities until – as de Sade intended – you are numb and senseless to the appalling action. A father mourns his young daughter’s death – only because he can no longer cause her pain and rapes her dead body while exulting ‘beautiful corpse!’ Moral anarchy and a hate of Christianity are illustrated with stark brutality and swathes of dry philosophy, all written with an enthusiasm born from perversity. We might forgive the Marquis his sexual neurosis if he could write – sadly he could not and his characters are one-dimensional and the style unpolished and amateurish. In the end the novel is an interesting reflection of an unsound mind and a collection of pornographic tableaux but not to be taken seriously as classic literature.

The best way to describe this book is to use Sade's own words: an "encyclopaedia of inhuman practices" (p.1130). For me reading this book was, on the whole, an uncomfortable literary experience. Page after page of the most abhorrent atrocities all committed in the pursuit of carnal pleasures. Sade's libertines are grotesque, caricature monsters, possessing incredulous appetites and gargantuan attributes. They are not of this world, they are a product of Sade's incarcerated mind, polluted by bitterness, anger and self pity. Groomed from a young age Juliette is trained in the art of libertinage, where she excels, becoming incredibly rich and influential. Alongside her chief occupation, Juliette is schooled in the art of philosophy by one libertine after another. The principle tenets are: God does not exist, nature is as indifferent to humans as it is to ants, virtue is a chimera, vice is fun, morals are irrelevant. A sort of nihilistic, murderous misanthropy and Juliette enjoys putting it into practice. Superficially, and as Sade teasingly states, the book is no more than a recycled catalogue of libertinage, mass murder and corruption. But is it? To some extent, Sade's enquiring and curious mind conjures up surprises. The philosophical treatises and debates are explored with depth and understanding, empirically supported by numerous examples. Sade is innovative in his Enlightenment thinking. Such as his visionary pre- Darwinian views on the concept of the survival of the fittest. Similarly there is significant attention given to the consequences of over population (Malthusian growth model perhaps?). It is interesting that Juliette is a woman, I felt a feminist murmuring throughout the novel, particularly in the Durand character. Libertine women, at least, are treated as equals. In presenting one brutal libertine action after another is Sade reflecting back to the reader the actual brutality of man? I think so because Sade goes to great lengths to suggest this through his repeated references to uninterrupted warfare, executions, tortures, assassinations, rituals. Religion features high on Sade's list of human made atrocities. And, by way of example the Pope and his workforce make a memorable contribution to many infamies in this book. It is also interesting the note the tone of Sade's descriptions of his libertines in action. The use of almost comical military euphemisms to describe the libertine's activities is rife, as is the over the top and impossible theatricality of Sade's blindly choreographed set pieces.

good job

What am I to do with myself after I finish reading something so good? Is there anything to compare with this or "the 120 days of sodom"?Everyone should read this. Everyone should be libertine. Everyone should engage in the lubricious. I am so enamored with the philosophy of sade... ahh, what a mind. Here is an example of what is truely crimanal, and that is to deny nature, whatever it's inclinations.Fantastic read! Please comment on this if there is something else I may read to compare with this work or I will be reading this over and over again untill I die. Yes, this book is that good. Thank You.

If you want to see what the basis for the word Sadism is all about, this is the place. Finally available on the net in its complete, unexpurgated evil entirety, with the translation improved by Austryn Wainhouse, as published by Grove Press in the mid 20th century. This is a cornerstone example of the extreme diversity that human imagination can produce, in this case advocating evil behavior in all aspects of life, and supporting its ethos with reams of "philosophy" mostly consisting of examples from remote cultures and convoluted reasoning which always reveals that evil is what Nature (not the nonexistent God) intended the enlightened individual to be, and that evil acts are the most laudable and most exciting to the passions, which are meant to be aroused by hurting others in every way possible. All this is of course interspersed with many, many scenes of physical cruelty and depravity, each more titillatingly disgusting than the last. Juliette is unlike anything else ever published, I think, in it's unrelenting conviction of the goodness of badness.

1,600 punishing pages devoted to disproving theology, worshing vice and exploring the deepest, darkest corners of the human experience. Plunge yourself into the hell of Sade. A philosophical, amoral tale of corruption, deprivatity, sex, hedonism, crime, hatred, blasphemy, sin and history. As if the man was possessed by demons to taint the hearts and minds of readers and drag them to hell."Abandonne tout espoir, toi qui entres ici."

Memoirs of a murderous female libertine, it explains Sade's philosophical viewpoints clearly. Wainhouse's translation is by far the best version in English.