The prisoner’s hand ached. He sat hunched over his desk in a cold tower of the Bastille jail in Paris, writing in tiny letters on a very long roll of paper—nearly 40 feet in total, made from smaller scraps he had glued together. These were not ideal working conditions. But they would do.
The prisoner was not treated badly in jail. He was a nobleman, which meant he was allowed luxuries in his cell: a wardrobe and tapestries, books and perfume, and his very own housekeeper. Yet he was aware that what he was writing might jeopardize these comforts. So, each night he would roll up his scroll, put it in a copper cylinder, and hide it in a gap in his cell wall. He did not want to risk the guards finding it. And with good cause. For his story was a record of his most debauched thoughts and desires.
Over thirty-seven evenings in the autumn of 1785, the prisoner, Donatien Alphonse François, better known to history as the Marquis de Sade, crafted in secret what he called “the most impure tale that has ever been told since the world began.”
Set in a remote medieval castle nestled in the Black Forest in southwest Germany—but based on Sade’s own castle, Château de Lacoste—the narrative tells of four wealthy male libertines indulging in a savage 120-day orgy, inspired by the vile tales of middle-aged female brothel keepers. Organized by a strict timetable, the procuresses weave stories of their degeneracy, each one illustrating perversions or “passions” ranging from the simple to the murderous. The exploits they arouse in the libertines involve sexually abusing thirty-six abducted victims, mostly children (some the libertines’ own daughters). The children are dismembered and penetrated, flayed alive, disemboweled, and their intestines set alight. There is incest and rape—some victims are as young as three years old. Feces and vomit and human flesh are eagerly consumed. As these atrocities become increasingly extreme, they ultimately result in the victims’ violent deaths, and necrophilia.
Art can be dangerous—but the very gatekeepers of supposedly depraved art can also be dangerous.
This is all narrated in stark, dry detail. Sade presents it to us with wry humor, describing it as a sensuous “banquet.” The story is known today as The 120 Days of Sodom.
*
The Marquis de Sade was abandoned by his parents at an early age. Raised by servants and educated by an uncle, Sade was a spoiled child with a temper and a taste for rebellion. He attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one of the most prestigious schools in Paris. There he was routinely beaten, an experience which instilled in him a lifelong fascination with flagellation and pain. After school he fought in the Seven Years War as colonel of a Dragoon regiment. On his return, Sade married Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil in 1763, a marriage arranged by his father.
For some people, marriage is a settling experience. But for Sade it was the opposite. His notorious sexual indiscretions in Paris led to him being exiled to his castle at Lacoste in 1768—a place that would become a theatre for his wildest fantasies. Together there, Sade and his wife—ever the loyal spouse—pursued an extreme libertine existence. There were orgies, including one during which Sade poisoned two sex workers with the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly. There was also illegal homosexuality: Sade and his manservant Latour were sentenced to death in absentia for sodomy.
Most notorious was the so-called “Little Girls” scandal, where Sade abducted five fifteen-year-old girls and sexually abused them in his castle. The abominable crime became a public sensation in Provence, which Sade seemed to relish: “I pass for the werewolf of these parts,” he said. “Poor little chicks with their words of terror!” Sade evaded French law by taking refuge in Italy. But a few years later, after committing similar crimes there, he was arrested and imprisoned at the Château de Vincennes at the king’s orders, under a lettre de cachet (signet letter). After Vincennes closed in 1784, Sade was transferred to the Bastille at the age of forty-five.
Four years after Sade began his debauched novel on the long scroll of parchment, he incited a riot among other prisoners at the Bastille by shouting to a gathering outside his window that prison guards were slitting the throats of inmates. Once order had been restored to the prison, he was removed from the Bastille—”naked as a worm”—and transferred to an asylum outside of Paris. This sudden removal meant that Sade could not retrieve his novel, which was still hidden in his cell wall. To make matters worse, ten days later, revolutionaries stormed the Bastille. Hearing of the mass lootings, Sade believed his novel had been lost forever. Overwhelmed with grief for his missing masterpiece, he wept “tears of blood.”
But remarkably, his secret scroll was not lost. It had been found and saved just before the storming, by a man called Arnoux de Saint-Maximin. After making its way through the hands of a Provençal aristocrat and then a German collector of erotica, the novel was eventually published in 1904 by Iwan Bloch, a Berlin sexologist. Although Bloch was careful to use a pseudonym when he published Sade’s work, he did not regard its wild sexual and violent excess to be inappropriate for public consumption. In fact, Bloch considered The 120 Days of Sodom to have great scientific and anthropological importance in its categorization of the most shocking sexual fetishes: “a similar work will not be found either among the ancients or among the moderns,” he later wrote.
Bloch was not alone in his admiration of Sade’s art. Throughout the twentieth century the novel was made available via private publications for wealthy patrons, produced pseudonymously or anonymously to evade the authorities. At mid-century a publisher called Jean-Jacques Pauvert put his name on a large print run of a collection of Sade’s works, including The 120 Days of Sodom. Like Bloch, Pauvert saw Sade’s novel as a valuable medico-legal document; while his was the first commercial French edition of the text, he claimed that most of his sales were to the medical community.
Artists, philosophers, and historians began to identify aesthetic, cognitive, and political value in Sade’s work. Simone de Beauvoir disagreed with Sade’s cruel ethics, but in 1955 she defended the publication of his literature on the grounds that it explored atheistic existentialist themes and therefore had philosophical importance. In 1957, Georges Bataille praised Sade’s work in its shameless presentation of man’s deepest desires, although he added: “Nobody, unless he is totally deaf to it, can finish Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome without feeling sick.”
Around this time, avant-garde artists and writers were harnessing what art historian Alyce Mahon calls the “Sadean imagination” to critique socio-political issues from fascism to terrorism, and to subvert traditional gender roles by placing the sexual body at the center of art-making as a form of political resistance.
Eventually, the dam cracked. In a landmark British legal case in 1960, Penguin Books were cleared of any crime for publishing an uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel condemned for its frequent use of the words “fuck” and “cunt.” While the novel had been published privately in small print runs in Italy and France, the UK trial, bolstered by a similar one in the US a year earlier, resulted in mainstream publishers across the world distributing works that had previously been considered obscene and unpublishable—including those of Sade.
This was hailed by many as an important victory in the struggle for freedom of artistic expression. It heralded a general reassessment of the legitimacy of art with subversive or offensive themes. Today, the original manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom is worth at least €6 million and is deemed a French national treasure. Some critics have even described Sade as France’s Shakespeare.
*
Since the middle of the twentieth century, societies around the globe have undergone a collective revolution in standards and attitudes towards obscenity and immorality. In the realms of art, literature, film, and television, words and images that would once have been considered indecent, offensive, or immoral are now commonplace, especially in the West. Where several generations ago it would have been difficult to incidentally glimpse explicit depictions of vice, sex, blasphemy, and violent death, today it would be more unusual to go through a single day without seeing one or more of these.
For those who actively seek out obscenity, there is a limitless supply. With pornography at our fingertips via laptops and smartphones, we can access images and videos that would have made even Sade blush. While some genres of pornography aim to encourage a more egalitarian erotic taste in consumers (one that is free from patriarchal conditioning and respects consent), other genres relish in portraying pure horror, including real sexual violence and death. Many of the acts Sade described in words are now actually performed in high-production videos, streamable for free.
This transformation in values and accessibility has profoundly affected the story of art. From sexualized horror films like Alfred Hithcock’s Psycho (1960) and art performances of masturbation like Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), to explicit music videos like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP (Wet-Ass Pussy)” (2020) and dark true-crime TV shows like Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025), traditionally “immoral” themes and images are now celebrated in art of all kinds. Where medieval Christian art in England was once under threat from the Lollards, who saw image worship itself as heathen idolatry, we now encounter overtly blasphemous art: the figure of Christ submerged in urine; a crucifix penetrating a demon-possessed child; the Virgin Mary painted with elephant dung; and “JESUS IS A CUNT” stamped on rock band T-shirts (this piece of merch from metal band Cradle of Filth also features a masturbating nun on the front—throughout the 1990s fans were arrested for wearing it in public).
Depravity does not always appear how we might expect it to. It can hide in plain sight like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Some find these works and objects amusing or exciting, but others are deeply troubled by them. Allegedly, so many cinema-goers vomited and fainted during the initial screenings of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) that theatre staff had to hand out smelling salts. And a very small minority resort to extreme violence in response, as with the terrorist attacks on the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2011, 2015, and 2020, which were motivated by the magazine’s mocking depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Today, violence is mainstream in many art forms, especially in videogames. The Grand Theft Auto series is infamous for its portrayal of drugs, sex, and brutality, with one scene inviting the player to perform waterboard torture. And where in the eighteenth century, shunga—Japanese erotic art showing sex between couples—was banned, in 2006 the videogame RapeLay was released in Japan. The game centers on a male character stalking and raping a mother and her two young daughters.
As art and its creators have shed their inhibitions in this post-Sadean world, politicians and cultural commentators have reliably lined up to condemn this total freedom of expression as being dangerous to society. In the 1960s, British campaigner and teacher Mary Whitehouse launched her crusade against this ever-growing “permissive society.” While Whitehouse—often seen as a Christian prude—should be criticized for her organizing against sex education in schools, and condemned for her homophobia, some critics now think she was ahead of her time. Her lobbying resulted in legislation which surely was good for society—for instance, the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalized child pornography.
Whitehouse’s views culminated in the so-called “porn wars” of the 1970s-80s. While radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography dehumanized women and caused gender-based violence, others like the novelist Angela Carter considered some pornography—including Sade’s literary art—to offer a progressive utopian reality where women have autonomy and sexual freedom.
The debate rages on. People still butt heads over “WAP” and its accompanying music video. Is it a feminist masterpiece celebrating women’s sexual empowerment? A step back in women’s progress? Or is it just simply “really, really, really, vulgar,” as right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro puts it? Republican politician James Bradley, who claims to have heard the song by accident, echoes Shapiro’s disquiet: according to him, “WAP” is “what happens when children are raised without God.”
Often these kinds of criticisms can be dismissed as a matter of taste, not to mention prejudice. But where they carry real weight is when artworks can be linked to harm caused in the real world. Many worry that the free and easy availability of pornography and the sexualization of popular culture has affected young men and women’s expectations of real sex; that the celebration of graphic violence and criminality in videogames, films, and music videos glamorizes such behavior to the extent that it inspires copycats. And many twenty-first-century civil rights activists argue that the celebration and glorification of historical imperialists, slave traders, or racist leaders by public statues and paintings perpetuates inequality in the modern world—causing concrete damage to the oppressed groups implicitly targeted by these artworks.
Then there are more specific cases. In the 1980s and 1990s, several white supremacists cited William Luther Pierce’s Turner Diaries (1978), a racist and antisemitic novel, as influencing their hate crimes and acts of terrorism. The novel tells the story of a violent revolution in the US which leads to a race war, and it has since been credited with shaping white nationalism in the US, the UK, and Germany. And after the disturbed American James Holmes murdered twelve people in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012 during a screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, persistent rumors and newspaper reports suggested he was dressed as (and influenced by) the character of the Joker from the previous The Dark Knight. The fact that this was untrue—Holmes had dyed his hair red, but not for that reason—did little to dispel the rumor, which seemed to fit the popular belief that violent, dystopian art has the power to induce some viewers to commit terrible crimes.
Sometimes we’ve got it wrong. Our views on morality and indecency are rife with inconsistency and hypocrisy. As recently as the 1990s, while sexually explicit images of women were plastered over so-called “lad mags” targeted at heterosexual boys and men, artists like Robert Mapplethorpe were censored for their explicit homosexual art. Mapplethorpe was called a “human cockroach” by Republican senator Jesse Helms, who blamed the LGBTQIA+ community for the seeming decay of culture. And while museums are bursting at the seams with paintings of naked women, real women are thrown out of museums for wearing too little (a low-cut dress) or too much (a niqab).
Taken together, these cases and others like them suggest a thorny and complex narrative about the philosophy and history of art. The general movement towards unbounded freedom of expression in liberal societies still meets legal, cultural, or social restrictions on the morality of artworks. Art can be dangerous—but the very gatekeepers of supposedly depraved art can also be dangerous. What we deem morally acceptable is itself fraught with issues; depravity does not always appear how we might expect it to. It can hide in plain sight like a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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From Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by Daisy Dixon. Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Daisy Dixon.
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