It describes the activities of four wealthy libertine Frenchmen who spend four months seeking the ultimate sexual gratification through orgies, sealing themselves in an inaccessible castle in the heart of the Black Forest with 12 accomplices, 20 designated victims and 10 servants.
Four aging prostitutes relate stories of their most memorable clients whose sexual practices involved "passions" including coprophilia , necrophilia , bestiality , incest, rape, and child sexual abuse. The stories inspire the libertines to engage in acts of increasing violence leading to the torture and murder of their victims, most of whom are adolescents and young women.
The novel only survives in draft form. Its introduction and first part were written according to Sade's detailed plan, but the subsequent three parts are mostly in the form of notes.
Sade wrote it in secrecy while imprisoned in the Bastille. When the fortress was stormed by revolutionaries on 14 July , Sade believed the manuscript had been lost.
However, it had been found and preserved without his knowledge and was eventually published in a restricted edition in for its scientific interest to sexologists. The novel was banned as pornographic in France and English-speaking countries before becoming more widely available in commercial editions in the s. The novel attracted increasing critical interest after World War II. In , Georges Bataille said it "towers above all other books in that it represents man's fundamental desire for freedom that he is obliged to contain and keep quiet".
