| L'histoire De Juliette |
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The full title of the novel in the original French is ''Histoire de Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice'', and the English title is "Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded". Both ''Justine'' and ''Juliette'' were published anonymously. Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author, and as a result Sade was incarcerated without trial for the last 13 years of his life. PLOT Juliette is raised in a Convent , but at the age of 13 she is seduced by a woman who immediately explains that Morality , Religion and other such concepts are meaningless. There are plenty of similar philosophical rants during the book, all attacking the ideas of God , morals, remorse, love, etc, the overall conclusion being that the only aim in life is "to enjoy oneself at no matter whose expense." Juliette takes this to the extreme and manages to murder her way through a huge number of people, including various family members and friends. During the novel, which follows Juliette through the ages of 13 to about 30, the wanton anti-heroine engages in virtually every form of depravity and encounters a series of like-minded Libertine s, such as the ferocious Clairwil, whose main passion is in murdering young men, and Saint Fond, a 50-year-old multi-millionaire who commits Incest with his daughter, murders his father, tortures young girls to death on a daily basis and even plots an ambitious scheme to provoke a Famine that will wipe out half the population of France . ANALYSIS AND INFLUENCE Significantly, as with most of de Sade's work, it is the female protagonists who are the most interesting and colourful. The male characters are generally quite two-dimensional and often absurdly over-the-top, such as the Russian giant Minski, who lives in a huge castle in the middle of nowhere, with dungeons full of hundreds of women and children. One of the essays in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 's '' Dialectic Of Enlightenment '' (1947) is titled "Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" and analyzes Juliette as the embodiment of the philosophy of Enlightenment . They write: "she demonizes Catholicism as the most-up-to-date mythology, and with it civilization as a whole procedures is enlightened and efficient as she goes about her work of sacrilege[... She favours system and consequence." Andrea Dworkin , who vilified Sade as the archetypical woman-hating pornographer, nevertheless modeled her first novel ''Ice and Fire'' ( 1986 ) on ''Juliette''. EXTERNAL LINKS
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