The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'Emmanuelle: God Is With Me' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 12)

'I produced many other very important pictures in France—cult pictures,' he continues. 'Emmanuelle is over. That does not interest me anymore.'

At first, I wonder if his reluctance doesn't have to do with his new career: he's now a politician, and a conservative one at that.

Currently the mayor of Menerbes, the village that Peter Mayle made famous, he was previously a member of Parliament.

Anywhere else, of course, having a skin-flick on your resume—as well as a cult film called Santa Claus Is a Shit (Le pere noel est une ordure)—might present something of a problem for a politico.

But in France, there's no shame in having created one of the most famous erotic films in history.

In fact, Rousset-Rouard reckons his box office success helped him at the ballot box.

One time, on a visit to Japan with Chirac, he told the former president: 'You know, Jacques, I've won more voters with Emmanuelle than you have.'

The mayor's office is festooned with photos of him and dignitaries from around the world, including the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and Chirac and his successor, Sarkozy.

Despite their political differences, Yves claims he's good friends with both, and I don't doubt it.

With his long nose and crafty eyes, there's something vulpine about Yves; he could flatter the red off a rose. 

With some blandishments of my own, though, I manage to get the old fox talking about Emmanuelle, and it turns out he is indeed proud of having produced one of the most successful French films of all time.

It happened like this: Yves was casting around in the Seventies for a project that would enable him to leap from advertising to feature films.

While flying to New York, he got talking to a guy who said: 'You must do Emmanuelle.'

'I had never read the book,' he admits.

When he got back to France, he met with the publisher, who tried to discourage him, telling him the film rights to the 1959 novel were renewed every year by a big production firm.

Yves asked the man to check just in case, and the publisher was shocked to find that the option had actually lapsed fifteen days earlier—'when I was on the flight,' Yves beams triumphantly.

'At that moment, I said, Emmanuelle: God is With Me.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Man Who Made Emmanuelle -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 11)

That said, reading Sade for the philosophy is like watching porn flicks for insights into life in modern California.

The Marquis owes his reputation as a philosophe mainly to the fact that his work was banned for decades and rediscovered just as sexology was taking off.

For years, the manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom and Gomorrah was thought to have been lost during the Storming of the Bastille in July 1789.

It wasn't until over a century later that one of the pioneers of sex studies, Dr. Iwan Bloch, managed to track it down and publish the first limited edition of the book—in German—in 1904.

And now a transplanted Irishman is hoping to do his own bit for the Marquis' myth here in his terre native.

Finn wants to open a shop that would highlight Sade's work and philosophy.

'But I want to do it non-profit-making. I want to do it for de Sade. I know sex sells and all that, but I don't want to get into this fetish-sadomasochism stuff because that shows a bad side to him. I think there's a whole other side to de Sade.'

* * *

Ever since the troubadours, the nobles of Provence have had a reputation for churning out porn, and one notable absence at the premiere of Sade is a former pornographer himself.

Of course, Yves Rousset-Rouard balks at this description, but as the producer of Emmanuelle (plus two sequels) and the founder of the world's first Corkscrew Museum, you can't help but suspect he's obsessed with screwing.

Inevitably, the collection of tire-bouchons on his vineyard five miles from Lacoste includes some naughty bits, such as a range of nineteenth-century 'erotic' corkscrews endowed with spread-eagle handles and male and female genitalia.

Nevertheless, Rousset-Rouard is reluctant to talk about his more famous world first: the softcore crossover that made erotica mainstream.

'I produced 35 movies in my life, and just three Emmanuelles,' he protests.

In case you're counting, that's three more than Spielberg, the Weinstein brothers, or Yves' friend, Ridley Scott.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Sadism: The Most 'Natural' Way to Live -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 10)

When the parents of four of the girls claimed that their children had been abducted, the Marquis' wife spirited them away to hide the signs of her husband's abuse.

One of the girls chose to continue serving the Sades, but three others were packed off to convents (the Marquis' wife told the nuns not to believe their confessions), and the most traumatized teenager was sent to be guarded by the Marquis' uncle.

Seeing that he was a priest, the raving girl tried to confide in him; little did she know that the Abbé de Sade—an expert on the troubadours—was almost as bad as his nephew: rumor had it he'd also recently kidnapped a girl from her parents.

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

In the spring of 1775, Sade's chambermaid, Nanon, had a child and claimed he was the father (which may very well have been a lie).

Just in case, to prevent her from joining forces with the parents of the abused girls, the Marquis' wife framed her for stealing some silver and succeeded in getting her locked up.

Nanon didn't find out until months later that her newborn had died while she was in prison.

Which makes me wonder: just as the Marquis' descendants are still kicking around—his great-great grandson lives in the Loire Valley—it's feasible that the victims of his victims might have survived down the ages, forming a kind of abusive family tree.

If it's true that many pedophiles have been victims themselves, and some of Sade's victims went on to abuse more than one child each, and their victims did the same, then even allowing for war, disease and margin of error, it's possible that someone somewhere is being abused now because of what took place in Lacoste less than eight generations ago.

Maybe that's why Sade gets so little publicity here.

Not surprisingly, Finn doesn't like to talk much about his hero's sex crimes, preferring to paint him as an important figure in the history of thought.

And to a certain extent, he's got a point.

For example, Sade mocked Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers for idealizing Nature.

Decades before Darwin, the Marquis preached that Nature was cruel, not kind; in his brutally reductive view, the most 'natural' way to live was to revel in Nature's cruelty.

A sculpture on the grounds of the Marquis de Sade's castle,
part of Pierre Cardin's Festival de Lacoste
(with a not-so-ghostly specter in the foreground)