The 120 Days of Sodom by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade.

"In 1784, Vincennes was closed and Sade was transferred to the Bastille in Paris. On July 2, 1789, he reportedly shouted out of his cell to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!", causing somewhat of a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris. (The storming of the Bastille, marking the start of the French Revolution, occurred on July 14.) He had been working on his magnum opus, Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom), despairing when the manuscript was lost during his transferral; but he continued to write."

>>> from the article about Sade on Wikipedia

>>> the text is available here

. . . and the film made by Pier Paolo Pasolini:


"Salo was based on the Marquis de Sade's gross sexual-political polemic The 120 Days of Sodom, in which a group of libertines gather in an isolated castle to tell perverse stories and torture a group of captives. Pasolini radically overhauled de Sade's original conception by placing the story in Italy during the closing days of World War II. The generic libertines of the original were made much more specific in Salo, intended to represent what Pasolini saw as the four destructive forces operating in modern Italy: a magistrate (representing the legal system), a banker (unbridled capitalism), a duke (royalty and the unbalanced class system), and a monsignore (the corrupt church). The victims in Salo are those Pasolini saw as victims in real life -- the poor, the peasants, the working class. In the opening scenes of the film, the four capture a large number of peasant youth and bring them to an isolated villa, where they enact all kinds of ritual tortures on them."

>>> from an article by Gary Morris in the Brights Lights Film Journal, on Popcorn Q found here

"When the movie premiered in West-Germany in February 1976 it was confiscated by the state attorney in order to ban it. The district-court of Stuttgart classified it as pornographic and violence-praising. A few days later though the movie was permitted for entire West-Germany."

>>> from the listing on the Internet Movie Database found here. Check out all of the trivia on this film.

below, a clip from the film with home-made subtitles in English