Juliette

Juliette is a novel written by the infamous Marquis de Sade around The French Revolution. It's a companion piece to his previous novel, Justine. While Justine focuses on a girl who is punished for being virturous, Juliette focuses on her titular sister, who is rewarded for her vice.

Set a few years before the Revolution, Juliette starts off as a young girl raised in a nunnery, but later joins a brothel in her teenage years. She becomes the most prestigious, sought-after prostitute among the French Aristocracy, and eventually falls in love with three elites, Saint-Fond, Noirceuil, and Clairwel, whom collectively corrupt her into a murderous, rape-hungry noblewoman that goes on a decade-long misadventure of debauchery and degeneracy.

To put into perspective how disturbing this story is, when Napoleon Bonaparte read it, he had de Sade arrested and imprisoned for the rest of his life.

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Tropes used in Juliette include:

• Aristocrats Are Evil: Quite fittingly, de Sade hated the French Aristocracy with a seething passion, so he depicted them as being irredeemably depraved and oppressive.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: De Sade's admittedly interesting philosophy on government and society is explored; he believes that law is unfair and lawlessness is fair, because the law is one-sided (only the law has the power to persecute and not vice versa) while lawlessness allows everyone to victimize each other equally.
• Anything That Moves: Juliette fucks everything under the sun. Men, women, children, animals...
• Asshole Victim: Most of the libertines are eventually killed by their own treacherous, amoral lifestyle.
• Author Filibuster: The story is absolutely drenched in this. Almost every single character has at least one multi-paged monologue where they act as a mouthpiece for de Sade's philosophy on politics, society, religion, morality, and sexuality.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Although never depicted, Juliette offhandedly mentions that she sometimes has sex with large dogs. Ironically, it's probably her tamest hobby.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The libertines literally call themselves "the Sodality of The Friends of Crime".
• Corrupt Politician: Saint-Fond is a member of France's Council of Ministers. His exact office isn't specified, but he seems to be a treasurer of some sort. He uses his powers to induce a famine. Noirceuil eventually poisons him and usurps his position.
• Combat Sadomasochist: The thing about the libertines is that there is no torture or humiliation they commit that they wouldn't gladly accept themselves. Juliette literally wallows feces of her male servants for the fun of it, and isn't fazed by the idea of getting skinned alive.
• Extreme Libido: Juliette's nymphomania defies possibility. There's a scene where she has sex with thousands of people in a single day.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Purposely averted. The libertines do show a fondness for each other, but they always make sure to specify that they're in love with their depravity, not them. They murder and betray each other without hesitation.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Juliette tries so hard to not have anything resembling standards, but even she is shook by Saint-Fond's plan to cause a genocidal famine. Her momentary hesitation is enough for Saint-Fond to exile her from France for decades.
• Evil Is Petty: Even though Saint-Fond doesn't believe in religious theology, he still can't stand the thought of his victims going to Heaven after he kills them. So he performs a Satanic pact to doom them to Hell, just to make sure.
• Evil Mentor: Noirceuil is Juliette's most recurring and overarching libertine friend. He's the one who grooms her into the sociopath she is today, and at no point do they have a disagreement.
• French Jerk: The biggest understatement of all time.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The story follows Juliette's 20 year journey, where she goes from a young orphan girl in a nunnery to the biggest menace in Europe.
• Hollywood Atheist: The libertines do not simply just disbelieve in God, but absolutely abhor the concept of religion.
• Historical Domain Character: Catherine the Great and Pope Pius VI make an appearance. Naturally, they get a Historical Villain Upgrade.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Catherine the Great and Pope Pious VI are treated as libertines, meaning they gleefully rape and murder children.
• Karma Houdini: The central theme of the story. The more depraved and destructive Juliette gets, the richer and more successful she becomes.
  • Karma Houdini Warranty: However, the author does say at the very end that Juliette died 10 years after the book's ending, without giving details. Since the book takes place a few years before the French Revolution, this could possibly imply that Juliette was one of the many aristocrats guillotined by crazed revolutionaries. There was no one who deserved it more than her. Then again, she probably enjoyed it.
• Kick the Son of a Bitch: The one "redeeming" thing about the libertines is that they betray and murder each other habitually. Nourviel kills Saint-Fond and Juliette kills Clairwil.
  • However, interestingly, Juliette sometimes purposely averts this. She's tempted to kill Minski, a Muscovite who threatened to kill her, but she relents because she can't stand the thought of depriving the world of such a ruinious criminal.
• I Love the Dead: Juliette molests the corpse of her sister at the end.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The libertines all engage in indulgent cannibalism. The most avid of which is Minski, an ogre-like Russian.
• Money Fetish: Juliette is the richest woman in Europe, and she doesn't even spend any of it. She simply likes hoarding money and conning millions from people for the sake of it, aroused by the idea of poor people getting even poorer.
• Nun Too Holy: Juliette was raised by a convent of nuns, whom taught her to hate God and engage in sadistic orgies.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Saint-Fond hates the lower-class so much that he orchestrates a genocide on them by causing a catastrophic famine.
• Parental Incest: Juliette has this both ways; she has sex with her father and rapes her daughter.
• Smoky Gentlemen's Club: The Sodality of The Friends of Crime is a private social club that all of France's libertines are secretly members of. Only the wealthiest can get in, since it demands an extremely high membership fee.
• Straw Feminist: Clairwil makes many long-winded monologues about how much she hates men, and seeks to avenge the eternity of female oppression by sadistically butchering little boys and grown men alike. She isn't, however, opposed to carving up females either.
• Straw Nihilist: The libertines believe that morality, love, and religion are all nonsense and that the only "right" thing to do is to appease Mother Nature by obeying your basest and most primal urges, which will inevitably include sex and violence. Some scholars have even tried linking de Sade's influence to Friedrich Nietzsche, the creator of nihilism, but the connection isn't concrete.
• Wicked Cultured: Juliette is very well-versed in historical and mythological figures associated with depravity and hedonism, like Tiberius, Nero, Messalina, Empress Theodora, Aphrodite (or Venus, as she calls her), and Dionysus (or Bacchus, as she calls him).
• Would Hurt a Child: There is no cruelty Juliette wouldn't inflict on children, including her own 7 year old daughter.