Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,

so that you may be able to prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Romans 12 2. This is resistance and reformation on the Fight,

Laugh Feast Network. Sometime in the early summer of 1787, Donatienne Alphonse Fassois de Sade completed the manuscript of his novella Justine.

Known in history as the Marquis de Sade, he had been imprisoned in the Paris Bastille for several years, charged with indecency, obscenity, pornography,

blasphemy, violent assault, and the corruption of public morals.

But his prior crimes could not even begin to hold a candle to the perversities portrayed in this concupiscent little book. He boasted it was

capable of corrupting the devil. Paris, then on the cusp of a tumultuous revolution, was awash

with sexual promiscuity. As De Sade's biographer, Maurice

Leverre wrote, Sex never sold so well. People went wild for lascivious scenes and

lubricous bodies. It was impossible to find debaucheries outrageous enough, love-making furious

enough, or perversions new enough to slake the public's lusty appetite. The erotic and the

political had never meshed so tightly.

The Palais-Royal complex of the Duke de Leon had become the nexus of rebellion against the Christian consensus of the Anseigne regime of the Bourbon Monarchy.

In its public theaters, shopping arcades, and cafes,

Parisian progressives celebrated every aberrant form of revolutionary politics, every profane,

sensual perversity, and every vicious abhorrence of anything and everything to do with traditional Christian morality.

Bolstered by the fawning radical journals, Tony newspapers, and chic magazines,

the Palais-Royal played host to grotesque displays of pornography, brazen prostitution,

and orgiastic Saturnalia side by side with ideological anarchism, nascent socialism, and utopian totalitarianism.

The publication of Justine served to throw kerosene onto the flames of

insurrection. Like all his works, the novella combined the graphic descriptions of sex acts,

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