SOURCE: Phillips, John. “Pornography, Poetry, Parody: Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Onze Mille Verges.” In Forbidden Fictions: Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth-Century French Literature, pp. 25-42. London: Pluto Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Phillips discusses Guillaume Apollinaire's pornographic novel, Les Onze Mille Verges, written in 1908 but not legally published until 1970, and considers how Apollinaire parodies the work of the Marquis de Sade.

It was not until 1970 that the first legal edition of the pornographic novel, Les Onze Mille Verges, bearing the name of Guillaume Apollinaire, was published. The heirs to his estate had finally admitted the existence of the book, written over 60 years earlier, and which has been described as the most explicit and violent erotic novel ever written in French. As Jean-Jacques Pauvert observes, there was no immediate public outcry, although only two years previously, in 1968, the Commission de protection de l'enfance et de la jeunesse had attempted to...