Set in the 1770 and 1780s, 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, who collectively corrupt her into a murderous, nymphomaniacal noblewoman that goes on a decade-long misadventure of debauchery and degeneracy.
To put into perspective how disturbing this story is, when Napoléon Bonaparte read it, he had de Sade arrested and imprisoned for the rest of his life.
Received a film adaptation In Name Only called Juliette de Sade (1969). However, bits and pieces of it are also more accurately adapted in Justine de Sade (1972) and Marquis de Sade's Justine (1969).
The story provides examples of:
- Appease the Volcano God: Juliette and Clairwil toss Princess Olympia Borghese into Mount Vesuvius as an experiment: if Nature hates them committing crimes, the volcano will smite them. The volcano does erupt, but they survive unscathed, which they treat as Nature's blessing.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: The French Aristocracy (and all aristocracies for that matter, such as Naples and Tuscany) is depicted as being essentially a human trafficking syndicate.
- Anarcho-Tyranny: The libertine government allows actual criminals to roam free unpunished, raping and killing as they please, while also imprisoning and oppressing law-abiding citizens.
- Anarchy Is Chaos: De Sade's 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.
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: Mid-way through the story, several chapters are told from the perspective of Borchamps, Clairwil's brother, and his misadventures in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Russia.
- Asshole Victim: Most of the libertines are eventually killed by their own treacherous, amoral lifestyle.
- Author Appeal: Like most of de Sade's works, practically every character is an out-and-out atheist if not anti-theist who despises the idea of the universe being a benevolent or fair place, much less one made by a benevolent deity. As the title makes clear, vice and hedonism are rewarded, torture, rape, murder, bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia (and practically any other -philia you can think of) are commonplace, and every sociopathic prick is a Karma Houdini. It's like if one took Humans Are Bastards and Hobbes Was Right as jerk-off material, which the author very well may have.
- 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: Juliette beds an entire menagerie of exotic animals... before killing them all.
- Brother–Sister Incest: Clairwil is married to her brother, Borchamps, doubling as Unholy Matrimony and Villainous Incest.
- Card-Carrying Villain: The libertines literally call themselves "the Sodality of The Friends of Crime" (a parody of the real-life Society of the Friends of the Constitution).
- Corrupt Church: All clergymen in the book, from Jesuit monks to archbishops to the Pope himself, are all treated as atheist libertines who simply use the Bible as a tool to legitimize their tyranny.
- 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 or justice minister of some sort. He uses his powers to induce a famine and falsely imprison innocent people. Noirceuil eventually poisons him and usurps his position.
- Dirty Coward: The libertines are all proudly cowards, sobbing and begging whenever the tables are turned and their lives are threatened. They believe that to be brave is to hate life, and to be a coward is to love life.
- Does Not Like Men: 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.
- Extreme Libido: A libertine's nymphomania defies possibility in this world. There's a scene where an Italian nobleman has sex with thousands of men in a single day, which literally isn't even logistically possible.
- 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 shaken 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 religion, 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 be safe.
- 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.
- Evil Sorceress: Durand, a Parisian poison master who dabbles in dark magic. But, being an atheist, she insists her magic tricks are all smoke and mirrors.
- Extreme Omnisexual: Juliette fucks everything under the sun. Men, women, children, animals...
- French Jerk: Every single French aristocrat is depicted as a hedonistic psychopath. They also tend to be French nationalists, making their behavior all the more pompous. However, to be fair, in de Sade's world all aristocracies are evil, whether they be French, Italian, Russian, Dutch, or Swedish.
- 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.
- Government Conspiracy: Yes, this trope is Older Than Radio. This story subscribes to the real-life "Pacte de Famine" conspiracy theory, which alleges that the French government orchestrated a series of famines throughout the 18th century to cull the population. This was one of the biggest fuels for the Revolution.
- Hollywood Atheist: The libertines do not simply just disbelieve in God, but absolutely abhor the concept of religion, plus they're all depraved murderers, rapists and torturers whose pastime is sadism (along with their philosophy).
- Historical Domain Character: Catherine the Great, Pope Pius VI, and Cardinal de Bernis make an appearance. Naturally, they get a Historical Villain Upgrade. And according to Wikipedia, Princess Sophia is supposed to be the real-life Princess Wilhelmina with the names changed.
- 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: The author says 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, or purged by Napoleon's regime like de Sade himself was.
- 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 ruinous 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.
- Malicious Misnaming: Juliette refers to Pius VI by his birth name, Braschi, to show that she spitefully refuses to recognize his authority as Pope.
- Money Fetish: Juliette is the richest woman in Europe, and she hardly even spends 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, who 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. Clairwil also says that, if she had the ability to kill every human on earth, she'd be sad she didn't have more worlds to exterminate.
- Parental Incest: Juliette has this both ways; she has sex with her father and rapes her daughter.
- Sadist: The book condenses sadism in one sentence: enjoy oneself at the expense of anyone and everyone.
- 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 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.
- Too Kinky to Torture: The thing about the libertines is that there is no torture or humiliation they commit that they wouldn't gladly accept themselves. Juliette literally swallows the feces of her male servants for the fun of it, and Durand isn't fazed by the idea of getting skinned alive.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: At the end, the author breaks character to insist that all characters and events really did happen, just with the names changed. More specifically, Juliette's tour of Italy is based on de Sade's, where he claims to have participated in blood orgies with the King and Queen of Naples, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the Pope... Dubious.
- Villain Protagonist: Most of the characters in the novel who are not victims. Contrary to her sister Justine, Juliette is extremely cruel and sado-masochistic, willing to go to any length to gain pleasure; be it poisoning an entire town or betraying her fellow libertines.
- 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.
