In 1784, Vincennes was closed, and The Marquis De Sade was transferred to the Bastille.
The following year, he wrote the manuscript for his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome (The 120 Days of Sodom), which he wrote in minuscule handwriting on a continuous roll of paper he rolled tightly and placed in his cell wall to hide.
He was unable to finish the work; on 4 July 1789, he was transferred “naked as a worm” to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris, two days after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there,
“They are killing the prisoners here!”
Sade was unable to retrieve the manuscript before being removed from the prison.
The storming of the Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, occurred ten days after Sade left, on 14 July.
To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was destroyed in the storming of the Bastille, though it was actually saved by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin two days before the Bastille was attacked.
It is not known why Saint-Maximin chose to bring the manuscript to safety, nor indeed is anything else about him known.
In June 1780, weary of the failed prosecution of the war in North America, and convinced that the ministry of Lord George North would bring eternal ruin to his dreams of permanent empire, Lord Shelburne, through the East India Company and its allied Baring Bank, bankrolled a Jacobin mob to descend upon London, ostensibly in protest over the granting of Irish reforms.
The so-called Irish reforms amounted to little more than forced conscription of Irishmen into the British Army to fight in North America--a move Shelburne hoped would also defeat the pro-American republican movement inside Ireland that had nearly launched its own revolt against Britain in 1779.
Led by Lord George Gordon, the Protestant rabble stormed Westminster, sending parliamentarians and lords alike down flights of stairs, out windows, and to the hospitals.
For eight days, London was ransacked, culminating in the storming of the Newgate Prison and the freeing of all the prisoners, who joined in the assault on the Parliament building.
Lord Shelburne, as head of the interior committee of the House of Lords, personally ensured the maximum terror by delaying the reading of the Riot Act (which would have called out the Home Guard) until violence had spread to every corner of the city.
When the flames subsided, the ministry of Lord North was in ashes as well.
North resigned as prime minister, and within months, Shelburne was himself in the new Rockingham cabinet as foreign secretary for the Northern District, subsuming the North American colonies.
From that post, he would be the principal negotiator in Paris across the table from Benjamin Franklin.
A postscript on Lord Gordon, Shelburne's agent provocateur:
After a brief stay in the Tower of London, foreshortened by Shelburne's personal intervention with the crown, Lord Gordon made off to friendlier ground in the Netherlands, where, to the astonishment of his Scottish Presbyterian cronies, he became a convert to Jewish cabbalism, taking the name Israel Bar Abraham.
He shortly thereafter surfaced in Paris as an occult adviser to Marie Antoinette, and from that position participated in Shelburne's intrigues against the French Bourbons.
The Jacobin insurrection in Paris during 1791-93 was a replay on grander scale of the earlier Shelburne-instigated Gordon Riots, down to the storming of the Bastille prison and the unleashing of the criminals.
"Behind you stands a Symbol of Oppression :- Blackgate Prison,
Where a thousand men have languished under the name of THIS Man : Harvey Dent, who has been held up to you as The Shining Example of Justice!
You have been supplied with a False Idol, to stop you from tearing down this corrupt city!
Let me tell you The Truth about Harvey Dent from the words of Gotham’s Police Commissioner, James Gordon.
'The Batman didn’t murder Harvey Dent, he saved my boy.
Then took the blame for Harvey’s appalling crimes so I could, to my shame, build a lie around this fallen idol.
I praised the madman who tried to murder my own child, but I can no longer live with my lie.
It is time to Trust The People of Gotham with The Truth,
and it is time for me to resign.'
And do you accept this man's resignation...?"
― Bane
