Unveiling the Secrets Behind ‘Emmanuelle’: A Literary Journey Through Love and Controversy

Published on September 25, 2024, at 21:24. / Modified on September 26, 2024, at 08:17.

In the early 1950s, two young people meet at a ball in Bangkok. Marayat Bibidh is the daughter of a diplomat, passionate about philosophy and stunningly beautiful. Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane is head of the Cultural Relations Office and shares his future wife’s taste for freedom and the erotic quest for happiness. One day, these two figures of the Thai high society decide to put their ideas into words and narratives: they write what will become the first two volumes of the Emmanuelle series, published clandestinely by editor Eric Losfeld in 1959. This monument of erotic literature sold over 800,000 copies in France. Adapted into a film in 1974, which was not very faithful to the authors’ intentions for Emmanuelle, it had bitter consequences for its creators’ lives.

Fifty years after its release, Camille Moreau, a bookseller in Brussels and a doctor in the philosophy of art, examined the story of this unique duo. United under the pseudonym Emmanuelle Arsan, with a work of mysterious contours and tumultuous reception, Marayat and Louis-Jacques have an extraordinary journey. The result of a passionate literary investigation, Emmanuelle Arsan. Biography of a Pseudonym revolves around the secrets of a couple determined to transform their ideals into a way of life, together, with and against the society of the 1950s to our days, as a new chapter in the odyssey of Emmanuelle has emerged with the release this year of a film by Audrey Diwan.

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