FRANCE – Paris’ dirty little secret is secret no more.Even before there was a United States to serve as a benchmark of Western sexual conservatism, the French had a libertine reputation. Perhaps that’s why the Bibliothèque Nationale, France’s national library, has been collecting erotica for at least 170 years. On Tuesday, it threw open the doors on a scholarly yet overtly prurient exhibition of more than 350 explicit books and prints from the official state collection maintained in the library’s forbidden section, officially known as “L’Enfer” — or hell.

The complete collection is much larger, containing more than 1,700 books and untold numbers of pamphlets and prints.

Only accessible by bona fide academic researchers before now, the collection will be on public display for three months. In addition, between December 17th and January 15th, passengers on Line Ten of the city’s famous Metro will be treated to larger-than-life previews of some of the milder materials in an otherwise abandoned public-transit station.

Would the exhibition play in Peoria? Probably not. According to The Independent, a British publication that was treated to an advance peep show, “[t]he material is often beautifully executed, sometimes surreal, sometimes very funny, sometimes brutal. It is steeped in French (and British) history. Much of it is not for the very young or for the faint of heart.”

According to The Independent writer John Litchfield, the exhibition includes examples from the poet Charles Baudelaire and the surrealist artist Man Ray, as well as particularly “energetically debauched” items from the collection of respected 19th-Century French Prime Minister Leon Gambetta, “beautifully executed, stylized but brutally explicit prints” from 19th-Century Japan and shockingly hardcore but coyly entertaining prints from Jane Austen’s Victorian England. It also offers three display cases devoted to the works of notorious BDSM enthusiast and political prisoner the Marquis de Sade and a rare first edition of Pauline Réage’s 1954 sado-masochistic classic The History of O.

What it does not include is contemporary erotica and pornography, which are consigned to the open shelves in the public section of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The L’Enfer collection — purchased, confiscated or donated since 1837 and dating back to the 17th Century — is believed to be one of the largest and richest collections of erotica and pornography in the world. “The Vatican’s secret stash is said to be even larger but that, presumably, will never be opened to the public,” Litchfield noted wryly.

He also noted, “The erotification, or pornification, of the internet was inevitable, one learns [from the exhibit]. Every previous technological or literary advance in human communication — from the printing press, to the novel, to the lithograph, to the photograph, to the cinema — has been hijacked by the human (or is it mostly a male?) compulsion to meditate, or drool, over our sexuality. Even established writers or artists also secretly wrote dirty stories or drew dirty pictures out of the act of lovemaking.”

More about the exhibition and L’Enfer can be found here: http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article3218046.ece.