Tales and pictures of naughty nuns, lustful queens and randy noblemen go on display for the first time today when the French National Library unlocks its secret archive of erotic art.

The show of 350 works, ranging from manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade to early pornographic photography, is causing a stir because the library’s trove of licentious literature – known as L’Enfer (Hell) – has been the stuff of fantasy since the early 19th century.

L’Enfer, to which “immoral” works were often consigned after police seizure, was closed in 1969. Now that morals have changed, the Paris transport authority has even joined the fun, converting a Métro station into a teaser for the exhibition. Underground trains will slow down at the disused Croix-Rouge station so that passengers can glimpse erotic engravings.

Hell got its name in the 1830s when the library isolated from its vast collection works that were deemed to be “contrary to good morals”. The original works, which survived police bonfires and theft by curators, include a rich collection from the libertine age of the 18th century. Top among them is Thérèse Philosophe, a 1748 novel about the initiation of a lustful young woman that was a bestseller of its era. Some great names were consigned to Hell, including Voltaire, whose heroic-comic poem La Pucelle (The Maid) sparked scandal and the wrath of the King and the Pope in 1762.

Sex turned nasty in the hands of de Sade, who wrote while locked in the Bastille. The 1789 Revolution was partly fuelled by scurrilous pamphlets that illustrated in joyful detail the supposed depravity of the Queen, Marie-Antoinette, and the Royal Court.

Marc Lambron, a novelist, said that a visit to the show, which is closed to visitors under 16, was a lesson for those who believe that good morals dominated the past. “Enter these ancestral grottos and you will gauge the scale of that lie,” he wrote.

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