Within the context of Apollinaire's work, The Eleven Thousand Phalluses can be considered the most "deliberately subversive" text. If the Marquis de Sade, through excesses and horrors, established the search for a new moral space before the French Revolution, Apollinaire before the First World War, under the revelation that starts from the moral bond, uses pornography and creates a book of landscapes and costumbrist anecdotes that outlines the path of excess as a way of reaching the communion of freedom. The Marquis's ideals, both formal and ideological, are taken up by Apollinaire. It adheres to a perfectly known and assimilated development, even allowing himself the luxury of citing references: “rogue marquises of the 18th century, already known in exquisite pages”, which clarify the poet's intentions... In this book, Apollinaire presents one of his facets, facets that shaped a writer of whom Breton would say: “the formula of his writing is free purity, words that confer countless meanings but which evoke and locate the poet's literature”.