Donatien Alphonse François, known as the Marquis de Sade, was a French aristocrat, revolutionary and writer who became famous for novels full of sexual violence. One of the largest impulses in his creative work was the pursuit of his personal pleasures.

German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing used his name to coin a term which refers to sexual enjoyment in the torture and humiliation of another person. Expression ‘sadist’ is commonly used to describe a person who gets a pleasure from making other people miserable.

Life full of scandal

De Sade was born in 1740 in the influential and wealthy family of the Counts de Sadi, who were one of the noblest families in Provence. He lived a life full of scandals and was involved in bestiality, incest and abuse of many prostitutes.

He participated in the seven-year war, the conflict between the European colonial empires from the 1756 to 1763, and a few years later, he was accused for capturing a Paris woman and threatening her with a knife. He claimed that the incident was just a joke. It is true that the victim freed herself and easily escaped through the window, writes intimatemedicine.

In 1772 he was involved in another scandal when he distributed a high, but not lethal, dose of a strong aphrodisiac that poisoned several prostitutes. It is not known if he did it intentionally. Court in Aixu condemned him to death, but he fled to Italy.

Due to the large influence of his family, the sentence was later reduced to several years in prison; however, he was released in 1790 instead of 1779 because of some very influential enemies. Stay in prison had a negative impact on his mental health. He spent thirty-two years of his life in prisons and psychiatric institutions. He died in 1814 in an asylum in Chareton.

Master of perverse writing

Marquis de Sade was described as a genuine atrocity, and his life, as well as his literary works, are full of rape, necrophilia, humiliation, torture and unusual sexual practices.

He advocated complete freedom without the constraints of morality, religion or law. Today, he is primarily considered a historical oddity.

As a prisoner in the Bastille, he wrote a few average and unimportant plays, essays and political pamphlets. He also began writing novels and series of works that were supposed to list all the perverse practices. In 1791 he anonymously published the first outstanding sadistic novel “Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu”  (The Misfortunes of Virtue), which is a novel about two troubled girls, a topic characteristic for the 18th century. However, his story had a twist: sin is paid with success, and virtue with suffering and humiliation.

The story follows the fate of two high-middle class Parisian sisters who, upon their father's death must fight their way through life. Older sister, Juliette, goes into a brothel and marries one of the clients, whom she later poisons. Younger sister, Justine, tries to stay virtuous, but ends up raped, falsely accused and thrown into prison.