For adult readers of BDSM and fetish, the Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse François, 1740–1814) is an eighteenth-century French nobleman whose name also became a knot of literature, law, and psychology. Sadism, pleasure taken in someone else’s pain or humiliation, takes its word from him, and later arguments about power, desire, and free will keep circling the name. He was not a consent educator in any modern sense. Debt, political shocks, and sex scandals ran through the life. The novels go further than the files. The files concern coerced adults. The servant scandals are a criminal record, not a scene to copy. The novels invent extremes. This piece does not describe sexual violence against children.
Sade was born into a Paris noble family. His mother had Bourbon-Condé blood. His father was a dragoon captain and a diplomat. An uncle and a respected tutor shaped the early education, then a Jesuit college and classical letters. On 14 December 1755, aged fifteen, he was commissioned sub-lieutenant in the King’s Foot Guard. On 21 April 1759 he became a captain in the Burgundian Cavalry. He would not flatter, and gambling and women kept him out of court favor. In May 1763 his father arranged the marriage to Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, from a recently ennobled bourgeois family. It was not a wedding Sade made in order to pay his own debts. Soon after, he kept a Paris rental for sex. On 18 October 1763, in the Testard case, the prostitute Jeanne Testard accused him of blasphemy, of masturbating with a chalice and a crucifix, and, after she refused to beat him with a cane, of threatening her with pistols and a sword until she trampled a crucifix. The charges were capital. His father petitioned Louis XV. On 13 November the king ordered his release and exile to the Montreuil estate at Échauffour in Normandy. The “sadism” in that file is class power and coercion, not a game both people enjoyed.
The next decade is a run of violence alleged against adult prostitutes, and a servant scandal at La Coste. On 3 April 1768, in the Arcueil case, the thirty-six-year-old widow Rose Keller accused him of luring her with housekeeper work, locking her in, and whipping her. She also spoke of knife cuts and hot wax. Agents of Madame de Montreuil paid her to withdraw. The king pardoned Sade on 3 June. A lettre de cachet still held him until November. On 27 June 1772, in Marseilles, he and his manservant Latour held an orgy with four prostitutes, and he offered aniseed pastilles laced with Spanish fly. Marianne Laverne fell ill. Marguerite Coste became critically ill and filed a complaint. After the women were paid to withdraw, the court went on anyway. On 2 September Sade and Latour were sentenced to death in absentia. The next day they were burned in effigy. He was already in Italy, was later locked in the Fortress of Miolans, and escaped on 30 April 1773. After Louis XV died in 1774, his mother-in-law obtained a new lettre de cachet in the name of Louis XVI. The long imprisonment did not start that year. At La Coste in 1774–1775 a servant scandal involved minors in the historical record. Families charged kidnapping and seduction. People were injured. One later died. On 13 February 1777 he was arrested in Paris under the existing lettre de cachet.
From that arrest he spent about thirteen years locked up, until the National Constituent Assembly abolished lettres de cachet in 1790. On 30 June 1778 the appeals court overturned the poisoning finding. On 14 July it threw out sodomy and convicted him only of debauchery and excessive libertinage, a small fine, and a three-year ban from Marseilles, then the lettre de cachet took him back at once. Prison did not stop the writing. In 1782 he began The 120 Days of Sodom. After the move to the Bastille in 1784 he made a fair copy. The manuscript catalogs atrocities in modules, and later political theater and film used it as a template. He walked out on 2 April 1790. The marriage was dissolved in September 1790. He lived with the actress Marie-Constance Quesnet, then thirty-three. Justine appeared anonymously in June 1791. During the Revolution he moved from constitutional monarchy to radical republicanism, served in the Section des Piques, and delivered the funeral oration for Marat and Le Peletier. In December 1793 he was arrested for moderatism, not for opposing a policy of atheism. An anti-religious petition had likely angered Robespierre, who at that moment wanted atheism suppressed. Sade was listed for execution on 27 July 1794, survived by bribery or a clerical error, and Robespierre fell the same day. Sade left prison in October. He then published Philosophy in the Bedroom anonymously (1795) and the first volumes of Juliette (1797–99). Justine punishes virtue. Juliette rewards vice. Debt forced the sale of La Coste in October 1796. His former wife took most of the proceeds.
In March 1801 he was arrested at his publisher’s office and held at Sainte-Pélagie. Stocks of The New Justine and Juliette were seized. Police minister Joseph Fouché ordered detention without trial, on the view that the pornography law was too weak and that a trial would only increase Sade’s fame. Sade was then declared to have “libertine dementia,” moved to Bicêtre, and transferred by the family to the Charenton asylum, with board paid by his ex-wife and children. Director Abbé de Coulmier let him write and stage plays and hold balls and concerts. A theater of about two hundred seats went up in 1805. In April 1807 Sade finished the ten-volume Les Journées de Florbelle, later seized in a search. He died on 2 December 1814 of a prostrating gangrenous fever and was buried at Charenton. The will had asked for Malmaison and no pomp. His son Claude-Armand burned the remaining unpublished manuscripts, including Les Journées de Florbelle.
The books, and what the files are not
The work turns on extreme rhetoric and philosophical argument. Philosophy in the Bedroom welds an orgy to a republican pamphlet. The fictional Le Chevalier delivers “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.” Speeches interrupt rape, torture, and blasphemy. The novels mix pornography, Gothic fiction, moral tales, and social satire. On the page there is blasphemy, flagellation, coprophilia, necrophilia, and the rape, torture, and murder of adults. They also contain violence against children, which this article does not describe. The life on file is coercion, class power, and some non-consensual violence. It is not the slaughterhouse of the novels. The novels are not a manual. Later readers cast him as a precursor to Nietzsche and Freud. Simone de Beauvoir called him a second-rank writer. Andrea Dworkin treated the veneration as a veneration of violence against women.
In the twentieth century the surrealist André Breton called him a surrealist in sadism. Roland Barthes, in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1971), turned to the text and away from psychology and biography. Angela Carter argued in 1978 that he put pornography to work claiming sexual rights for women. Clinical sexual sadism disorder means sexual arousal from extreme pain inflicted without consent. That is not the same thing as mild or simulated pain under agreement. John Phillips has warned that the fiction has no single authorial voice, and that the documented acts cannot be taken as the whole clinical picture of sadism. Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) uses the Bastille manuscript as a template. The name also sits on Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1964), Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade (1965), and Philip Kaufman’s Quills (2000). In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing used the novels to give sadism its clinical definition. In 1990 Sade entered the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
