French nobleman and
author (1740-1814). Full name:
Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade. Sent off by his uncle at age 14 to join an
aristocratic cavalry regiment of the
Chevaux Legers. He fought in the
Seven Years War as a
teenager and witnessed many acts of
cruelty and
brutality visited upon
villagers and fellow
soldiers alike, in the guise of either
strict military discipline or torturing captured
prisoners.
After his service in the military, de Sade was
accused of
spanking a
prostitute in his garden and
pricking her with a
knife. He denied the charges, and the woman agreed to drop the
complaint if he gave her some
money. Soon afterward, he was accused of
poisoning a group of
prostitutes at a
banquet.
Doctors who examined the women later did not find them to be
ill or
weakened by the alleged
ordeal, but people preferred to believe the
sensational story. De Sade
suspected that the whole thing had been invented by his
political enemies (he was an outspoken
opponent of the
church and the
judicial establishment) and his
wife's family (who had opposed their
marriage). His wife left him, so he
eloped with his wife's sister, and they left
France. However, he was later forced to return to France to face the
charges against him, and he was sentenced to
prison.
De Sade spent seven years in the prisons of the
Chateau de Vincennes and five years in the
Bastille. After the
French Revolution, he was imprisoned again by
Napoleon I in
Sainte-Pelagie for about three years and at
Charenton for about eleven years, until his
death in December 1814. In his
will, he requested that he be buried in a densely-
forested part of his estate and that his
grave be strewn with
acorns.
Despite the
Marquis' reputation for
debauchery and
torture, it is believed that he expressed his desires mainly through his
writing. Much of his work
praised the
natural human, whose only
desires were
food and
sex and who despised
civilized society, which de Sade saw as hopelessly
corrupted by
greed,
perversion, and the
lust for
power. He often expressed the desire to go and live in the
forests -- he once noted that he wished he could live among
bears.