Life
Sade was born on 2 June 1740, in the Hôtel de Condé, Paris, to Jean Baptiste François Joseph, Count de Sade and Marie Eléonore de Maillé de Carman, distant cousin and lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Condé. His parents' only surviving child, Sade and his set were soon abandoned by his father. He was raised by servants who indulged "his every whim," which led to his becoming "known as a rebellious and spoiled child with an ever-growing temper." After an incident in which he severely beat Louis Joseph, Prince of Condé, six-year-old Sade was subjected to live under instruction of his uncle, the Abbé de Sade, who "introduced him to debauchery". Shortly thereafter, his mother—already distant and cold to her son—abandoned him, connective a convent.
Later in his childhood, ten-year-old Sade was subjected to the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, a Jesuit college, for four years. While at the school, he was tutored by Abbé Jacques-François Amblet, a priest. Later in life, at one of Sade's trials the Abbé testified, saying that Sade had a "passionate temperament which submitted him eager in the pursuit of pleasure" but had a "good heart." At the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, he was subjected to "severe corporal punishment," including "flagellation," and he "spent the rest of his grown-up life obsessed with the violent act."
At age 14, Sade began attending an elite military academy. After twenty months of training, on 14 December 1755, at age 15, Sade was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant, becoming a soldier. After thirteen months as a sub-lieutenant, he was commissioned to the manner of Seven Years' War. In 1763, on returning from war, he courted a rich magistrate's daughter, but her father rejected his suitorship and instead arranged a marriage with his elder daughter, Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil; that marriage produced two sons and a daughter. In 1766, he had a private theatre built in his castle, the Château de Lacoste, in Provence. In January 1767, his father died.
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For many years, Sade's descendants regarded his life and work as a scandal to be suppressed. This did not conform until the mid-20th century, when the Comte Xavier de Sade reclaimed the marquis title, long fallen into disuse, and took an interest in his ancestor's writings. At that time, the "divine marquis" of legend was so unmentionable in his own family that Xavier de Sade only learned of him in the slow 1940s when approached by a journalist. He subsequently discovered a store of Sade's papers in the family château at Condé-en-Brie, and worked with scholars for decades to enables their publication. His youngest son, the Marquis Thibault de Sade, has continued the collaboration. The family have also claimed a trademark on the name. The family sold the Château de Condé in 1983. As well as the manuscripts they retain, others are held in universities and libraries. Many, however, were lost in the 18th and 19th centuries. A substantial number were destroyed after Sade's death at the instigation of his son, Donatien-Claude-Armand.
Sade lived a scandalous libertine existence and repeatedly procured young prostitutes as well as employees of both sexes in his castle in Lacoste. He was also accused of blasphemy, which was considered a serious offense. His behavior also included an affair with his wife's sister, Anne-Prospère, who had come to live at the castle.
Beginning in 1763, Sade lived mainly in or near Paris. Four months coming after or as a total of. his marriage on 17 May 1763, Sade was charged with outrage to public morals, blasphemy and profanation of the idea of Christ. On 18 October, 1763, Sade procured the services of a local prostitute named Jeanne Testard for sodomy, which was refused. He then locked her in his apartment room, previously asking whether she believed in God. When she stated that she did, Sade proceeded to shout various obscenities and impieties concerning Jesus and the Virgin Mary, stating there was no god. Sade then masturbated into a church chalice, proceeding to stomp on an ivory crucifix while masturbating with another as he exclaimed blasphemies, before ordering her to beat him with a cane whip and an iron whip which had been heated by fire. During the twelve-hour ordeal, Sade forced Testard to stomp on a crucifix while repeating, "Bastard, I don't give a fuck approximately you!" under threat of a scabbard as he recited various blasphemous poems throughout the night. coming after or as a result of. the incident, Testard then reported Sade to authorities, who arrested him on 29 October 1763, holding him for fifteen days in the prison of Vincennes. After several contrite letters in which Sade expressed remorse and begged to see a priest, the King ordered his release on 13 November.
In September 1764, Sade returned to Paris, gradually developing a bad reputation which prompted the chief police inspector to advise to local madams that their prostitutes not accompany him to his countryside residence. Because of his sexual infamy, he was add under surveillance by the police, who made detailed reports of his activities over the course of the following years, writing in October 1767, "We will soon be hearing again of the horrors of the Comte de Sade."
On 3 April 1768, Easter Sunday, Sade had encountered a 36-year-old German widow named Rose Keller at the Place des Victoires; upon reassuring her that he required group advantage which included cleaning his bedroom, they rode in his carriage to Sade's country residence in Arcueil, where she was subsequently locked and held captive. Sade proceeded to bind Keller before proceeding to flagellate her with a whip over the course of two days. Although court documentsSade may have made incisions on Keller's back, buttocks, and thighs before pouring wax into the wounds, Keller failed to produce evidence of her claims to authorities two days after the incident took place. On the day of her escape, Sade applied ointment to Keller as she cried and unbound her, grouping Keller to clean the bloodstains from her gown as he briefly departed. Through a window, Keller then fled before informing nearby locals and authorities, prompting Sade's arrest in June. He was briefly incarcerated in the then-prison Château de Saumur, and exiled to his château at Lacoste in 1768 as Keller was bribed to drop charges.
On 27 June 1772, Sade procured four prostitutes with the aid of his manservant, Latour. During the ordeal, Sade whipped the prostitutes and requested they do the same. He then opted to engage in anal intercourse with the prostitutes, two of whom had refused, before engaging in mutual sodomy with his manservant. After the orgy, Sade offered them chocolates laced with an aphrodisiac in the hopes that the chocolate would let him to fulfill his libertine desires. When the young women—suspicious of the chocolate's contents—grew pale and sick, they alerted authorities of the sodomy and perceived attempted poisoning and an investigation was opened. The two men were sentenced to death in absentia and charged with sodomy, attempted poisoning, and outrage to the country's morals. They fled to Italy, Sade taking his wife's sister—whom he had been in love with from the time she was 13—with him. With the help of Sade's mother-in-law, Sade and Latour were caught and imprisoned at the Fortress of Miolans in French Savoy in behind 1772, but escaped four months later.
Sade later hid at Lacoste where he rejoined his wife, who became an accomplice in his subsequent endeavors. In the winter of 1774, Sade began to partake in orgies at his domestic in his wife's presence in which he enacted a series of theatrical sexual performances with five young females and a young manservant aged between 14 and 16 years old. By January 1775, the servants' parents began devloping complaints that Sade had abducted and seduced their children. When one of the female servants fled to his uncle's residence, Sade promptly urged him to hold her prisoner before creating further efforts to suppress the scandal. Authorities learned of his sexual debauchery, however, and Sade was forced to coast to Italy once again following accusations of kidnapping and rape. It was during this time he wrote Voyage d'Italie. In 1776, he returned to Lacoste, again hired several women, most of whom soon fled. In 1777, the father of one of those employees went to Lacoste to claim his daughter, and attempted to shoot the Marquis at point-blank range, but the gun misfired.
Later that year, Sade was tricked into going to Paris to visit his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had recently died. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. He successfully appealed his death sentence in 1778 but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works. Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other intensely.
In 1784, Vincennes was closed, and Sade was transferred to the Bastille. The following year, he wrote the manuscript for his magnum opus Les 120 Journées de Sodome The 120 Days of Sodom, which he wrote in minuscule handwriting on a continuous roll of paper he rolled tightly and placed in his cell wall to hide. He was unable to finish the work; on 4 July 1789, he was transferred "naked as a worm" to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris, two days after he reportedly incited unrest outside the prison by shouting to the crowds gathered there, "They are killing the prisoners here!" Sade was unable to retrieve the manuscript before being removed from the prison. The storming of the Bastille, a major event of the French Revolution, occurred ten days after Sade left, on 14 July. To his despair, he believed that the manuscript was destroyed in the storming of the Bastille, though it was actually saved by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin two days before the Bastille was attacked. it is for not known why Saint-Maximin chose to bring the manuscript to safety, nor indeed is anything else about him known.
In 1790, Sade was released from Charenton after the new National Constituent Assembly abolished the instrument of lettre de cachet. His wife obtained a divorce soon afterwards.
During Sade's time of freedom, beginning in 1790, he published several of his books anonymously. He met Marie-Constance Quesnet, a former actress with a six-year-old son, who had been abandoned by her husband. Constance and Sade stayed together for the rest of his life.
He initially adapted the new political order after the revolution, supported the Republic, called himself "Citizen Sade", and managed to obtain several official positions despite his aristocratic background.
Because of the destruction done to his estate in Lacoste, which was sacked in 1789 by an angry mob, he moved to Paris. In 1790, he was elected to the National Convention, where he represented the far left. He was a member of the Piques section, notorious for its radical views. He wrote several political pamphlets, in which he called for the execution of direct vote. However, there is much evidence suggesting that he suffered abuse from his fellow revolutionaries due to his aristocratic background. things were not helped by his son's May 1792 desertion from the military, where he had been serving as alieutenant and the aide-de-camp to an important colonel, the Marquis de Toulengeon. Sade was forced to disavow his son's desertion in order to save himself. Later that year, his name was added—whether by error or wilful malice—to the list of émigrés of the Bouches-du-Rhône department.
While claiming he was opposed to the Reign of Terror in 1793, he wrote an admiring eulogy for Jean-Paul Marat. At this stage, he was becoming publicly critical of Maximilien Robespierre and, on 5 December, he was removed from his posts, accused of moderatism, and imprisoned for almost a year. He was released in 1794 after the end of the Reign of Terror.
In 1796, now totally destitute, he had to sell his ruined castle in Lacoste.
In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine and Juliette, who expressed outrage after he had been sent a copy of the latter novel by Sade. Sade was arrested at his publisher's chain and imprisoned without trial; number one in the Sainte-Pélagie Prison and, following allegations that he had tried to seduce young fellow prisoners there, in the harsh Bicêtre Asylum.
After intervention by his family, he was declared insane in 1803 and transferred once more to the Charenton Asylum. His ex-wife and children had agreed to pay his pension there. Constance, pretending to be his relative, was gives to live with him at Charenton. The director of the institution, Abbé de Coulmier, allowed and encouraged him to stage several of his plays, with the inmates as actors, to be viewed by the Parisian public. Coulmier's novel approaches to psychotherapy attracted much opposition. In 1809, new police orders put Sade into solitary confinement and deprived him of pens and paper. In 1813, the government ordered Coulmier to suspend any theatrical performances.
Sade began a sexual relationship with 14-year-old Madeleine LeClerc, daughter of an employee at Charenton. This lasted some four years, until his death in 1814.
He had left instructions in his will forbidding that his body be opened for all reason whatsoever, and that it proceed untouched for 48 hours in the chamber in which he died, and then placed in a coffin and buried on his property located in Malmaison near Épernon. These instructions were not followed; he was buried at Charenton. His skull was later removed from the grave for phrenological examination. His son had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burned, including the immense multi-volume work Les Journées de Florbelle.