ON THE WRITER / CHARACTER
Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 in Paris, and died in 1814, in the Charenton lunatic asylum, where he had been interned since 1803 and where he used to put on plays with the inmates. The inescapably radical views expressed in his literary work and his libertine philosophy led to him spending a good part of his life in prison. His biography is punctuated by sexual scandals, escapes and imprisonments. He married against his will in 1763. Five years later, accused of forcing the prostitute Rose Keller to physical punishment on the pretext of testing a new healing ointment, he spent more than seven months in jail. In 1772, after an orgy with his servant and four women in Marseilles, he was accused of poisoning, fled to Italy, and was condemned to death ‘for contumacy’. He was finally caught near the Swiss border, though he was to escape with his wife’s help. He was arrested again in 1777 and transferred to the Bastille in 1784, where he wrote some of his masterpieces, such as
One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. These manuscripts were stolen during the taking of the Bastille in 1789. Again at liberty, for a short time he collaborated with the French Revolution as an ordinary citizen, but the radical singularity of his views was incompatible with the new political and social order, and the marquis was finally condemned to death for ‘moderatism’. He was saved by the death of Robespierre. His château, at Lacoste in the south of France, was sold. He lived in poverty until he was arrested again in 1801, accused of writing pornography by the counter-revolutionaries, who saw his texts as literary manifestos for the Terror. Titles such as The Philosopher in the Bedroom, Aline and Valcour, Justine or Juliette, among others, caused indignation and were banned for almost two hundred years after they were written. In 1957, the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert was prosecuted in France for publishing Sade’s books. The stir provoked by his strange work is due in part to the libertine scenes which he describes — in which men and women are like mechanical parts of a great sexual machine — but above all to his implacable philosophical views, which expose the paradox of the human condition, its tragic foundations and the hypocrisy of moral and social codes. In 1801, a contemporary wrote about Sade: