Historical Figure
Marquis de Sade
d. 1814
French writer and nobleman (1740–1814)
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Biography
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French writer, libertine, political activist, and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy, and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.
Timeline
The story of Marquis de Sade, told in moments.
Born Donatien Alphonse Francois in Paris. A count's son. Related to the Condé princes. Raised partly by his uncle, an abbot with a taste for debauchery. The boy learned early that rules applied to other people.
Arrested for poisoning and sodomy after an incident with prostitutes in Marseille involving cantharides (Spanish fly). He flees to Italy. He's sentenced to death in absentia. The sentence is later annulled, but his reputation isn't.
Writes The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille on a 12-meter scroll of paper, both sides filled with tiny handwriting. He smuggles it out sewn into the wall. He weeps when the Bastille falls in 1789, believing it lost. The scroll survives.
Napoleon orders his arrest after the publication of Justine and Juliette. No trial. Declared insane and sent to the Charenton asylum. He'll spend the last 13 years of his life there, writing plays and staging theatrical productions with the other inmates.
Dies at Charenton at 74. He'd spent 32 years of his life imprisoned or committed. His will asked to be buried in an unmarked grave, the ground sown with acorns so trees would grow and his name would be "erased from the memory of men." They ignored every instruction.
In Their Own Words (16)
And you, amiable debauchees, you who since youth have known no limits but those of your desires and who have been governed by your caprices alone, study the cynical Dolmancé, proceed like him and go as far as he if you too would travel the length of those flowered ways your lechery prepares for you; in Dolmancé's academy be at last convinced it is only by exploring and enlarging the sphere of his tastes and whims, it is only by sacrificing everything to the senses' pleasure that this individual, who never asked to be cast into this universe of woe, that this poor creature who goes under the name of Man, may be able to sow a smattering of roses atop the thorny path of life.
To Libertines, 1795
Lewd women, let the voluptuous Saint-Ange be your model; after her example, be heedless of all that contradicts pleasure's divine laws, by which all her life she was enchained.
To Libertines, 1795
The philosopher must teach these pupils [French students] that it is far less essential to understand nature than to enjoy and respect its laws; that these laws are both wise and simple; that they are written in all human hearts, and that one need merely question a heart in order to appreciate its impulses.
Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans, 1795
The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.
Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans, 1795
You charming sex, you will be free; like men, you will enjoy all the delights that nature has made your obligations; you will not have to be constrained in any pleasure. Must the more divine section of humanity be clapped in irons by the less divine section? Ah, smash those chains—nature wants you to smash them! You should have no other limits than your leanings, no other laws than your cravings, no other morals than nature; stop languishing in those barbaric prejudices that caused your charms to fade and imprisoned the godly surges of your hearts.
Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans, 1795
Artifacts (15)
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Philosophy in the Boudoir: Or, The Immoral Mentors (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
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