The most infamous writer in the history of French literature, who occasionally has been hailed as "the freest spirit who has ever existed." Marquis de Sade published erotic writings, that gave rise to the term sadism - enjoyment of cruelty, which first made it into a dictionary in 1834. His works have been seen as exploration of sexual and political freedom, and on the other hand he was a multiple rapist, torturer, and proto-murderer. In his Idées sur les romans de Sade writes that the essence of novelistic representation lies in the writer's incestuous relationship with nature. To be true to this relationship is to eschew all limitations, and exceed the bounds of convention and knowledge.

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was born in Paris into an aristocratic family. He was the only surviving child of Jean Baptiste de Sade and his wife Marie Eléonore de Maillé, a distant cousin of the Prince de Conde. His family had been ennobled in the 12th century and remained a major power-broker in the southern region of Provence. Aged four, de Sade was sent to Avignon into the care of his uncle, Abbe de Sade, whose sexual life was notoriously irregular. After this period de Sade attended the Jesuit college of Louis Le Grand.

From the age of 14 to 26 de Sade was in active military service, and participated in the Seven Years War. He married in 1763 Renée Pélagie de Montreuil, the daughter of a high-ranking bourgeois family, but also began an affair with an actress and invited prostitutes to his house. In 1768 he held a prostitute called Rose Keller captive and abused her. The chief of the Paris vice squad warned brothels of de Sade - he was considered a mortal threat to prostitutes. In the following years de Sade was found guilty of all kinds of sexual crimes, and he managed to anger Mme de Montreuil, his mother-in-law by seducting her younger daughter, Anne Prospre, when she was visiting his medieval fortress at La Coste in Provence.

At Aix in 1772 de Sade received the penalty of death for an unnatural crime and poisoning, but escaped to Italy with his valet Latour. After arrest he was excluded from Paris and sent to his wife's family home in Normandy. At La Coste de Sade continued to arrange orgies from 1773 to 1777 - he had hired a harem of young girls as sexual slaves. After continuous scandals and charges de Sade was arrested and sent to round tour of 27 years in prisons, which started in the dungeon of Vincennes on February 13, 1777. At Vicennes he was sometimes fed through the bars of his cage. To overcome boredom he started to write sexually graphic novels and plays.

After escape de Sade was transferred in 1784 to Bastille in Paris, where he had a large room sixteen feet in diameter. In the new surroundings he wrote Les Journées de Sodome, an underground classic over a hundred years. He was released from insane asylum at Charenton on April 2, 1790. Renée-Pélagie obtained a divorce. Next year, at the age of 51, de Sade published Justine. Somehow de Sade survived through the years of the French Revolution, although many other aristocrats were executed. Perhaps the rage of the Revolution saw only itself in the activities of de Sade. To secure his freedom and property he wrote a eulogy of Marat, and got elected secretary of his district in Paris. In 1801 he was again arrested and sent to Charenton, where he began to work a 10-volume novel, Crimes of Passion. During this period he also stage plays in the asylum. His last days de Sade spent under the control of an ex-abbé. After his death on December 2, 1814 his elder son burned his last and other manuscripts. de Sade's grave was later desecrated when his skull was taken for pseudo-scientific measurements.