Unsurprisingly, the Marquis de Sade Was a Prostitute Junkie
The French aristocrat Donatien Alphonse Francois, Comte de Sade , better known as the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814), could never get enough of prostitutes. He became so notorious for his deviant practices, perversions, and erotic writings which combined pornography with philosophy and violent fantasies, that his name gave rise to the terms sadist and sadism.
Like Gary Ridgway, de Sade was a pervert who is known to history only for being a pervert, unlike others in this list. He wrote about politics and philosophy, but those writings are not what he is known for. Were it not for the perversions he did, and the perversions he wrote about wanting to do, little would be known today about history’s most famous Marquis.
He advocated total freedom, and his fantasies’ emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy – and his actual criminally violent practices – kept him incarcerated in prisons and insane asylums for most of his adult life. On and off, de Sade spent 32 years behind bars, including 10 years in the Bastille. Most of his writing was penned from behind bars.
De Sade was addicted to prostitutes from early on. Addicted to abusing them, that is. In the early 1760s, numerous Parisian prostitutes complained of his mistreatment, which got him numerous short jail stints, before he was exiled from Paris to his countryside residence. While the details of the mistreatment are murky, the very fact that a French aristocrat in those days got locked up because of his treatment of prostitutes, indicates that whatever he did must have been pretty bad.
In 1768, de Sade had his first big scandal, when he lured a street walker to his home with an offer of a housekeeping job. He then ripped off her clothes, tied her to a sofa, and tortured her by flogging and pouring hot wax on her. She eventually escaped through a second floor window. However, the Marquis’ family killed the ensuing investigation by securing a royal decree that removed the case from the courts’ jurisdiction.
In 1772, there was another scandal when de Sade and his servant sodomized prostitutes in Marseilles after incapacitating them with Spanish fly. The duo skipped the trial, fled to Italy, and were sentenced to death in absentia. They were eventually caught and imprisoned in Savoy, but escaped after a few months and hid in de Sade’s rural castle in southeast France.
De Sade had a high employee turnover rate in his castle, as he kept hiring youngsters as domestics, only for them to quit within a short time, complaining of the Marquis’ mistreatment and predation. When the local boys’ and girls’ parents complained to the authorities, de Sade was forced to flee to Italy once more, until things quieted down.
In 1776, he returned and resumed his perversions, which steadily intensified, with one scandal following another in quick succession. Finally, in 1777, the authorities tricked de Sade into going to Paris to visit his supposedly sick mother, who unbeknownst to him, had actually died. When he arrived in Paris, he was arrested and locked up in a royal fortress’ dungeon. He was kept there, in harsh conditions, until 1784, when he was transferred to the Bastille. De Sade remained in that infamous prison until he was transferred to a mental asylum, only two days before the Bastille was stormed in 1789, and all its prisoners were freed in the opening act of the French Revolution.
He was released in 1790, amidst France’s revolutionary turmoil. Taking to the new order, he took to calling himself “Citizen Sade”, and within months, got himself elected as a representative to the French National Convention. He barely survived the Reign of Terror, during which he was imprisoned for a year, emerging from jail in 1794 utterly destitute.
In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered de Sade’s arrest for pornographic and blasphemous novels that he had written a decade earlier, and had him imprisoned without trial. In 1803, his family had him declared insane and transferred from prison to a mental asylum, where he continued writing, and staged plays with inmates as actors. His writing career finally to an end in 1809, when the police ordered de Sade kept in solitary confinement, and deprived him of pen and paper.