The answer to this question is not as obvious as it seems at first glance.
Donacien Alphonse François de Sade (1740-1814) belonged to the French aristocracy. His father was governor in the provinces of Bresse, Buge, Valrome and Same. Before receiving this title, he was for some time the French ambassador to Russia. Donatien's mother was the maid of honor of the Princess de Condé. Donatien himself in childhood had the honor of playing with the prince, received a good education, graduating from the famous College d'Arcourt. Then he entered the military school. In 1755, with the rank of lieutenant of the royal infantry regiment, he took an active part in the Seven Years' War that broke out at that time. He fought bravely, as befits a nobleman of a good family, and in 1763 he retired with the rank of captain of the cavalry.
He could only marry profitably and spend the rest of his life in secular amusements and worries about the welfare of the family, in order to repeat the path of most of the noble nobles of France.
However, everything turned out quite differently.
Two elements intervened in the matter: the own character of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade himself and the Great French Revolution.
… "Where are we? There are only bloody corpses here, children torn from the hands of their mothers, young women who have their throats cut at the conclusion of an orgy, goblets filled with blood and wine, unheard-of torture, cane strikes, terrible flogging "- this is how the literary critic of the 19th century wrote about the works of de Sade Jules Jeanin.
The son of the Marquis, after his death, made sure that his papers were burned, so horrified by his monstrous content of the texts written by his father.
It was said about de Sade's novel Justine that after reading only one page of it, no girl would be as pure as before.
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All his novels tell about incest, seduction of innocent girls, monstrous torture and perversion.
This is literature. And what happened in the real life of the Marquis?
His entire biography is a series of violent scandals and imprisonments. He married the daughter of M. de Montreuil, President of the French Tax Chamber. Soon after the wedding, de Sade threw such a wild party in a brothel that he was banished from Paris for a while. After that, there were attempts to rape some actresses or courtesans, and treating guests with strange sweets containing the aphrodisiac that was fashionable at that time - Span flies. Having swallowed this delicacy, the guests began to behave very freely, indulging in various voluptuous amusements.
Actually, the first serious arrest followed precisely on charges of sodomy, which was then a criminal offense.
De Sade fled and was executed in absentia: his effigy was burned in one of the central squares of the city. For some time, de Sade hid in the family castle, contrived to seduce his wife's younger sister, who for some time shared his lifestyle with him. Even hiding from persecution, de Sade still from time to time got into stories with either attempted rape, or with some girls whom he whipped.
Finally, his mother-in-law secured his arrest, and de Sade was first placed in the Château de Vincennes, and then transferred to the Bastille. He spent more than ten years in prison.
It was in prison that he began to write. During this period he wrote "Dialogue between a priest and a dying man", "Eugene de Franval", "120 days of sodom" and other, no less remarkable things.
In a strange irony of fate, de Sade was almost the only prisoner who languished in the Bastille by the time the French Revolution began. When riots broke out in the city, he shouted from the window that here, in the Bastille, prisoners were beaten and tortured, which was one of the reasons for the storming of the castle by the insurgent people.
Freed, de Sade takes an active part in the revolutionary movement, becomes a member of various committees, publicly reads his proclamations dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution, publishes new novels, including Justine. This page of his life ends with his arrest and awaiting execution. He managed to avoid the guillotine only because the coup of 9 Thermidor took place in Paris, and the sentence was simply not carried out.
De Sade spent his last years in poverty and oblivion, and he ended his days in a hospital for the mentally ill. He entered the history of culture as a writer and philosopher, professing the denial of God, as well as all moral norms and rules, both prescribed by church canons, and general human principles of behavior in the family and society. Actually, the result of his life is a vivid example of what such a morality leads to.
What is more in his biography - monstrous or pathetic - is difficult to judge.
One thing is clear: Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was not a sadist in the sense in which this word can be understood by a person who has read at least one of his works. No sophisticated torture, terrible killings, and even more so, incest and infanticide on his conscience. He, as modern sexopathologists who are familiar with his works say, certainly suffered from sexual disorder, which boiled down to the fact that in a situation where his partner did not resist, he turned out to be impotent. He could only engage in sexual intercourse by violence, causing, and himself experiencing pain. Whipping the maids is certainly not good, but in this sense, de Sade was hardly more cruel than many other nobles who indulged in such entertainment, not even suspecting that they would soon have the medical name "sadism."
Actually, it is precisely the originality of his literary texts that de Sade owes to the fact that he went down in history as the “first sadist”. In this sense, it is even a little offensive for Caligula, Nero, Henry VII Tudor, the Spanish king Ferdinand II and other rulers, whose voluptuous cruelty crossed all boundaries.