Born into an aristocratic Provençal family related to the king of France, Sade began a career as an officer in a royal army regiment in 1754. Despite his powerful family and marital ties, he was repeatedly arrested for sexual assault, sodomy, and even murder by means of an overdose of the aphrodisiac “Spanish fly.” In 1777 he was incarcerated on order of the king and was later held in the Bastille until the French Revolution began. While in the Bastille he wrote his famous Les 120 journées de Sodome, which was not printed until the 1930’s. After his release he continued to write plays and novels, including Justine, and La Nouvelle Justine, suivie de l’historie de Juliette, which were published in 1797. The latter in particular resulted in a second period of imprisonment, under Napoleon Bonaparte, from 1801 to the end of his life in 1814. Much of this time he spent in an insane asylum near Paris.
Sade’s writings have always been controversial for extolling atheism and egoism and for extolling murder as a supreme act of virtue. They are also controversial because of their scatology and their detailed descriptions of sexual acts, including sodomy, incest, orgies, coprophagy, and physical torture—particularly that involving clerical figures. Nevertheless, many later French critics and writers—from Sainte-Beuve to feminist Simone de Beauvoir—have ranked Sade among the great writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Although some of Sade’s writings are technically still banned in France, a nearly complete edition of his works was published in 1948; a “complete” edition was published in 1966 (a freshly edited edition appeared in 1986). His most erotic writings were translated into English and published in the United States by Grove Press in the late 1960’s. Although these writings have neither been banned by the federal government of the United States nor specifically challenged under various obscenity laws, they have not been easily accessible. Public and private libraries have exercised indirect censorship, either by refusing to acquire Sade’s works or by keeping them under lock and key.