In recent years, the term sadism was turned into a trend by the movie "50 Shades of Grey". In short, sadism is a sexual disorder associated with fantasies, impulses and violent behavior. This term originates from the life and experiences of the Marquis de Sade, a Frenchman who lived in the eighteenth century.
The word sadism was coined in 1869 by psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who coined it from the name of Marquis Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, commonly known as Marquis de Sade or DAF de Sade. According to von Krafft-Ebing, the sadist derives erotic pleasure from the suffering he causes others and delights in cruelty. Thus the pleasure experienced by humiliation, as described later by Freud, in Three Essays on Sexual Theory.
In ordinary language, the meaning of sadism oscillates between cases where it is characterized simply by an active or violent attitude towards the sexual object and those in which pleasure is completely conditioned by its abuse and humiliation.
The history of mankind has shown how often there is an aggressive factor in the libido and, consequently, how cruelty and the sexual instinct are closely connected. And no one has managed to faithfully represent this instinct better than the Marquis de Sade.
Born in Paris on June 2, 1740, the Marquis de Sade belonged to one of the oldest noble families in France, even related to the Bourbons. He was enrolled in a well-known military school at the age of 14, a year later he took part in the war against Prussia, distinguishing himself for his courage. This could guarantee him a life of comfort and idleness. However, things did not go that way. Personal vicissitudes, along with his revolutionary ideas and rampant sexuality, soon made him a prisoner of the monarchy, then the republic, and finally the empire. His first prison, however, was marriage.
Worried about his promiscuous life and propensity for vice, his father had forced him in 1773 to marry Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the daughter of a wealthy magistrate. After only five months of stormy married life, Sade was arrested by order of the king and sent to the prison of Vincennes on the charge brought by a sex worker.
The woman had accused him of rampant debauchery, proven by a manuscript written by the Marquis himself. After 15 days of captivity, his wife's family managed to get him out, with the promise that he would stay in the castle in Normandy where the two young men had started life as a couple. But it didn't last long: this was only the first arrest in a long series of arrests.
In 1768 he was imprisoned for six months for kidnapping and torturing a woman, but after being released by the king, he returned to the holidays and above all to his wife's younger sister, Anna, with whom he had already established a connection. In 1772 he was accused of poisoning after drugging some sex workers during an orgy. He fled to Italy, but was sentenced to death in absentia, then arrested by the militia of the King of Sardinia and imprisoned in Milan prison, from which he escaped after five months.
He spent another five years traveling and debauchery, until his arrest in 1777 in Paris. It was in Vincennes prison that he began to write his most famous works. Transferred to the Bastille, he worked on his two most famous novels: The 120 Days of Sodom and Justine or the Humiliations of Virtue. It was in this last novel and in the story of its protagonist, subjected to all kinds of cruelty, torture and sexual violence, that the sadistic thought appeared.
In July 1789, ten days before the storming of the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade was transferred to an asylum. After his release in 1790, he returned to live with his wife and three children, but was soon abandoned by his entire family. His wife in particular could no longer tolerate the violence. It was at that moment that Marie Constance Quesnet appeared in his life, a young actress who stayed by his side until the end of his life.
In 1793 he was arrested again for his militancy in a revolutionary group and again sentenced to death. However, he managed to avoid the guillotine thanks to a bureaucratic error and was released the following year. Meanwhile, his novel "Justine" was published anonymously, considered shameful by the press. In 1801 de Sade was imprisoned in Charenton prison. He spent the last 13 years of his life in a cell. He died on December 2, 1814, at the age of 74.
