Marquis de Sade

Sade, Marquis de (Comte Donatien Alphonse Françis de Sade; 1740–1814), French soldier and writer. He proposed that the existence of sexual deviation and criminal acts prove they are natural. He was charged with many sexual offenses and spent much of his life in prisons, writing sexually explicit romances, e.g., Justine (1791). He lived his last 11 years in Charenton lunatic asylum. The word sadism (infliction of pain to attain sexual pleasure) was named for him.