Born into a noble family dating from the 13th century, Sade served as an officer in the Seven Years' War before a series of sex scandals led to his detention in various prisons and insane asylums for most of his adult life.

Peter Marshall states that Sade's "known behaviour (which includes only the beating of a housemaid and an orgy with several prostitutes) departs greatly from the clinical picture of active sadism.

[10] Many prominent intellectuals including Angela Carter, Simone de Beauvoir, and Roland Barthes published studies of his work and numerous biographies have appeared.

[11] Cultural depictions of his life and work include the play Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss and the film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[12] Dworkin and Roger Shattuck have criticized the rehabilitation of Sade's reputation, arguing that it promotes violent pornography likely to cause harm to women,[13] the young and "unformed minds".

In the summer of 1765 he took his then mistress, Mademoiselle Beauvoison, to his favourite castle at La Coste, Provence, where he passed her off as his wife, greatly offending Madame de Montreuil.

That summer, Sade went to La Coste where the local dignitaries and vassals formally swore homage to their new lord; a revival of a feudal custom which his father had avoided.

[59] Sade narrowly avoided arrest in January 1774 when he was warned of an imminent police raid on his home in La Coste which had been arranged by Madame de Montreuil.

Madame de Montreuil, wishing to avoid the disgrace of a criminal conviction in the family, sent a representative to Marseilles to bribe the prostitutes and other prospective witnesses.

Vincennes prison was closed in February 1784 and Sade was transferred to the Bastille, where he produced a fair copy of The 120 Days of Sodom, which many critics consider his first major work.

Following the fall of the monarchy in September 1792, he was appointed the section's commissioner on health and charitable institutions, and in October 1793 he was chosen to deliver the funeral oration for the revolutionary martyrs Marat and Le Peletier.

[97] The director of Charenton, Abbé de Coulmier, attempted to run the institution on humane principles with an emphasis on "moral treatment" in accordance with the nature of the mental illness.

"[111] John Phillips argues that Sade's views cannot be easily determined due to the "difficulty of distinguishing a single authorial voice" from the multitude of characters in his fiction.

[112] Geoffrey Gorer states that Sade was in opposition to contemporary thinkers for both his "complete and continual denial of the right to property" and for viewing the political conflict in late-18th-century France as being not between "the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another," but rather all of these "more or less united against the people."

[10] Marshall writes that Sade was a proponent of free public brothels paid for by the state in order to reduce sex crimes and satisfy people's wishes to command and be obeyed.

[118] Maurice Lever, Laurence Louis Bongie and Francine du Plessix Gray present Sade as a political opportunist whose only consistent principles were libertinage, atheism, opposition to the death penalty and the defense of his own property and aristocratic privileges.

A review of Justine in the Journal Général de France stated that although Sade displayed "a rich and brilliant" imagination, "It is difficult to not often close the book out of disgust and indignation.

Although writers such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Stendhal, Byron and Poe expressed admiration for Sade's work,[138] Swinburne found them unintentionally funny and Anatole France said, "their most dangerous ingredient is a fatal dose of boredom".

In 1971, Roland Barthes published an influential textual analysis, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, which largely resisted psychological, social and biographical interpretations of his work.

Angela Carter, writing in 1978, argued that Sade put pornography in the service of women by claiming rights of free sexuality for them and depicting them in positions of power.

[147] Camille Paglia, writing in 1990, presented Sade as a rigorous philosopher of power relationships and sexuality who was undervalued in American academia because his emphasis on violence was difficult to accept.

[13] In 1990, Sade was published in the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series, which Roger Shattuck calls "an honor which corresponds to an artist being admitted into the Louvre".

[13] Roger Shattuck, writing in 1996, argued that writers who try to rehabilitate Sade place too much emphasis on abstract notions of transgression, linguistic play and irony, and marginalize the sexual violence at the core of his life and work.

[156] After World War II, Sade attracted increasing interest from intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Camille Paglia and others as an early thinker on issues of sexuality, the body, transgression and nihilism.

"[164] Phillips, in contrast, argues that Sade's enduring legacy is in replacing theological interpretations of the world with a materialist humanism thus contributing to "a modern intellectual climate in which all absolutisms are regarded with suspicion.

[168] Sade is best known for his libertine novels which combine graphic descriptions of sex and violence with long didactic passages in which his characters discuss the moral, religious, political and philosophical implications of their acts.

The characters engage in a range of acts including blasphemy, sexual intercourse, incest, sodomy, flagellation, coprophilia, necrophilia and the rape, torture and murder of adults and children.

The work is not pornographic but outlines some of his main themes including the non-existence of God or an afterlife, nature as semi-divine, materialism and determinism, the permanent flux of living matter, a relativist and pragmatic morality, and a defence of libertinism.

[174] In 1812–13, while confined at the Charenton insane asylum, he wrote three conventional historical novels: Adelaide of Brunswick, Princess of Saxony; The Secret History of Isabelle of Bavaria; and The Marquise de Gange.

[179][180] Sade's avowed political writings include his "Address to the King" (1791), his pamphlet "Idea on the method for the sanctioning of laws" (1792) and his eulogy for the revolutionaries Marat and Le Peletier (1793).