June 2, 1740 - Marquis de Sade
His name became a clinical term — sadism — which perhaps best measures his lasting imprint on both psychology and culture. Across decades of imprisonment, Sade produced an extraordinary volume of writing that pushed sexual violence, coercion, and transgression into literary form, giving philosophical scaffolding to cruelty. The crimes that repeatedly landed him in custody were not merely scandalous by the standards of his era; they involved real victims and real harm, a fact that his rehabilitation as a literary figure has sometimes obscured.
From Wikipedia
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade ( SA(H)D; French: [dɔnasjɛ̃ alfɔ̃s fʁɑ̃swa maʁki də sad]; 2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) was a French writer, libertine, political activist, and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy, and pornography. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. Some of these were published under his own name during his lifetime, but most appeared anonymously or posthumously.
Born into a noble family dating back to 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. During his first extended imprisonment from 1777 to 1790, he wrote a series of novels and other works, some of which his wife smuggled out of prison. On his release during the French Revolution, he pursued a literary career and became politically active, first as a constitutional monarchist then as a radical republican. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned for moderatism and narrowly escaped the guillotine. He was re-arrested in 1801 for his pornographic novels and was eventually incarcerated in the Charenton insane asylum, where he died in 1814.
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