The "S (Sadism)" in BDSM: A Word Named After Marquis de Sade, And His Crimes.

The word Sadism entered the dictionary in 1886.

The man behind it had been dead for 72 years. He lived 74 years. 30 of them in confinement.

He committed atrocities. Yet some people defend him.

 

Marquis de Sade

Born 1740, Paris

Died 1814, Charenton Asylum

Title Marquis

Occupation Writer, Libertine, Military Officer

 

A Scandal-Prone Aristocrat

Sade came from one of France's oldest noble families. On paper, a brilliant future awaited him. In practice, his father privately called him a boy with "not one good quality and all the bad ones".

 

October 1763 — The Testard Affair

Sade rented a private house in Paris for "sexual encounters" shortly after his wedding.

He hired a young woman, Jeanne Testard, who was devoutly religious.  He reportedly used religious objects in deliberately offensive ways, threatened her with a pistol and a sword, death and rape. He read her anti-religious poems through the night...

She went to the police the next morning.

He was arrested but released within two weeks after his father pleaded for clemency.

 

Easter Sunday, 1768 — The Arcueil Affair

Sade approached a widow begging in a Paris plaza and brought her to his country house. There, he tortured her with canes, knives, and hot wax.

She escaped through a window and filed a complaint. But privilege shielded him from lasting consequences.

 

1772 — The Marseilles Affair

Sade hosted an elaborately staged orgy involving intercourse and flagellation with four women. He offered them an aphrodisiac known as “Spanish fly”. Two fell critically ill.

The courts sentenced him to death in absentia. He fled to Italy.

 

The Banned Masterpiece: The 120 Days of Sodom

In 1777, Sade was finally caught and imprisoned for a long stretch.

Paradoxically, prison made him one of the most prolific writers of his era. He began his most notorious work, The 120 Days of Sodom.

The premise: four powerful libertines imprison forty-six victims in a remote castle. One hundred and twenty days. No escape. They proceed methodically through escalating forms of cruelty.

Coprophilia. Necrophilia. Bestiality. Incest. Rape. Sexual abuse of minors.

 

The libertines are depicted as drawing pleasure from the suffering and degradation of  their victims  — many of whom are adolescents and young women.

The 120 Days of Sodom became one of the most controversial texts in Western literary history. Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini adapted it in 1975 as Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, relocating the story to Fascist Italy.

The film remains banned or restricted in numerous countries to this day.

 

From Criminal to Cultural Figure

After his release in 1790, Sade reinvented himself as "Louis Sade, man of letters." Critics were appalled, one reviewer called his work detestable.

In the 20th century, everything flipped.

Some critics consider it his first major work. Extreme content. Philosophy. Desire. The absence of God.

Guillaume Apollinaire called him "the freest spirit that has yet existed."

André Breton celebrated him as committed to "total liberation, both social and moral."  

Angela Carter argued he had advanced women's sexual freedom.

Not everyone agreed.

Andrea Dworkin,  condemned the entire rehabilitation of Sade as a cultural willingness to aestheticize violence against women.

The debate has never settled.

Long before any of this, however, sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing borrowed Sade's name in 1886 for a clinical term the world still uses today:

Sadism.

 

The Asylum Years

By 1801, Napoleon's government intervened.

Sade was arrested at his publisher's office. There was no formal trial.

When he was found attempting to seduce younger inmates at his prison, he was officially declared insane, and transferred to the Charenton Asylum outside paris.

At Charenton, Sade was allowed to write, direct, and perform theatrical productions. By 1805, a theater seating 200 people had been built on the asylum grounds, . Parisian elites attended. His companion,

 Marie-Constance, lived with him there.

Privilege bought him time. Not immunity.

The authorities grew suspicious of this comfortable arrangement. They eventually shut it all down. Sade was placed in solitary confinement and deprived of pen and paper.

In 1813, all theater and entertainment at Charenton was banned.

Sade died on 2 December 1814, age 74.

 

Behind the Name

Sade's legacy handed BDSM two things at once:

A dark glamour.

A lasting debate.

Some call him the father of BDSM. Historically, his writings did influence later discussions of sexual transgression. He was also one of the most notorious practitioners of extreme violence in his era.

But modern BDSM is built on principles Sade himself did not practice: consent, negotiation, and the clear separation between fantasy and harm.

 

We reject violence against women.

We reject the abuse of minors.

We reject coercion disguised as desire.

Whatever intellectual influence his name carried into modern vocabulary, his documented acts of cruelty are not something to romanticize.

Whether he deserved to be linked symbolically to consensual BDSM remains a debate. What is not debatable is:

Non-consensual violence has no place in BDSM.