A look at liberation through the lens of the Marquis de Sade

It is said that in July 1789 the Marquis de Sade cried out that his fellow inmates were being tortured and killed behind the high walls of the Bastille. Less than two weeks later, rioters stormed the royal penitentiary and set all seven of the Bastille's prisoners free. The marquis was not among them, his transfer to an insane asylum at Chareton having been arranged several days earlier.

While Sade's contribution to Bastille Day, which signified if only symbolically the onset of the French Revolution, remains a matter of historic conjecture, his role in literature does not. It is from his name that the term "sadism" is derived, less for his real-life pursuits of abusing prostitutes and serving girls than for his imagined ones of raping and killing men and women at will. Before the marquis was transferred to Chareton, he set some of his fantasies/philosophies to paper. Click here for the full article