15. The Marquis de Sade Ended His Days in a Mental Asylum
The Marquis de Sade returned to France in 1776 and resumed his perversions, which steadily intensified, with one scandal following another in quick succession. Finally, the authorities tricked de Sade in 1777 to come to Paris to visit his sick mother. Unbeknownst to him, she had actually died, and when de Sade showed up, he was arrested and locked up in a royal fortress’ dungeon. He was kept there, in harsh conditions, until 1784, when he was transferred to the Bastille. There he remained until transferred to a mental asylum, just two days before that famous prison was stormed in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution. He was released in 1790 amidst France’s revolutionary turmoil.
De Sade took to the new order, and took to calling himself “Citizen Sade”. Within months, he got himself elected to the National Convention as a representative of the far left. He barely survived the Reign of Terror, during which he was imprisoned for a year. He emerged from jail in 1794 utterly destitute. In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered his arrest for pornographic and blasphemous novels he had written a decade earlier, and had him imprisoned without trial. In 1803, his family had him declared insane and transferred from prison to a mental asylum. There, he continued to write and stage plays with inmates as actors. His writing career finally to an end in 1809, when the police ordered de Sade kept in solitary confinement and deprived him of pen and paper.
