The Perverted Donatien Alphonse Francois
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Comte de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade (1740 – 1814), was a French aristocrat who became notorious for deviant practices, perversions, and erotic writings. Stuff that gets people kicked off Tinder. He so combined pornography with philosophy and violent pleasure fantasies, that his name gave rise to the terms sadist and sadism. Unlike most other figures on this list, who had significant life accomplishments in fields outside the bedroom that sufficed to earn them a place in history, de Sade was a pervert who is known to history only for being a pervert. He did write about politics and philosophy. However, were it not for the perverse things that he did, and the perverse things that he wrote about wanting to do, little would be known today about history’s most famous marquis.
De Sade advocated radically unrestrained freedom, and his fantasies emphasized violence, criminality, and blasphemy – a shoo-in for a Tinder ban. His real life engagement in criminally violent perversions kept him behind bars in prisons and insane asylums for most of his adult life. On and off, he spent 32 years behind bars, including 10 years in the Bastille. Most of his writings were penned while incarcerated. He was addicted to prostitutes from early on, and even more addicted to their mistreatment. In the early 1760s, he first appeared in the record after numerous Paris prostitutes complained of his mistreatment. That led to several short jail stints, before he was exiled from Paris to his countryside residence. The details of the abuse are murky, but the fact that a French aristocrat ended up behind bars in Ancien Regime days, based on his treatment of prostitutes, indicates seriousness.
