Marquis de Sade

Born into 13th-century nobility in 1740, Donatien Alphonse François served as an officer in the Seven Years' War before sex scandals landed him in prisons and asylums for most of his remaining years. During his first long imprisonment, 1777 to 1790, he wrote novels his wife smuggled out. Released during the French Revolution, he turned politically active - constitutional monarchist, then radical republican - and was jailed again during the Reign of Terror, narrowly missing the guillotine for moderatism. Re-arrested in 1801 for pornographic writing, he spent his final years in the Charenton asylum, where he died in 1814. His major works - The 120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom - mixed extreme sexual violence with discourses on religion and politics, later drawing the attention of 20th-century intellectuals who saw in him a precursor to Freud, surrealism, and anarchism.