I saw the movie. I liked it. I loved Michael Caine's performance. Michael Caine is always great. I was also stunned by the stomach-turning depravity of the French legal and medical system of the time. Then I read the book. The first half of the movie is typical Hollywood bad history: composite characters, events out of sequence, a devoted wife where there should have been a devoted mistress, etc. But the second half is fiction. In fact, De Sade (b. 1740) spent the last 10 years of his life, 1804 - 1814, living in relative comfort, with a mistress boarding in an adjacent room, at his family's expense, in the Charenton Asylum. By this time de Sade had spent a major part of his life in and out of prisons and asylums for sexually abusing prostitutes and servant-girls, and also for complicated reasons connected with prison escapes, bad debts, and the French Revolution. He had even been sentenced to death at one time (1772). The pretext for his final imprisonment (he was now 63) was publishing pornography. But the real reasons were complicated. He was notorious and infamous, both for his crimes and his pornography. Napoleon wanted him put away, because he believed de Sade had written a pamphlet defaming him and his family. The family wanted him put away to protect the family honor. The asylum was under the control of the French Ministry of the Interior. It was run, except for the last 7 months of de Sade's life, by an Abbe' Coulmier, and at one time a Dr. Royer-Collard was the medical director. There was also a 17-year-old worker in the asylum, Magdeleine Leclerc, with whom de Sade had (by his count) 57 sexual encounters during the last year of his life. The Abbe viewed himself as a humanitarian not a jailer and respected de Sade as an intellectual. The Abbe has been described as despotic but enlightened. While de Sade was in the asylum, he continued to write and publish (anonymously) pornography; but he also wrote and published ordinary plays, many of which were performed at the asylum, and choral pieces, some of which were performed at the asylum's church. There were sporadic attempts to curtail his writing activities. In 1807 police seized one of his pornographic works during a search of his room. It was dutifully returned to his family after his death. (They destroyed it.) In October 1809 he was briefly placed in solitary confinement and deprived of writing materials. In 1813 the Minister of the Interior banned the performance at the asylum of the plays. But all things considered, de Sade was pretty much left alone. He was in failing health during the last 4 months of his life and finally died of natural causes at age 74. His surviving son was visiting at the time, but missed the last moments. What is particularly troubling about this movie, is that it uses the correct names of people and places. >
