Framing Donatien Alphonse François De Sade as an actual human being and not just a comic book villain is incredibly difficult due to lacking records and the sheer outrageous peculiarity of the man. Sade is, to any reasonable measure, a problematic character in the history of the French Bourgeoisie; being responsible for acts of: child rape, murder of at least one child, attempting to rape a women and masturbating over a statue of Christ. While the crimes he committed may strike you as crimes of a broken man with wealth; his life, to the best that we can gather, was pampered for and largely spoiled. This brings up questions as to where Sade got his ideas from, how Sade was able to justify his crimes, and what pushed Sade into a life of crime. 
	De Sade’s book, 120 days of Sodom, like the man himself is a deeply peculiar and conflicting work which holds equally disturbing beliefs. While this post will talk more about the man himself I would like to acknowledge that the text will still be referenced, if infrequently. Understanding the work’s origin is necessary to understanding De Sade’s mental state both at the time of writing and while planning. After 6 years at Vincennes, where he planned the book, he was transferred to the Bastille and put into solitary confinement. He admonishes the prison structure in discourses with his wife whom he sent letters to during this period and he is generally said to have been a nuisance during this time. It is good to interject that while De Sade admonishes the prison system when he is captive in it; he had also sent a girl to prison, unjustly, for trying to expose the “Little Girls Affair”, the event in which he raped multiple children. The question to then propose is how; how could someone with an extremely pampered life turn out so vile? Is it human nature to be vile? I do not believe so and I believe I can provide an argument for a possible reason as to why De Sade became the man he did become.
A portion of why he may have become the man that he became may have been due to his formative experience in Lycéé Louis-le-Grand Jesuit school. To preface this De Sade’s own work “He was a church-man of 55 to 56 years of age, but so youthful and vigorous one would have thought him under forty. No one in the world had a more singular talent than this man for luring young girls into vice” shows a clear and thorough distaste for specifically the church, though it can also be gathered that he disliked the class that he himself was a part of (McMorran, 112). De Sade himself: 
He was a friar of around 40 years of age with a very handsome physiognomy; he stops me  - “Where are you going Françon?” he asks me. “To put the chairs out, Father.” “Fine, fine your mother will put those out. Come come into this closet,” he tells me as he leads me into a little cubbyhole that was there, “I shall show you something you’ve never seen…” I follow him in, he closes the door behind us and having placed me right in front of him - “Look, Françon'' [he] says to me, taking from his breeches a monstrous prick that almost bowled me over backwards with fear. (McMorran, 72)
 inserted clues in his own text to what may have happened in the formative. One thing to note is that Françon shares the effeminate with De Sade’s third name. As Wynn puts it:
When he was four years old he was sent away from Paris for reasons revealed in an apparently autobiographical passage from his epistolary novel, Alaine and Valcour:
Born and Raised in the palace of the illustrious prince to whom my mother had the honor of being related, and who was about my age, I was keenly encouraged to consort with him, so that, being known by him since childhood, I should have his support throughout my life; but my vanity at this time, understanding nothing of such calculations, was one day wounded during our youthful games by a quarrel over some object or other to which he doubtless believed with very good reason his rank entitled him, and I avenged myself for his resistance with repeated blows without a second thought holding me back, and with nothing but brute force able to separate me from my adversity. (Wynn, xvi)
With this framework I would like to propose that it is likely that De Sade himself was a victim of sexual abuse during his stay at the Jesuit School. This theory, while not provable, may offer one of many reasons as to why De Sade turned out as poorly as he did.