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He had started to write in prison. In 1782 he completed Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, expressing his atheism by having the dying libertine convince the priest of the mistakes of a pious life. The novel The 120 Days of Sodom was written in 1785 and describes a wide variety of sexual perversions performed on a group of enslaved teenagers. In 1787, he wrote Les Infortunes de la vertu, an early version of Justine which was published in 1791. It describes the misfortunes of a girl who continues to believe in the goodness of God despite evidence to the contrary. In Aline and Valcour (1795) he contrasts a brutal African kingdom with a utopian island paradise. Other works are Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795), Juliette (1798), and Crimes of Love (1800) as well as a number of plays.
De Sade's works contain explicit and often repetitive descriptions of rape and a great number of sexual perversions, many of which involve violence and transcend the boundaries of the possible. He disdained the church and argued for atheism and for the rejection of all moral and ethical rules, advocating for an extreme hedonist way of life, pleasure being the highest principle.
During his time of freedom (beginning 1790), he met Marie-Constance Quesnet, a working-class single mother; they would stay together for the rest of his life. He initially arranged himself with the new political situation after the revolution and even managed to obtain several official positions despite his aristocratic background. Sitting in court, when the family of his former wife came before him, he treated them favorably, even though they had schemed to have him imprisoned years earlier. By now extremely obese, he was even elected to the National Convention, where he represented the far left.
Appalled by the Reign of Terror in 1793, he nevertheless wrote an admiring eulogy for Jean-Paul Marat to secure his position. Then he resigned his posts, was accused of "moderatism", imprisoned for over a year, and barely escaped the guillotine. Presumably, this confirmed his life-long detestation of state tyranny and especially of the death penalty. Now all but destitute, he wrote the pamphlet Frenchmen! One More Effort If You Wish To Be Republicans! in which he advocated a utopian form of socialism. In it he states that laws against theft are absurd: they protect the original thieves, the wealthy, against the poor who have no option left but theft. He also argues that the state has no right to outlaw murder, while at the same time ordering killings when executing prisoners or fighting wars.
In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the anonymous author of Justine, or the misfortunes of virtue and Juliette to be arrested. Without trial, de Sade was imprisoned in the harsh fortress of Bicetre . After intervention by his family, he was declared insane in 1803 and transferred again to the asylum at Charenton.
Constance was allowed to live with him there. The liberal director of Charenton, Abbe de Coulmier allowed and encouraged him to stage several of his plays with the inmates as actors, to be viewed by the Parisian public. The play by Peter Weiss titled The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade is a fictional account of this period. Coulmier's novel approaches to psychotherapy attracted much opposition.
De Sade began an affair with twelve-year-old Madeleine Leclerc at Charenton. This affair lasted some 4 years, until de Sade died in the asylum in 1814. His eldest son had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burned; this included the immense multi-volume work Les Journées de Florbelle. De Sade was buried in Charenton; his skull was later removed from the grave for scientific investigations.
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