Is This Film Accurate On Marquis de Sade's Life?

No. His name is about all that's accurate. That doesn't bother me. The writer did a fine job and I love the film.

"a malcontent who knows how to spell"

Not remotely. There are elements taken from Sade's life to shape the narrative but it's definitely a fiction, not a biography. If you have the DVD, listen to the excellent commentary by Doug Wright - he discusses in detail the ways in which the film departs reality, and why he made those choices.

Sade was interred at Charenton, but he did not die with his tongue cut out swallowing a crucifix. He died in his seventies, apparently overweight, rather contrary to the figure cut by Geoffrey Rush.

He was once put into solitary confinement and deprived of his writing equipment, but Coulmier managed to reverse that decision. It did not, to my knowledge, provoke a riot. The incident did, however, provide the spark that inspired Doug Wright's play: he simply uses Sade as an ideal figure around whom to construct a debate of censorship and creative freedom.

The real Coulmier was, as has been noted often, a hunchbacked dwarf, about as physically dissimilar to Joaquin Phoenix as one can imagine; the real Madeleine was thirteen when she began a sexual relationship with Sade, who also had his mistress Constance live with him at Charenton.

Now cure me of my madness or I won't put my shoes on, ever.

Not really. The only true parts are that Sade used to live in that house for a while and there was an Abbe (though very unattractive in temrs of looks) that ruled that place and was a nice guy, Madelaine was also there but not the way she was pictured.

Not much. Sade's wife divorced him in 1790 and spent the rest of her life in a convent. Their three children are absent (his two sons, Louis-Marie and Claude-Armand visited him at Charenton; Louis-Marie was killed in Italy several years before Sade died). Also absent is Sade's longtime companion, Constance Quesnet, who had been granted permission to reside in Charenton.

Justine was written and published several years before his last incarceration in Charenton.

This is an old thread, but since no one mentioned it - the term "Sadism" was quite literally derived from the Marquis de Sade's name. That says it all. A tortured hero, he was not.