Susan P. Conner
Overview and Sources
Paris, France changed dramatically between the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. As the population of Paris increased from nearly 250,000 residents in 1600 to a current population of approximately 2.2 million in the city centre,1 the city was redefined by its revolutions, sub-sequent industrialization and immigration, and wars. During those centuries, prostitution was redefined as well. Originally prostitution was a moral offense and an issue of public order. Individual prostitutes, who were defined collec-tively under the law, were typically poor, young women from the provinces.2 They were dealt with in three ways: the judicial system if they committed other more serious infractions, prison hospitals if they were diseased, or the police in an effort to enforce order.
1 Initially the walled city of Paris was defined by its customs barriers. Today the city centre is defined by its twenty arrondissements which include 2.2 million residents, and the metro-politan area includes nearly 12 million inhabitants and casual residents. Without the customs wall of the eighteenth century, there is little distinction between the city and the outskirts.
2 Court records confirm this demographic, although period writers often described prostitutes as lazy, slothful do-nothings who were courting luxury.
* I would like to thank Central Michigan University for several Research and Creative En-deavors Grants in support of this project, the neh for a Travel to Collections Grant, and col-leagues who have given critiques on aspects of this research including Dena Goodman, Isser Wolloch, Alan Williams, Linda Merians, Tim Shaffer, and Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley. Por-tions of this research have been published as “The Pox in Eighteenth-Century France”, in Linda Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Lexington, ky, 1996), pp. 15–33; “Public Women and Public Virtue: Prostitution in Revolutionary Paris”, Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (1994–1995), pp. 221–240; “Politics, Pros-titution and the Pox in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1799”, Journal of Social History, 22 (1989), pp. 713–734; and “Prostitution and the Jacobin Agenda for Social Control”, Eighteenth-Century Life, 12 (1988), pp. 42–51.
In the seventeenth century, the system of dealing with prostitution in Paris changed from sporadic toleration briefly to confinement. In the eighteenth century, toleration and social control characterized governmental practices.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, houses of prostitution or brothels (lupanars, maisons closes, maisons de tolérance, and bordels) were licensed, and the “French System” was inaugurated. As a regulationist system, it also al-lowed for toleration because prostitution remained untouched by governmen-tal legislation. Functionally, the “French System” protected those prostitutes whom it enclosed while expanding police surveillance. Toleration continued to be a hallmark of the first half of the twentieth century, in spite of aboli-tionist assaults on the system. Even when the regulated houses of prostitution were closed after World War ii, prostitution per se was unaffected. This posi-tion was consistent with how the French have historically defined prostituposi-tion in classical terms, i.e., prostitution as a “sewer in the palace” or an unavoidable necessity.
In 1960, the French adopted the un “Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others” (1949), which officially placed France among abolitionist countries.3 Yet, the French also clarified their position; they would continue to respect the liberty of an in-dividual to be a prostitute. There was little debate until the 1990s, so the police continued their surveillance and monitoring of prostitutes. Toleration, for all intents and purposes, continued. Only very recently has a new, systematic re-evaluation of prostitution taken place. Fundamentally this is because Paris has changed dramatically. There are far more defined types of sex work than even a half century ago, and morality is not an unimportant element in the debates.
In Paris today, prostitution is not viewed as a singular type of female solicit-ing. There are multiple prostitutions, each with its own character, and they are viewed differently by those in authority. In fact, the most recent French na-tional legislation (the Sarkozy Law) placed sex workers, the majority of whom are immigrants, under the legal umbrella of a “danger to domestic security”.4 As of 2013, with a change in the government, the debate on prostitution was
3 “Circulaire du 25 novembre 1960 à la répression du proxénétisme”, available at: http://www .legifrance.gouv.fr/jopdf/common/jo_pdf.jsp?numJO=0&dateJO=19601127&numTexte=1060 9&pageDebut=10609&pageFin; last accessed 7 July 2017.
4 “Loi n° 2003–239 du 18 Mars 2003 dite la Loi Sarkozy ii pour la sécurité intérieure”, available at: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do;jsessionid=83ED992BAE071FD7FA1CF83853 CFF981.tpdjo10v_3?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000005634107&dateTexte=20120426; last accessed 7 July 2017. See also Marie Elisabeth Handman and Janine Mossuz-Lavau (eds), La prostitution à Paris (Paris, 2005).
renewed, and on 4 December, the National Assembly (the lower house of the French Parliament) overwhelmingly passed a law to criminalize clients while reversing the Sarkozy Law and decriminalizing the outward manifestations of prostitution. When the French Senate received the bill for review and action, it was far less enthusiastic and referred the legislation to a Select Committee which rejected the stringent fines on customers, saying that prostitution would be driven underground, tying it more directly to human trafficking and endan-gering prostitutes further.5 Since then, the government has taken new action, rejecting the criminalization of clients and reinstating the crime of passive solicitation against prostitutes. One opponent of the 2015 Senate measure re-marked, “Prostitutes are always the offenders; the client is always king.”6
In this urban overview of prostitution in Paris, I have employed a number of studies defining prostitution, outlining its context, and delineating prostitutes’
social profiles. I have also attempted to provide evidence about governmental and church responses to the work done by prostitutes in Paris, along with the challenging issues of migration, industrialization, late marriage, the impacts of war, and ultimately the market for sex. There are clear changes in policy during this four-century period, particularly the explicit gender and class differentia-tions that were firmly established in the nineteenth century.7 I will also address the agency of prostitutes themselves as they have, over time, exhibited differ-ent responses to their employmdiffer-ent and their condition.
In France, commercial sexuality has most often been viewed in terms of its relationship with the authorities. Therefore, it is important to note that the le-gal, juridical, and administrative approaches to prostitution often obscure the ways prostitutes operated. Prostitutes had their own networks, whether they were members of a family in pre-industrial France, supporting the family, or separated from it. Later, in post-revolutionary France, industrialization alone did not set the context for prostitution; nor were prostitutes always voiceless as moral crusaders have typically characterized them. Their relationship to the French state and to bourgeois society was much more complex. Finally, it is
5 France 24 coverage of the National Assembly, available at: http://www.france24.com/en/
20131204-french-assembly-parliament-votes-fine-pay-sex-clients-prostitution/; last accessed 11 March 2016. See also Gert Vermeulen and Nina Peršak, Prostitution: From Discourse to De-scription, from Moralization to Normalization (Antwerp, 2014), p. 200. For additional cover-age, see “Congratulations to Sex Workers in France”, available at: http://prostitutescollective .net/2014/07/23/congratulations-sex-workers-france/; last accessed 7 July 2017.
6 “Le Sénat pénalise les prostituées mais pas leur clients”, Le Monde.fr Société, 30 March 2015, available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/03/30/prostitution-le-senat-retablit -le-delit-de-racolage_4606124_3224.html; last accessed 7 July 2017.
7 See especially Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1985).
true that police, court, and prison dossiers reflect the words of the bureau-crats who recorded them; but they also contain the words of their subjects, and those truths and fictions can be ferreted out.8
I have based this study of prostitution in Paris on the following types of sources: royal decrees, administrative and police circulars, and national laws;
case studies (also collected as aggregate data) based on the records of tribu-nals such as the Châtelet and transcripts of the Correctional Police; prison ledgers such as those of the Salpêtrière and Saint Martin, as well as records of police clerks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; scientific and medical treatises and studies on venereal diseases; the work of moral crusaders and crusaders for individual liberty; and the words of sex labourers themselves, as they have been collected.9
Finally, it should be noted that Paris is an interesting case study because of its historic paradox. During the Revolution of 1789, individual liberty was enshrined in the French pantheon of virtues (although large segments of the population, including women, were excluded at that time) while, at the same
8 See the approach taken by Natalie Davis in Fictions in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (Stanford, 1987).
9 The laws, decrees, and circulars through 1870 are itemized in a number of sources including La prostitution à Paris et à Londres by C.J. Lecour (Paris, 1870) who was commissioner and bureau chief at the Préfecture de Police. His work also includes descriptions of prostitutes, statistics on those who were registered and those who were not, and additional statistics on venereal diseases. Similarly, Handman and Mossuz-Lavau’s work (see note 4) defines each type of prostitution in Paris in 2002–2004, with demographics and legal restrictions when applicable. Other works dealing with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods use archival collections at the Archives de la Préfecture de Police [app], the Archives de l’Assistance publique [aap], and the Archives nationales [an], as well as published works at the app and the Bibliothèque nationale [bn]. Nineteenth-century studies rely heavily on the collections of the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand. Contemporary works concerning the lat-ter nineteenth century include Emile Richard, La prostitution à Paris (Paris, 1890), Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (New York, 1896), Dr Oscar Commenge, La prostitution clandestine à Paris (Paris, 1897), and Louis Fiaux, La police des moeurs devant la commission extraparlementaire du régime des moeurs (Paris, 1907–12). Important secondary sources include Philip Riley, A Lust for Virtue: Louis xiv’s Attack on Sin in Seventeenth-Century France (Westport, 2001); Erica Marie Benabou, La prostitution et la police des moeurs au xviiie siècle (Paris, 1987); Harsin, Policing Prostitution on the nineteenth century (see note 7) and Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge, ma 1990) on the latter nineteenth century; and Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American gi in World War ii France (Chicago, 2013) and Lilian Mathieu, “The Emergence and Uncertain Outcomes of Prostitutes’ Social Movements”, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 10 (2003), pp. 29–50, on aspects of the twentieth century.
time and since then, there has been a continuing history of governmental reg-ulation through which the public is deemed to need protection from disorder and particularly from disease. Three questions should be kept in mind in this regard. First, where does individual liberty end, including the right to use one’s body as a means of labour? Second, where does governmental intervention for the protection of others begin? Third, during these four centuries, how and why did prostitutes navigate the spaces they inhabited or in which they found themselves?
Defining Prostitution in Paris
The next paragraphs provide definitions of the terms associated with the prac-tice of prostitution in Paris and its regulation, focusing in particular on four words: prostitution, soliciting, pimping, and procuring. “Prostitution” has typi-cally meant the provision of sexual services, later defined as the exchange of sexual services for payment. While it has generally been seen as a female pro-fession, prostitution has not historically been gendered; and in Paris in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, prostitution has taken many forms among female, male, and transgendered practitioners.
“Soliciting”, the second term identified with prostitution, is the act of at-tracting clients. While simple on face value, soliciting is strikingly complex because of its variations. Overt solicitation or le racolage actif has always been under legal sanction, whether in the army encampments of Louis xiv, under the arcades of the Palais Royal, or along the rue Saint-Denis. Penalties for overt solicitation were most often meted out by the police, and they varied dramati-cally. Passive solicitation or le racolage passif is something quite different be-cause it assumes that the prostitute makes no strikingly outward overtures to the potential client. Yet, a slight glance, an uncategorized attitude, an inad-vertent approach, or perceived provocative poses can all be deemed passive solicitation by authorities. Codified most recently under the Sarkozy Law, such actions were subject to police intervention.10 Historically, passive solicitation was considered a corollary of prostitution so long as it was not scandalous; but as of 2003, it was classed as criminal. Such remains the case today.
“Pimping”, the third term associated with prostitution, is carried out by a pimp who serves as an agent for a prostitute, receiving a portion of the pros-titute’s earnings. In return, the pimp provides physical protection, advertis-ing, and/or a location for practise of the trade. Contrary to contemporary
10 See above, note 4.
prostitution, during most of the pre-twentieth century Parisian brothels were actually run by madams, the female equivalent of a pimp. “Procuring”, the fourth term associated with prostitution, has been identified since the turn of the twentieth century with international slave trafficking and human bondage.
Prior to that time, procurers were often synonymous with pimps and madams who lured prostitutes into their brothels, promising them a better life than un-protected street walkers. In the last several decades, procuring has taken on a more sinister meaning because of organized crime which is identified with cartels and mafia-type networks.
Another set of definitions is in order as well to set the stage for the history of French prostitution. In France from the sixteenth century to the present, there have been three governmental positions regarding the external manifestations of prostitution: toleration, regulation, and abolition. The legal position called
“toleration” characterized most of the late mediaeval period, the early modern period except for the reign of Louis xiv, and the Revolutionary years. Pros-titutes were free to practise their trade unless they were engaged in another proscribed activity or they engaged in notorious or scandalous behaviour. The legal position known as “regulationism” was incorporated into French practice and law by 1804. Under the system of regulation, the “French System” was es-tablished to register and monitor prostitutes. The intent was to encourage pros-titutes to practise their trade in houses of prostitution (maisons de tolérance or maisons closes) that were under the surveillance of the state. Allegedly families were protected in this way, innocent women could venture from their homes without fear of being mistaken for prostitutes, and a healthy population was assured because of the examinations and confinement of prostitutes for vene-real diseases. Ultimately France became a model for other countries in dealing with prostitution.
“Abolition” is the third position, and it is the most difficult to define. Two contradictory meanings have been associated with abolitionism: (1) the elimi-nation of regulationist laws including particularly brothel prostitution, while allowing for the continued practice of prostitution, or (2) the eradication of prostitution, particularly forced prostitution.11 The first meaning characterizes some debates and actions that occurred in the twentieth century, while the second meaning represents some of the current discourses.
11 Debates since the nineteenth century often have centred on whether any form of prosti-tution is a choice. According to some arguments, it cannot be a choice because it is either a form of sexual slavery to a procurer or pimp or a response to poverty and need.
A Social and Labour History of Prostitution in Paris
Antecedents: Mediaeval Prostitution as a Function of Urban Life Throughout most of the history of Paris, efforts to suppress prostitution have been “few, short-lived and ineffective.”12 While this study of prostitution in Paris officially begins in the seventeenth century, it is important to trace ante-cedents to earlier times. Prostitution was a fact of urban life; prostitutes were indeed sex labourers, and licensed brothels and bathhouses (public stews) were ubiquitous during the Middle Ages. Common language differentiated the types of prostitutes, e.g., public prostitutes in the brothels, street walkers, “easy women” who might also be vagabonds, and women who practised clandestine-ly.13 In Latin texts, prostitutes were called meretrices; in impolite French, putain or whore.14 Ultimately, prostitution was restricted to an area that today corre-sponds to portions of the 1st through 4th arrondissements on the Right Bank.
The area was a labyrinth of narrow streets with colourful and earthy names that described the commerce that took place there: la rue du Poil-au-con, la rue Tire-Vit, la rue Gratte-Cul, la rue Pute-y-Musse, and la rue Trousse-nonnain.15
As the fourteenth century dawned, Paris boasted 200,000 inhabitants, making it the largest city in western Europe, and a reasonably loose code of morality governed the court, the well-off, and even the poor. While not wide-spread, there had been earlier church teachings that rendered judgement on whether or not prostitutes’ earnings could be contributed to church coffers.
12 Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution (New York, 1988), p. 9. The most notable attempts to eradicate prostitution were made by Louis ix in 1254 to expel all “women of evil life”
from the kingdom of France and to confiscate their belongings. Two years later, Louis ix demanded that they be expelled from the centre of the city, particularly from anywhere near “holy places, such as churches and cemeteries.” Louis ix revised his position in 1269, establishing extramural areas for the practice of prostitution. His son took a repressive position regarding procurers (who were mostly female). Under the law they could be burned alive, subjected to the pillory, scourged, or mutilated. See also Leah Otis, Pros-titution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban InsPros-titution in Languedoc (Chicago, 1985), p. 20, and William Sanger, The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (New York, 1858), pp. 95–97.
13 Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, pp. 7–8.
14 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge, ma, 1987), p. 215.
15 See Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1961). One must search alphabetically by modern street names. See also Benabou, La prostitution, p. 21. I have not attempted to translate the names of these streets since words change over time. For readers who do not know French, note that the names generally reflect private parts of the body, the acts themselves, or anti-clerical fixations.
The question revolved around whether a prostitute was actually engaged in work. According to Thomas of Chobham, a canon of the cathedral of Notre Dame, women who took pleasure in the act of venal sex “accomplished no work”, and the church could not receive their offerings. On the other hand, he noted that the majority of prostitutes were women who had no choice: “they rent their body and furnish work.” In essence, he classed most prostitutes as working poor and therefore their offerings to the church could be accepted.16
The poor married late and female mortality was higher than male
The poor married late and female mortality was higher than male