In late December 1791, Rose Mainville, a 17-year-old French girl, made a horrifying discovery. She found her name, address and physical description in a pornographic book advertising itself as a detailed guide to the sex workers of Paris. Ashamed, humiliated and terrified at the thought of being confronted by her family, friends and neighbours, she took her own life by drinking a bottle of nitric acid.
Amid the tumult of the early years of the French Revolution, the tragic story of Mainville’s suicide might easily have been forgotten. Instead, it became a cause célèbre, with newspapers across Paris reporting on the story. Mainville was cast as an honest, hard-working street vendor who had been the victim of malicious slander. Two Parisian theatre companies even staged a dramatisation of her story in order to rally public opinion in her defence. Journalists called for the pornographic book to be banned, and for the book’s anonymous author to be punished. In fact, they argued, many other libellous books and pamphlets, offering similarly revealing information, should be forbidden. A private person should not fear exposure in the public sphere.
If Mainville was alive today, we would call her exposure ‘doxxing’: publishing or publicising an individual’s name, address or employment information, often with malicious intent, so that they are ‘unmasked’ or ‘shamed’. It wasn’t illegal for the anonymous author to include her name and address in his pornographic book. Although she was harmed by this identification and exposure, she had no recourse to justice, nor could she demand a retraction. Mainville’s story shows us how difficult it can be for victims to find justice in a society grappling with the balance between free speech and the right to privacy. All societies decide where this balance lies. In Revolutionary Paris, privacy was a privilege that only the elite and powerful could enjoy.
Mainville lived and worked in and around the Palais-Royal, a site renowned for its association with both liberty and licentiousness. Initially built in the 1630s as a palace for Cardinal Richelieu, the Palais-Royal had a succession of royal owners, ultimately ending up in the hands of the Duke of Orléans, a cousin of King Louis XVI. In the 1780s, the duke dramatically expanded the Palais, adding new six-storey apartment buildings with retail space, and enclosing the palace’s extensive gardens on three sides. This commercial venture was a success, and the Palais-Royal regularly attracted huge crowds to its shops, cafés, theatre and public gardens. Crucially, because it was owned by a member of the royal family, the Palais-Royal lay outside the jurisdiction of the Paris police. This meant that it was a safe space for radical or controversial political speech. In fact, in July 1789, the protests that led to the storming of the Bastille had begun in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.
But the Palais harboured other forms of illicit activity: gambling, stock-jobbing, the sale of pornographic materials. It was also a space for sex work. In the arcades and gardens of the Palais, sex workers walked, talked and mingled with wealthy shoppers, middle-class theatre-goers, and street vendors like Rose Mainville.
The pornographic book in which her name appeared – called the Almanach des demoiselles de Paris – purported to be a comprehensive guide to the sex workers who laboured in the gardens and brothels of the Palais-Royal. Such books were not uncommon in the late 18th century. Almanacs, reference books and city directories were a popular genre, and it is perhaps no surprise that some authors saw an opportunity to parody those works and give them a salacious twist. The author of the Almanach claimed to be inspired by Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a well-known London directory of sex workers published between 1757 and 1795.
The entries in the Almanach were sexually explicit and full of jokes and innuendo. Whether or not the book actually served as a practical guide, it was definitely used for entertainment, for masturbation as much as assignation. Attempting a pun about ships and sailing, the author sneered that Madame Dugazon was a ‘large & beautiful frigate’ who, when younger, had been ‘an excellent sailboat, but today she is leaking everywhere. – To plug all the holes … 600 livres.’ If a man wanted to have sex with Adeline, rumoured to be the mistress of a priest, he had to pay 500 livres ‘to say a mass at her chapel’. Even the Revolution and its ideals were subject to ridicule in the Almanach. Madame Laurent was ‘very constitutional’ and ‘knows the rights of man by heart’. This woman was, the author laughed, a true citoyenne, for ‘she admits into her central committee two deputies every day’ and would accept only the Revolutionary government’s paper money as payment.
All of this information, the Almanach argued, served the public interest. The author claimed that his book was most useful for foreigners and provincial visitors, but also could be a valuable resource for Parisian men. Drawing upon eroticising and orientalising stereotypes, the book claimed to provide its reader with a ‘portable harem’, transforming him from a ‘simple citizen’ into a ‘real Sultan’. The author of a rival pamphlet, the Tarif des filles du Palais-Royal, described his own work as ‘an act of patriotism’, explaining that its purpose was to provide information about the true cost of sexual services so as to prevent price gouging.
It may seem surprising that these guides, filled with misogynist humour, dirty puns and political satire, were printed at all. The French monarchy did, in fact, impose strict censorship rules on all printed materials. This did not stop libellous, rude or sexually explicit materials from circulating; it just meant that they often had to be printed outside of France, smuggled in, and sold in secret. Before the revolution, it would have been possible to buy a pornographic work like the Almanach, but only by asking a discreet bookseller about materials kept off-book and under the counter.
But at the start of the revolution, the monarchy was forced to abandon its censorship rules. The Revolutionary government, filled with new ideas about free speech, made it possible for any kind of radical work to be published without oversight. Thousands and thousands of books, pamphlets and newspapers were published and read. While the majority of these works were political, the end of censorship also massively increased the availability and visibility of illicit texts of any kind, including pornographic ones like the Almanach. By 1791, these works were being hawked across the city and under the arcades of the Palais-Royal where Mainville worked.
In the wake of Mainville’s suicide, her defenders in the press argued that the Almanach des demoiselles de Paris had broken these Revolutionary libel laws, and they called for the prosecution of its anonymous author. However, critics of the Almanach were not concerned about the privacy of sex workers, because, as one journalist remarked, these women ‘want nothing more than to be known’. Instead, they worried that sexual slander was damaging to family relationships and, by extension, to social hierarchies and the state. Amid bitterly contentious revolutionary politics in the early 1790s, sexual slander was increasingly used as a political weapon against politicians and public officials. This libellous speech not only undermined public trust in government but also threatened to spill over into disputes between private citizens. This appeared to be the case in Mainville’s tragic tale.
Protests against Mainville’s ‘doxxing’ didn’t appear just in print. Within a month of her death, two theatre companies each brought a different version of her story to the stage. The plays dramatised and no doubt embellished her story, including changing her name to Gertrude. Gertrude, ou le Suicide du 28 Décembre debuted on 25 January 1792 and was performed at least 11 times in the span of two months, while Le Suicide du 28 Décembre 1791, ou les Effets de la calomnie debuted a week later and was performed at least 10 times.
The first to appear, Gertrude, was performed at the Théâtre Montansier, located within the Palais-Royal itself, and was written by a playwright named Joseph Aude who claimed to be personally acquainted with the details of the incident. In Aude’s version of the story, Gertrude Mainville was an honest, hardworking young woman, soon to marry her sweetheart. The play had two villains: Gertrude’s jealous ex-boyfriend, who wrote the Almanach; and Gertrude’s female rival, who sent a copy of the book to Gertrude’s mother so as to intentionally embarrass her in front of her family. Gertrude is driven to despair at the shame and humiliation of these revelations, and is tortured by the anticipated collapse of her engagement. Her head spinning, she swallows a bottle of nitric acid that she had purchased to produce an engraved portrait as a gift for her fiancé. Reviews of the play lauded the performance of the actress playing Gertrude, Anne-Françoise Boutet, known as Mademoiselle Mars. In fact, Mars’s premiere performance was so emotionally wrenching and her physical convulsions on stage so life-like that the audience was reportedly left disturbed and disquieted – so much so that Aude was forced to rewrite the ending of the play to make it more palatable to the public.
Mademoiselle Mars’s riveting yet upsetting portrayal of Gertrude was no doubt inspired by her own experience. Although it was never acknowledged by journalists commenting on the story or reviewing the play, Mademoiselle Mars was herself mentioned very prominently in the Almanach. And Mars was not alone: her two female co-stars in Gertrude at the Théâtre Montansier were also included in the book, as were two actresses at the Théâtre de Molière where Le Suicide du 28 Décembre 1791, ou les Effets de la calomnie was performed. In fact, actresses made up a significant majority of the entries in the Almanach.
The women represented in the Almanach were part of a large and diverse group of people who undertook sex work in Revolutionary Paris. Some women and men did this kind of labour all the time. Others performed occasional or seasonal sex work, soliciting when times were tight or when other jobs failed to come through. Some worked in an organised corps of workers; others worked alone. There were certainly moments of solidarity and mutual aid among sex workers but – just like in any type of employment – there were also rivalries and divisions. Sex workers competed with one another for clients, space and pay.
One particularly unified group of sex workers included women and men who worked in the theatres of Paris. Although not every performer did this kind of labour, it was a truism in the period that many of the people who worked on the stage also acted as companions, lovers or mistresses for the social, political and financial elite. These professionals were well compensated for their time, receiving cash payments, gifts of clothing or jewellery, rent for fashionable lodgings, or even valuable pensions from their patrons. Actresses like Mademoiselle Mars may have exchanged sex for money or gifts, but their relationships were imagined as ‘exclusive’, not in the sense that they were necessarily monogamous, but in that they were private and selective. Theatre professionals managed their sexual relationships carefully, cultivating an aura of erotic singularity, where potential patrons were vetted and assessed before being accepted. This was one reason why inclusion in the Almanach was so damaging. It was not just that elite sex workers did not like to be imagined as people who solicited passers-by in the gardens of the Palais-Royal; it was that they risked losing the air of fashionable rarity that might promise a more secure and lasting livelihood. They definitely did not want men showing up at their homes uninvited, clutching a copy of the Almanach and its advertised sum.
Mainville was not an actress – her name does not appear in any of the period’s theatre guides – but it is more difficult to know how she made her living or why she was listed in the Almanach. Although the two theatrical performances and the newspaper articles about her death consistently portrayed her as a street vendor, other evidence is less conclusive. Some elements of her story suspiciously resemble well-worn narrative tropes of the late 18th century. At least one journalist, even as he protested her innocence, described Mainville as ‘a sausage seller’ at the Palais-Royal, perhaps a not-so-subtle wink at male readers keenly aware of the location’s reputation as a centre of sex work in Paris. It is also important to note that another guide to sex work at the Palais-Royal, the Tarif des filles du Palais-Royal, most likely published in 1790, listed a woman named ‘Mainville’ at an address similar to the one in the Almanach. Perhaps Rose Mainville was a sex-worker at the Palais. Perhaps she was only a street vendor there. But this ambiguity is not surprising, especially given the diversity of sex workers in Paris.
No matter how she supported herself, Mainville certainly had something in common with Mademoiselle Mars and the other actresses listed in the Almanach: her reputation, her livelihood and her connections with family and friends may have been threatened when she was revealed as a ‘prostitute’ in print, but the legal system afforded little recourse. Absent prepublication censorship, anyone could publish anything, whether it was a controversial political opinion or a sexual slander. New Revolutionary free speech laws did allow for civil and criminal prosecution of authors who wrote slanderous works, but only after they appeared in print – in other words, after the damage had already been done. And even these legal remedies were of limited use. Prosecution was difficult in cases where books or pamphlets did not reveal their authors or publishers.
In the case of the Almanach, Aude, the playwright of Gertrude, claimed to know the true identity of the author, but there is no evidence that this person ever faced charges. Criminal or civil lawsuits would have been expensive and would have invited additional unwelcome public scrutiny of women who had already suffered damaging exposure. In its practical application, the law permitted the author of the Almanach to protect their anonymity even as victims lost their own, their private lives and livelihoods exposed to a voyeuristic and potentially dangerous public.
Technically in possession of legal rights but deprived of any realistic ability to exercise them, many women who appeared in the infamous pages of the Almanach would have felt as powerless as Mainville. But Mademoiselle Mars and the other actresses did have one very potent weapon at their disposal: the stage. By taking up Mainville’s cause and reimagining her story in front of their audiences, they crafted a compelling and sympathetic narrative designed to undermine and publicly shame the author of the Almanach. This approach, too, had limitations. Given the public’s hostility towards sex work, Mars and her fellow actors had to cast Mainville as an ‘honest’ and ‘innocent’ young woman unfairly slandered in print. To describe her as a sex worker, even on the stage, would have invited criticism of her story.
This story suggests some valuable lessons that might inform how we think about more recent cases of doxxing of sex workers, who have been targeted because their labour supposedly blurs the line between public and private, what is shared and what is kept separate, what is allowable as a freedom of the press and what constitutes a gross invasion of privacy. Doxxing is unethical as well as, in some cases, illegal, but its victims have found that they cannot rely on the law to protect them. Neither the government nor social media companies take the problem seriously enough and, as in the case of the Almanach, by the time private information is removed from public view, significant damage has already been done.
In November 18, 1850, a Monsieur Langangne decided he had had enough and took up his pen to write a letter to the police. Having the habit of taking an evening walk “en flâneur” from the Madeleine to the Faubourg Montmartre in what was then the first arrondissement (now the eighth), Langangne wrote that he had begun to notice “spectacles of shameful immorality that have painfully afflicted my sight and my spirit.” These spectacles, he specified, were none other than “those offered by those beings without name, those hideous hermaphrodites!” He explained that so long as their behavior remained within “certain limits, he kept quiet, but that is impossible now that the activities of these unfortunates (who no doubt also portray themselves as advocates of the right to work, since bad examples are contagious) reach the alarming heights of organized blackmail.” Indeed, Langangne proceeded to describe how, the previous day, he was “accosted” by two young men with “cheeks painted with makeup,” who claimed to know him and who asked him to buy them some drinks. Surmising that the reason they approached him was that “he may have something in common with one of their brothers or friends,” Langangne refused, which led the two men to launch a series of insults at him. This unpleasant encounter convinced this particular Parisian that “the boulevards are currently a veritable court of miracles planted in the middle of Sodom and Gomorrah, and soon all promenades on them will be forbidden not only to honest women who have not been able to show themselves for a long time, but also for men who should not have to be at odds with rascals.”
As an employee within the Ministry of Finance, Langangne seemed to expect that the streets were in some ways “his.” His right to them certainly outweighed that of those “hermaphrodites,” a faith indicated by his self-identification as a “flâneur.” The idea of the “flâneur” encapsulates a form of urban wandering predicated on class and gender privilege that permitted movement and observation of the attractions of modern city life. The act of flânerie depended on the management and maintenance of perception, the clear control over what one saw and heard, as well as one’s response. More broadly, as scholar Vanessa Schwartz has described it, the flâneur represents “a positionality of power—one through which the spectator assumes the position of being able to be part of the spectacle and yet command it at the same time.”
By asserting himself as a “flâneur,” then, Langangne referenced a whole host of assumptions about his place within the urban environment, all of which revolved around his ability to move about, look on, and assert himself within urban space as he wished.
Langangne was not entirely successful at asserting his own respectability against the disrepute of the men he encountered. The letter notes, after all, that he was only writing because the hermaphrodites’ behavior had exceeded “certain limits.” Presumably, in other words, they had been present before this moment, fixtures of a broader neighborhood culture that became an annoyance once they specifically targeted him. In addition, his admission that the “hermaphrodites” may have addressed him because “he may have something in common with” them highlights his difficulty in distinguishing his own identity from those who accosted him.
Although the letter may have tried to construct the writer’s knowledge against the supposed ignorance of its objects, that knowledge was, in fact, premised on Langangne’s own familiarity with his targets: he knew how to recognize them through their behavior and dress. That he may have “resembled” them reinforces the difficulty he faced in separating himself. He could know who they were only if he was in some sense already one of them. The “straight” flâneur thus becomes decidedly queer, because we can ultimately never know who he was: a victim or a participant in a culture of public sex.
The use of public space for sex should not be seen only in terms of anxiety by regulators and Parisians, but also as a practice that actively shaped the ways people encountered urban space.
During this period, expert commentators, the police, and lay Parisians believed that sex was increasingly available and unavoidable on the streets of Paris. At the same time, the redevelopment of the city oriented it even more toward its image as a site of commercial “pleasure.” This combination—an emphasis on the dangers of public sex and a social world that revolved around seeking out public pleasure—made sexual knowledge more essential to experiencing the city at the very time when it seemed that sex was escaping its boundaries. As the brothels failed and men who sought sex with other men were more apparent, the need to recognize the possibility of a sexual encounter, whether in order to pursue or avoid one, became more important. Public sex, therefore, should not be seen as an “other” practice against which “dominant” “norms” were defined, but rather as one way the city emerged in the first place. The need to know how to understand the possibility of encountering public sex disrupts any easy division between supposedly “illicit” forms of public sexuality and “licit” forms of social practice. Such a distinction, rarely named but often implied, never actually cohered.
As Haussmannization oriented the city around the flow of capital, commerce, and the middle classes, the congruence between sex and commercial pleasure became increasingly problematic as the police and expert commentators considered the regulation of urban space. It was one thing to accept the presence of venal and immoral sex in areas of the city already associated with working-class debauchery as a necessary safety valve. It was another when such practices took center stage in spaces devoted to middle-class and elite Parisian consumption.
And while it is difficult to precisely map the areas of the city where such encounters occurred, both the police and many Parisians began to see sex everywhere they looked. Encounters premised on these forms of sexual knowledge created a new sexual public.
Sexual solicitation had wider ramifications for how users of public space understood their own role. For instance, an 1872 letter complained that “an honest man can no longer walk peacefully on the cours la Reine [near the Champs-Élysées] between 9 and 11 at night without being accosted by women who engage in revolting touches and direct the following verbatim proposition (Do you want me to jack you off?).” The writer apologized for using such explicit language, “but it has been used by many of the ignoble creatures.” That these encounters bothered him enough to write, that they stayed with him after he moved on, highlights the ways sexual solicitation created new feelings and emotions that were anything but momentary.
The letter stands as evidence of the creation of a broader sexual public (who else heard these words?) even as it highlights how the individual writer’s sense of self changed in some undefinable way in response to the encounter. In another instance, a man named G. Feuille wrote to the police in 1880 to complain: “It is scandalous…to see oneself attacked (assaili) and almost violated (violenté) by several prostitutes, who direct at you the most filthy remarks.” The violation implied here may not have actually been sexual assault as the French word violenté may imply, but the connotation remains significant. That this man felt sexually assaulted by women who put themselves at the service of male clients highlights the inversion at play as men were forced to reckon with their own sexual response. In both cases, the unwilling participation in a public sexual culture threatened the urban experience as imagined by privileged male pedestrians.
The “violation” felt by these two men at the attention of female prostitutes disrupted their ability to move about the city as they so chose, but it did not necessarily put into question their status as potential clients. Insofar as these “assaults” may have elicited a sexual response, they may have heightened their awareness of their status as sexual beings even as it challenged their gender privilege.
These possibilities often proved problematic for women who wished to also enjoy public space. An 1872 letter signed by multiple residents of the boulevard de la Villette, for instance, claimed that the street was so encumbered that a wife and child could not exit their house without being taken as prostitutes by men who were constantly on the lookout. The expectation that sex was available thus shaped how these residents were understood by those who saw them. As others have argued, the common assumption that a woman in public was a public woman placed all women, but especially working-class women, in a vulnerable position. The emphasis on the threat of the prostitute by the police and Paris residents tended to increase the association of public space with the possibility of venal sex, which, in turn, shaped how women encountered the life of the city. This is not to say that all women who appeared in public were assumed to be sexually available, nor that middle-class women were forbidden from the streets. The streets enabled a wide variety of encounters, dependent on the particular circumstances in which they occurred.
In fact, rather than two possible categories—honest and dishonest—into which an unsuspecting woman could fall, movement about the city made such categorizations highly contingent. For example, on the evening of January 19, 1874, two police inspectors arrested a woman named Valerie Durand, a thirty-three-year-old piano teacher. According to the police, the officers were taking a prostitute to the station when they came across “a woman, alone, standing in the middle of the boulevard, next to a garden where they claimed to have seen her address several individuals.” One of the officers then turned to his partner, “saying to him, ‘Look over there, since you know the women of this neighborhood better than me, if that’s an unregistered prostitute.’ ” The partner, so the police claimed, decided to approach the woman only after “recognizing that she was looking at men in a provocative manner.” Asked what she was doing there, she responded by saying she was waiting for her husband and refused to give her name. She was then arrested and taken to the station, where she admitted to having lied about being married and “that in reality, she was waiting for a man who was employed in a factory, and, finally, that she was perfectly free to wait for whomever on the boulevard.” She claimed that she was on her way home when she was arrested after stopping to button herself up. During the course of her arrest, the officers refused to check her story at her home, or even by asking an acquaintance living in the same building as the commissariat of police, before sending her off to the depot. Police confidence in their ability to tell who was and who was not actually a prostitute, reliant on such vague attributes as a provocative glance, thus determined their will to act.
Durand’s situation on the one hand highlights women’s vulnerability. But on the other hand it illustrates the ways that the assumption of prostitution was never so stable as to totally delimit someone’s ability to act. For Durand’s actual identity was never fully determined in the police documents. Was she innocently returning home, as she claimed? Or was she waiting for a “male friend,” as she also claimed? Perhaps the police were right and she was actually looking for a sexual client. The police eventually let her go, but despite having received “the most favorable information on her family,” they still argued in favor of the “facts certified by the police agents.” Indeed, the police superintendent took the opportunity to assure his superiors that he would “be even more circumspect regarding unregistered prostitutes who are vouched for by honorable persons.” This indeterminacy enabled Durand to be released to her family not only without being condemned as a registered prostitute but also without admitting to being totally honest. Perhaps Durand was an innocent working woman out for a date who got caught up in an awful situation. But perhaps she was actually a prostitute able to use the thin line between her own profession and that of other (honorable) women to her advantage to get off the hook.
Although far from typical, this case of apparently false arrest demonstrates two essential aspects of the public sexual culture. On the one hand, the moral discourse of prostitution did leave women vulnerable. The public sexual culture remained hierarchical, predicated on gendered and classed relationships. But it also provided, on the other hand, if not evidence of the opportunity for resistance, then at least the possibility of a different understanding of sex in the modern city outside the binaries of honest and dishonest, registered and unregistered. The administrative category of the prostitute struggled to remain solid in the face of the uses of the street. Valerie Durand’s success at evading registration without falling into the category of the honest is but one example of the ways that late nineteenth-century sexual culture could not be slotted into a discrete set of categories.
Between the Streets. By Andrew Israel Ross. Lapham’s Quarterly, September 26, 2019.
C’est peut-être un goût pervers, mais j’aime la prostitution et pour elle-même, indépendamment de ce qu’il y a en dessous. — Flaubert
Some years
ago I acquired a small, modest-looking French book published in 1826 that would
become the source of my interest in women and prostitution in Paris, especially
after the French Revolution. It was a 32mo bound in plain crimson boards, small
enough to fit in one’s hand or pocket and titled Dictionnaire Anecdotique des
Nymphes du Palais-Royal et autres Quartiers de Paris par un homme de bien. In
124 pages, the anonymous author lists scores of Parisian prostitutes
alphabetically by their first names, from Adelaide to Zoe, and gives the
streets where they could be found along with descriptions of their physical
appearance and personalities, including:
Olympe, rue
du Richelieu, who is beautiful, tall like a man, and is said to flirt with the
lovers of her friends — and that her desires are not always satisfied by just
one.
Véronique
(La Blonde), rue Traversière, is far from pretty, but her blond hair, falling
with grace over her beautiful pale skin, sets her apart.
How, I
wondered, did a society perfect prostitution to such a degree that a dictionary
of hookers could be published as easily as a glossary of words, a bibliography
of books or a tourist’s vade mecum? With this little guidebook in hand, a man
in the 1820s could save the wear-and-tear of prowling the streets in order to
find an appealing nymphe to suit his erotic tastes — it was almost like
choosing a chocolate from a box of assorted flavors, or even a breeding
stallion from a stud book. And who was the gentleman, the homme de bien, who
wrote it? In a short preface, hoping to avoid complications lest he be
discovered and considered a pimp, he disavows knowing any of the women
described, claiming that he merely received the information from others.
Somewhat unexpectedly, he then rails against a society that preaches morals but
permits vice, and urges fathers to protect their children against prostitution.
How? By reading his book. The list of nymphs begins immediately after this
peculiar suggestion.
Intrigued,
I began to piece together what I knew about post-Revolutionary France with the
mystery of my little dictionary. It took me thirty years to solve the riddle of
the nymphs, which I will get to shortly. But before I was able to zero in on
that, I began to look for clues in other books, and started to assemble a
collection of material on Parisian prostitution — from the fall of the Bastille
to the rise of the Eiffel Tower — and discovered an entire genre of books and
prints devoted to it. In fact, I began to realize that prostitution was at the
epicenter of the era. A frequent visitor to Paris, I was aware that the capital
was (and still is) fueled by large quantities of caffeine, nicotine, alcohol
and sugar, but I was unaware, until I began my quest, that prostitution had
formerly been as fundamental to Parisians as those other stimulating staples.
My next
discovery, a major one, proved pivotal: Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s De La
Prostitution dans La Ville de Paris, 1836. Issued in two thick 8vo volumes a decade after
my petite Dictionnaire, it is not a guide to pleasure but rather, an extensive
textbook, the first attempt to investigate and analyze prostitution
scientifically in order to create effective solutions to the problems it was
creating. The alluring sirens described in my dictionary, the nymphs who had
been sought by flâneurs, philanderers and married men, had become, within ten
years, clinical objects of scientific inquiry. Studied as exotic specimens from
the animal kingdom, they were probed, questioned and examined by doctors and
experts in the newly emerging fields of hygiene, statistics, and sociology. In
ten years, a portable, somewhat prurient
“gentleman’s guide” had been displaced by a substantial, authoritative,
government-sponsored work on prostitutes’ sexual habits, health, and attitudes,
one filled with analytic texts and tables based on facts; it became a
shape-shifter.
[Anonymous
artist]. Allons, voyons, voulez-vous monter? (Come on, look, do you want to go upstairs?) Handcolored etching, 1815. Frontispiece to
Déterville, Le Palais-Royal ou Les Filles en Bonne Fortune, 1815. Nymphs at the Palais Royal invite
soldiers and other men up to their rooms. This little book was intended as a
guide to initiate young men into the world of sex and prostitution.
Parent-Duchâtelet
(1790-1836), its author, was a medical doctor who had worked for France’s
nascent public health services in the 1820s and had been successful in
organizing the first campaign to clean and sanitize the sewers and cesspits of
Paris, which were beginning to be recognized as sources of infectious diseases.
His unstinting investigations (he regularly descended in the city’s foul lower
depths) led to a major report advising on how best to unclog, clean and
disinfect the sewers of Paris in 1824.
Parent next
turned his clinical, pragmatic mind to the public health problem posed by
prostitution after being contacted by an unidentified colleague who wanted to
research and publish a study of prostitutes in order to rehabilitate them but
who could not afford to do so. When this gentleman unexpectedly died, Parent
sensed an opportunity, and recognizing the importance of prostitution as a
medical issue rather than a moral one, and with the resources of the state
behind him, took on his colleague’s project, stating: “I have found in most
minds a particular disdain attached to the functions of all who, in one way or
another, deal with prostitutes… I could not understand this excess of delicacy…
If I have been able, without scandalizing anyone, to descend into the
cesspools, to touch putrid matter, to spend part of my time in the refuse pits
and to live, so to speak, in the midst of all the most abject and disgusting
products of human congregations, why should I blush to tackle a sewer of
another kind [i.e.,prostitution], a sewer more filthy, I confess, than all the
others, but the study of which offers me the hope of effecting some good?”
It was only
logical. Sewers and prostitutes, each receptacles of human bodily excreta,
could be cleaned and regulated scientifically, and because prostitution was
legal in France, the task could be undertaken in an orderly fashion. This
seemingly liberal approach to prostitution was a result of Enlightenment
thinking that recognized the futility of suppressing male sexual desire while
attempting to keep men disease-free through the medical regulation of
prostitutes — it was they, and not their clients, who were required to undergo
physical exams. What could be more reasonable? The new law codes of the
Revolution that replaced those of the Ancien Régime made no mention of
prostitution, and as it began to proliferate in the 1790s, the usual problems
arose, from serious crimes to public disorder and disease — but it was not
outlawed. Regulation, not eradication, became the goal, and brothels soon came
under the supervision of the police. By 1823, all brothels were licensed and
regulated, but a new problem arose: although registration was mandatory, many
women worked illegally, that is, without a permit.
The
problems posed by prostitution, along with general health issues, continued to
grow. In 1832 a cholera outbreak killed 20,000 Parisians while the number of
prostitutes in the city reached an all-time high of 43,000 (out of a population
of about 750,000). The health risks to both men and women from venereal and
other diseases were becoming severe, the issue of public health as a responsibility
of the state was emerging and the police were having trouble keeping up with
the supervision of both legal and illegal prostitutes. Something had to be done
to halt this threat to social stability, and Parent was the man to do it. The
results of his work were published after he had spent a decade investigating
the “sewer of another kind.”
In
twenty-five chapters, Parent, who died of exhaustion the year his work
appeared, discussed every aspect of Parisian prostitution by categorizing the
prostitutes physically, geographically, medically and economically; he
suggested methods of police and medical controls (he was an advocate of
regulated brothels), and even proposed a way for prostitutes to pay taxes. He
also supported the formation of institutions where women who had renounced
prostitution could go to reconstruct their lives, taking a cue from his
anonymous colleague. Throughout the entire work, and all subsequent works to
follow on the subject, prostitution was seen as an exclusively female problem —
not once is male sexuality called into question for requiring it.
Parent
created lists and tables showing the distribution of Parisian prostitutes by
quartier, surveying areas throughout the city including the Île St. Louis,
where, alone among neighborhoods, there were none; the Place Vendôme, where he
found thirty-nine; and the Palais Royal, center of all things illicit, where he
counted 346 prostitutes. They were also grouped by street, by suburb, and by
which département in France they had come from, even by which floor of a
building they most frequently occupied. (It was the French first floor, the
floor above street level.) Parent took advantage of the information supplied to
him by the police, who, in 1816, had begun to keep more accurate data on the
prostitutes they arrested than they had previously. By 1832, he had access to
just over 5,000 records which included information on each woman’s place of
birth, the occupation of her father, the determining causes of her becoming a
prostitute, her education level, the number of children she had, as well as the
age at which she registered as a prostitute. (The ages ranged from ten to
sixty-five.)
Pierre-Numa
Bassaget, called Numa (1802-1872) [attrib]. Boulevard St. Denis.
Chromolithograph, c. 1855. A prostitute from the Boulevard St. Denis fondles
her jewelry while exposing some flesh. Such images provided source material for
later artists, including Manet; the link is especially evident in his Olympia
(1863).
Yet within
this methodical work, I found one bit of whimsy, certainly unintended, that
called to mind my Dictionnaire: in a chapter on the pseudonyms prostitutes gave
themselves, Parent included a double-columned table of these assumed names,
arranged by social class. The first column contains the Classe Inférieure,
including such ribald, lewd, and comical nicknames as Rousselette (Little Red
Pear), Poil-Long (Long Hair), Belle-Cuisse (Nice Thighs), Faux-Cul (Fake-Ass),
and Raton (Little Rat). In the second column, the Classe Elevée, are such names
as Amanda, Calliope, Delphine, Paméla, Olympe, and Flore, names associated with
Greek mythology, literature or the upper class. This classification by descriptive
name was maintained throughout the century, helping men choose women based not
only on her physical attributes, but also on what class she was likely to be
from as revealed in her nickname. Later, the astute and often pontifical
observer of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Octave Uzanne,
used the exact same method to describe Parisian prostitutes in 1910:
“At the
very bottom of the ladder is the woman who haunts the fortifications… The
soldiers do not even know her name; they call her la paillasse… A much more
formidable species of prostitute is the gigolette [who] is almost always young,
and often pretty… There are grades and degrees in all this peripatetic
prostitution… In Paris, there are about 60,000 filles insoumises. They constitute
the main part of what [is] called middle-class prostitution.”
As for
upper-class prostitution, Uzanne refers to it as “clandestine prostitution” and
the women who represent it are known as belles petites, tendresses,
agenouillées, horizontales, and dégrafées. He also refers to Parent,
complaining that of all the writers on prostitution who came after him “not one
has sounded its deepest depths or probed its darkest mysteries.”
Many tried.
Parent’s formidable work became the cornerstone of a staggering amount of art
and literature — he has been called “a veritable Linnaeus of prostitution.” Balzac,
Flaubert, the Goncourts, Hugo, Huysmans, Sue, and Zola were all familiar with
Parent and each created novels based on the lives of prostitutes that were
based, in part, on data gathered by him. In art, the prostitute became a
frequent figure in the caricatures and chromolithographs of the 1840s-1860s, as
she did in the subsequent works of Manet, Degas, Lautrec, and Picasso, whose
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) refers not only to the name of a Barcelona
brothel, but also — and originally — to one of the old slang words for
prostitute, Pont-d’Avignon, so-called for
the bridge under which many prostitutes met their customers during the
Avignon Papacy in the 14th century. Sur le pont d’Avignon on y danse, on y danse.
But perhaps
Parent’s most devoted acolyte was Alexandre Dumas (père), who acknowledged him
not only on the first page, but throughout Filles, lorettes et courtisanes
(1843), his analysis and description of the Byzantine typology used to describe
each of the three levels of Parisian prostitution, elaborating on Parent’s
original list. From the lowest working-class filles de la Cité (known as
numéros, chouettes, calorgnes and trimardes), to the middle-class filles du
boulevard (grisettes, lorettes, ratons, louchons), and up to the highest level
of filles en maison (courtisanes, femmes du monde), Dumas inventoried them all.
Although such terms were included in other works, notably those on slang, no
other book had been devoted exclusively to the subject, and in such a literary
way. As Dumas observes in his introduction: “Here is a corner of the grand
Parisian panorama which no one has dared to sketch, a page in the book of
modern civilization whose base is a word no one has dared utter.” Dumas had the
audacity and honesty to assert that prostitution was at the base of Parisian
society. He wasn’t wrong.
Alphonse Liébert
(1827-1914). Adah Isaacs Menken and Alexandre Dumas. Carte de visite
photograph, 1867. This
photograph was taken on March 28, 1867.
Yet Dumas,
who understood so much about prostitution’s place in 19th century Paris, made
no mention of the sexism that accompanied and regulated it — even though it was
he who coined the phrase Cherchez la femme, inferring that a woman was usually
the cause of most problems. Others, steeped in misogyny, did not hesitate to
express their sexist views, although not as metaphorically as Dumas. Noted
historian and sociologist Jules Michelet held that the social order was in
grave danger due to women’s “weak, atavistic and deranged sexuality” as
evidenced by prostitution. Writing about women’s “natural inferiority,” he
asserted that women were only fit to be wives and mothers. A more brutal
attitude suited Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the influential philosopher known for
his socialist-libertarian politics and for being the “father of anarchism.” He
was also an extreme misogynist whose views, although widely shared, were rarely
put into print with such viciousness. He did not think twice in declaring in
his most shocking work, La Pornocratie (1875), that a woman was capable of
being only “a harlot or a housewife” and that “a woman does not at all hate
being treated with violence, indeed even being violated.” (Little wonder that
so many women, thwarted and abused mentally, emotionally and physically, were
diagnosed with “hysteria.”) Many of these presumptuous attitudes about women
may be traced back to Parent, whose classification and regulation of
prostitutes heralded the 19th century’s determination to proscribe women’s
opportunities, education, and sexuality. Yet Proudhon’s words seem more
monstrous than most, and I wondered how deeply his views were embedded in
French culture. With Dumas as a guide, I began to compile my own list of French
synonyms for prostitute, reasoning that such words would reveal a great deal
about how the French regarded women and sex. I didn’t realize just how long the
list would become — it now has 400 entries. I discovered that the majority of
the words were fanciful, imaginative, allusory or metaphorical; many were
facetious and derogatory; and some were outright expressions of disgust, à la
Proudhon, including salope, latrine, and cul crotté (filthy woman, latrine, and
shit ass.) The crudest words were, like anarchism’s father, in the minority,
but they do exist.
Having
collected so many words, I decided that a good place to study their evolution
would be at the beginning, in the first French dictionary, Jean Nicot’s Thrésor
de la langue françoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (1606), in which Nicot
includes courtisane, cantonnière, fille de joye [sic], paillard, chienne, and
putain. From this base, the vocabulary would multiply over the centuries, but
Nicot’s six words would remain stalwarts, persisting along with the
classification of prostitutes based on the rank of their clients. The
courtisane would remain at the top — the lover of aristocrats and the rich —
while the clients of the filles de joie and paillards were from lower ranks,
but whatever their station, men had no trouble finding women to hire for sex:
prostitution is as much a part of Parisian history as Notre Dame, and as
important — the city, its streets and its prostitutes have had a long-term
relationship. As my little dictionary indicated, women and streets were
intimately linked: the pavement nymphs and roadside flowers — the fleurs du
macadam — were categorized by the street names or area where they worked, and
had been for centuries.
A study of
some of Paris’ old street names reveals the longevity of the link. The tiny rue
du Pélican might strike one as merely fanciful since pelicans don’t roost in
Paris, but the name derives not from sea birds but from its bawdy 14th-century
name: the rue Poil au Con (Puss Hair Street), so-named for the many prostitutes
who worked there; with a nod to propriety, the street later assumed its less
vulgar homophone. Similarly, the medieval rue Pute-y-Muce (Hidden Whore Street)
would later become the rue du Petit Musc (Little Musk Street).
The lure of
the streets was so potent that each image in Les Lionnes de Paris, a set of
chromolithographs depicting individual prostitutes published circa 1855, shows
each one identified only by the dress and décor of the street or neighborhood
where she could be found: each title is the name of a street. The cocotte from the
Boulevard St. Denis (currently and historically known for prostitution)
reclines seductively on her lush bed, her left breast exposed as she fondles a
gold necklace — prostitutes were typically portrayed as rapacious deceivers. As
the Goncourts declared, “Women only consider their sex as a livelihood!… their
sex is a career.”
Philippe Jacques
Linder (1835-1914) [attrib]. L’Anglais à Paris. (An Englishman in Paris.) Color lithograph, c.
1867. An Englishman eyes a young woman while holding his map of Paris, an
allusion to a “streetwalker.” The artist cleverly mocks the man by placing the
figure of a punchinello behind him.
Other such series enjoyed great popularity in the mid-19th century, and these popular prints often became source material for later artists. Manet, whose modern, penetrating eye never failed to see things as they were, did not hesitate to choose his subjects from everyday life, including prostitutes; he must certainly have seen the chromolithographs of the 1850s before creating his notorious Olympiain 1863. Its scandalous subject matter — a confident courtesan wearing only a neck ribbon, earrings, a gold bracelet, some dainty slippers and a flower in her hair — echoes the chromolithographs from the 1850s, but instead of calling his subject by a street name, Manet chose “Olympia,” a name associated with prostitutes, and one that was in Parent’s original list.
Having
learned so much about Parent and his influence, I was still in the dark about
the anonymous author of my dictionary, the anonymous homme de bien, until a
short while ago. Thanks to persistence, luck and the Internet, which did not
exist when I acquired the book, I identified him, and the circumstances
surrounding the dictionary’s publication — and destruction. I had already been
able to find the book listed by title in several bibliographies of French
books, and that the Bibliothèque Nationale apparently had the only
institutional copy extant, leading me to believe that the book was very rare,
and to assume that the edition size had been small. But why would someone go to
the trouble of compiling such a dictionary and print very few copies
considering that the demand for such a book would have been enormous. Information
on edition sizes prior to the late 19th century is difficult to find, and
especially so for such an obscure book as the Dictionnaire — or so I thought.
From time
to time, I would check the Internet to see if any new information had surfaced,
and during a recent search, I found it cited in two obscure reference books
that I did not know and had never seen before: Fernand Drujon’s Catalogue des
ouvrages écrits et dessins de toute nature poursuivis, supprimés ou condamnés
(1879) and Antoine Laporte’s Bibliographie contemporaine: Historie litteraire
du dix-neuvième siècle (1887). Each citation had more information than was included
in the standard bibliographies, which repetitively included only the title,
publisher and date. In these newly discovered reference works, I at last found
the author’s name: Charles Lepage. After a bit more searching, I learned that
he was a poet, singer, writer, journalist and inventor who was born in 1803 and
died in 1868, making the dictionary a work of his youth. What astonished me was
the short note in both entries indicating that the dictionary had been
destroyed by the authorities with the consent of the author as per a court
judgement of December 15th, 1826, making the book “very rare if not very
interesting” according to Laporte. This was shocking news in itself, but Drujon
included one small parenthetical word, Moniteur. Armed with this lead, I
discovered that he was citing Le Moniteur Universel, a long-running daily
Parisian newspaper. Now all I had to do was find the actual article. Thanks to
the Bibliothèque Nationale’s online services, I did.
In a
triumph of French bibliophily, every issue from 1790 to 1901 is available
online, and knowing that the article must have appeared on December 15 or soon
thereafter, I read through those of December 15th and 16th with no luck, but
found it in the December 17th issue under the headline The case of the
Dictionnaire anecdotique des Nymphes du Palais-Royal was settled yesterday. I
had tracked it down! This is the sort of discovery that makes a biblio-sleuth
ecstatic, and I was. The article reported that the case against the author had
been settled; that Lepage still had 600 to 700 copies of the little book; that
the court had found the book to be shameful but not illegal; and that the
author had agreed to destroy his remaining copies. This led me to believe that
the original edition size had been perhaps 750 or 1000 copies, and that after
the destruction of Lepage’s remaining copies, only a handful had survived,
including mine.
I soon
discovered more about the book’s legal history, finding the transcript of the
trial online in an issue of the Gazette des Tribunaux, December 9, 1826. Lepage
was not the only defendant. The printer, publisher and three booksellers also
had to face the tribunal for “facilitating vice” by circulating the addresses
of prostitutes and for violating several statutes of an 1819 censorship
law.
The lawyers
for the accused presented their case in a very clever, droll and literary way
by first asking the court how it could prosecute those involved in a book on
prostitutes when prostitution itself was legal. As one said: “I blush to say
it, but prostitution is in the public domain.” They went on to describe Lepage
as a young man, just out of college, whose innocence was equal to the indecency
of his “heroines” and that the book was a reflection of nothing more than
Lepage’s naïveté. The lawyers suggested that instead of sentencing the author
to prison, the court should require him to read his dictionary for eight hours
a day, which, they assured the court, would be punishment enough. They
concluded by reminding the court that the dictionary was nothing more than a
pale imitation of an actual visit to the Palais Royal (the center of Parisian
prostitution), which could be truly upsetting. They conclude by quoting
Horace’s Ode IV, To Sestius, a paean to pleasure. With their adroit arguments,
they won the case. Lepage destroyed the remaining books, and the Dictionnaire
was duly placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books. Later, it was cited
in several bibliographies and generally forgotten.
But I still
had a further question: Why was this book singled out for prosecution? There
had been a flurry of dictionaries of prostitutes in the 1790s, when flaunting
decadence and vice became de rigeur during the Revolution and when the
unprecedented porno-libertine works of the Marquis de Sade were published;
other such books were published well into the early 19th century. Yet this
little dictionary, a pale descendant of its predecessors, was scandalous enough
to initiate a criminal prosecution. I surmise that in the 1820s the book evoked
the licentious and radical early-1790s, the memories of which would have been
especially disturbing to the conservative Bourbon king Charles X and his prime
minister, Joseph de Villèle, an ultra-royalist known for imposing strict
anti-press and anti-sacrilege laws.
On December
29, 1826, just days after Lepage was acquitted, Pierre-Denis Peyronnet, the
Minister of Justice, proposed a new law that imposed harsh new sanctions and
penalties on the press; he called it “the law of justice and love.” It was
anything but that, and upon hearing of its severity, one legislative deputy
left the chamber shouting: “You might as well propose a law for the suppression
of printing in France, for the benefit of Belgium.” The reaction to the
proposed law was swift and powerful, from members of the Academy to the public
at large — the majority of the country was horrified and protested. The bill
was withdrawn in April, but it and other manifestations of repression resulted
in a bill of impeachment for Villèle, who was removed from office in 1828,
presaging the July Revolution of 1830 in which Charles X was forced to
abdicate. Perhaps the little dictionary was the last straw for the
ultra-conservative government, or perhaps it was a coincidence, but the desire
to impose heavy restrictions on the press followed the Dictionnaire’s court
case.
Lepage,
undeterred and perhaps inspired by the government’s failure to pass the
repressive law, wrote (with his friend and frequent collaborator Emile
Debraux), two satiric works in 1827 on his former tormentors. The first,
Villèle aux Enfers, was a satiric verse on the punctilious prime minister. The
second work, Peyronnet devant Dieu, satirized the authoritarian justice
minister.
Lepage went
on to a successful career as a singer and writer of popular songs. An ardent
voice for the people, anti-royalist, and member of the emerging bohemian class,
he sang his way to fame in the goguettes of Paris, the many small,
working-class bars/cafés devoted to communal singing, drinking and socializing
where goguettiers often sang about love and women, including prostitutes, with
lyrics using some of the other names for nymphes, as in “Le Boudoir,” a popular
19th-century ditty:
Voyez-vous,
lion, rat, grisette,
Encombrer le
sacré parvis;
Par
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
A l’enfer
criminels ravis?
Aux frais
minois qu’on y contemple,
Aux parfums
sentant leur terroir,
On se dit :
quel est donc ce temple ?
Est-ce une
église, est-ce un boudoir?
[Can’t
you see, lion rat, grisette,
That by
cluttering up the sacred space
Around
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
You’ve
thrilled the criminals in hell?
To the
fresh little faces one sees there
To the
perfumes redolent of a bazaar
One
asks, what then is this temple?
Is it a
church, or is it a boudoir?]
Church or
boudoir? Sacred or profane? Virtue or vice? Lepage’s Dictionnaire, a vestige of
the libertine spirit of the Revolution, and Parent’s encyclopedic analysis, an
example of Enlightenment values of reason and science, embody these opposing
sides of the French dilemma regarding prostitution after the Revolution.
Much ink
and paint were utilized to address the problem in the 19th century through the
work of numerous writers and artists who brought the hazy subject of
prostitution into clearer focus. Yet the actual issue remains unresolved.
Hundreds of French words for “prostitute” indicate that the popular preference
(at least for men) was the boudoir; art and literature, ditto. But for women,
the choice was not quite so clear. Denied access to many of the rights promised
by the Revolution, including education and gainful employment, many women had
no alternative except the boudoir. It might have been a choice, but it was one
of last resort and all the synonyms for prostitute — whether as ethereal as
nymphe or as sordid as salope — did not disguise the cruelty and misery that
lie beneath prostitution. These are the dismal facts to which Flaubert alluded
in his own honest admission of prostitution’s appeal. Parent claimed as much
nearly two decades earlier in the blunt style of a statistician: “Prostitutes
are as inevitable in any great aggregation of humanity as sewers, cesspits and
refuse dumps.” But perhaps we should hear not from the boudoir, but from the
church, from someone whose virtue is undeniable, yet who understood the
necessity of some forms of vice, for it was Saint Augustine who warned: “Remove
prostitutes from human affairs, and licentiousness will overthrow society.” And
so, at the least, we must acknowledge the perenniality of prostitutes and cease
to vilify or scorn them while ignoring the men who create their ranks. And we
must certainly give thanks to all the pavement nymphes and roadside flowers,
all the lorettes and grisettes, all the kept women and courtesans for all the
art and literature they have inspired. For this alone, they deserve our respect
and reverence — but for their ability to survive pain, privation, degradation,
and misery, they deserve our awe.
Pavement
Nymphs and Roadside Flowers: Prostitutes in Paris After the Revolution. By Victoria Dailey. Los Angeles Review of Books,
March 1, 2019.
The star’s
moment should be triumphant. She’s brilliantly lit, her leg lifted in a
graceful ballet pose, and she’s clearly the star of the show. But in the wings
lurks a black-clad figure—a symbol for the sordid backstage reality of the
ballerina.
It’s not
clear who Edgar Degas used as the model for the 1879 painting, L’Etoile, that
depicts that tense moment. But it’s likely that she was a prostitute. Sex work
was part of ballerinas’ realities during the 19th century, an era in which
money, power and prostitution mingled in the glamorous and not-so-glamorous
backstage world of the Paris Opera.
The Paris
Opera Ballet, founded in the 17th century, was the world’s first professional
ballet company, and continues as one of the preeminent outfits today. Throughout
the 19th century, it raised the bar for dance—but on the backs of many
exploited young women.
Women
entered the ballet as young children, training at the opera’s dance school
until they could snag a coveted position in the corps de ballet. Girls who
studied at the school became apprentices to the Opera; only after years of
militaristic training and a series of brutal exams could they get guaranteed,
long-term contracts.
In the
meantime, they attended classes and auditioned for small, walk-on roles. Often
malnourished and dressed in hand-me-downs, the “petits rats” of the ballet were
vulnerable to social and sexual exploitation. And the wealthy male subscribers
of the Paris Opera—nicknamed abbonés—were often on hand to exploit them.
“The ballet
is…what the bar-room is to many a large hotel,”wrote Scribner’s Magazine in
1892, “the chief paying factor, the one from which the surplus profits come.”
Men subscribed to the opera not for the music, but for the beautiful ballerinas
who danced twice per show—and, behind the scenes, they bought sexual favors from
the women they ogled on stage.
The abonnés
were so powerful, they were part of the Opera’s very architecture: When Charles
Garnier designed his iconic opera house in the 1860s, he included a special
separate entrance for season ticket holders. The building also included a
lavish room called the foyer de la danse. Located directly behind the stage, it
was a place where ballet dancers could warm up and practice their moves before
and during performances. But it was designed with male patrons, not dancers, in
mind. The foyer was a place for them to socialize with—and proposition—ballet
dancers.
At the
time, women’s bodies were typically covered by lots of clothing. In contrast,
ballet dancers wore skimpy and revealing outfits (though ballet costumes of the
time, which included skirts, were much less form-fitting than today’s leotards
and tights). Subscribers could, and did, go backstage to ogle women. Due to
their social status, they were free to socialize with them, too.
“Epic
scenes took place backstage,” wrote the Comte de Maugny, who described the
foyer de la danse as a kind of meat market. For subscribers, backstage was a
kind of men’s club where they could meet and greet other power brokers, make
business deals and bask in a highly sexualized atmosphere.
For
dancers, though, it was a place where they were subject to scrutiny and harassment.
Dancers were expected to submit to the attentions and affections of
subscribers,most of whom were nobleman and important financiers and whose money
underwrote the majority of the opera’s operations.
Since
subscribers were so powerful, they could influence who made it into coveted
roles and who was fired from the ballet. They could lift a girl out of poverty
by becoming her “patron,” or client, setting her up in comfortable quarters and
paying for private lessons that could increase her cachet in the ballet. Often,
girls’ own mothers—who acted not unlike entertainment agents today—helped set
up and maintain these relationships. For many Paris Opera ballerinas from poor
backgrounds, a relationship with a rich man was their only chance at stability.
Some
dancers managed to advance without a rich patron, becoming celebrities on the
merits of their own abilities, notes historian Lorraine Coons. But even those
dancers who did succeed independently were looked down on as suspected
prostitutes.
One
influential Parisian couldn’t afford the expensive subscription that allowed
special access to ballerinas: Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. During the
1870s and 1880s, he produced hundreds of drawings and paintings of Paris Opera
dancers, relying on his friends tosecure backstage passes so he could sketch
the dancers in their habitat. There, he recorded behind-the-scenes views of
dancers practicing—and captured glimpses of the world of the lecherous male
subscribers, too.
One of
Degas’ best-known works is his Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, a life-sized
statue of a teenage “petit rat,” or ballet dancer in training. To modern eyes,
it’s the portrait of a child who eagerly awaits her next dance step. But when
Degas exhibited it in 1881, it was panned by the critics, who called the dancer
“frightfully ugly,” monkey-like, and “marked by the hateful promise of every
vice.”
Degas’
subject may have been vulnerable, but for 19th-century observers, she was
marked by the sordidness of the sexual harassment that was baked into ballet.
Teenager Marie van Goethem, a Paris Opera petit rat who modeled for the
sculpture, likely traded sex for money in order to survive—but even if she
hadn’t, it’s almost certain Degas’ audience would have assumed she did.
Sexual
Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas. By Erin Blackmore. History , August 22, 2018.
An hour
with a prostitute costs on average $150, though prices can range from as low as
$5 for a single sex act to $1,000 an hour, the going rate for “high-end” online
escort services in Miami. Many of those in the sex trade were encouraged by
family members to take up sex work. Pimps rely as much if not more on emotional
manipulation than physical violence to control their sex workers.
These are
some of the findings of a recently released study by the Urban Institute
describing the structure of the underground commercial sexual economy—street
and Internet prostitution, escort services, massage parlors, brothels, and
child pornography—in eight major cities across the U.S. Funded by the National
Institute of Justice, the report is unprecedented in its scope and depth: It
will surely change how both lawmakers and law enforcers think about the sex
trade and shape their approaches to control it.
Trying to
understand the underground sex economy, however, is as old as police work
itself. One of the very first police forces in the Western world emerged in
18th-century Paris, and one of its vice units asked many of the same questions
as the Urban Institute authors: How much do sex workers earn? Why do they turn
to sex work in the first place? What are their relationships with their
employers?
And yet,
unlike the Urban Institute researchers, who undertook their study in the hope
that a better understanding of how this underground economy functions might
lead to better public policy, this Parisian vice unit had more nebulous
motives. Its inspectors compiled vast dossiers of information on the city’s
elite sex workers and their patrons. But they rarely acted on that information.
To this day, it remains a mystery why the Parisian police spent so much time
and effort observing an underground economy it apparently had no interest in
curtailing. But their files are an historian’s dream. They paint a vivid
portrait of 18th-century Parisian life and offer a particularly fascinating
view of the city’s elite sex workers, who had greater social mobility than most
women in that period.
The focus
of this particular vice unit was the demimonde, the world of elite
prostitution. The policing of street prostitution and brothels that catered to
men of little means were left to other police personnel, who were far more
aggressive in their tactics. They apprehended street prostitutes and those who
worked in taverns. They raided and shut down brothels, bringing all those
arrested women—prostitutes and petty madams alike—to police court where they
were tried en masse and then taken, heads shaved, to serve time in Paris’
famous women’s prison, La Salpêtrière.
Elite
prostitution was treated differently. Certain brothels that catered to the male
elite were allowed to operate. It was one duty of the vice unit’s inspectors to
make sure the madams of these “authorized” brothels abided by certain rules,
one of which was to supply the inspectors with a steady stream of information.
But most of the unit’s energy was spent watching a particular group of elite
prostitutes that worked as professional mistresses. Called kept women (the
French term is dames entretenues), these women (and girls) provided sex,
company, and sometimes even love for elite men in exchange for being “kept,”
financially supported so that they could establish and maintain a household. La
galanterie, the practice of being or keeping a mistress, was not illegal, even
while prostitution was.
The vice
unit, which operated from 1747 to 1771, turned out thousands of hand-written
pages detailing what these dames entretenues did. Being kept in the 18th
century was not a profession in the modern sense of the term, but it was a job.
What was sold was standardized: sex, company, the pretense of affection, and
usually the illusion that the patron was the center of the mistress’s world.
Kept women had oral contracts with their patrons, which stipulated how much the
mistress would be paid each month, and whether the patron would set his
mistress up in an apartment, buy her new furnishings, pay her bills, and give
her gifts. The mistress’ duties were not delineated but rather were
“understood,” leaving a great deal of room for misunderstanding.
In
following kept women about Paris, the police, much like the authors of the
Urban Institute report, were interested in every aspect of these women’s
professional and personal lives, from their entry into sex work to the intimate
details of their relationships with their patrons. They gathered biographical
and financial data on the men who hired kept women—princes, peers of the realm,
army officers, financiers, and their sons, a veritable “who’s who” of high
society, or le monde. Assembling all of this information required cultivating
extensive spy networks. Making it intelligible required certain bureaucratic
developments: These inspectors perfected the genre of the report and the
information management system of the dossier. These forms of “police writing,”
as one scholar has described them, had been emerging for a while. But they took
a giant leap forward at midcentury, with the work of several Paris police inspectors,
including Inspector Jean-Baptiste Meusnier, the officer in charge of this vice
unit from its inception until 1759. Meusnier and his successor also had clear
literary talent; the reports are extremely well written, replete with irony,
clever turns of phrase, and even narrative tension—at times, they read like
novels.
Here is an
example. In 1752, Inspector Meusnier wrote a report about a woman named
Demoiselle Blanchefort. It was the first of at least 20 that came to make up
her file, covering more than a decade of her life in elite sex work. The first
report was a sort of back history, which the inspector tried to assemble on
most of his subjects. It explained how the subject under surveillance came to
be an elite prostitute. Blanchefort, Meusnier wrote, was the daughter of a
surgeon in Angers, a city in western France. Surgeon in this period was not yet
a high-status profession. It was closer to the artisan than the professional,
still linked in popular thinking with barber—the red and white strips of the
barber’s pole represented the blood and bandages once associated with the
trade. Blanchefort, like most kept women, was from the lower middle of the
social spectrum. The inspector did not seem to know her real name, or how or
why she came to Paris, but he was able to trace her once she became an elite
sex worker at the brothel of Madam Carlier, where she took the name “Victoire.”
Victoire was not a virgin, claimed Meusnier. Brothels were not supposed to take
virgins as workers, though they often did and with police cognizance. The
report, as with most reports, justified why it was permissible, in the state’s
eyes, for Blanchefort to be a prostitute. Her virginity gone, she was “ruined,”
theoretically unfit for marriage.
Meusnier
goes on: At Carlier’s, Blanchefort met an army officer who pulled her out of
the brothel to set her up as his mistress. This was a common practice;
customers often met their future mistresses at these establishments. To take
Blanchefort, the army officer had to pay all of her debts, which could be
significant. Debt was one way the madams bound sex workers to them, compelling
them to stay in the brothels to work. Some workers arrived with debt the madams
assumed. Others borrowed money from the madams to pay for their food and
clothing and particularly for medical care, the cost of which could easily
exceed a prostitute’s earnings.
After a
two-year break, Meusnier returned to the dossier of Demoiselle Blanchefort. Her
fortunes had changed, greatly. She now called herself Varenne (the constant
name changes are one of the challenges facing the police, and scholars trying
to reconstruct this world centuries later). In two short paragraphs, Meusnier
caught his files up to date. Varenne had had a number of wealthy patrons and
the cumulative result of their benefaction was her “perfectly furnished”
apartment in the Marais section of Paris. The term “perfectly furnished”
indicated that Varenne had made it in the demimonde. She possessed not only
furniture of necessity such as a bed and table, but also those of display and
various objects d’art. The furniture would have been of the best quality,
stylish and expensive. Kept women were obsessed with furnishings. As the
historian Kathryn Norberg argues, their possessions distinguished these sex
workers from streetwalkers, by defining a home and suggesting permanence. Given
their extraordinary cost, furnishings were also a form of capital acquisition
and functioned as status symbols. Varenne’s furnishings (as well as her jewelry
and clothes) represented the value other elite men placed on her services,
making her a more expensive commodity in the subculture of the demimonde. This
sort of financial mobility and wealth acquisition was unheard of for women from
such backgrounds. Had Varenne stayed in Angers, the most she could have
expected was to marry a man in her father’s profession, or one who had a
similar social status.
Over the
next eight years, Meusnier and his successor, Inspector Louis Marais, charted
Varenne’s career. Marais’ final report, dated Feb. 26, 1762 found Varenne,
after a decade of sex work, now in possession of significant wealth for someone
of her background and on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, who was an army
officer and a noble. She was stealing from her patron to pay for the nuptials.
Did the marriage go through? The inspectors hoped it would not, fearing the social
destruction of the officer. If it had, it would have represented a significant
jump in social status for Varenne. But the real question is why did the police
even care about the marriage, Varenne’s furniture, her love life, and her
virginity?
The question
only becomes more vexing when you consider what the police were supposed to be
doing in the 18th century. The police at the time were responsible for all that
was necessary for “the good regulation of a city.” By the time of the
Revolution, the Paris police regulated the city’s markets; ensured the honesty
of its merchants; lit, cleaned, and made safe the city’s streets; fought its
fires; ran its prisons; solved its crimes; kept its wayward elements in order;
and made sure its abandoned babies were cared for. They were also charged with
spying on and suppressing subversive elements in the population and making sure
the city was provisioned with all that it needed, even in times of dearth,
because not doing so increased the very great risk of riot. In the 18th
century, the lieutenant general, the officer in charge of the police, was
mayor, city manager, and top cop. Police interest in the demimonde certainly
fell within their larger charge. But with so few men and so much to do, a great
deal of which concerned the political stability of the city and the safety of
its inhabitants, why did the police devote such considerable resources to
following kept women around and writing down what they did, when these women
were neither criminals nor considered subversive?
Disappointingly,
the archives have failed to provide a definitive answer, and none of the more
logical explanations have stood up to scrutiny. It is unlikely that the
dossiers were used for judicial purposes as being kept was not illegal. Kept
women were never arrested for selling sex. Patron blackmail, another
possibility, seems unlikely. It assumes patrons wanted their affairs hidden.
Some did. For many others, however, mistress-keeping was a display of status
and hence required publicity. Another theory is that the police may have
watched these women so that they could prevent the depletion of those family
fortunes made vulnerable by infatuated sons of the wealthy and powerful. But
while Meusnier and Marais were well aware of who was bankrupting whom, the
inspectors intervened only when they were asked to do so, which happened less
than a handful of times.
A final and
enduring theory is that the reports were meant as bedtime reading for King
Louis XV and his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, who had been the
protector of the police lieutenant general most responsible for establishing
the unit in the first place. According to this theory, the reports were meant
to enliven the reputedly jaded, enervated royal sex life. But the biggest
strike against this theory is the reports themselves. They contained so many
third-party references to the king, and related so many incidents at which he
was present, that it is unlikely these documents were intended as a royal read.
If anything was destined for the king, it was probably the Anecdotes Galantes—a
newssheet of sexual gossip of le monde—which the unit began to produce only
occasionally beginning in 1764. Each issue was but a few pages in length,
hardly an efficient use of a sophisticated surveillance unit. So the question
remains—why did Meusnier and Marais care about Varenne?
A clearer
motive lies both in the larger police mission in this period and in
understanding the importance of the demimonde, this particular sex market, to
elite male society in the 18th century. The Paris police was rapidly changing
in the middle of the 18th century, driven both by the needs of the police
themselves in their effort to control and administer a city that was increasing
in size and sophistication and by royal demands that the Paris police serve as
sort of a domestic intelligence agency. Paris was the kingdom’s capital and, at
a half-million souls, by far its biggest city. It could be unstable and
dangerous. Its proximity to Versailles, the seat of the monarchy that King
Louis XIV deliberately built some 13 miles away, having been traumatized by
political revolution and uprisings in the city during his youth, made the
capital’s stability and obedience even more important. Crucial to that control
was information.
From its
very inception in the mid-17th century, the Paris police (which took decades to
actually become an integrated functioning institution) was concerned about
particular groups of people considered innately dangerous to the realm. These
included Protestants, foreigners, and Jews, those whose allegiances to the French
Catholic state were suspect. They also included the gens sans aveu (people who
have not sworn allegiance or people without papers), such as beggars, vagrants,
and street prostitutes, individuals who posed a threat not only by their
disruptive presence in the street but by their position in society. Everyone in
early modern France was supposed to belong to a social unit such as a family, a
household, or a guild, for example. Each unit theoretically occupied a niche in
a larger social hierarchy. This system ensured each person was under what
18th-century political thinkers considered to be the “natural oversight” of
their superiors, a hierarchy at the top of which sat the king. Being outside
this system was highly problematic to the state because such a person was
beyond social and political systems of control. For the police, controlling
these populations meant keeping track of them, which in turn required
developing the capacity to spy and manage information.
With every
decade, the police brought more groups and more types of activities under
surveillance. By the 1720s, for example, agents stationed in cafés wrote down
overheard conversations, in part to satisfy a monarchy increasingly concerned
with public opinion. By the 1730s, the police had a fairly sophisticated
operation to track and arrest men who had sex with other men in public. By the
late 1740s, however, police surveillance had extended beyond those subjects,
like writers or homosexual men, whose threat to the existing political and
social order was clear. In principle and largely in practice, it extended to
anyone outside the social hierarchy and to any group that met behind closed
doors. Contemporaries were convinced spies were everywhere, an impression the
police actively fostered. The last lieutenant general before the Revolution
boasted in his memoirs that if five people stood on a street corner in the
capital, three of them “belonged to him.”
Eighteenth-century
Parisians overstated the extent of surveillance, perhaps because they did not
really understand its purpose. By the late 1740s, the police were no longer
collecting information in order to investigate criminals or even to anticipate
problems. As French police scholar Vincent Milliot argues, by spying on
Parisians, the police were literally incorporating them, putting those outside
the hierarchy into a special group—the spied upon—for which the police provided
oversight. More generally, however, the police were gathering information just
to gather information, endeavoring to make the city visible to its government.
Intelligence gathering had it own momentum.
So what of
kept women? If they were hurling epithets against the king, plotting sedition,
consorting with enemies of the state, and secretly converting to Protestantism,
the police never indicated. They were not a threat to men who hired them, even
socially. Rather, like the gens sans aveu, the police kept track of them as
part of the effort to provide oversight to a group that naturally had none.
Kept women were largely outside the concatenation of corporations that defined
18th-century France. Few were married and hence were not under the “governance”
of husbands. Those living with families often dominated them, as heads of
household and hence were not supervised by fathers, as was considered natural.
They were free to leave their patrons and often did. They were not bound by the
workshop and hence the master.
But the
contents of the police files suggest a second reason why Varenne was
interesting to the them, why they expended so much energy collecting so many
details on her life, and why Meusnier wanted to be assured Varenne was not a
virgin when she walked through the door of Carlier’s brothel. The demimonde was
an important part of elite culture. The inspectors exposed the workings of this
community to their superiors, but they also provided the community with a loose
sort of governance. Their goal wasn’t to shut it down, but to make sure that
the buying and selling of mistresses occurred within police view and that
buyers and sellers did not scandalize the rest of Parisian society. The inspectors
set limits on acceptable behavior. They determined, very generally, who could
be a professional mistress. They decided which elite brothels could operate and
where. The latitude allowed to the tolerated madams was remarkable. The
inspectors permitted them to sell children, girls as young as 12, as long as
they were made aware of the transactions, even as such sales were considered
both criminal and reprehensible.
As for
mistresses and their patrons, the police watched and scribbled, scribbled and
watched. Occasionally they mediated between patron and mistress or mistress and
someone in her community who wished her gone, like the local priest.
Occasionally they stepped in to stop a patron from spending himself into ruin
or to arrest a kept woman for something unrelated to being a mistress. But
mostly they just observed.
The Case of
the Closely Watched Courtesans. By Nina Kushner. Slate, April 15, 2014.
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