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As of 1804, “houses of tolerance” were officially permitted in France. These were legal and licensed brothels, which the morality police in France permitted to exist. All of the prostitutes who worked in them had to be registered officially. On the surface, this might seen like a fairly unremarkable version of legalisation, comparable to licensed brothels in Nevada in the modern day; they were not. As is often the case with learning about the historical treatment of a marginalized group, the treatment of sex workers in 1800s France gives us context for modern views and literature on prostitution.
We have some famous books about these houses of tolerance, including Parent-Duchatelet’s “On Prostitution in the City of Paris” (De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris, in the original French) in 1836. This book was well-cited, making it into texts like “Psychopathia Sexualis” which was a foundational text about sexual pathology, or Léo Taxil’s “La Prostitution Contemporaine” (Contemporary Prostitution) in 1884, who you might know of for inventing conspiracy theories relating to Satanism for which he is still cited to this day despite revealing it was a hoax. From these works, we can learn a lot about how sex workers at the time viewed their profession and the legal system as well as how the public viewed them.
This article provides a breakdown of some of the ideas around prostitution in the early to mid 1800s in Paris, as well as tables of statistics translated into English giving insight into the level of literacy of prostitutes in Paris and the ages they were enlisted… as well as letters from real sex workers who were asking the police for the permission to become brothel managers, which I translated from La Prostitution Contemporaine (full translation coming soon, which will be available to subscribers!)
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