Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture

Sex, Commerce and Morality

Ann Lewis, Markman Ellis, Ann Lewis, Markman Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848931343
• eBook ISBN: 9781317322863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The eighteenth century saw profound changes in the way prostitution was represented in literary and visual culture. This collection of essays focuses on the variety of ways that the sex trade was represented in popular culture of the time, across different art forms and highlighting contradictory interpretations.

1 CLASSIFYING THE PROSTITUTE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Ann Lewis

The figure of the prostitute is common in the canonical literary texts of eighteenth-century France, as well as proliferating in a host of lesser known sentimental, libertine and pornographic novels. In fact, it is difficult to think of any novels of the period (at least those written by men) that do not include them in some form or other. However, compared to the large field of criticism dealing with the prostitute in nineteenth-century French literature and culture (or in the eighteenth-century English context), there is relatively little criticism relating to the eighteenth-century French field. This reticence may at least in part be due to the problems encountered when trying to define the category ‘prostitute’ itself. The first part of this article will explore various facets of this defining ambiguity, and I will then turn to two French writers from the late eighteenth century, Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, who explicitly set out and categorize different types of venal women, through a series of shifting classificatory schema.

This article will examine the unstable and at times contradictory ways in which these different sets of categories are defined and ordered, with a particular focus on the mediation of a series of anxieties relating to the structure of society more generally. It is striking that both Rétif s and Mercier’s taxonomies of prostitution take the form of hierarchies, in which the different ‘classes’ or categories are described in terms similar to those of different types of social rank – the terminology of ‘rang’, ‘classe’ and ‘condition’ being used in both cases. Of course, the notion of ‘class’ in Ancien Régime society (as opposed to that, for example, of orders) has long been contested in historiographical writing on the period preceding the revolution, particularly in reaction to the oversimplified postulation of a so-called ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’ (a recent refutation of this putative ‘rise’, for example, is Sarah Maza’s polemical book on the Myth of the French Bourgeoisie).¹ Nonetheless, a close inspection of Rétif’s and Mercier’s texts sheds interesting light both on the construction of social categories and those of varying classes of prostitutes. The mapping of one onto the other – both in the delineating of boundaries, and their blurring and collapse – is particularly revealing of certain ambiguities and anxieties at the heart of the eighteenth-century social imaginary.

Defining the Prostitute

For various reasons, defining the category we recognize as ‘prostitute’ is highly problematic, and it immediately raises the possibility of an anachronistic projection backwards. Was the term used at all in eighteenth-century France, and if so, did it mean the same as what we understand by it today? The 1762 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française entry for ‘prostituée’, for example, simply mentions ‘femme ou fille abandonnée à l’impudicité’. In the same dictionary, a ‘catin’ is described as a ‘une personne de mauvaise vie’. These descriptions evoke immorality and sexual incontinence but not necessarily our modern understanding of the ‘prostitute’ as a ‘person, typically a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment’ (the definition in the New OED). The potential conflation of the ‘prostitute’ with any woman transgressing the eighteenth-century norms of legitimate sexuality (for example, marriage) is visible in many texts of the period.

Erica-Marie Benabou’s La Prostitution et la police des mœurs au dixhuitième siècle, which remains the most comprehensive social-historical account of the topic, specifically draws attention to the difficulties in pinning down legal definitions of the crime of prostitution, noting that ‘l’aspect “mercenaire” n’y apparaît nullement au cœur du délit’ (‘its mercenary aspect was by no means a defining feature of the offence’),² instead, it was scandal and visible indecency which constituted the crime. In this respect, a distinction might be drawn between ‘public’ prostitution (for example, involving visible soliciting on the streets), and ‘private’ arrangements (kept mistresses, courtesans, etc., conducted discreetly behind closed doors) which might not be considered as falling within the category of prostitution’ at all. The Encyclopédie article for ‘courtisane’, for example, states: ‘on appelle ainsi une femme livrée à la débauche publique, surtout lorsqu’elle exerce ce métier honteux avec une sorte d’agrément et de décence, et qu’elle sait donner au libertinage l’attrait que la prostitution lui ôte presque toujours’ (‘this is the name for a woman given over to public debauchery, especially when she exercises this shameful trade with a kind of charm and decency, and knows how to make libertinage appealing in a way that prostitution cannot’).³ This definition both aligns the courtesan and prostitute in the exercise of the ‘shameful trade’ of ‘public debauchery’, but at the same time invokes ‘prostitution’ as a separate category.

Benabou’s study, which provides a detailed survey of the practice of prostitution also draws attention to the fact that, in many cases, women engaged in occasional part-time sex work (‘des soupers’, ‘des partis-de-plaisir’ to use the terminology of the period), rather than being full-time professional prostitutes. Women from the lower social classes who had a métier (such as filles de boutique, marchandes de modes, coiffeuses) would identify more closely with this métier than with a category or identity ‘prostitute’, although terms such as ‘fille du monde’, ‘du monde’, were often used by the women themselves to evoke their availability and venal status. In fact, how frequently the term ‘prostituée’ itself was used in different eighteenth-century contexts would be worth investigating further, and it is perhaps significant that Mathilde Cortey opts for the terms ‘courtisanes’ and ‘filles du monde’ in her recent study of the subgenre of memoir novels narrated by fictional characters of this type.⁴ It is worth noting, however, that both Rétif and Mercier do use the terms ‘prostitution’ and ‘prostituée’ frequently, in addition to a large number of other less specific epithets such as ‘malheureuses’, ‘créatures’ and ‘filles publiques’, and the multiple categories examined in the sections below.⁵

These more general reservations concerning the understanding of what we call ‘prostitution’ in an eighteenth-century context make Rétif’s and Mercier’s attempts to pin down a series of definitions – and their grappling with some of these issues at a very particular moment of the eighteenth century – all the more revealing. Before examining the ways in which both writers evoke and construct elaborate hierarchies of prostitutes, it is worth noting that there is no attempt in the present article to gauge how far these constructions mapped on to the social realities of prostitution (although they purport to describe them).⁶ The aim is to explore what they might tell us about the social and sexual anxieties of these particular writers, and what they therefore also tell us about the social imaginary of the period.

Other Orders for Exploring the ‘Spectrum’ of ‘Prostitutes’

It is also worth noting that Mercier and Rétif were not alone in exploring the broad spectrum of and connections between different levels of prostitution. Such classifications can also be found in a range of British texts,⁷ but different principles of ordering can also be found in various other genres and contexts. Many novels of the period (including, for example, Rétif’s own La Paysanne pervertie) also dramatize the rapid ascent and descent of a central character through the ranks of prostitution, thus exploring a similar range of categories in a different way – often from a fictional first-person perspective in which the psychological effects of such mobility are evoked.⁸

The multiple publications in both England and France in the genre of Harris’s Covent-Garden Ladies or Les Demoiselles de Paris also provide us with various types of lists of prostitutes.⁹ These almanacs, ‘guides’ and dictionnaires generally comprise a list of ‘stage names’, addresses, prices, physical attributes and erotic specialities, and sometimes related anecdotes and stories – thus providing a succession of individual (presumably largely fictionalized) portraits in serial form (although several names are recognizably those of famous actresses). The entries are sometimes listed in alphabetical order by name (for example in the Nouvelle Liste des plus jolies femmes publiques de Paris, 1801), andsometimes accordingto geographic location (the Liste complète des plus belles femmes publiques et des plus saines du Palais de Paris evokes a series of dwellings in Palais-Royal in turn, and their inhabitants), but sometimes there is no discernable order structuring the list of names and descriptions at all. The lists rarely provide overarching categories or groupings by ‘type’ – the ladies enumerated come under generic headings such as ‘nymphes’, ‘demoiselles’, ‘courtisanes’ in the titles of such publications. (An exception is Les Bordels de Paris, 1790, which provides the following categories: ‘Bordel de négresses’, ‘bordel des pucelles’, ‘bordel des élégantes’, ‘bordel des bourgeoises’, ‘bordel des grisettes et marchandes’, ‘bordel des provinciales’, ‘bordel des paillardes’.) Generally speaking though, the order of exposition in these lists seems to correspond more to an erotic-aesthetic principle based on stimulating the reader’s pleasure and amusement through wit, variety and piquancy, and structured to provide entertainment and distraction, rather than a more systematic arrangement according to price or type.

The narrative potential inherent in Rétif’s and Mercier’s taxonomies, suggestive of the clichés of fictional narrative of the period, will be touched on in the following analysis, while the ‘pleasure’ principle of the almanacs may also be perceived at some level in the exuberant inventiveness of Rétif’s classifications. And although there is no scope to explore the relationship between these different genres more fully in this context, it is useful to compare the structuring principles of Rétif’s and Mercier’s taxonomical enterprises in the context of these other models of order/disorder.

Mercier’s Classification of the Prostitute in the Tableau de Paris (1781–8)¹⁰

Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne were writing in the decades before the revolution, and their texts have been the object of fascination both for historians and literary scholars, given their desire to observe and provide various kinds of documentary account of the society and social values of their time (as well as a series of utopian projects for their reform). Critics have been particularly struck by their focus on everyday life, and evocation of social groups from across the whole social spectrum, using a range of innovative literary forms.¹¹ The two writers knew each other personally, and Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, makes several references to Rétif’s writings on prostitution.¹² In fact, there are very few texts in Rétif’s vast literary output that do not feature and discuss prostitutes; in reference to his project for the reform of prostitution, Le Pornographe, a contemporary writer sarcastically remarked on his obsessive interest in this field, or his ‘érudition en matière de prostitution’ (‘erudite knowledge on the subject of prostitution’).¹³

What is most immediately striking about Rétif’s and Mercier’s respective taxonomies of the prostitute is that, while they draw attention to the large variety of different types of women and activities that could be encompassed within this ‘métier’ (whether practised publically or in private, as amateurs or professionals), they nonetheless clearly suggest that it could be perceived as an overarching category at this stage of the eighteenth century. In the Tableau de Paris Mercier imagines a painter representing: ‘le gradin symbolique, où seraient [représentées] toutes les femmes qui font trafic à Paris de leurs charmes’ (‘Matrones’, Chapter 542) (‘the symbolic spectrum of all the women who traffick their charms in Paris’).¹⁴ He insists repeatedly on the sameness of the activity from the highest class of courtesan to the lowest streetwalker. And the identifying characteristic of this métier is venality:¹⁵

Il y a de la différence dans les noms … mais le métier n’estil pas le même? (‘St, St, St’, Chapter 964)

(The names are different … but surely the métier is the same.)

Quelle hiérarchie dans le même métier! Que de distinctions, de nuances, de noms divers, et ce pour exprimer néanmoins une seule et même chose … Cent mille livres par an, ou une pièce d’argent ou de monnaie pour un quart d’heure, causent ces dénominations qui ne marquent que les échelles du vice ou de la profonde indigence. (‘Courtisanes’, Chapter 239)

(What a hierarchy within the same métier! What distinctions, nuances and diverse titles, and all this to express what is but the exact same thing. One hundred thousand livres a year, or a silver coin or small change for a quarter of an hour, this is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture
• Part I: (Auto)Biographical and Classifi catory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
• Part II: Visibility and Th eatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
• Part III: Th e Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
• Part IV: Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
• Notes
• Index