Sex, Sin and Suffering

Venereal Disease and European Society since 1870

Roger Davidson, Lesley A. Hall, Roger Davidson, Lesley A. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134566471
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume brings together for the first time a series of studies on the social history of venereal disease in modern Europe and its former colonies. It explores, from a comparative perspective, the responses of legal, medical and political authorities to the 'Great Scourge'. In particular, how such responses reflected and shaped social attitudes towards sexuality and social relationships of class, gender, generation and race.

1
SYPHILIS AND PROSTITUTION

A regulatory couplet in nineteenth-century France

Andrew Aisenberg

Introduction

The attempt to write the interrelated histories of the regulation of prostitution and syphilis in modern France poses a number of paradoxes. The distinctive aspects of this regulation – the creation of officially sanctioned brothels, the inscription of prostitutes and the requirement that they submit to medical examinations for syphilis – became widely publicized and admired. So identified were these practices with the example of regulation in France that observers came to refer to them summarily as the ‘French system’. For all this admiration, however, they were only infrequently emulated and adopted, and then so only in a modified form. By the end of the nineteenth century, admiration gave way to criticism. The extended and extra-legal police powers that made these regulatory efforts possible, and the exclusive focus of regulation on female prostitutes, came to be seen increasingly as incompatible with an emerging commitment to universal civil, political and (in limited cases) social rights among European nation states. Even in France, in the wake of the 1870 bloody popular massacre known as the Paris Commune, supporters of the nascent Third Republic judged the expansive police powers embodied in the regulation of prostitution and syphilis to be untenable if the Republic was to succeed. Such criticisms, however well articulated in the press and in the Chamber of Deputies, ultimately proved unpersuasive. The police regulation of prostitution remained intact in France until 1960.¹

It is the persistence of these regulatory practices in Third Republic France, long after other European nations had rejected or significantly modified them, that has particularly preoccupied historians. That historians perceive this persistence as paradoxical is based upon certain presumptions about the principles that grounded the political system of republican France. If, as assumed by historians, the logic of democracy entails the ever-increasing inclusion of subjects in the exercise of rights, why did the Third Republic elaborate a system of social regulation that effectively excluded women prostitutes as a group from the exercise of political and social rights? For historians, the problem of this paradoxical exclusion is further highlighted by the role of science in the justifications and practices of regulating the relationship between syphilis and prostitution. For, if science is based upon the sensory and rational capacities possessed by all human beings, why and how could medical understandings of syphilis define prostitutes as a social danger that effectively served to define them outside of the category of ‘individual’ and thereby exclude them from the enjoyment of civil, political and social rights?

Historians usually deal with these questions either by emphasizing the distance between (political and scientific) theory and (regulatory) practice, or by evoking the peculiar combination of democracy and state centralization that characterizes French republicanism.² Both of these strategies are inadequate for they avoid explanation and thus leave the paradox of regulation in place. My goal here is to make explanation possible by rethinking the place of science in the formulation of republican social regulation. What such a rethinking entails specifically is a nuanced consideration of the multivalent and contradictory meanings of ‘rationality’ that grounded the relationship between science and the regulation of prostitution and syphilis.³

Government officials associated their proposals and justifications for social regulation (including but not limited to the problems of prostitution and syphilis) with a vision of rationality that emphasized the human capacity of reason as the basis of knowledge, rights and sociability. In doing so, they sought to portray government intervention in social life informed by scientific research and institutions as fully adequate to the conception and practice of French republicanism. Even as they invoked the human origins of rationality, however, the nature of the regulation they sought to realize and support through rationality produced and (in turn) depended upon an understanding of individual social relations that transformed social life from an attribute of human autonomy into an object of government agency, in the process creating what Jacques Donzelot refers to as the ‘invention of the social’.⁴

Examined from the perspective of the discursive operations of scientific rationality, the relationship of the intertwined regulation of syphilis and prostitution to the French legacy and practice of ‘rights’ becomes comprehensible, if not unproblematic. In this regulation, we see the process by which a realm of thinking about and regulating industrial social problems was articulated without reference to claims about sovereignty, avoiding an interpretation of intervention as an acknowledgement of social rights imposed by the sovereign nation on government. Such claims had been at the centre of social and political conflict that developed between an organized workers’ movement and government officials (supported more often than not by industrialists) in France in the 1830s and 40s. Workers’ claims sought to expose the contradictions between the Revolutionary promise of universal political equality and the emergence of widespread poverty by demonstrating how political liberty engendered and was premised upon the establishment of social distinctions. Workers offered a solution to this dilemma in the form of social rights, insisting upon the obligation of government to ensure the equal social conditions (well-remunerated work and steady employment were the two most important ones) necessary for the enjoyment of inalienable political rights. The immediate response of government to such arguments and demands, which in important ways called for the rejection of accepted notions of limited government as the basis for the possibility of political liberty, is well known: the bloody June Days of 1848. But equally significant, if less well known, is the attempt by government, through science, to fashion new ways of thinking about and regulating industrial social problems. The regulation of prostitution and syphilis is one of these.⁵

The origins of a scientific regulation of prostitution: Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet

The earliest and most influential examination of the relationship between syphilis and prostitution was written at the height of the ‘social question’ in 1836 by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet. This study, entitled De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris considérée sous le rapport de l’hygiène publique, de la morale et de l’administration, served as the basis for understanding and regulating the social problem of prostitution in France and other industrializing societies. It was nothing if not rigorously scientific. Parent-Duchâtelet felt more comfortable in his preferred sites of observation, the sewer and the brothel, than in the official venues provided by the Conseil de salubrité de la Seine and the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, which sponsored his investigations and which relied upon his work in advising government on policy regarding social problems. In regard to his method, Parent-Duchâtelet’s refusal to define the causes of prostitution suggests the empiricist’s disdain for undertaking research based upon an articulation of first principles. Indeed, at least one historian has noted the overwhelming, even exasperating, empiricism of his work, which is contrasted to the more suggestive and politically interested approach of his renowned colleague and peer, Louis-René Villermé.⁶ Supposedly eschewing both conjecture and moralizing, Parent-Duchâtelet instead provides a detailed description of the different types of brothels (closed or unregistered) and prostitutes (registered or independent); the social and geographical origins of prostitutes; the array of sexual services offered to their clients; and the functioning of the dispensary, where prostitutes are checked and treated for syphilis, and its regulatory alternatives, the hospital and the prison.

However, Parent-Duchâtelet’s reluctance to discuss the causes of prostitution is more than offset by his expansive statements regarding the consequences of prostitution, and it is here that the relationship of his scientific approach and the politics of the social question become manifest. In his view, disease (syphilis) is the pre-eminent consequence of prostitution; that disease ‘ruins the health’ of young girls in urban and industrial centres.⁷ On the basis of the unassailable evidence of syphilis, Parent-Duchâtelet proceeds to describe prostitution analogically as a moral disease.⁸ Indeed, throughout his analysis it is difficult to ascertain whether the disease at issue here is syphilis, prostitution, or immorality, although in the end it is the disease of working-class immorality that most interests him. Prostitution results from the ‘transmission of vice’ in working-class families that inhabit urban and industrial areas. Husbands and wives who live separately, young widows and widowers who take lovers on the side, and parents who drink excessively and who sleep with their children in a single bed, create a corrupting home environment and facilitate dangerous ‘contacts’. Once ‘inoculated’ by this ‘gangrene’,⁹ young girls abandon their families prematurely and enter the industrial work force. In factories and boarding houses where they live and work, and later in the hospitals and prisons where the consequences of their prostitution are confronted, they come into contact and/or transmit the vice of prostitution and immorality more generally. The end result, in Parent-Duchâtelet’s view, is that this moral disease will spread from generation to generation, eventually affecting society as a whole. ‘One of the constant laws of nature’, he argues, ‘is that living beings resemble those who produce them, and that generations transmit vices as well as virtues of body and mind’.¹⁰

This analogy of prostitution to a moral disease demonstrates how, in Parent-Duchâtelet’s analysis, scientific and political fields are mutually constituted.¹¹ Syphilis is defined as the most prominent consequence of prostitution because, in turn, that disease provides a compelling basis for reconceptualizing the social problems identified with urbanization and industrialization as a consequence of working-class immorality and family life. What is at stake in this mutual definition of syphilis and prostitution is not simply the removal of industrial problems from the realm of economic analysis (poverty as the result of industrial liberty and free market practices) to a moral one (poverty as an expression of workers’ irresponsibility). Rather, the relationship between syphilis and prostitution creates a new way for considering industrial social problems as moral problems. The reference to disease situates the possibilities of working-class morality and immorality outside of individual voluntarism, thus avoiding a confrontation with the contradictions of liberal discourse. Does poverty reveal the lie of the republican notion of universal liberty, which both depends upon and produces invidious social distinctions? If so, how would government resolve these problems without rejecting its commitment to protecting political and economic liberty? These questions grounded social and political conflict in the 1830s and 40s. References to syphilis avoid these questions by reorienting prostitution as a moral problem that concerns society as a whole, thus making allusions to individual liberty inappropriate and instead justifying the intervention of the state in the working-class family as an alternative.¹²

This reorientation is evident in the way Parent-Duchâtelet addresses the working-class home as part of his study of prostitution. Now associated with the causes of syphilis, the working-class dwelling is defined as a site of scientific observation rather than as a sphere whose inviolability is necessary for the fostering of the moral capacities of workers as free individuals. In the interest of knowledge, the most intimate experiences must be rendered transparent and explicable. ‘I found many families still in bed together, if one can call by this name the miserable pallets upon which they were stretched out. Parents and children sleep together pell-mell, adult brothers and sisters were side-by-side in a state of total nudity.’¹³ The process of investigating and understanding these causes reduces the moral relationships and influences to a set of determining conditions. In a way similar to the Cholera Commission Report on the 1832 epidemic to which he contributed, Parent-Duchâtelet considers the moral habits and influences of family members as a potential cause of disease alongside other aspects of the dwelling (toilets, filth, humidity and darkness), leading him in the process to define moral capacity like a space, determined rather than determining. This is best illustrated in his now famous observation that ‘prostitution is as inevitable as the sewers, garbage dumps, and rubbish heaps’.¹⁴ Once such findings are discovered, they are presented as yet another reason for intervention. The working-class dwelling, and especially the relationships and actions that define its moral potential, contains the causes of disease. As such, it constitutes a danger to society and must be regulated.

The relationship between working-class immorality and syphilis, which Parent-Duchâtelet secures by referring to both as a ‘mal’, ultimately leads to an extended vision of government intervention. He characterizes that intervention as tutelary, where government will become responsible for the moral capacities that families have abdicated, an abdication made manifest in the spread of prostitution in urban and industrial centres.¹⁵ Among the responsibilities that comprise this tutelary role, Parent-Duchâtelet includes returning unregistered prostitutes to their families, requiring the registration of those prostitutes whose families are deemed incapable of raising them, and delivering prostitutes who will not register or undergo venereal disease checks to the disciplinary complex of dispensary, hospital and prison.

Parent-Duchâtelet justifies this extended vision of government regulation by analysing it as part of government’s larger responsibility for public health. This in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Syphilis and prostitution: a regulatory couplet in nineteenth–century France
• 2 Passing the ‘Black Judgement’: Swedish social policy on venereal disease in the early twentieth century
• 3 ‘The shadow of contagion’: gender, syphilis and the regulation of prostitution in the Netherlands, 1870–1914
• 4 Doctors, social medicine and VD in late–nineteenth–century and early–twentieth–century Spain
• 5 ‘The Fatherland is in Danger, Save the Fatherland!’: venereal disease, sexuality and gender in Imperial and Weimar Germany
• 6 Visions of sexual health and illness in revolutionary Russia
• 7 Venereal diseases and society in Britain, from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service
• 8 ‘The thorns of love’: sexuality, syphilis and social control in modern Italy
• 9 Public health, venereal disease and colonial medicine in the later nineteenth century
• 10 Health and Empire: Britain’s national campaign to combat venereal diseases in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore
• 11 Venereal disease, sexuality and society in Uganda
• 12 Women, venereal disease and the control of female sexuality in post–war Hamburg
• 13 ‘The price of the permissive society’: the epidemiology and control of VD and STDs in late–twentieth–century Scotland
• 14 Sexually transmitted disease policy in the English National Health Service, 1948–2000: continuity and social change
• Index