Policing Same-Sex Relations in Eighteenth-Century Paris: Archival Voices from 1785

Part of a project to make records amassed by eighteenth-century Paris police concerning same-sex activity widely accessible (http://coloradocollege.website/phs/), this volume is mostly fascinating, but also a touch frustrating. As the title’s sole year implies, the focus is narrow but deep—complementing Merrick’s broader 2019 volume, Sodomites, Pederasts and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France. This compendium presents all 221 police reports on the men arrested for having—or appearing to intend to have—sex with other men in 1785, translated and annotated by the editor. Surprisingly, that year produced more cases than the six surrounding years combined. Why 1785 yielded such a bumper crop of ‘pederasts’ can only be guessed, since the single commissaire assigned to this category of policing was the same person from 1783 to 1789, and there were no changes in the law itself.

A thoughtful introduction contextualises the material historiographically, explains key translation choices, explains police processes, suggests interpretive outlines for the cases and points out how collectively they may throw doubt on some received views. For example, neither the men arrested nor the police show much interest in ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ roles, nor is there much preoccupation with categories of masculinity or effeminacy. The editor, able to cast these categories aside, instead almost amusingly divides the 425 men who made statements to the police into ‘no-men’ and ‘yes-men’, according to whether they admitted or denied the act or intention. However, as Merrick points out, his categories reflect only what the men said, not what they did, let alone how they thought, felt or desired. Those are things that remain difficult to discern through material of this nature.

A surprising lacuna is discussion of the prevailing law on same-sex sexual relations. The Revolutionary Assembly famously removed such religiously determined offences from the new criminal code in 1791, but did not the ancien régime stipulate death by fire for sodomites? Although such executions had not taken place since 1750, some reflection on the relative lenience meted out in 1785 (from a warning to a few weeks’ detention in prison) would have provided useful background. Clearly, the many men who habitually sought sex in well-frequented outdoor locations even in open daylight did not live in fear of being burned at the stake. Perhaps a short essay on the law and its changing interpretation by the police could be added to the project website.

The book’s main thrust is sexual relations viewed ‘from the bottom up, not the top down’, and the wealth of detail about how men who desired sex with other men located each other is genuinely novel and fascinating. What these men, police observers, and the arresting officer said they actually did is perhaps less so—in terms of sexual acts, ‘stroking’ is the activity that gets the highest number of entries in the index. Although the arrested men’s voices have been passed through the mill of police bureaucracy, they still bear colourful witness to a wide variety of ages, social classes, occupations and other traits. Their sheer variety gives the lie to stereotypes that can too easily emerge from restricted numbers of causes célèbres.

The reports contain a few hints of the existence of collective subcultures (such as nicknames, and the organisation of sexual parties), but most cases concern individuals who profess not to have known the partner(s) they were caught with, usually in specific areas of the Tuileries or on the Quai des Orfèvres. As often as not they went to those areas to ‘pass water’, but loitered too long over the task, or too close to other men doing the same. But, as the editor is only too aware, these men ‘did not tell [the commissaire] the whole truth and nothing but the truth about themselves, let alone everything we would like to know about them today’. There remains an essential inscrutability about the records that is frustratingly tantalising. In some ways, the sexual ‘rendez-vous’ of the past seem so close, so familiar, but the eighteenth century was another country, and a whole series of sexual concepts, including homosexuality, still awaited invention. How these men saw themselves, each other, and their activities—and how the police and their ‘observers’ viewed them—is a curiosity that will never be completely satisfied.

That does not mean historians should stop trying. On the contrary, in more recent times, important new liberties have often been undergirded by historical research that showed ‘we are everywhere’, in the past as well as the present. In these contemporary times of reaction against positive recognition of varieties in gender and sexuality, this book is a timely reminder of the practical impossibility and indeed futility of seeking to corral human sexual behaviour into rigid categories.