Prostitution in France

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Toulouse Lautrec : The drawing room on Rue des Moulins. 1894

The prostitution in France in the recent past, from abolitionism embossed and was made in April 2016 penalty. Pimping , trafficking in women , brothels and prostitution with minors were previously punishable . Since April 2016, prostitution has also become a criminal offense for the clients of prostitutes (clients) , but remains unpunished for the prostitutes.

In the 19th and up to the first half of the 20th century, prostitution in France, especially in Paris , was dominated by brothels (French maisons closes ). The mass brothels , so-called maison d'abattage (German slaughterhouse ), were notorious : prostitutes and guests were exposed to the worst conditions alike. These brothels and the conditions in them were, in addition to the supposed collaboration with the German occupying power in World War II, one of the main reasons for Paris city councilor Marthe Richard to initiate the French brothel prohibition law of 1946.

history

Prostitution in the 17th and 18th centuries

Transporting the girls to the police station , Étienne Jeaurat , 1755

In 1658 prompted Louis XIV. , That all women who were prostitutes convicted of fornication or adultery and be to intern in the Salpêtrière, until they repent done and by a priest, the absolution would have received.

The prostitute on the street had to resolve a contradiction: she had to hide from the authorities, but at the same time be recognizable to potential customers. Obviously, eye contact was very important.

In the years 1781 to 1784 around 60 houses with arcades were built around the palace garden ( 1st arrondissement ) in Paris , which housed apartments, shops, restaurants and entertainment facilities. The nightlife of the capital was concentrated here, and it was a main meeting place, where around 1,500 prostitutes gathered every day. The promenade on the Allée des Soupirs ( Alley of Sighs ) was famous all over Europe because the most beautiful girls and women from all classes prostituted themselves there, and people from the high nobility were also found there. Since the complex belonged to the Duke of Orléans , a relative of the king , the police had no access. This allowed a certain freedom of assembly . On July 13, 1789 (according to some sources on July 11 or July 12) Camille Desmoulins called for an armed uprising there. Paris had 500,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the 18th century and 600,000 in 1789.

Madame Marguerite Gourdan owned one of the largest brothels called Chateau de Madame Gourdan on rue des Deux Portes at the corner of rue Saint-Sauveur . Rich and influential politicians, nobles and even clergymen came and went in their establishment. It was one of the largest brothels of its time, spread over various houses and even streets. Marie-Jeanne Bécu, who later became the comtesse du Barry , worked in the house and became Louis XV's mistress . brought.

Another example was the French actress , philosopher and feminist Marie-Madeleine Jodin . For various reasons she came into conflict with the police des mœurs , a moral police of the Ancien Régime . Partly because she and her mother worked as prostitutes for a certain period of time due to the death of their father, the watchmaker Jean Jodin (1713–1761), and the resulting poverty . The police des mœurs was founded in 1747 by Nicolas René Berryer and was organized within the “Bureau de la discipline des mœurs”. At the age of 20, she was interned with her mother in the women's prison at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in November 1761 . Her experiences from this time led her to make various demands about the future rights of women. She advocated the abolition of public prostitution and that prostitutes, filles de joie , no longer had to justify their actions to the police des mœurs . She was responsible for setting up a separate women's jurisdiction to deal with family conflicts. She also campaigned for the establishment of homes for women in need and a right to divorce .

The wages of prostitutes in the area of ​​the Palais Royals ranged between 7 and 20 livres until around 1790 . The prostitutes were required to wear a gold-plated emblem on their belts . The phrase is borrowed from this: "Bonne renown vaut mieux que ceinture dorée." (In German: A good reputation is better than a gold belt.) As a result, women who set themselves apart from prostitutes chose a simple and plain belt.

Prostitution in the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century

Mass brothels as a result of the industrial revolution

There is hardly any contemporary coverage of the mass brothels; the sex and prostitution researcher Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet (1790–1836) does not mention any explicitly, but his writings in 1857 definitely speak of mass prostitutes , women of the lowest social class who follow the garrisons :

“Very few of them live in rooms or even have furniture; they live for the most part in holes and storehouses […]. I saw a cellar that was only lit by a shaft and was five meters underground, in which up to thirty women were sometimes crammed together. A landlord in Belleville had planked twenty two meters long and one and a half wide cells together; in each of these sheds at least two girls spent the night, lying on a horrific mixture of rubbish and vermin. "

In 1887 Gustave Macé , former head of the criminal investigation department, reported on the mass brothel 29 in his book called A Pretty World :

“Let's enter the brothel in house number 29, the last one down the street, so that you can get an idea of ​​what such houses looked like back then. On the first floor of this lupanar there is a large hall where the girls and the owners are. In this parlor, which can be reached through a corridor barely three feet wide, there are three tables made of raw wood with horribly filthy mended oilcloths on them.
An oil spill hangs from the ceiling of the low, smoky hall; the light is directed upwards from a dark shade, onto a red-painted wooden box and the head of an old woman who is sitting on a pillow stuffed with straw and has snow-white hair; horrific, the sight of her open toothless mouth. ... The six rooms are furnished with a bed, a small table, a wash bowl and a jug, which are completely filthy because they have not been cleaned for weeks. The bed linen is changed once a month.
The staff of these houses corresponds to the facility. "

With the industrialization of France and the growing factories, more and more cheap laborers were needed, thousands of whom were recruited from the former colonies. Many cheap workers pushed into France from Africa, who did not have the opportunity to bring their families to France or even to found one, since they were out of the question for the French marriage market due to everyday racism and their limited wealth. So only the cheap mass brothels remained for the North African workers.

Marseille, 1919

An excerpt from the 1929 house rules of the Moulin Galant:

“The customer pays 5 francs 25. Of this, the house receives 2 francs fifty and the lady too; The towel costs 25 centimes . The customer is not obliged to give the lady a present; if he does, she has to share the gift with the management. Every lady is obliged to be present twelve hours a day, from two in the afternoon to two in the morning.
The expenses for the ladies are 30 francs per day; Visits to the doctor are not included in this total. The ladies are expressly asked not to have their mail sent to the address of the establishment, 10, rue de Fourcy. "

The writer Alphonse Bodard quotes from a letter to Paul Langevin from 1934:

“… The women arrive at nine o'clock in the morning and stay until half past twelve at night, often even longer,… Not a single chair is available to them during work! These repulsive places are frequented by Algerians and Moroccans. Often fifty or more lay down on these unhappy girls a day; the customers wait in a corner that is referred to as a 'garage' in the milieu until it is their turn ... "

In his book The Golden Age of the Brothel, Boudard gives the following description by the scientist and criminologist Edmond Locard :

“In whore jargon, 'go to slaughterhouse' means looking for a lot of customers quickly without worrying about quality. A slaughterhouse is a brothel in which simple customers are received who do not have the right to make special demands. In the brothels of the popular and poorer districts, the 'slaughter festival' takes place mainly on the weekends; it is assembly line work. "

The Lanterne Verte , closed in 1921, was one of the more moderate slaughterhouses .

According to police reports, there were twelve official slaughterhouses in Paris in 1938; some brothels had no names at all, but were simply named after the house numbers in the street in which they were: known were 106 and Panier Fleuri ( Boulevard de la Chapelle ), 164 and Bon Accueil (Boulevard de la Villette), the Eden (Rue de Lappe), Le Soleil (Rue Caron), Le Moulin Galant (Rue de Fourcy), the 43 (Rue Frémicourt), 162 (Boulevard de Grenelle), the 9 (Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui), the 26 ( Rue Gérard), the Fragonard (Rue Bessière next to the town hall of Clichy).

Noble brothels

Brothels such as One Two Two or Le Chabanais were not only regarded as simple places of sexual satisfaction, but also as artistic and cultural meeting places and, during the Second World War, as important bases and shelters of the Resistance .

Brothels as a result of French colonization and military prostitution

French colonial empire (light blue: first acquisitions in the 16th century, dark blue: acquisitions up to 1920)

Prostitution was an integral part of the French way of life in all French colonies , such as in New Orleans . Mass brothels in former French possessions such as Algeria or Tunisia have their origins in military prostitution .

Prostitution was legally allowed in North Africa and was even encouraged. The French military felt it was important to keep their soldiers stationed there happy in view of the rigid sexual morality prevailing in Islamic countries. In addition, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases should be avoided with the help of medically controlled prostitutes and homosexuality , which is feared and condemned as sodomy , should be prevented.

In Algiers in the 18th century by Venture de Paris you can read:

“'A military law in Algiers prohibits soldiers from marrying under penalty of punishment ... The government had to turn a blind eye and openly tolerate two vices that are the result of this bachelor existence: girls of pleasure and young men for sale. Every Moorish girl who wants to work as a whore has herself entered in the register of Mezouar; her parents then no longer have any right to her; she becomes the wife of the Youldash. "

The field doctors were tasked with setting up military brothels, strictly separated into soldiers and officers. Usually the military brothels were very different in level; While the officers were able to visit noble houses with beautiful and educated women, the common soldiers and mercenaries almost exclusively had very poorly run houses with catastrophic working conditions for the women, a misery for both sides, since the women hardly got together in the mass onslaught of soldiers wash let alone protect against venereal diseases and passed them on to the men.

“In North Africa ... there are so-called slaughterhouses for less well-off customers ... where the number of stitches is supposed to compensate for the relatively low price. Each woman receives an average of forty to sixty customers a day. In the military brothels, the numbers are considerably higher, especially in rural areas: a handful of unhappy girls usually split a battalion among themselves; this means that each one has to cope with more than a hundred suitors in less than twenty-four hours ... "

During the First World War, military prostitution was placed on an official basis, even if it was hardly publicly discussed, through the widespread introduction of the Bordels militaires de campagne (BMC) administered by the army . These field brothels were modeled on the facilities in the North African colonies and were initially only intended for colonial soldiers and foreign legionnaires, as the military leadership wanted to avoid sexual contact between these and local women. As a result, there were no French women from the mother country in the BMC, but mainly Algerian women. Military brothels continued to exist for the Foreign Legion and in the colonies when the French brothel prohibition law came into force in 1946.

The Second World War and the occupation of France by the German Wehrmacht

Soldiers brothel , Brest, 1940

After the defeat of France in 1940 in World War II , the German occupying power took advantage of the services of French prostitutes ( Wehrmacht brothel ). Cheap brothels were used by the Wehrmacht men , expensive houses like One Two Two or Le Chabanais were reserved for officers. The brothels made high profits, while the working conditions were poor and the physical and mental health of the women was affected by the mass processing. Each soldier received a card at the brothel entrance, on which the name of the brothel and the girl and the date of the pleasure had to be entered. Below were the words:

“You have to get sanitized after intercourse ! You can find the next redevelopment site on the poster at the exit. Keep the card in a safe place for at least 5 weeks. "

Developments since the second half of the 20th century

Marseille, 1920s
Caravan prostitution in France, 2006

The law initiated by Christian Democrats and Communists ( "Loi Marthe Richard " ), passed on April 13, 1946, banned brothels. The Paris brothels Aux Belles Poules and Le Chabanais , the mass brothel L'Étoile de Kléber and the establishment One Two Two were closed in 1946 . L'Étoile de Kléber opposed the closure.

Prostitution per se was still allowed and has since taken place mainly in the big cities as street prostitution. Prostitution was largely tolerated in the immediate post-war years.

In the post-war period, many of the immigrants began to take advantage of cheap prostitution for themselves. Many switched sides and even let women work for themselves as prostitutes. It was not uncommon for women to have a given workload. Boudard guarantees an example of a woman at a North Africans belonged . She was supposed to work in Paris in June 1959 (when brothel prostitution was officially banned in France) and earn 20,000 francs a day, with an average price of 500 francs per traffic.

“Do the math for yourself: You had to win forty times in order to be able to deliver the required amount; assuming of course there were so many customers. "

The French suffragette Odette Philipon published a report in 1960, in the preface of which unionists wrote:

“The number of customers is considerable; this is evident from the incredible income from pimps and the number of prostitutes registered by the police or venereal disease treatment centers. 13,000 women are registered as prostitutes, 4,000 of them in Paris. This means that in the capital at least 8,000 men commit this act of humiliation every day: A prostitute who only has two rounds a day is poor off and can barely pay for her room. If she works for a pimp, she has to get ten to fifteen stitches a day. "

In 1960 France signed the UN Convention to Stop the Trafficking in Human Beings and the Exploitation of Prostitution for Others ; since then pimping has also been banned, a criminal offense that is now widely interpreted. In 1975 French sex workers struck and occupied a church in Lyon to protest police violence and discrimination.

Since the end of the 1990s, legislation and local authorities have been increasingly restricting prostitution. "Active recruiting" to establish contact is punishable on public streets and in public squares for both prostitutes and clients.

Prostitution in the 21st century

Since the law was tightened in March 2003 ( "Loi Sarkozy" ), prostitutes could also be punished for "passive recruiting" ( raccolage passif , for example smiling at, eye contact) with two months' imprisonment or a fine of up to 3750 €. Both suitors and prostitutes are convicted in the course of police checks for the criminal offense of "sexual exhibitionism".

The proposal to completely prohibit prostitution based on the Swedish model and only punish suitors was discussed in public. For 2007, the Socialist Party announced a draft law aimed at making suitors liable to criminal offenses (“Swedish model”). Critical voices feared that the restrictive stance would mean that prostitution would migrate more to the anonymous underground and to the Internet, so that it, and thus possibly also the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, could no longer be effectively controlled. At the end of 2011, a bill to punish customers was discussed in the National Assembly for the first time. In December 2013, the National Assembly passed a first reading of a draft law against prostitution, which provided for the punishment of clients, but at the same time was supposed to lift the ban on “passive recruitment” in order to protect prostitutes.

The bill was not only criticized from the conservative side. Celebrities like actress Catherine Deneuve also signed a petition against plans to punish suitors. In an interview with the FAZ in November 2013, the French philosopher and feminist Elisabeth Badinter also spoke out against a ban on prostitution. A distinction must be made between the fight against mafia pimp rings and prostitution. Women have the right to do what they want with their bodies. "A prostitution ban would worsen the situation of prostitutes because they would then have to work in secret." Criticism also came from the French sex workers' organization Strass.

In July 2014, the Senate , the French upper house, rejected the draft criminalizing clients of prostitutes. After hearing numerous experts and prostitutes, the commission decided that criminalizing clients would force prostitutes to work in secret, which would threaten their health and expose prostitutes to further dangers. Punishment also violates the human right to sexual self-determination of adults. The law was nevertheless passed after several passes through parliament and the Senate and became legally valid in April 2016. A few months later, the implementation was already sharply criticized: only 249 cases were prosecuted in the first six months, but the aggression against sex workers had intensified and their working conditions had deteriorated significantly.

See also

literature

  • Alphonse Boudard , Romi : The golden age of the brothel. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich, ISBN 3-453-05181-5
  • Hollis Clayson: Painted Love. Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era . (PDF) 2003
  • Alain Corbin : Les filles de noce. Misère sexual et prostitution au XIXe siècle , Paris 2010 (1978).
  • Alain Corbin: Women for Hire. Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 , Cambridge 1990.
  • Jill Harsin: Policing prostitution in nineteenth century Paris , Princeton 1985.
  • Malte König: The state as a pimp. The abolition of regulated prostitution in Germany, France and Italy in the 20th century (Library of the German Historical Institute in Rome, vol. 131), Berlin, De Gruyter 2016.

Web links

Commons : Prostitution in France  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

in French:

Individual evidence

  1. ^ France prostitution: MPs outlaw paying for sex.BBC News, April 7, 2016, accessed April 7, 2016 .
  2. ↑ prostitution: les députés rétablissent la penalisation du client. Le Monde, April 7, 2016, accessed April 7, 2016 (French).
  3. ^ Franz S. Huegel: On the history, statistics and regulation of prostitution. Dogma, 2012 ISBN 3-95507-579-6 , p. 143
  4. ↑ Ulrike Weckel (ed.), Claudia Opitz , Olivia Hochstrasser: The eighteenth century. Supplementa: Order, Politics, and Sociability of the Sexes in the 18th Century. Wallstein, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-89244-304-1
  5. ↑ Romana Filzmoser: Iconography of the songful. Strategies for visualizing prostitution in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century. Research project of the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies, Vienna (2005–2006)
  6. ↑ St. Winkle: Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. Urban hygiene and social medicine from Mercier's Tableau de Paris . 2003 Collasius, online ( Memento of the original from October 16, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.collasius.org
  7. ↑ Eberhard Wesemann (ed.); Preface to Robert Andrea de Nerciat: The devil in the body. Leipzig 1986, p. 21
  8. ^ B. Moreau: Recherches et considérations sur la population, 1778.
  9. ↑ Today N ° 23, rue Dussoubs (2nd arrondissement) .
  10. ↑ Today at N ° 12 rue Saint-Sauveur
  11. ↑ La maison close de la Gourdan ( Memento of the original from December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nicolaslefloch.fr
  12. ↑ Stephanie Bee: La secte des anandrynes . ( Memento of the original from December 24, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. March 16, 2009 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.univers-l.com
  13. ↑ Felicia Gordon: This accursed child: the early years of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741–1790) actress, philosopher and feminist. In: Women's History Review , 10: 2, pp. 229-248, doi: 10.1080 / 09612020100200283
  14. ↑ Wages for prostitutes
  15. ↑ AJB Parent-Duchatelet: De la Prostitution dans la ville de Paris, considérée sous le rapport de l'hygiène publique, de la morale et de l'administration. Baillière, Paris 1836.
  16. ^ G. Charpentier: The Parisian Police. A fine world. Paris 1887.
  17. ↑ Alphonse Boudard, Romi: The golden age of the brothel. Heyne Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05181-5 , p. 57.
  18. ↑ Edmond Locard quoted in: Alphonse Boudard , Romi : The golden age of the brothel. Heyne Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05181-5 , pp. 43-44.
  19. ↑ a b c d Alphonse Boudard, Romi: The golden age of the brothel. Heyne Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05181-5 , p. 44.
  20. ↑ Malek Chebel : The world of love in Islam. VMA-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-928127-86-1 .
  21. ↑ Alphonse Boudard, Romi: The golden age of the brothel. Heyne Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05181-5 , p. 175. (Illustration of a Wehrmacht map)
  22. ↑ Emma ( online )
  23. ↑ Liberation , July 6, 2006, liberation.fr ; Retrieved January 19, 2007.
  24. ↑ Stefan Ulrich: France wants to ban love that can be bought. sueddeutsche.de, December 8, 2011; Retrieved December 8, 2011
  25. ^ France: Large majority for the law against prostitution . Telepolis
  26. ↑ Valeria Costa Kostritsky: Il aurait fallu réfléchir à deux fois avant de faire de la prostitution à la suédoise un modèle. slate, December 30, 2013, accessed December 30, 2013 (French).
  27. ↑ swr.de
  28. ^ French stars sign petition against plan to ban prostitution . uk.reuters.com
  29. ↑ Elisabeth Badinter in conversation. In: FAZ . November 25, 2013. Retrieved November 26, 2013 .
  30. ↑ berufsverband-sexarbeit.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / berufsverband-sexarbeit.de  
  31. ^ Paris: Senate rejects punishment for suitors . Young world
  32. ↑ deutschlandfunk.de
  33. ↑ Menschenhandelheute.net
  34. ↑ cncdh.fr
  35. ↑ Direction de l'information légale et administrative: Loi du 13 avril 2016 visant à renforcer la lutte contre le système prostitutionnel et à accompagner les personnes prostituées April 14, 2016, accessed on December 30, 2016 (in French).
  36. ↑ LObs: Loi anti-prostitution, 6 mois après: un premier bilan catastrophique , October 19, 2016, accessed on December 30, 2016 (in French)