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Parisian Police Entrap "Pederasts"

Paris, 1715.  Police inspector Simonnet and his two assistants directed an unprecedented campaign to suppress and contain sodomy in Paris, a problem that seemed to be growing at an alarming rate. Inspector Simonnet, by all accounts a committed and incorruptible policeman, pioneered the techniques of interrogation and entrapment used in France throughout the 18th Century.

One favorite police method was to send informants to cruise known meeting places for sodomites. The informants, called "flies" in official records, chatted with suspected sodomites and if a man signaled an interest in sex, the fly called nearby gendarmes to arrest the victim. The flies were familiar with the ways of sodomites because they themselves had been arrested for sodomy and in exchange for favorable treatment - an exchange that amounted to blackmail - they became agents of the police.

During interrogation, arrestees were pressured to inform on fellow sodomites. The interrogation process was terrifying because the accused knew that he could suffer awful penalties if convicted. The law books called for burning at the stake, but this penalty was so rare that only two men are known to have been burned for having sex with each other in the 18th Century. One common sentence was imprisonment, often at Bicêtre, a  prison south of Paris infamous for its harsh conditions and high death rate. The inadequate food made scurvy, a wasting disease caused by lack of Vitamin C, a common scourge that induced dementia and hallucinations and killed many inmates.  Whether the police used torture is unclear - self-serving police records claim that they didn't  - but after two or three days of interrogation and under the threat of incarceration at Bicêtre, many arrestees were scared into informing on their sexual partners.

The police, not the courts, decided on punishment for sodomy, and the sentences were arbitrary. Commoners could expect anything from eight days in jail to penal exile in the West Indies. The wealthy and well-connected were usually released immediately after arrest, but they had to worry about their reputations. One unfortunate young gentleman, the son of a government official, was jailed for 27 years on his father's orders after his sodomitical practices were found out.

Some Parisian citizens helped the police in their anti-sodomite campaign.  When these often anonymous informants told the police about sodomites, the police arrested suspects and interrogated them.  One tipster, the abbot Theru, was especially helpful.  Concerned for "the glory of God and the good of the public", Theru spied on people, especially fellow clerics, and urged the lieutenant general of the police to arrest them.  Though unconcerned with "the glory of God", police were happy to use Theru's tips to harass the people he fingered. 

When medieval theologians had used the term sodomy, they almost always expressed a fear of divine retribution if it was not stopped, but the Parisian police had more mundane concerns.  They were charged not with the enforcement of divine morality, but with preserving social order in their growing city.   An oft repeated theme in police records is a fear that the sexual vices of the royal court - vices that included sodomy, adultery, and all sorts of licentiousness - would spread to the populace.  Sodomy was singled out as the worst of these, and dubbed the aristocratic vice. 

The aristocratic vice seemed dangerous to the police because it threatened the structure of society.  If it could be contained in the royal court, the status quo could be maintained, but again and again, people arrested for sodomy admitted that not only had they had sex with other men, but they had sex with men outside of their own class, nobles with commoners, servants with businessmen.  To 18th Century European eyes, the class structure seemed an inviolable component of an orderly society.  Sodomites, by ignoring it, threatened to undermine it. 

Before 1738, police records referred to same-sex eroticism as "sodomy", a term coined by St. Peter Damian around 1050 in his Book of Gomorrah.  After 1738, the police adopted a different term, "pederasty", the ancient Greek word for sex between men and boys.   In French usage, the word came to mean sex between two males, or even between two females, regardless of the ages of the participants. 

The change in terminology also reflected a change in perception.  The Catholic church had traditionally viewed sodomy as one of the sins of luxury and idleness, a kind of debauchery that could tempt anyone, but the French came to perceive the pederast as a special kind of person with an unusual, perhaps inborn, sexual disposition.  A second word was often used to describe such a predilection, "antiphysique", a word that highlighted the unnaturalness of same-sex desire.

Pederastic Life

Like London's mollies and Amsterdam's sodomites, the only historical information that survives about the Parisian pederasts comes from records written by their detractors.  Little is know about how the people called pederasts saw themselves; no one is even sure what they called themselves.   The evidence that does survive depicts pederastic life as very similar to the lives of the England's mollies and the Netherlands' sodomites.

One police report dating from 1706 describes a group of pederasts that sounds a lot like Ned Ward's account of London's mollies in his History of the London Clubs.  The report describes the charges against Simon Langlois who was alleged to have created "an assembly for a kind of order of young men who want to enter it and who take the names of women, making marriages together ... they make these assemblies ordinarily in the Cabaret du Chaudron, rue St. Antoine ... where after having drunk to excess they commit the sin of sodomy; they make certain ceremonies for the reception of proselytes and they take oaths of fidelity to the Order."  The Cabaret du Chaudron was not alone.  Historian Bryant Ragan lists at least four other cafes whose names have survived;  how many others existed secretly or disappeared without a trace is unknown.

Cafes were not the only meeting places.   Parisian pederasts also met each other on promenades - often in the same places that prostitutes frequented - and in parks where they could arrange assignations or, with enough privacy, have sex on the spot.  They had a system of codes and signals known only to each other (and enterprising policemen), and police records claim that they were outrageously effeminate.  Their sexual tastes ran from mutual masturbation to anal sex, but most at least claimed to dislike oral sex.  Some said they hated women, but others were married.

What sets the 18th Century pederast apart from his sodomitical predecessors was the emergence of a new sense of identity.  A secret subcultural language created a subculture of like-minded men, and pederasts were seen, and came to see themselves, as constitutionally different in their sexual tastes.   Just as in the Netherlands and in England, the sin of sodomy - once thought to be a universal temptation - had become the basis of a new sexual identity.  

Notes and References

The story of Mr. Simonnet and police methods is reported in Rey, 1988, pp.131-135.  The quotation from abbot Theru appears in Rey, 1988, p. 133.  For an overview of the change in the perceptions of pederasty in France, see Ragan, 1996.  For the medieval history of the term sodomy, see Jordan, 1997.  The police description of the Cabaret du Chaudron is from Jacob, 1996.

Jacob, Margaret C., 1996.  "The Materialist World of Pornography" in Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography.  New York:  Zone Books.

Jordan, Mark D., 1997.  The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Ragan, Bryant T., 1996.  "The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality" in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Rey, Michel, 1988.  "Police and Sodomy in 18th Century Paris:  From Sin to Disorder."  Journal of Homosexuality Vol. 16, Nos. 1 and 2.

Sibalis, Michael D., 1996.  "The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815." in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France.   New York:  Oxford University Press.

© 1998 Andrew Wikholm All Rights Reserved