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Parisian Police launched a long campaign against accused
"pederasts"
that lasted nearly 100 years. The police
pioneered methods of entrapment, extortion and blackmail
that persisted well into the twentieth century.
As in 18th Century London
and Amsterdam, the men the French police arrested behaved
effeminately, and had an elaborate urban subculture that
included taverns and meeting places right under the noses
of the police. Unlike their contemporaries in London
and Amsterdam, French authorities did not persecute their victims
out of religious fervor, but because they feared a decline
in the "social order."
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