Sodomitical Inclinations in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris

During the last hundred years or so many advocates of gay and lesbian liberation have attempted to secure the future by reclaiming the past and compiling lists of famous “homosexuals” throughout the centuries. Academic and independent scholars working on the history of homosexuality, meanwhile, have moved beyond enumerating celebrities to reconstructing subcultures. They have used criminal records to explore the ways in which sexual relations between members of the same sex were experienced, regulated, and represented, in England, France, and the Netherlands, for example, in the first half of the eighteenth century. ¹ Since the prohibitions against “unnatural” relations were enforced selectively and sporadically, these sources do not provide comprehensive documentation about who did what with whom in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. They do include facts about hundreds of cases, filtered through the eyes and ears of police and magistrates. They document the actions and attitudes of men attracted to and involved with other men as well as the assumptions and anxieties of the agents who apprehended them and the authorities who prosecuted them. Read in conjunction with theological, legal, philosophical, literary, and polemical texts, these sources allow us to explore tensions in traditional discourses about sexual deviance and reassess conventional wisdom about sodomitical acts and identities before the nineteenth century.

This essay is based on a sample of more than sixty cases from the last years of the reign of Louis XIV included in the manuscript registers of disorderly behavior (everything from quackery to lunacy) compiled from the papers of Marc-René de Voyer d’Argenson, lieutenant-general of police of Paris from 1697 to 1718. ² They differ in several ways from the more numerous and informative cases documented in other types of criminal records during the following decades, when the police practiced systematic surveillance and entrapment in the Tuileries and other locations frequented by “sodomites.” Unlike routine arrests in public places, they involve the use of lettres de cachet, royal orders solicited, in some instances, by relatives or colleagues and countersigned, in every instance, by the chancellor, Louis Phelypeaux de Pontchartrain. ³ The registers generally provide a limited number of facts about the backgrounds and activities of the men incarcerated in the notorious “hospital” of Bicêtre (or, in some cases involving preferential treatment, in Saint-Lazare or Charenton) but usually indicate what happened to them in royal custody. After reviewing their offenses before detention and their conduct during confinement, d’Argenson made recommendations to Pontchartrain, case by case, with several objectives in mind: punishing sexual misconduct, protecting public morality, and reducing prison expenses.

In the eighteenth century the word “sodomy,” derived from the name of the Biblical city destroyed because of the sins of its inhabitants, could be applied to a considerable variety of nonprocreative sexual acts, ranging from masturbation to bestiality, including anal and oral intercourse within marriage. In the cases under analysis, however, it always refers more specifically to what were described, in unambiguously negative terms, as abominable, criminal, depraved, infamous, monstrous, odious, or scandalous relations between males. The registers do not contain any graphic details about sexual acts, but they do identify some common locations for sexual encounters and illustrate some common patterns of sexual activity. Several cases involve couples or circles of adults, identified as “comrades” or “accomplices” in debauchery, who were usually arrested at or around the same time. Two lackeys named Simon Langlois and Emanuel Bertault committed “the worst abominations” at gatherings in taverns in the Saint-Antoine quarter, where they were called “the grand master” and “the mother of novices,” respectively (985:81). None of the other cases that ended up in the registers mentioned this kind of collective carousing (and consciousness?), complete with references to Masonic and monastic rites that distinguished insiders from outsiders, but many of them do locate individual actions in social contexts.

Most of the cases involve traditional patterns of seduction or exploitation of boys by adults, especially members of the clergy. The list of clerical offenders includes thirty year-old Jacques Chabert, “an abominable priest who has dishonored his ministry through a public profession of sodomy” (985:53), and thirty-four...