Chaussons in the Streets: Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Paris

Chaussons in the Streets:

Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Paris

We have learned a great deal in recent years about the sodomitical subculture of Paris in the eighteenth century, but we know relatively little about the seventeenth century because of the shortage of documentation. When Louis XIV created the office of lieutenant general of police in 1667, he may have envisioned or even expected the suppression of blasphemy, gambling, prostitution, and other religious, moral, and sexual offenses, but Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie and his associates could only do so much to punish misconduct and reform Parisians.¹ The reorganized police did not generate and accumulate the same sorts of records about same-sex relations before 1700 as they did from 1715 to 1750 and during the 1780s.² In exploring the seventeenth century historians have necessarily relied on two other types of sources. First, there are journals, letters, memoirs, satires, and polemics, which contain gossip and slander about nobles, clergy, writers, artists, and other figures of rank or note.³ The list includes Louis XIV's brother Philippe, duc d'Orléans, marshals Vendôme and Villars, cardinals Bonzi and Bouillon, the poets Théophile de Viau and Claude Le Petit, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, and many others who reportedly pursued younger males, sometimes of the same class but more commonly of lower status: soldiers, students, and servants. Second, there are judicial proceedings, most notably a collection of ten cases adjudicated by the Parlement of Paris between 1540 and 1726, compiled in the eighteenth century and published in the twentieth century.⁴ These cases, too, involve older and younger males, age, for example, forty-three (Chausson) and seventeen in 1661, forty-five (Mazouer) and twenty-one in 1666, and fifty-six (La Contamine) and eighteen in 1671. The cases themselves are genuine, and much of the information in the texts is accurate, but the manuscripts as a whole, Alfred Soman has argued, are not reliable copies of the original documents and therefore should not be read and used as such.⁵ Until Soman publishes the results of his research on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we will not have much sense of the number and nature of the prosecutions or the identity and experience of the individuals arrested, interrogated, and, in some instances, executed.⁶

In the seventeenth century, as in the sixteenth and even more so in the eighteenth centuries, magistrates prosecuted sodomy sporadically and selectively, most commonly when the offense involved physical violence and provoked public scandal. Most same-sex relations, especially involving members of the privileged classes, did not result in prosecution, and the records of prosecution, even authentic ones, do not tell the whole story. In sodomy cases, as in many other types of criminal cases, judicial documents produced by local courts like the Châtelet (the royal court with jurisdiction over the capital) and appeals courts like the Parlement of Paris (which had jurisdiction over a third of the kingdom) are usually more focused and condensed and therefore less informative than the original reports by the district police commissioners. The papers of the commissioners, whose offices antedated 1667, include the interrogations conducted and the depositions recorded before any decisions about prosecution were made. More often than not, the latter sources document cases from the outset on and from the bottom up. They show how the police conducted the investigation and what the neighbors, who sometimes claimed to speak for the neighborhood as a whole, said about the offense in their own words. They provide access, as much access as we will ever have, to the minds of people without public voices, as opposed to the clergy and jurists who told them what they should feel, think, and say. It would be foolish to assume that the clerks wrote down exactly what they heard, without any alterations, but witnesses did have a chance...