Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (review)

Dumas, Alexandre. Filles, lorettes et courtisanes. Introduction by Emmanuel Pierrat. Paris: Flammarion: "L'enfer," 2000. Pp. 127. ISBN 2-08-068015-3

Neither entirely scientific, nor entirely fictional, Dumas's Filles, lorettes et courtisanes is a curious hybrid of sociology and storytelling that gives voice to the widespread effort to contain the menace of the prostitute in the first half of the nineteenth century. This long out-of-print text is pivotal to our ongoing study of women, gender, sexuality, and society in nineteenth-century France. Penned just six years after A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet's De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1837), Dumas's work continues Parent's project of exposing the supposed threat the prostitute poses to public health and moral order. Parent's ambitious study, which explores how prostitution affects public hygiene, morality, and the administration that seeks to control it, is used by the Prefecture to justify the century-long system of regulation. Throughout the century, administrators cite Parent's belief that the prostitute's unbridled sexuality would escalate the spread of syphilis and destroy moral order by corrupting the wives and daughters of the respectable bourgeoisie as reasons for implementing a harsh, often arbitrary system of surveillance. Though scholars of art, history, and literature such as Hollis Clayson, Alain Corbin, Charles Bernheimer, and Jann Matlock have recently explored Parent's influence on representations of prostitutes, Dumas's work remains largely untreated and therefore adds another dimension to scholarship on prostitution.

In the preface, Dumas capitalizes on the lewdness of his subject, and with a nod to Balzac lauds himself as the only person daring enough to paint such a scandalous area of the great Parisian panorama. Faithful to the Cartesian esprit, Dumas employs a tripartite plan, dividing his work into three distinct categories, and ranking prostitutes in terms of classes that correspond to the French social order in the mid-1800s. The fille therefore represents the lower classes, the lorette the bourgeoisie, and the courtisane the aristocracy. In a libertine clin d'œil reminiscent of Laclos's sug-gestion that his Liaisons dangereuses be given to a daughter on her wedding day, Dumas warns that his tome is not written for the "demoiselles qui sortent du couvent" (12). Along the same lines, Dumas coyly reveals in a note to the reader: "[...] pour les choses que Parent Duchâtelet a oubliées, j'en ai appelé aux lumières de quelques-uns de mes amis, fort savants sur la matière [...]" (14). Despite its apparent lacunae, Parent's work lays the groundwork for Dumas's chapter on the filles publiques, where Dumas uses Parent's data to explain what pushes honest girls into prostitution as well as what factors convince them to leave the profession.

In Chapter one, Dumas traces the prostitute from her appearance at the Palais-Royal in 1789 to her romp through the muddy streets of the Bourse district, then to her relatively leisured existence in the Empire-inspired bourgeois decor of the bordello she inhabits. The images of mud and sewers that permeate Parent's work also appear in Dumas's. Both men used the images to insist upon the prostitute's moral degradation ("la fille publique est le Paria de la Société," 21) and her dangerous contagiousness ("C'est la pestiférée," 21). Dumas divides the low-class prostitutes into a sub-hierarchy. For example, the streetwalking fille de la Cité who frequents escaped convicts and working-class cretins, occupies the lowest rung of the social ladder, while the fille du boulevard ranks as the "bourgeoisie" (26). She generally lives in a hôtel garnis, undergoes her medical examination at the Dispensary twice a month, and engages an "homme entretenu" to reflect her status and spend her money. The fille en maison, according to Dumas, represents the aristocracy of prostitution with her exotic names, her days spent idly playing cards, and her tendency to look down upon the...