Demi-Monde

Between 1747 and 1771, two inspectors in a distinct unit of the Paris police compiled reports on the world of elite prostitution. They tracked relationships between about a thousand women working in the top sector of the Parisian sex industry and thousands of male patrons. The sardonic and writerly Inspector Jean-Baptiste Meusnier and, beginning in 1757, the crude and direct Inspector Louis Marais collected gossip, sent out spies, visited brothels, and interviewed, and sometimes slept with, the women. Meusnier paid for sex. Marais did not. They developed privileged connections with some twenty brothel proprietors, all but two of whom were women. These proprietors orchestrated passades (onetime tricks), arranged petits soupers (supper parties), negotiated sales of virgins or the terms for keeping a mistress, and maintained continual communication with the police. Primed perhaps by rumors in the pre-Revolutionary press about femmes galantes and police surveillance, looters made off with some of the records during the taking of the Bastille in 1789.¹ Remarkably, the documents to survive comprise about 7,500 manuscript folio pages. This is the archive that Nina Kushner ransacked for her absorbing and well-written social history of the elite Parisian sex trade in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

It is not surprising that it has taken this long for a scholar to do justice to the world half-conserved in the inspectors’ reports. Erica-Marie Benabou’s posthumous La Prostitution et la police des mœurs au dix-huitième siècle (1987) unfortunately reproduces the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century disciplinary taxonomy of prostitutes, from streetwalker to courtesan. In contrast, Erotic Exchanges distinguishes elite prostitution as a world with its own rules and economy. Advances in cultural, social, and women’s history since the publication of Benabou’s work have allowed Kushner to see through a dusty layer of hygienist discourse and the clouded varnish of salacious commentary about famous femmes entretenues (kept women). The most enduring anecdotes have concerned a score of dancers and singers at the Opéra de Paris and actresses of the Comédies-Française and -Italienne. The “sexual capital” (to use Kushner’s term) of these women was enhanced by the fortunes in income and presents that prominent men—sword and robe nobles, diplomats, financiers, functionaries, and other members of a mixed elite—paid to retain their services. Male patrons, in turn, doubtless augmented their own reputations for libertinism or virility—in short, homosocial power—by actively participating in the demimonde. Scholarship by Robert Darnton, Arlette Farge, and others has allowed Kushner to frame her discussion of the police archive within the context of eighteenth-century print culture and ambivalent popular pre-Revolutionary responses to paternalist state authority. Finally, the methodology of women and gender studies and a sizable body of research on eighteenth-century French women’s history have spurred Kushner to ask challenging questions. How did elite prostitution function as a market? What forces, economic, juridical, social, or emotional, governed actors in this sexual market? How did actors move into and out of the market? Where did they come from, where did they go, and to whom were they connected? What was the place of elite prostitution and of the madam’s professional mediation of sexual transactions with respect to other kinds of women’s work or with socioeconomic contracts, including marriage? Most elusively, did this market and its actors contribute to the reorganization of emotional and intimate life in the crucial third quarter of the eighteenth century? Did the elite’s exploration of companionate sexual relationships with courtesans alter expectations surrounding love and marriage?

As Kushner explains in two compelling sections entitled “Leaving Home” and “Being Sold into the Demimonde,” from the onset of adolescence at around age fifteen, to the end of their average professional life span, about a decade later, girls and women often worked in elite prostitution “as part of a family strategy” (9). The strategy might entail investment of family resources in a dress, or in singing and dancing lessons, the...