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  • Sodomy, Suicide, and the Limits of Legal Reform in Eighteenth-Century France
  • Jeffrey Merrick (bio)

Foreign critics who described the French as a frivolous people could have cited two humorous treatments of serious subjects, sodomy and suicide, that provoked laughter in Paris in 1781. According to Le Pot-pourri de Loth, a comical and musical version of the story of Lot in the book of Genesis,

In awakening one fine morning,The Almighty eyed SodomAnd swore, with lightning in hand,To grill every last one of them,For in that place each wretchEnjoyed himself as in Berlin,And the rogues all took each otherIn the rear as in the front.And the rogues all took each otherIn the rear as in the front, from under as from over.1

The pleasures of Berlin in the sixth line refer to the “abnormal” sexual interests of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who did not share his days or nights, in the city or at Sans-Souci, with his wife.2 The first plate in the French text shows the indignant Jehovah, with lightning in hand, ready to smite the Sodomites, including two men hugging and kissing in a classical [End Page 183] archway. One of them has a hand around the other’s erection, and they are framed by two male couples symmetrically engaged in anal intercourse.3

As for suicide, a Parisian shoemaker with a bossy wife, a frisky daughter, and a comely son busied himself with taking measurements and making deliveries, counting the money hidden in his room, and talking literature with his friends, who knew no more about it than he did. When he got home late one night, he found that his wife had run off with his foreman, that his daughter had been arrested for solicitation, that his son had enlisted in the army, and, worst of all, that his money had been stolen. Overwhelmed by these misfortunes, the shoemaker resolved to take his own life. He was about to cut his throat when he recalled that it was customary to leave behind an explanatory note. He put down his knife, took up his quill, and scrawled a few lines:

Let no one be charged with my death. I myself have killed myself in a fit of the most righteous fury, yes, of the most righteous sorrow that any bourgeois de Paris has ever felt, for, as Molière puts it so well,

When one has lost everything, when one is without hope,

Life is a disgrace and death a duty.4

Molière, he wondered, or Jean Baptiste Rousseau? Worried about his posthumous reputation as a man of parts, he delayed his demise long enough to consult his literary friends, who attributed the verses to other poets. They gave themselves a week to investigate. During that week the shoemaker realized that his wife did him a favor by leaving him, that his daughter deserved her punishment, that his son had the honor of serving their king, and that he could replace the money he had saved and lost. So much for deadly despair.5

Humor aside, sodomy and suicide were not only serious subjects at this time but also criminal offenses that had been widely and loudly stigmatized for many centuries.6 The revered Greeks and Romans embraced sex between men and endorsed self-destruction, though not without restriction and contention on both counts, but the church condemned and the state punished these marginal practices throughout early modern Europe. As the eighteenth century unfolded, however, both types of transgression seemed more prevalent and visible in major cities such as Paris. During the course of 1781, the police arrested dozens of “pederasts” (by this time they used classical rather than Biblical terminology to categorize males who desired males of any age) for prowling public places in search of sex.7 They also documented the successful and unsuccessful efforts of dozens of men and women to end [End Page 184] their lives by drowning, hanging, stabbing, shooting themselves, cutting their throats, or jumping to their deaths. Ten years later, the National Assembly decriminalized many religious, moral and sexual offenses, not by declaring them legal...

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