- Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History ed. by Jeffrey Merrick
The lack of accessible edited primary sources about early modern European sexuality has been so keenly felt that scholars regularly crowd-source suggestions on Twitter.2 Building on decades of archival research, numerous articles, and several edited volumes, Jeffrey Merrick (Professor Emeritus of History, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) has furnished an indispensable resource that responds to this need. With careful curation and scrupulous English translations, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France: A Documentary History is a crucial collection for researchers, teachers, and students of early modern same-sex desire. Because there is, in Merrick's view, "more information about sex between men (but, alas, not between women as well) in Paris than in any other major city in the eighteenth century,"3 this volume also enables Anglophone scholars interested in cross-cultural comparison and thus will benefit sexuality studies in the early modern world more broadly. The volume's rich prefatory commentaries in each subsection and its abundant endnotes provide readers with a patient orientation to each source base, distilling years of expert reflection by the subject's leading historian.
This collection brings together documents of two kinds: police files and printed representations. The first corpus, "Surveillance of the Parisian Subculture," assembles English translations of 48 documents generated by the early modern Parisian police according to four institutional and chronological groupings: the lieutenancy general of police's morals bureau primarily in the 1720s, reports of the watch around the 1770s, reports of the Swiss Guard of the Champs-Élysées in the early 1780s, and reports of commissioners, or commissaires, in the 1780s. These sources, in Merrick's deft hands, shine particular light on the texture of everyday life.
The first of these policing institutions, the morals bureau of the lieutenancy general of police in Paris, undertook surveillance, arrests, interrogations, and detentions of men for the crime of sodomy, as Merrick has shown in numerous articles [End Page 109] (helpfully listed in the book's "Recommended Reading" section).4 The lieutenancy general's bureaucratic apparatus generated paperwork including reports of undercover spies (or "decoys") dictated to police clerks, denunciations of arrested men, and case summary sheets. (Merrick previously published some documents selected from the moral police's sodomy files in his first primary source collection, co-edited with Bryant Ragan, which inspired me as an undergraduate.5) In this section, readers meet a representative line-up of sodomites: the "incorrigible" recidivist Marquis de Brécey and his lackey Jacques Bernard (no relation), and the lace merchant Emery Eraux who cruised the Seine riverbank by the Collège Mazarin. Merrick has carefully selected cases from thousands of manuscript pages to demonstrate the "variety and complexity" of homosexuality in early modern Paris: patterns of behavior that include the prevalence of age-differentiated relationships, the role of labor patterns in structuring affective relations, and even the at times surprising limits of tolerance. Readers can consider whether transformations between these 1720s sources and the later documents reflect changes in the practices of policing, in the mores of the population under surveillance, or in both.
In Part II, "Representations of Same-Sex Relations," Merrick collects thirty-one depictions of male-male and female-female sexuality in print. The first subsection, "Gossip and Slander," includes scandalmongering pamphlets known as nouvelles and libelles that narrate social episodes. This subsection also juxtaposes those newssheets with archival evidence: in addition to translating a newssheet relating the story of a botched pickup at the opera in 1780 by the unfortunate actor Jean-François Bithemer, Merrick appends a legal petition Bithemer's mother filed against a calumnious actress at the comic opera who publicly denounced her son's "improper relations with men" (141–42).
The next subsection, "Tradition," includes excerpts of humanist and legal encyclopedias that contrast with the moral dynamism of the third subsection, "Enlightenment." The latter comprises texts generated by self-described philosophes and some that interdisciplinary scholars...