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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 5 Conclusion to Part 1 Even without the French Revolution and the generation of war that followed, the various nations of northern and western Europe would have followed different paths so far as their attitudes toward the proper role of the public in private morals was concerned: the French toward a laissez-faire policy, at least as far as state intervention was involved, England and Prussia toward a more intrusive policy of enforcing moral norms not only through social and religious pressure (as, of course, the French did too) but also through law. The general tendency of Enlightenment thought, centered in France, on the one hand, and the religious revival in the Protestant nations of Germany and England, to which there was nothing comparable in France, ensured that they would go in opposite directions. Revolution, counterrevolution , and war exaggerated and hardened the differences, adding a political dimension to the widening divergence over morals—and vice versa. That said, it would be misleading to draw the distinctions too sharply. The nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie was as concerned with respectability as its English or German counterparts, while the middle classes of England and Germany were as intent on protecting their privacy as the French. In practical terms this meant that the individual was generally left free to indulge his vices so long as he did so discreetly, but violations of public decency were as severely censured in France as in England or Germany. The example one set, in short, was generally regarded as at least as important as what one did. For members of the various sodomitical subcultures of northwestern Europe, therefore, similarities in public attitudes toward them were often of greater importance than the differences in their legal status. Private consensual sodomy might be legal, or, more accurately, might not be illegal in France, while still criminal in Prussia and England, but the French retained laws punishing “any person who shall have committed a public offense against decency”| 61 05-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 61 G&S Typesetters PDF proof or who “habitually [facilitated] debauchery or corruption of young people.” These vaguely worded articles (330 and 334) of the French Penal Code of 1810 often were used to entrap sodomites in public places, to close cafés and other notorious meeting places, and the like, especially from the midnineteenth century on. Not that the legal distinctions were not important. Clearly they were, if only in creating a climate of opinion and a chilling threat of persecution in those countries where sodomy itself remained a crime. To be sure, sodomy was difficult to prove (though England made it easier in 1828 by no longer requiring proof of penetration and emission), but once it was proven, of course, the consequences could be devastating to the individual arrested and a terrifying object lesson for others of his kind. Even in England and Prussia, however, there was a gradual move away from the most savage punishments for sodomy. The general European tendency toward law reform that had led France to decriminalization produced in Prussia and England a much slower, less far-reaching, but nonetheless steady mitigation in the severity of the laws themselves and in their application . Prussia, which had abolished the death penalty for sodomy in 1794, replacing it with a term of imprisonment followed by banishment, reduced the penalty still further to a term of imprisonment only as part of a general law reform in 1837. England did not replace the death penalty for sodomy with a term of imprisonment, and that a life term, until the general law reform of 1861, but the application of the death penalty fell into abeyance some time before that. The last hanging for sodomy seems to have taken place in 1835; after that the death sentence, though invoked, was routinely commuted. Earlier attempts to abolish it were, however, as routinely defeated. Abolition of the death penalty for sodomy (and rape) passed the House of Commons in 1841 but was killed in the House of Lords on the grounds that repeal, as one member put it, “would do great violence to the moral feelings of a very large class of the community.” Earlier than that the tendency was simply to avoid the issue altogether. In 1836 a commission on the criminal law recommended reducing the number of capital crimes to eight. All but one, sodomy, were crimes of violence, but the commission refused to address that contradiction or, for that...

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