Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Work in 18th Century Paris

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Paris was a wild place in the 18th century.It was the Age of the Enlightenment, cafe culture was exploding along with the world of ballet and opera, and there's the small matter of the Revolution in 1789.Before that kicked off, though, there were estimated to be 30,000 sex workers in Paris, plus an additional 10,000 high-class courtesans.What was the world of sex work like during this time? Who were the King's courtesans? And what happened to these people after the Revolution?Joining Kate today is Nina Kushner, author of Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris, to help us find out.Edited: Tom Delargy. Producer: Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Bonjour, my lovely betwixters. I don't know how to say my lovely betwixters in French. I only got as far as the bonjour. Honestly, I was a terrible student in school. But bonjour, lovely betwixters. Jean-Mapel, Kate Lister,

and I am here once more with your... What's fair-dos in French? I have no idea. I have no idea. I'm switching back to English. I am here with your fair-doos warning. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adultery way

and you should be an adult too. Why am I talking to you in French? Because this week's episode is looking at sex work in 18th century Paris. Gay-pery. And if that sounds good, well, perhaps you could do as a petty favour and vote for us for the listeners choice awards

at this year's British Podcast Awards. You can do that by simply going to the website www.w.w.w.w.britishpodwards.com forward slash voting. and clicking on Betwixta sheets. And if you've already done that, then you get a gold star. Well done for you. For the rest of you, go and do it right now. Stop holding up the show.

Let's take a gentle stroll through Gay Parie, lovely betwixtas. No, no, no. It's not in the aftermath of the Olympic Games. Let's just forget about all of that. This is the 1790s, and we are in the aftermath of the glorious, if slightly bloody, revolution. Down these cobbled streets with the smell of gunpowder still hanging in the air, Sex work has become a whole lot more visible. It's everywhere.

The revolutionaries, fresh from beheading Louis XVIth and Marie Antoinette, removed sex work from the domain of law, which made the whole thing more visible, more accessible, less stigmatised. Well, that was the theory. He didn't actually offer a whole lot of protection for the people selling sex. I mean, rates of STIs absolutely rocketed. But I suppose stopping people selling sex being penalised by the law was a step in the right direction Paris well done but how was sex work seen in the decades leading up to the revolution how did it fit into a city in the throes of the Enlightenment will let us travel a little bit further back to find out what do you are calling

man oh money of course you're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button yes social courtesy does make a difference Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Before the Revolution in 1789, there were an estimated 30,000 sex workers in Paris, plus an additional 10,000 high-class courtesans.

And I say estimates, because you have to ask who was doing the estimating there, but that's what they were saying. How did all of this fit into the rich experience of 18th century Parisians? in life? Was there a hierarchy of sex workers at this time and how were they viewed by the public and lawmakers? Well, joining me today is the rather wonderful Nina Kushner, author of Erotic Exchanges, The World of Elite Prostitution in 18th Century Paris to help me find out. If you're curious for more histories of sex work, then you can take a scroll back and listen to our episodes on Sex Work in Colonial Australia and Sex Work in the Middle Ages. But without

further ado, let's get into it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Nina Kushner. How are you doing? I am well and delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to have you here. You are the author of Erotic Exchanges, the World of Elite Prostitution in 18th Century Paris. So I suppose my first question has got to be, what brought you to the subject of the history of sex work, why the 18th century, and why Paris? Well, I sort of want to say that I wanted to do this ever since I was a child,

you know, but that my origin story actually isn't that far away, which is that when I was in high school, my mother was a community activist and a politician, and she was super focused on reproductive rights and trying to establish gay rights. So, you know, from a pretty early time, I was really thinking about why does the state let you do some things with your body, but not other things? It seemed like a kind of obvious question. And then when I got to graduate school, the history of sexuality was emerging as a field. I had one advisor who was working on it.

And I was really interested in the early modern period because it felt like this is where I can kind of get the answers to those questions. And he said, you know what? There's this great archive in Paris of the secret police. And it's in what was the best deal. And it was stormed. And a lot of the papers were thrown out the window. But of what remained, there was a ton on policing of sex between men. because this is where kind of the most interesting work was being done.

So I went in and I looked at this archive and I just want to have a shout out to secret police archives because they're fantastic. And I read all about, you know, they're spying on Protestants and they're spying on Jews and foreigners and masons and men who are having sex with men. And then I came across the most interesting cache of documents I've ever read, which is that the police were following kept women around Paris and writing down everything that they did and kept women. And kept women are, they're called Damantrotanu. They're women who serve as mistresses to men of the elite in this period. And everything was there. Like this was the story of power and agency and desperation and poverty and wealth. And just how women who were, ended up in this sort of secondary economy of sex work,

how they were able to kind of manipulate the conditions to which they were subject. And I was like, this is fascinating. And so I used that and I wrote this book. And then once you publish on sex work, you end up publishing more on sex work. That's kind of how it works. Why were they keeping detailed documents of kept women around Paris? Yeah. So this is the question. There's no definitive answer to it. But some theories where, you know, it was being used for blackmail or the king was really interested because this is such

excellent gossip. But I think the real answer is just that Paris is the capital and riots happen. and the police is sort of established to kind of keep the peace, right, to make sure there's enough wheat and firewood, but also to make sure that there's not conspiracies that are going to lead to rioting that are going to upset order. And one of the ways that order was kept in this period was that everybody was sort of part of a corporation. You know, professors would be in a corporation, you know, weavers, they had masters. And so everybody answered to somebody. And it was this sort of hierarchy of control. But these women were outside of that. They had no one really to answer to, a lot of money was changing hands. And so I think part of it was just the growth of

the state, right, of just wanting to keep records on, on where you see enormous exchanges of wealth and where you see sort of very important people spending a lot of time. And the rest is just, it's a way to kind of incorporate them, right? Like now they are being surveyed, the police are taking an active notice, and it's a way to kind of put them into a group. So that's my working theory about why the police followed them around and wrote down everything that they did. Before we get into what they were writing down, which I'm endlessly fascinated by, what period in time were we talking about here and these records started to be kept? Mid-18th century. So the 1740s and then it kind of end in the early 1770s.

There was this demeimonde of elite prostitution before the records were established and it continued after. But that's the period where we have this richest details. I was quite surprised by how old the police force are in France, because if I remember my French history correctly, and I probably don't, so you can probably tell me where I've got this wrong, but Louis the Sun King, he as he got older, like he started off his reign being quite, yeah, everyone's, this is loads of fun, everyone have loads of fun, but as he progressed, he became quite strict and introduced a lot of moralising rules and laws and legislations, and he utilised a police force as well. And that would have been a couple of hundred years before the 18th century? Well, it was in the 1660s that he made the decision not to kind of rebuild the wall surrounding Paris, but instead to create this police force. And there's this great book on this that says

the police force are the new wall. And it took a while because there were multiple sort of codgers of groups. There were multiple groups of men who had different cultures and they had control over different things. And it was one of the jobs of this new police, which was headed by a lieutenant general, was to kind of get all these different groups under his control. I mean, it was so bad that, like, the sidewalk might be controlled by one group

and the one part of the block might be controlled by another and, you know, the policing of one kind of activity. So that took years, and it wasn't to the mid-18th century, that you can really, people really talk about the police, as opposed to police meaning the running of a city, like the good administration of a city. That's what it meant. And then in the mid-18th century,

it starts to refer to a group of, of people who are doing this and they are under the command. And he wanted, and Louis the 15th, especially really wanted to know everything that was going on. And the police had this profound reputation. You know, I think it was Diderot, but it could be wrong there, who said, you know, if there are five men talking on the sidewalk, three were spies for the police. And that wasn't true. But the belief was that, you know, the police were everywhere. Oh, that must have been terrifying. That sounds like a police state. That's like everyone's spying on everybody else. Yeah. Wow. But, you know, they weren't doing a ton about it. I mean, if you were out there shouting, you know, the king is bad, you would probably be incarcerated. But yeah, there was a lot of record keeping, but it didn't always turn into action. And in fact, there's a lot of research showing how the police were helpful, right, that people utilize the police to meet their own goals around the security of their homes or their families. So we get to the 18th century and by the sounds of it, the police force is relatively early in its formation, but it's definitely there as a proper established police.

force. What is going on in a social context in the 18th century that impacts sex work? Because as long as we've had money and capitalism, people have been selling and buying sex. But what is happening in the 18th century to make this enough of an issue for the police to start keeping notes? Yeah. So that's such a great question. First of all, Paris is growing, right? So by the end of the century, it has, I think, like 650, 650,000 people. So it's one of the biggest, cities in Europe. And it's certainly the biggest city in France. And, you know, as you know, the cities are a place where sex work, heterosexual sex work, where women are selling sex to men, occurs, isn't really an urban phenomenon more than anything else? So that's one thing. There's also more money in circulation,

right? So you have this booming economy that's helping. And then a third thing. So you have just sex work up and down the social scale, right? So everyone who works on sex work always talks about this hierarchy, where at the bottom you have impoverished women who might be trading sex to sort of very poor men for maybe a scrap of bread. And there's these girls called the Fie Barrier, these women who were working at the barriers where the old wall had been, who were sort of servicing like criminals. And then at the very top, you have, you know, these hyper-elite kept women who are earning just extraordinary amounts and have mansions. So on the one hand, I'm not sure a whole lot changed, right? That most sex work is just as it was, except maybe there's

more of it. And what the big shift is in how the state is thinking about it and the state's capacity to deal with it. On the other hand, you do see a switch amongst the elite Le Monde, right, the French version of the Ton. You see a switch from men taking mistresses from within their own community to taking them from theater and these sort of other groups of women that are develop into this cadre of kept women. That's interesting. Joe, as I thought was really interesting about your work, was the wild amount of numbers that are given for women selling sex in Paris. And they did the same thing in London. I've read statistics about the amount women selling sex in 18th, 19th century London, and it varies from 90,000 through to almost quarter of a million.

And it seems that these number, people just listen to it and went, oh my God, that's terrible. But when you actually break it down, no, they weren't. That's impossible. That would mean that almost every single woman in London was on the game. That's not true. How does that stack up when you're looking at the figures in Paris? Is that the same thing going on or are these numbers to be trusted? I mean, there's people saying, oh, they're 50,000 prostitutes. And at that point, there are 500,000 people. And then you think about, well, you know, most prostitutes are between like 14 and 25, like, and then it adds up to a huge percentage of the population. Part of the problem, I mean, so on the one hand, you see that they're moralists freaked out by the number of women who are on the street selling sex, and then they exaggerate.

But no one actually defines what sex work is. And so the laws don't. They conflate violating community norms around sexual behavior with sex work. And they do this, you know, there's really not sort of clarity until the early 18th century when Louis created this big carcoral complex called the General Hospital, Epital General. And in it there's a branch for women, La Salle Petyere, which is now like a famous hospital, which I find hilarious. And in there, there's a specific prison for women. And he sets up these ordinances trying to separate out women who cannot be rehabilitated. So what we would think of as professional sex workers from women who just had sex that violated community norms. So there isn't this clarity, right? Even though

he sets this down, no one really follows it. And the police are always arresting women who are in suspect places as prostitutes. But then in reality, you have women moving in and out of sex work, right, when they're underemployed or unemployed, and then they go back. So you have these numbers that, first of all, would include most, you know, a good chunk of the female population. But they also make no sense because, you know, we have clear definitions of sex work, or do we, right? Like if you, if someone has sex in exchange for a meal, that's transactional sex, but is it sex work? But back then, it was even worse. And so it's hard to kind of know. And also the permanence, right? Like, you know, someone might be doing this for a little while and then they do something else or they, they have

sex maybe with the man next door in addition to all the other work that they do. Are they a sex worker? So, yeah, the hysteria is really interesting. It's really difficult, isn't it? Because I mean, when you think about it logically, we don't have accurate numbers for how many people are selling sex today. For all of the reasons that you've just given is it's an inaccessible population most of the time that don't want to come forward and give this information to someone with a clipboard. How do you define it is very difficult. People identifying themselves as sex workers is an issue because a lot of people don't. So if we can't get those numbers today, how on earth did they get them in 18th century, Paris?

But it's really interesting. They're trying to make distinctions between this is somebody that can't be reformed and this is somebody that, or what are they saying, that we're going to help? What was that if like they can't be help to sod them, but these people stand a chance? Yeah, I mean, they would put them into these. I mean, according to the regulations, it was pretty brutal. Like they would eat bread and water and they would be forced to work and they would be forced to have these, you know, pray and go through these various religious regimes and then they would

be reformed. But the irony is that there's one scholar who says that when women are arrested for prostitution and sent to prison, right? That's when they become professionalized. because they have this chance, they have this space where they're dealing with other women who are selling sex, and they kind of form a group, they learn how to be in this profession from each other. And some of them have their head shaved. So when they leave, they're really marked as prostitutes.

And that's it, right? So there's women that I studied who were doing pretty well as kept women. They were mistresses. But one was arrested for dressing as a man, which the police really did not like that. And then once she was incarcerated in the hospital, Then she ended up becoming a permanent prostitute. She was professionalized because she couldn't find any other work. Wow. Oh, my God. That's so brutal.

Were they arresting women who were the subject of your book, the most elite, the richest of the rich, or was this targeted mostly at poorer women? They were not arresting the elite. They were generally arresting sex workers who were annoying their neighbors. So they were making too much noise. So there's community norms, and they're not what we think they might be. It's not like, oh, there's a brothel next door. I'm shocked. I'm scandalized. Oh, horrible. Let me call the police. Sometimes that happened. But it's usually there's a brothel next door. It's fine. Oh, my God, now it's

not. Soldiers are coming. They're making a lot of noise. It's scary. Now I'm calling the police. So brawels that were noisy, women in the street who were obstructing people, women who were in brothels and hanging out of windows and screaming at people to come by or exposing themselves. Those were the ones that tended to be picked up, although there were police patrols that would pick up women who were not doing this. Like, they just happened to be in the wrong place, and that coded them as sex workers. But the police were not trying to create a moral state, right? It wasn't like Reformation Geneva. They were just trying to stop the worst of the scandal, which is when people were too loud. So kept women were not arrested, really ever. And part of it was, I'm not sure what they were doing

was thought to be illegal. Part of it was who their patrons were, right? You didn't want to mess with them. And they weren't really causing scandal. I mean, maybe individually, like there's one woman who wanted to go to church and the curate is like, no, you can't come here. You're kept a woman. But for the most part, they weren't scandalous. It was the same in the UK as well. I'm sure it's the same elsewhere, is that they tended to be punished under vagrancy laws or just sort of like public nuisance laws. It's this idea of visibility, isn't it? Is who can see? it and what can they see? Exactly.

Was it the same with men having sex with men? Do they come into these records very much? They don't come into the records on prostitution. There are a lot of records of men having sex with men, prisoners who were sent to the Besty and in other places. And there's a lot of wonderful work on this by an historian called Jeffrey Merrick, who, together with Tip Reagan, have created this database at Colorado College where you can see were all these different men were arrested for sodomy. There, it was also the same thing. Like,

it was, you know, what men did behind closed doors the police didn't really care about as much as if it was in public and creating scandal. And so they would go to cruising grounds. They had, they would arrest people and then make them into agents, right, especially if they're good looking and send them into these places to attract someone who would then be arrested for sodomy. But actually, let me just correct myself, they weren't ever arrested for sodomy because that's, a capital offense. And that, I think the last time that happened was the early 1750s. And usually if someone was arrested for sodomy, it was because there was something else, like kidnapping or murder. They were usually arrested and incarcerated for being debauched or libertine, which actually

weren't, there weren't laws against that. And those carried lesser sentences. So it was much safer. That's amazing that there's work being done on the cruising grounds and the pickup haunts of 18th century Paris. What about sex work? Was there red light areas of Paris in the 18th century? Where would you go? Where would you work? So my understanding is that most of it was concentrated around the theaters. So when the theaters would move, like there's a fire and they had to find a new building, the locus of sex work would file them. Now, generally there's sex workers in most places, right? You wouldn't have to travel too far. But that was the center. It was also the center. So that's like Rusin-on-Hare, the Palais Royal. These were really hot spots. They were also, you know, where a lot of really wealthy men lived.

And so in most neighborhoods in Paris were integrated by class. In fact, buildings were integrated by class, so the poorest on the top and the wealthiest, on the lower floors. And then there were other sort of areas that had a lot of sex workers as well. I'll be back with Nina after the short break. I'm going to assume that it was the same in Paris as it is everywhere else. If you were a super high class kept woman mistress. She would not be identifying yourself with the oipolloy working out on the streets. So the question then comes, how would you meet a wealthy patron? How did these circles move together? So this is such a great question and the answer is really complicated. So there's like a few random meetings like someone live next door or someone saw someone in the street. The sort of world of

elite prostitution, the demi-monde, is pretty well organized. And at the center were madams who were, they had these small brothels, usually with two to four women that were staying there. And then they had women that they could get if more men arrived or the men wanted other women. But they were brokers, right? They so put together buyers and sellers of sex. And so one way to kind of get into this is to, you know, approach a madam. But of course, then you'd have to know who those people were. So there are all these kind of stories. and novels about, you know, madams at recruiting people at, you know, entrances to Paris. And that wasn't as common as I think one would think.

The other way is to enter the theater, specifically the opera. So there were families that sort of organized around getting their girls, getting their daughters, into the ballet school of the opera. So the opera in this period was singing, and it was a ballet. And so there was the opera and the comedy Italian and the opera comique and then the comedy French. And specifically with the opera and the ballet, once you were in the ballet school, it was like you were advertising that you wanted to have a patron. And those were the girls and then women who had usually the most prestigious and highest paying patrons were ones who were in the opera.

And then secondarily the comedy Italian and the opera comique, less so the comedy francis. There were fewer women there that were engaging in this kind of work just because they had, you know, higher pay. And it was just a different culture somewhere, but most weren't. So that's sort of how. But it's complicated, right? If someone wanted to do this, right? And they wanted to get to the highest level. They either had to have the sort of perfect accident or they really had to have connections. It's so precarious as well. It's not great. The parents would sell their children into prostitution. And sometimes those girls would have careers, right? And they would be supported and they would be well, you know, well maintained. But sometimes it wouldn't be, right? It would just be this one time thing. And then, and And what happens? We don't know because they disappear from police records, but you can imagine that they would be engaging in a different kind of prostitution, which was less remunerative and far more dangerous. So are the police just hanging around ballet schools, just taking names and trying to work out what's going on here? So they had agents everywhere, but I think the madams were supplying

most of the information. So there's like a group of about 20 madams who are the core of the demi-monde. and I believe that they were tolerated in part because they imposed order, but also because they were these fonts of intelligence. And there are all these documents that they would send on a weekly basis to the police. And I think they were the ones to sort of figure that out. But I think it was like in mid-1750s, one of the inspectors that was in charge of this made basically an early spreadsheet where he had every woman from all the theaters and who her lover was

and all this information. And it's really sad because there's this one woman. And they said, she has no one. She's ugly. I was like, oh, my God. So mean. So the thing to realize, though, is that once women, girls really got into this world, there was this huge level, like they could be paid kind of a little or they could be put

into a newly constructed mansion, right? So there's this huge diversity in pay. But for most of them, it was being supported at a level that they hadn't been supported before. And you asked earlier about differentiating them from from streetwalkers. One of the things that did this was having furniture. And there's some great research on this. So they were,

they would get furniture. They would have, you know, newly renovated apartments if possible, beautiful clothes. And this kind of increased their sexual capital, right? So the fees that they could later charge because it was like,

well, somebody rich and important invested in you, therefore you must be valuable. Therefore, you can charge more for your services. So they, they were big consumers. And that partially,

differentiated them from streetwalkers. So the madams who, it sounds like a giving information to the police and a kind of reciprocal will give you this information if you don't arrest us. And it's kind of a bit of an uneasy truce. Were they anonymous or do we have their names? Who was the most notorious madam in 18th century France? So there were a number like the Justine Paris, Madame Gordon. Madam Gordon has a number of works of satire written about her and about her brothel. So she was pretty famous. There was Paris. There was Domain, who I think there's a book coming out on her, hopefully pretty soon.

So they were all pretty well known. And they knew each other, right? They were competitors, but they also shared, you know, if somebody needed a sex worker, you know, they would transfer from one brothel to the other. But they also ratted out each other to the police as a way to kind of gain the upper hand. in their world. So all right, so you've joined the ballet and you can tell me how old you would be when you did that. But what is the sort of career trajectory here? Because you can't keep being a ballerina for forever and ever. You can be a sex worker forever and ever, but your client

pool will shift slightly. But I suppose then you could go on to be a madam. But like, what was the plan here? How could you sustain this? So a lot of girls joined at age 14. And it's important to realize that Menarchie typically hit at 16. So these are prepubescent girls. In fact, the police seem to be okay. 12 seem to be the cutoff, right? If there's a girl younger than 12, then they would step in. But above that, they seem to be all right with it. And, you know, she might find a patron or a series of patrons. Most of them disappear from the police records in their mid to late 20s. Some we know become madame. Some actually, some get married. But what's really interesting is that the period that they're doing this, right, that we know that they're doing this. So it's 14 to 25 or 15 to 26. Coensides with the exact same

period in all like girl life cycles for girls from the background that these ballet dancers were from. So like the artisan and working families. And so their children, their girls would sort of leave home, usually around age 12 or 14, work for 10 years to accrue a dowry and then they would get married. So one theory is that this is something that women could do, right? engage in elite sex work in order to kind of get money and then establish themselves as adults. And it fits the life cycle is exactly the same. We do know like a few managed to go into their 30s and the police were so insulting. They're like, oh, she's had so many kids. Her body's awful. Like she's had the kind of med. So the cure for syphilis involved all this awful stuff with

mercury and people lose teeth and she had small. I mean, just it's so insulting. But most of the insults were about age and having had children and the body's not being quite. the same. So that indicates that very few women went into their 30s in this. I guess you would want, I mean, the goal, wherever you look in the world seems to be like, what you hope for is you're going to go into this, you're going to make

your money, you're going to secure a rich patron, then you're going to get married, and hopefully he'll die and leave you all of his money. And then you'll be done and out by the time you're about 26. And I hope that many of them did make that, but when you're aiming high with that, aren't you? There must have been so many who didn't, and then what would happen to them?

A few married their patrons. That was pretty rare. Others married other disreputable people. Like, women in the theater would often marry other people in the theater. You know, that's sort of a different culture. Women who came from theater family. So it wasn't just that they were put into the ballet. It's that their sisters were ballerinas. Their brothers were dancers. Their parents had been dancers or singers. So those people often intermarried. Others might marry, you know, a boyfriend, right, that they had had. Some open shops. They became, sort of fashion merchants or they might become madams. But for the most part, we don't know. And so the assumption is that if they weren't able to get married or they were not smart about their money, because a lot of the time they were in debt, because they kept getting more and more furniture to establish themselves as being more and more prestigious. But if they were smart about their money, they could then have a business, which a lot of women did in this period. Or, you know, the other assumption is that they would just kind of move down the hierarchy and end up being, you know, these non-elite brawolds.

or on the street. Did they know that there were notes being kept on them by the police? Did they have any idea that that's what was happening? I'm not sure. I mean, I think some of them did, but they didn't act like they did, right? I mean, I always think of these reality shows where I know that they're highly edited, but you get the sense that after a few minutes, people forget their cameras on. And perhaps it's like that.

But I don't know if they knew. Many people did. Like the philosophs, writers, you know, they knew that about the intensity of the spine. Yeah, I'm not sure. No, it's just interesting, isn't it? Because you think that, all right, you've done that, you've secured your patron, you've been a bit of a wild one in your youth, but now you're settling down, you've met a nice patron. And I always wonder, like, were they honest about what happened?

Did they lie about what happened? Did they say, no, no, no, I was just a milkmaid, I'm a complete virgin, da-da-da. And if that was the case, were they blackmail? Did they know that these records existed? I mean, women who were arrested, one historian, Eric Marie Ben-Aboo, She went through and looked at arrest records of women who arrested for streetwalking and being in these sort of low-end brothels and who were arrested on night raids. And 96% of them said they had a profession, right? And it was usually something either service or they were in textiles, which is what most women of that, you know, status were in.

Right. So it makes sense that they were moving in and out of this work into sex work. The women who are elite, they often, they would go from patron to patron to patron. And what structured their relationship were these sort of verbal contracts that determined how much money they would get every month and whether they would have their household supported and all of this. And so, you know, they had, because of this structure, they had the ability to kind of plan and save, right, if they were smart, but not all of them did that. A lot of them were kind of wild. But some of them were so well known. I don't know if they were trying to hide.

They had this sort of weird prestige that they may have been able to. leverage into marriage as opposed to this being embarrassing, right? Like I was, you know, arrested and put into prison and my head was shaved. That's like a whole other level of, you know, it might be hard to find a husband. Although going through those records, women were let out because there were men who wanted to marry them. So basically, after spending a couple of decades on this, I don't think that the shame levels were what we always assume them to be, right? Like, oh, I'm ruined forever. Like, I just don't, I just don't. think that's where it is. I think that they, even for women who violated community norms, there were

ways to kind of find your way. But that being said, this is an era of such precarity and poverty that, you know, if you're living in a free union, so you're living in this common law marriage with your partner and you had been a prostitute, you're not necessarily differentiated in terms of your bad luck from half the other people that may be in your neighborhood. Tell me about the French revolution because this is fascinating. This is what I really wanted to talk to you about, although I wanted to talk to you about everything, is what happens to sex work and sex workers during the French Revolution? Because on one, I don't know anything about this, but on one hand, you've got this not celebration of the poor, but a reclamation of the poor and sex workers

are definitely there. They're definitely workers in their poor. But on the other hand, if you happen to be the super elite mistress of an aristocrat who is being kept in unbelievable the luxury, you might end up on a guillotine. There isn't a ton, like, we don't know. Historians haven't gone in and said, like, what happened to these mistresses? There is one historian, Clyde Plumazil, who went and looked at sort of street workers. And so in 1791, sex work is no longer illegal. One of the various governments rewrote the laws, and they said, like, unless it's really

damaging to the public good, it's not illegal. And so they decriminalized a lot of stuff. And so in her work, what she found was that, you know, these women started to ask for rights that other citizens had. And they did not present themselves as victims, but as impoverished citizens, right? And that this is the kind of work that they did. So there's this, it sounds like from her work,

that there's just increased agency in this real sense of ownership over their lives. But after the revolution is where the things really change. And the French and then basically every country in Western Europe, except Britain, I think, imposes this regulatory, regime where women are either supposed to be in these brothels that are sort of hidden, or they have to be registered and they have like checks like every week or every other week for venereal disease. And then a lot of women, of course, are sex workers outside of this. So you go from during 18th century sort of increasing repression in the city of Paris of most sex work, but at the same time

you have this sort of elite stuff where nothing, there's no repression at all, into the revolution where one would imagine these elite women are in big trouble, but lower-class sex workers are doing much better, right? They're decriminalized. Then into the next century where the elite women, again, are protected, but you have this regulatory regime, which is supposed to include all sex workers, and is pretty harsh. Was it Madame de Barry who ended up with her head cut off?

She was a royal mistress, wasn't she? Well, I could say that royal mistresses typically were like the sort of a different economy, right, then this demi-monde. And they typically came from the aristocracy. Louis the 15th broke that. So his first mistress, long-time mistress, was Madame Pompadour, who came from financial circles and was very wealthy. And then he made her marquise and introduced her to court. And then she became his longtime mistress. And then he kept this kind of like, not a harem, but the park to surf, this place at Versailles where he would go and have sex with these people, most of whom, women, most of whom were in the aristocracy. But his second long-time mistress, Madame Duberry, was actually from the Demiomald. That was considered pretty shameful.

Absolutely scandalous. I hope that somebody is researching sex work in the revolution. And whenever this kind of stuff happens like history, it's very, very interesting to see how do they treat sex workers? Because it's like this old Vivler Revolution and the workers and the workers, and then sex workers come forward and go, we're workers. And it's always very interesting to see how do they react to that. It was the same in communist Russia and sort of like early, like Karl Marx, who wasn't a big fan of people selling sex. He thought that it was terrible and an awful thing, despite his mate Engels being a client and buying sex himself.

But it crosses so many boundaries of like, how do people react when you're looking at workers and then the sex workers come forward themselves? I love that it was decriminalized or made legal before the revolution there. It was made legal during the revolution. It was decriminalized during the revolution. Yeah. I couldn't agree more because I think when you study sex work where you're ultimately studying is the nature of power and also like the nature of work, like what counts is work. But the other thing is like, you know, you have all these ways in which femininity and women are constructed and what they're supposed to do. And the idea is that they're supposed to follow certain rules that lead to marriage. And if they don't, they're forced into the secondary economy of sex work. But what we find is that those are, first of all, studying sex work challenges all of our assumptions about that first economy and that, you know, how sturdy it is and how separate it is. And so then when you have this huge cultural, social, and political shift that's like really sort of threatening the underpinnings of a society, sex work is really a way to understand those shifts better, not just because it's obviously interesting to study sex workers on their own, but it's a way into these larger questions.

And I just want to say right now I'm editing this six-volume series with Dan Orals, the Cultural History of Prostitution. And our entire approach is to say, you know, sex work is not marginalized, right? It's central to definitions of the market, the state, identity, religion, and that we've really framed the whole project around that idea that you can't just say, oh, it's this thing, this gray or gray economy that's on the side and we can study it separately. and also that sex workers spend a lot more time being mothers and daughters and sisters and subjects and consumers and neighbors than they do actually selling sex. And so all that needs to be understood. And so I think studying sex work during the revolution or any revolution is a really great way to understand these larger narratives much better. Well, that's amazing. And my final question, though, I could just talk to you about this forever and ever. What do you think that we can learn

from sex work in the 18th century because it seems that we never learn historical lessons when it comes to sex work in particular. We seem to move through cycles and we repeat the same things again and again and we try the same things again and then we go, oh, it didn't work, da-da-da. What is it that we can take from 18th century, France,

in your opinion? What can we learn from that? I mean, most of the lessons are sort of depressing, but at the same time they're not. It's like, well, you have a vagina, right? So you have all this power in this way. But you have a vagina, so you have no power. So it's like you follow the rules and you go down one path. You break the rules. You go down another path. In that other path, very few people are able to end up with this level of this lifestyle. They never would have been able to accomplish had they gone down the first path. But the sort of permanence of that is in doubt, right? Will they have a future? So the questions that always come up for me is like how sex like is so determinative. and so powerful. And so I think here's the place where we see that just happening completely openly. We don't have to decode anything. It's just it's right there, right? Like this girl ended up being sold or entering into a brothel and then she found an elite brothel and then she found a bunch of patrons

and she became wealthy. It's not hidden. So I think that's sort of one thing we can, it's more what we can learn is that we have a set of questions that we can bring to our own present. Like, you know, how are the ways in which sex kind of is repressive to women and how is it a way that women manipulate the very system that represses them in order to be powerful? But that's really depressing because none of us want to be in that system at all, right? Where like, here's your way out. You can just be a prostitute and that's dangerous and you sleep with people you don't want to sleep with and you get venereal disease and all these children and it's just a bad deal. So I'm not sure if that fully answers the question. That answers the question perfectly.

It shows us what can happen, right? You know, the flexibility of a system that's not supposed to be flexible. Yes. Oh, Nina, you've been amazing to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Well, I have a website at my university. So just Google me at Clark University.

And that should have what I'm working on up there listed. Well, thank you so much. And I can't wait for the new edited collection to come out. That sounds incredible. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Nina for joining me. And if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say bonjour, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from how to be a Renaissance woman to life lessons of historical women all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie

and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheet, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.