Jeffrey Merrick

Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or similar acts in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. These remarkable documents, curated and translated into English by Jeffrey Merrick, allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions about sources, patterns, and meanings in the history of sexuality. This volume centers on two cartons of paperwork from commissaire Charles Convers Desormeaux. Dated from 1785, the cartons contain 221 dossiers of men arrested for sodomy or similar acts in Paris. Merrick translates and annotates the police interviews from these dossiers, revealing how the police and those they arrested understood sex between men at the time. Merrick discusses the implications of what the men said (and what they did not say), how they said it, and in what contexts it was said. The best-known works of clergy and jurists, of enemies and advocates of Enlightenment, and of novelists and satirists from the eighteenth century tell us nothing at all about the lived experience of men who desired men. In these police dossiers, Merrick allows them to speak in their own words. This primary text brings together a wealth of important information that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, sodomy, and sexual policing.

Archival Voices from 1785

Policing Same-Sex Relations in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Michael Sibalis

Deconstruct changing representations of homosexuality with this important new work of cultural criticism! Homosexuality in French History and Culture explores episodes, patterns, and images of same-sex attraction in France from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from the essays of Michel de Montaigne to pride parades in contemporary Paris. This groundbreaking book documents the ways homosexuality has been named, experienced, regulated, understood, and imagined. During these centuries, homosexuality has been stigmatized as a sin, crime, or disease, and denounced as a threat to social order and national identity. Yet the rhetoric of condemnation has always co-existed with the reality of toleration. This groundbreaking collection analyzes the ways in which persecutions, as well as differences within minority sexual subcultures, have highlighted stereotypes and anxieties about class and age differences, gendered roles, and separatism. Homosexuality in French History and Culture offers historical and literary studies based on a wide variety of sources, including: novels, plays, and poetry gossip and satires police reports medical texts travel literature newspapers and periodicals memoirs Homosexuality in French History and Culture combines fresh, creative re-interpretation of familiar texts with exciting new explorations of neglected historical episodes and cultures. It is a landmark of meticulous scholarship and rigorous theoretical analysis, and a vital resource for scholars of queer theory, French history and culture, and literary criticism.

Homosexuality in French History and Culture

Bryant T. Ragan Jr.

This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of "homosexuality" in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualized same-sex relations and connected them with more general concerns about order and disorder. The contributors--Elizabeth Colwill, Michael David Sibalis, Victoria Thompson, William Peniston, Vernon Rosario II, Francesca Canade-Sautman, Martha Hanna, Robert A. Nye, and the editors Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Jeffrey Merrick--use the methods of intellectual and cultural history, the history of science, literary studies, legal and social history, and microhistory. This collection shows how the subject of homosexuality is related to important topics in French history: the Enlightenment, the revolutionary tradition, social discipline, positivism, elite and popular culture, nationalism, feminism, and the construction of identity. Given the role of gays and lesbians in modern French culture and the work of French scholars on the history of sexuality, this collection fills an important gap in the literature and represents the first attempt in any language to explore this subject over three centuries from a variety of perspectives.

Homosexuality in Modern France

Suzanne Desan

Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France

This collection of revised and previously unpublished articles explores aspects of the history of monarchy, family, suicide, and sodomy in early modern, especially eighteenth-century France. The durable but flexible traditions of the Ancien Régime not only sanctified but also limited the prerogatives of sovereigns over subjects and husbands/fathers/masters over wives, children, and servants. Private and public weakness and excess in those who ruled the kingdom and the household undermined their masculinity and legitimacy. Merrick analyzes expositions of and contestations about the origins, extent, and use and abuse of gendered royal and domestic authority in a wide variety of sources, including descriptions of beehives, pamphlets published during the Fronde, statues of Louis XV, police reports about disturbed subjects, parlementary remonstrances, Jansenist polemics, essays submitted to the Academy of Berlin, the memoirs of the marquis de Bombelles, and complaints of wives against husbands and marital separation cases in Paris. In principle, kings and husbands/fathers/masters preserved order in the kingdom and the household by controlling themselves as well as their subordinates. In practice, they sometimes provoked disorder and failed in many ways to prevent and punish disorder. Merrick’s articles on suicide and sodomy not only revisit some celebrated incidents (the deaths of the dragoons Bourdeaux and Humain, who shot themselves on 25 December 1773) and notorious characters (the “pederast” marquis de Villette and “tribade” mademoiselle de Raucourt) but also document patterns in the lives and deaths of ordinary men and women. Based, like the articles on marital disputes, on extensive archival research, they investigate changes in jurisprudence and mentalities during the eighteenth century. As a whole, this volume challenges simplistic assumptions about absolutism, Enlightenment, and Revolution. Given the number of subjects addressed and the nature of the issues involved, the engaging articles will interest many readers.

Order and Disorder under the Ancien Régime

Renaissance to 1789 : Selected Reading Lists and Course Outlines from American Colleges and Universities

Early Modern European History

Early Modern European History : Renaissance to 1789

We know more about men who sought and had sex with men in eighteenth-century Paris than in any other city at the time. Police records provide information about thousands of sodomites who were arrested and thousands more who were not. Michel Rey explored the sodomitical culture of the capital in five articles, based on one set of sources, published from 1982 to 1994. No one has completed his pioneering work in the archives and challenged his anachronistic conclusions about identity, community, and effeminacy. This book, the first on the subject based on extensive research in all of the relevant series of police records, explores patterns and changes in the lives of men who desired men and in the surveillance and punishment of same-sex relations across the century. Chapters 1 and 2 offer a more systematic, skeptical, and subtle analysis of complex questions about mentalities than Rey did. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the ways in which sodomites made connections through solicitation in public spaces and networking in private places and the ways in which the police tracked them. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the operations of agents who entrapped sodomites and the procedures of magistrates who judged them. The book examines what the extant sources do and do not tell us about the heads, hearts, and hands of men detained or mentioned by the police. To that end, it includes a generous selection of documents that allow us to hear voices from the archives, including many that require us to rethink what we thought we knew about the subculture.

Jeffrey Merrick

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