In
France
prostitution (the
exchange of sexual services for money) is not illegal, but several
surrounding activities are.
Legal situation
A man or woman may seek or offer compensation for sexual services,
but may not advertise this fact. Owning or operating a brothel is
illegal. Passive solicitation is also prohibited. If someone
working as a prostitute stands in a public place known as a place
where prostitutes congregate, dressed in somewhat revealing attire,
it is considered passive solicitation.
Passive Soliciting is punishable by up to six months in prison and a fine of £5,000.
All forms of
procuring are illegal in France.
Procuring (
proxénétisme) is defined as:
- helping or protecting someone to prostitute him/herself
- profiting from the prostitution of another or receiving funds
from someone who prostitutes him/herself habitually
- hiring or training someone to prostitute him/herself or
pressuring someone to prostitute him/herself.
Paying someone for sexual services (except those under 18) is never
illegal in France.
Politics
France is an "abolitionist" country - its public policy is the
eradication of prostitution. However, it considers that making it
illegal to offer sexual services in return for goods or services in
the context of one's private life is a violation of individual
liberty.
The 2007
Socialist
Party
Manifesto calls for holding clients
"responsible". The vague language is due to the fact that
the such measures remain controversial in the Socialist Party. The
Manifesto also calls for repealing the ban on "passive
solicitation".
Many sex workers oppose more constraining legislation since that
would prevent them from choosing their clients, the acts they wish
to perform, etc.
Public opinion
A 2002 telephone survey analysed French attitudes about
prostitution. 64% of respondents said that
prostitution was "a degrading practice for the image and the
dignity of the woman (or the man)". 66% of those questioned
favoured the reopening of the brothels, 37% wanted the clients to
be criminalized, 22% wanted the prostitutes to be criminalized and
33% wanted all forms of prostitution to be illegal. When analysed
and broken down by age and gender, the survey showed that some
people gave contradictory answers: for example some people appeared
to favour both the reopening of the brothels and the interdiction
of all forms of prostitution (probably believing that both
solutions would work, as the survey showed that most people were
dissatisfied with the existing legal situation). Older people and
men were more accepting of the idea of having legalized
brothels.
Forms and extent of prostitution
Prostitute activist in Paris,
2005
Studies from 2003 estimated that about 15,000 - 20,000 women work
as prostitutes in France.
Regular
street prostitution is
partly controlled by pimps and partly autonomous prostitutes.
The most
famous prostitution street in Paris, la Rue
Saint-Denis
, has been somewhat gentrified in the recent
years and the prostitutes have been moved up north.
Escort services, where you hire a
girl for "entertainment" or companionship - followed by sex - exist
in France, but remain quite rare compared to
North America.
In
bar, women try to induce men
to buy expensive drinks along with the sexual services. Prices are
set by the bar owner, and the money is shared between the owner and
the prostitute. Pigalle peepshows are well-known for practising
such scams.
Apartment prostitution is
frequently advertised in the adult newspapers.
Swingers clubs are a place where
partner-swapping swing clubs with paid prostitutes in attendance,
as well as 'amateur' women and couples who get in without paying
the flat-rate charge of about 80 to 120 euros that men pay,
including food, drink and unlimited sex sessions, with the added
twist that these are performed in the open in full view of all the
guests.
Earnings
The earnings of a French prostitute are estimated at €500 a day.
For Sub-Saharian prostitutes living in France, it is less, around
€200-300. Some barely make €50-150 a week.
History
In the middle of the 13th century, King
Louis IX allowed brothels (then called
bordeaux, from which the modern word derives) outside of
city centers. The appearance of
syphilis
had stigmatized these houses at the end of the 16th century, but
their continued existence was confirmed by King
Henry IV.
In the early 19th century,
Napoleon ordered the registration and
bi-weekly health inspection of all prostitutes.
Legal brothels (then
known as "maisons de tolérance" or "maisons closes") started to
appear in Paris
and in other
cities and became highly popular throughout the century.
They had to be run by a woman (typically a former prostitute) and
their external appearance had to be discreet. By 1810, Paris alone
had 180 officially approved brothels.
Among the most expensive and best known
maisons de
tolérance in Paris were:
More sordid brothels, offering quick and dirty services, the
maisons d’abattage, were also popular amongst the
lower-class.
During the
World War II German
occupation of France, twenty top Paris brothels, including le
Chabanais, le Sphinx and le One Two Two, were reserved by the
Wehrmacht for German officers and
collaborating Frenchmen. The brothels flourished during this time,
and
Hermann Goering visited
Le
Chabanais, as is related in the 2009 two-volume book
1940-1945 Années Erotiques by
Patrick Buisson.
An exhibition about historical Paris brothels took place in the
building of the former
Le Chabanair from November 2009 to
January 2010.
After the war,
Marthe Richard, a town
councillor in Paris and former street prostitute, campaigned for
the closure of all brothels. On 13 April 1946, the "loi de Marthe
Richard" was passed with votes of the Christian-Democrat
MRP and the communists. As a
result the legal brothels were closed and the prostitute registries
destroyed. Roughly 20,000 women were affected by this law and
approximately 1400 houses closed.
Paintings and drawings of scenes in these brothels were produced by
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
Edgar Degas and
Pablo Picasso, among others.
Brassaï published photographs of brothels in
his 1935 book
Voluptés de Paris. A voluminous illustrated
work on the phenomenon is
Maisons closes. L'histoire,
l'art, la littérature, les moeurs by
Romi
(Robert Miquet), first published in 1952.
The
Musée de
l'Erotisme
in Paris devotes one
floor to the maisons closes. It exhibits
Polissons et
galipettes, a collection of short erotic silent movies
that were used to entertain brothel visitors, and copies of
Le
Guide Rose, a contemporary brothel guide that also carried
advertising. The 2003
BBC Four documentary
Storyville - Paris Brothel describes the
maisons
closes.
Many former brothel owners soon opened "hôtels de passe" instead
where prostitutes could keep on working but the visibility of their
activities remained somewhat hidden. Prostitution thus became a
free activity: forbidden was only its organization and exploitation
- i.e.
pimping - and its visual
manifestations.
Active solicitation was also outlawed in the late 1940s. Passive
solicitation was outlawed in 2003 as part of a package of
law-and-order measures by then interior minister,
Nicolas Sarkozy. Prostitutes' organizations
decried the measure, calling it punitive and prone to increase the
power of pimps.
References
- " SOS Femmes Accueil - Prostitution - Le cadre
juridique en France"
- Article L. 225-10-1 of the Code pénal defines passive
soliciting (racolage passif) as "the act, by any means, even a
passive attitude, to solicit another in the aim of inciting him or
her to have sexual relations in exchange for remuneration or a
promise of remuneration..."
- French war on immorality targets porn, prostitutes
and pay-TV, The Guardian, 26 October 2002
- " Article 225-5 of the Code Pénal (partie
législative)" on Legifrance.
- " Prostitution : le PS veut pénaliser les
clients" Coignard, Jacqueline. Libération. 6 July 2006.
- 2002 Survey results, CSA
- De plus en plus de prostituées africaines en France,
Afrik.com, 7 May 2004.
- Die Schliessung der "Maisons closes" lag im Zug der Zeit,
Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 15 October 1996.
- Dirty Bertie's seat of pleasure, The Times, 17 January 2004
- Peter Allen, Sleeping with the enemy: How 'horizontal
collaborators' in Paris brothels enjoyed a golden age entertaining
Hitler's troops, Daily Mail, 1 May 2009
- Storyville - Paris Brothel, BBC Four documentary, 2003
- A Nice Mix of Art, History and Sex,
Metropole Paris, 16 January 2004
- French police turn attention to 'the pimp on the
corner', The Independent, 21 March 2005
External links
(opened 1878 and favored by Prince Edward, who had
himself made a special "love seat" there),
,
in the
second
arrondissement
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