French Attitudes Towards Male Homosexuality

From Robert Nye, “The Culture of the Sword: Manliness and Fencing in the Third Republic” from Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.108-110.

In view of the pioneering role played by French doctors in the movement toward  a more humane  treatment of the insane in the nineteenth century, one might have

reasonably  assumed they would move in a similar direction. But they did not.  French  doctors were conspicuous by their  absence  from Hirschfeld's international Scientific Humanitarian Committee. There was virtually no medically-led homosexual  rights agitation  in France  until after 1945, and  then  only of a tentative kind.

Part of the reason for this inactivity was the very "liberality"of the Napoleonic Code on sexual crimes. The code punished only forcible rape, child molestation, and "outrage" to public decency; it laid down no penalty for sodomy or homosexual  acts, indeed  did not mention  them by these or any other  name.  This silence was not one  inspired by horror. In matters of sexual comportment, the code followed the same noninterventionist libertarianism that  had informed  the civil rights agenda of the Declaration of  the Rights  of Man: "All  that  is not expressly  forbidden by the law is permitted."  More out of a consistent vision of the law than for any other reason, no major statutory emendations were made respecting homosexual behavior  until a relatively mild law of 1941 under the Vichy regime. What rights might discontented homosexuals or their medical  allies claim in an atmosphere of such legal forbearance?

This is not to say that the authorities were unable to use the law against homosexual  practices when they wished. Article  #330 on "public outrage" was  used  throughout the  nineteenth century  against  homosexual prostitution. This part of the code replaced the sodomy  law that that been used as the legal pretext  for arrest and conviction in the Old Regime. Article #331 on child molestation might well have been  designed  by the framers of the code to counteract pederasty, a practice that was regarded in law and in popular  culture as qualitatively distinct from sodomy at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, tolerance  for this practice lessened in the course of the century, exemplified  by the advance  of the age of minority in this crime from eleven  to thirteen  years old in 1863.

As a general  rule,  however,  the state seldom used the criminal law as its entering  wedge into the domain  of private  sexuality.  Unlike the regulation of sexuality in the Anglo-Saxon  legal tradition, French law respected the distinction between private and public sexual behavior, for the most part confining its efforts at law enforcement to the latter domain.  This had also been so in the Old  Regime,  when the brigade des moeurs [standards brigade] conducted its sweeps through the public parks and other sites popular for homosexual encounters. From  what we can tell, the homosexual  vice squad that  was formed under  the Second  Empire  by the police prefect  F. Carlier  aggressively pursued  its mandate to round  up homosexual prostitutes and pederasts, but did not interfere with acts unlikely to be the occasion for chance public witness.

The  legal  and  police  discrimination  between  public  and  private  was mirrored , perhaps shaped, in practice by a social distinction between  rich and poor, between those who had the time and means to conduct their erotic relationships in private,  and  those whose  sexual  lives were more exposed to view. Thus, lower-class homosexuals were  arrested   routinely in vice squad  raids on public urinals,  but by the end of the century there is considerable evidence that upper-class homosexuals and lesbians benefited sufficiently from their  relative legal invulnerability to attain  a kind of tolerated status in elite  life.  It is nonetheless unlikely, as Eugen  Weber has implied, that homosexuality  and other  "fashionable perversions" were simply exotic identities  casually assumed  by bored  or esthetically inclined poseurs for their shock value.  An identity  lightly worn is not necessarily one lightly chosen.

The multifaceted  social and cultural  life of fin de siecle Paris permitted a greater range of personal expression  than had been possible at any earlier time in the capital or in contemporary provincial life, but there were definite limits on the forms these expressions  might take,  and these limits were not enforced by the law, but by opinion.  There is reason to believe that homosexuals themselves took careful note of this fact and conducted  themselves accordingly.  For the discreet homosexual  male,  there was little need  to fear direct police intervention in his private life; he had much more to fear, however, from the judgments  of his fellow citizens about  the quality of his masculinity.

It is my argument  here and in later chapters that in this era assessments about a man's  masculinity  took on an unusual importance in social life. At least for middle and upper-class men,  being anatomically "of  the male sex" was necessary,  but was not in itself sufficient to satisfy the ideals of masculinity articulated routinely in public discourse. . .