Policing The Pederasts: Gay Sexuality, Urbanization and Identity in Paris (1850-1880)
Date
2013
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
The nineteenth century in Paris witnessed the turmoil of a devastating cholera epidemic as well as the political upheaval of the 1848 revolution, which ended the regime of Louis-Philippe and led to the creation of the French second republic. Eager to model London, seen as the epitome of modernity, Napoleon III commissioned urban planner Baron Haussmann to reorganize the city with the express goals of hygiene and order. This reorganization made the entire city accessible to an increasingly influential bourgeois class, displacing thousands of lower income residents in the process. The reorganization both supported and coincided with the emergence of a moral and social order based on the bourgeois value of conjugal marriage. To enforce order, the police took on a vastly increased role in monitoring the daily lives of Parisians. Those who fell outside of the ideal citizen, namely various sub-sections of the working class, were increasingly stigmatized. This thesis examines the ways in which same-sex attracted men were controlled and repressed by legal, medical and police authorities. I use a variety of source types to trace an emerging gay identity and subculture. I argue that the same urban spaces that supported the bourgeois reorganization of the city were re-imagined by same-sex attracted men as spaces where they could meet, socialize, engage in same-sex activity and express non-normative gender identities. These spaces included bathhouses, café-concerts, urinals and the street itself.