Filles, lorettes et courtisanes (review)

Abstract

Neither entirely scientific, nor entirely fictional, Dumas's Filles, lorettes et courtisanes is a curious hybrid of sociology and storytelling that gives voice to the widespread effort to contain the menace of the prostitute in the first half of the nineteenth century. This long out-of-print text is pivotal to our ongoing study of women, gender, sexuality, and society in nineteenth-century France. Penned just six years after A. J. B. Parent-Duchâtelet's De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris (1837), Dumas's work continues Parent's project of exposing the supposed threat the prostitute poses to public health and moral order. Parent's ambitious study, which explores how prostitution affects public hygiene, morality, and the administration that seeks to control it, is used by the Prefecture to justify the century-long system of regulation. Throughout the century, administrators cite Parent's belief that the prostitute's unbridled sexuality would escalate the spread of syphilis and destroy moral order by corrupting the wives and daughters of the respectable bourgeoisie as reasons for implementing a harsh, often arbitrary system of surveillance. Though scholars of art, history, and literature such as Hollis Clayson, Alain Corbin, Charles Bernheimer, and Jann Matlock have recently explored Parent's influence on representations of prostitutes, Dumas's work remains [End Page 195] largely untreated and therefore adds another dimension to scholarship on prostitution.