Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

I n a f r o n t p a g e 1882 a r t I c l e in Le petit parisien, Jean Frollo drew his readers’ attention to a new kind of drinking establishment appearing on the streets of Paris. He claimed that these cafes, called brasseries a femmes because they employed serving girls who interacted with the customers, threatened the well-being of the city’s youth: “Young people, sometimes children, lean on wooden tables, forcing themselves to swallow some infected beverage without grimacing, smoke cigarettes, and try to earn the approval [suffrages] of the venue’s goddesses.” These women, Frollo explained, “circulate, pouring the venue’s poisoned ambrosia, sitting next to this one, provoking that one” in an effort at selling as much drink as possible. With their presence thus depicted as the key component of the experience, these “goddesses,” the serving girls, differentiated the brasseries a femmes from other kinds of drinking establishments. Serving up not just drink but an entire experience predicated on the interaction between customer and server, the brasseries a femmes simultaneously provided a novel form of pleasure, a unique business opportunity, and a target for moral disapproval. First appearing in the 1860s, brasseries a femmes received a great deal of attention from the Paris police and various moral commentators because the way they used sex to attract customers linked them to the problem