Sodomitical Scandals and Subcultures in the 1720s

Abstract

Published letters, memoirs, and pamphlets discuss two scandals involving sexual relations between noblemen at Versailles in 1722 and 1724. Unpublished police records document the entrapment of some forty men, many of them unmarried workingmen, in Parisian parks in 1723. This article compares the patterns in and representations of same-sex relations in the different sources and milieux. The literary sources generally describe the courtiers who committed sodomitical acts as libertines involved with both sexes and credit them with personal and political, not just sexual, motives. The archival sources, which provide information about the behavior and attitudes of what the police called “infamous types” in the sodomitical subculture, contain evidence of the emergence of a notion of distinctive sexual taste or inclination manifested but not wholly defined by sexual acts.