I walked
back from Ménilmontant in the dark on Sunday, along the boulevard de Belleville
and de la Villette and across to the canal St Martin, the latter gleaming oily black,
smooth as glass under the street lights. The leaves of the plane trees were
lying in rusty drifts on the central allées. The benches were full of old
people. Children were racing around on their trottinettes. The café terrasses
were packed out. No one wanted to go indoors. If it wasn’t for the fallen leaves
you’d have thought it was an evening in late spring.
It was about
7 o’clock so the prostitutes, mostly Asian in that arrondissement, had just
come out. They were standing around in pairs, chatting and smoking. Our local
working girls hang around at the carrefour of rue Marx Dormoy from midday on and
they all seem to be black, very young and overweight. I doubt if they earn in a
week what the ones in the 16th make in an evening. The women I
passed on the avenue Kléber last week wouldn’t look out of place on a fashion
catwalk: slim, shapely, glossy-haired, scantily but elegantly dressed.
There has
been endless debate in France over the past two decades on the rights and
wrongs of prostitution, on whether the ‘maisons closes’, or ‘maisons de tolérance’
as they used to be called – the officially regulated brothels – should be
reopened (they were shut down in 1946).
There was a
brief flurry of activity around a bill, brought in by the Socialists in 2011,
to penalise the clients of prostitutes but it never made it into law. Similarly,
despite occasional new calls for them, there are still no registered brothels.
There are lots of vans however and a new type of maison close, brothels
masquerading as massage parlours, hundreds of them in Paris alone. The vans are
partly a result of Sarkozy’s infamous 2003 law (Loi pour la sécurité intérieure)
which made ‘passive soliciting’ a criminal offence and forced a lot of the woman
to work in the late hours of the night and in the back streets where they have
less chance of being arrested but more of being attacked.
Sarkozy played
his usual populist card, straightforwardly drawing a distinction between those
he called France’s traditional ‘women of the night’, whom he described as ‘part
of France’s cultural heritage’, and the women from eastern Europe and
sub-Saharan Africa, many of them illegally-trafficked migrants, who were out
there earning for their pimps and their families. He wanted 'ces malheureuses
filles étrangères’ (his exact words), picked up and sent back to where they’d
come from, regardless of the circumstances that had led them to flee in the
first place. You can still see sex vans parked up in the Bois and along some city
side streets, grim, insanitary testimonies to the impact of the measures he
introduced more than ten years ago.
sex vans parked near the bois de Vincennes
Prostitution,
libertinage, voyeurism – Paris has the lot. I don’t know if there are
statistics showing the value to the city’s economy of the sex trade in all its
multiple forms but it must be in the millions, probably only an infinitesimally
small part of it ever reaching the taxman.
‘Splendeurs et misères, images de la
prostitution, 1850 – 1910’ is the title of this autumn’s main exhibition at the musée d’Orsay. It ‘celebrates’
that nostalgic image of the Parisian prostitute, as painted, drawn and modelled
by various, mainly nineteenth century, artists.
Parisian prostitutes by Toulouse Lautrec
The city also has its musée de
l’Erotisme on the boulevard de Clichy, as well as all the other clubs and entertainments
Paris is known for: peep shows, high-end cabarets, like les Folies Bergères and
Crazy Horse, strip-tease clubs like Pink Paradise and The Penthouse Club Paris.
And then there are the swingers’ clubs, the most pretentious of which is
probably Les Chandelles, (‘l’esprit
glamour invite toujours aux charmes frivoles’ according to its website).
Dress code there forbids flat shoes for women, short-sleeved shirts and white
socks for men. A rival establishment, Le Mask, requires its clients to wear one
but there doesn’t seem to be a prohibition on white socks.
Hotel de la Paiva
If your
interests in libertinage are more
historic and aesthetic than actual and practical, you can head to the l’Hôtel
de la Païva, 25 Avenue des Champs Elysées, once the opulent residence of Thérèse
Lachmann, alias la marquise de Païva, mid-nineteenth century Paris’s most
(in)famous courtesan. (Check the website www.paris-capitale-historique.fr for
available dates).
The hotel is a near-perfect illustration of Oscar Wilde’s bon mot: ‘Everything in the world is about sex except
sex. Sex is about power.’
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