The Dictionary of Homophobia (60 page)

It is also in the Renaissance that a discourse took place that was hostile to love between women. Christian doctrine on female homosexuality was, up to then, very scarce. It was the discovery of antique works, and particularly
Sappho
’s, re-edited by Henri Estienne, that brought the threat of lesbianism into view. At the same time that it was realized that two women could have amorous feeling for one another (once again, “this manner was imported from Italy,” according to the French historian Brantôme), it was immediately stigmatized. Estienne invented the then pejorative word “
tribade
,” which was very widely used up to the Revolution. For a woman, the
tribade
(“fricative,” “rubbing”) was associated with forgery, fake, and imitation, as she could not penetrate her companion. In short, sexuality without a virile member was a scandal (“a woman needs a husband or a fence” went a then popular saying) and a lesbian was a liar: women who dressed as men were brought before the courts. While for theologians, cross-dressing was deeply idolatrous and thus negated the divine will, for civil authorities, it was mostly a “crime of falsehood.”

Homophobia acquired other motifs in the seventeenth century. The main ones were “libertinage” (in the sense of irreligion), the confusion of rank, and
debauchery
. In a massively Christian society, homosexuals were frequently accused of ungodliness: this was the case with poet Théophile de
Viau
in the 1620s and within the Grand Condé a generation later. They were also accused of disrupting the natural harmony of social ranks: sodomy was a vice of aristocrats who slept with their menservants; the threat of subversion was doubled in the case of the Marshal Vendôme who, not only made love to commoners, footmen, grooms, and chair bearers, but was also content to play a strictly passive role with them. Sodomites were more and more often accused of depravity or “wickedness,” which were recurrent themes of mundane preaching of the Great Century: rich people’s luxury caused them to fall into a spiral of greater and greater sins (they tried to awaken their “dulled senses” by “extravagances”), the unsurpassable summit of the horror being “
crimen nefandum inter cristianos
.” Concerned with order and good taste and furious about the spectacle of his brother, Louis XIV did not like sodomites and took measures against them. Roused by his confessors and preachers against “these monsters that Scripture prevent from naming but that His Majesty knows and hates,” he dealt harshly against the “brotherhood,” a secret society of ultramontanes created at court around 1678 that endangered the integrity of the Count of Vermandois, son of the king and Louise de la Vallière. Then at fourteen years of age, in June 1682, Vermandois, pressured by questions, denounced the other followers. He was reprimanded and whipped, and the rest of the brotherhood was driven out of court. This being said, the arsenal of measures against gays of high rank (very numerous in Versailles under Louis XIV, at least if we believe La Palatine and St-Simon) were rather limited: they were reprimanded, threatened or temporarily exiled, in certain cases, if they were young, they were whipped or forced to marry. Trials and especially pyres were reserved exclusively for commoners: the Lament of Chausson and Fabbri, executed for sodomy in 1661, denounced these “double standards”: “If we burned all those that act like them, in a very short time, I’m afraid several Lords of France, and important prelates, would be deceased.” For their part, gay Parisians dealt mainly with the general guard of
police
in Paris, created in 1667. Its director, the lieutenant general of police, was all powerful; he had a network of spies and informers, the “flies,” which let him see all and hear all so he could blackmail homosexuals. He had the power to punish and send people to jail. At the beginning of Louis XV’s reign, two men were burned at the stake for sodomy, out of an estimated 20,000 persons that were arrested for “soliciting” sex with other men. Those arrested were met with various penalties; according to their social condition, they were simply admonished, sent to the Bastille (the elitist jail), sent to the prison of the bishop, or to the small Châtelet prison, or to the Bicêtre prison-hospital (for those suffering from venereal disease), and very seldom tried (there were seven executions for homosexuality between 1715–83, and in five cases out of seven, the accused were charged with more serious crimes). High-ranking lesbians were equally subjected to surveillance and their names were proposed to the king for internal exile measures (this was the case for Madame de Murat).

The eighteenth century saw the transformation (but not the disappearance) of homophobia under the effect of Enlightenment thought that gradually drifted from sin to social pathology. Now, for enlightened minds, homosexuality was less a sin against divine law than a vice against nature (sodomites were more often called “antiphysics”) and it is interesting to note that lesbianism was more and more often reported as clitoromegaly (a medical condition of abnormally enlarged clitoris). Most philosophers did not see homosexuality favorably: for Montesquieu (who nevertheless requested the end of pyres), it was the result of special conditions (Ancient Greek influences, nudity, grouping of teenagers in colleges)—conditions that a civilized society had to abolish (“that we do not encourage this crime, that it be proscribed as all morality violations, and we will suddenly see nature either defend its rights or take them back”). For Voltaire, homosexuality was typical of Jesuits, and on these grounds, deeply ridiculous. Incidentally, even if it shouldn’t have been subject to a legal penalty, homosexuality seemed to Voltaire to be an “error” that social morality had to continue to censor. As for Rousseau, he felt a physical repulsion for the “Chevaliers de la manchette,” and believed very much in natural “complementarity” of sexes. Only a few discordant voices were heard: some refused the very idea of “against nature.” “All that is cannot be either against or outside nature” stated Diderot who, nonetheless, in
La Religieuse
, considered monastic Sapphism as a particularly negative effect of the cloister: “the depraved retreat.” Others maintained the right to freedom of reasonable sexual pleasure. For example, philosopher Marquis de Condorcet stated, “sodomy, when there is no violence, cannot fall under criminal laws. It does not violate the rights of any man.” That being said, for most, homosexuality was always part of depravity, as proven by the very aggressive use of the lesbian-themed accusations against Marie-Antoinette in the last years of the Ancien Régime and until her trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal, in October 1793.

From 1791 to 1942: Decriminalization Without Acceptance
As proposed by the Marquis de Condorcet, the French Revolution secularized public order and relegated sodomy, along with blasphemy and witchcraft, to the rank of “imaginary crimes.” This
decriminalization
was maintained, thanks to Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, in the 1810 Napoleonic Code which did not show sodomy as a crime. In French law, nothing was prohibited anymore for two consenting adults of the same sex in sexual relations. However, this silence of the law did not in the least mean that social
tolerance
was widespread, or even greater than it had been in the preceding century. In a country anguished by the infinite potential of revolutionary challenges, homosexuality, as
feminism
, fell victim to a myth of Nature, which imposed impassable limits to the legislator’s boldness. Besides, we find in nineteenth-century France, the idea that the silence of the law was the most appropriate social response to this “horror of such monstrosity” that was sometimes defended by magistrates, and it was clear that judiciary power had only applied the law grudgingly: homosexuality was automatically seen in justice as an aggravating circumstance. Furthermore, administrative arbitrariness is not negligible: in 1800, a Paris police prefecture ordinance prohibited women from “dressing up as men”; in 1804, public authorities intervened outside all legal guidelines against a couple of gay male servants who had been condemned by a simple police decision to be kept inside in separate locations. In society as a whole, the taboo was very strong, as historian Anne-Marie Sohn reminds us: the subject was very rarely mentioned in everyday conversation, and until the 1950s, homosexuality cases give rise to a kind of disbelief (this taboo no doubt motivates the development of gay prostitution in big cities, between 1870 and 1900). All this explains why as recently as the middle of the 1970s, a very large number of French people believed that homosexual relations between consenting adults were still illegal.

While the 1830s and 40s had been marked, at least in literary works, by a certain fluidity in relation to sexual roles, we note a hardening and reinforcement of boundaries and identities by the middle of nineteenth century. The Second Empire, born out of social fear from June 1848 to December 1851, associated homosexuality more and more with delinquency and crime. This negative stereotype is shown quite clearly in the increasing number of novels with gay characters: Joseph Méry’s
Monsieur Auguste
in 1859,Théodore de Banville’s
Les Parisiennes de Paris
in 1866, Ernest Feydeau’s,
La Comtesse de Chalis ou les moeurs du jour
in 1868, and Adolphe Belot’s
Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme
in 1870. At the same time, certain magistrates did their best to use Article 334 of the penal code, from punishing for the incitation of minors to debauchery to creating asymmetry between heterosexual acts and homosexual acts (judgment of the Angers Court of Appeal, September 1, 1851), before the Court of Cassation imposed the return to the letter of the penal code. Other magistrates, fighting pornography in literature, saw the lesbian themes in Baudelaire’s poetry
Les Fleurs du mal
, published in 1857 (“Lesbos,” “damned women”) as an “offence to morality” that deserved condemnation.

The Second Empire was a time when police action started up again. This action developed in a non-legal area (only the struggle against
pedophilia
was based on consistent legislation, 1832 provisions related to “indecent assault without violence” on eleven-year-old minors; the age was raised to thirteen in 1863). In keeping with the tradition of the Ancien Régime, morality squads patrolled areas of prostitution and made arrests. Files were kept on gay prostitutes and occasionally made them “abetting agents.” The Second Empire also heralded the strengthening of medical stigmatization. The most important name here is that of the medical examiner Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, who in 1857 published the first edition of his famous
Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs
(Medical-legal studies of assaults against decency). Throughout this book, he consistently based homophobia in positivism and biological determinism, comparing the homosexual to both woman and to animals. Also, he claimed the homosexual had psychic characteristics said to be feminine: chit-chat, fickleness, and duplicity) and animal (the pederast, in his coitus and his organs, recalls the dog; and sodomy associates him to excrement). Tardieu set the anatomical and physiological characteristics of the male homosexual population for generations of medical students: “The excessive development of buttocks, the anus funnelform, sphincter relaxation, effacing of folds, ridges and caruncles of the anus periphery, extreme dilatation of anal orifice, matter incontinence, ulcerations, rhagades, hemorrhoids, fistulas, and rectal gonorrhea,” without forgetting the penis was formed like a canine’s. He created a caricatured typology, which was destined to last: “queer” for occasional homosexual, “true pederast” for born gay, and “active” pederast as well as “passive” pederast. He claimed that there was a socially subversive effect that homosexuality caused that linked together French and foreigners (speaking of the “cosmopolitism of these degrading passions”). Tardieu was enormously interested in gay prostitution and its menace to public order, by blackmail and crime (a series of recent killings had “clearly revealed the cruel end that may be the fate of those that can only find in the foam of the world the most vile of these unconfessed liaisons in which they demand satisfaction of their monstrous desires”). One will note that contradictions abound in his writing; the concerns of clinical science is accompanied on each page by the
rhetoric
of depravity; the thesis of innate pederasty goes hand in hand with that of vice, or immoral choice.

Around 1880, in a context of national doubt and anxiety over declining French power and fearing
decadence
, homosexuality gained the status of mental disease. Jean-Martin Charcot, a professor of neurology and anatomical pathology, described the first French case of “genital sense
inversion
” in 1882, and Ladame endeavored to treat homosexual patients through hypnosis as early as the end of the 1880s. It has been said that Charcot pathologically psychologized homosexuality in France and thus helped further diminish its social acceptance. It was he who, in 1882, created the expression that would have a prosperous future, “sexual
perversion
,” where medical, social, and moral preoccupations are linked.
Les Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, de criminologie et de psychologie normale et pathologique
(Archives of criminal anthropology, criminology and normal psychology), founded in 1885 by Alexandre Lacassagne and Gabriel Tarde, clearly affirmed the overrepresentation of sexual perverts in prison population. At the same time, under the influence of social Darwinism, homosexuality became a sign of hereditary
degeneracy
. Psychiatrist Henri Legrand du Saulle, in 1876 in
Société médico-psychologique
, affirmed that a lot of “reproductive perversions” were due to hysterical heredity; and it is for this reason that Dr Charles Féré, in
L’instinct sexuel, évolution et dissolution
(
The Evolution and Dissolution of the Sexual Instinct
) in 1899, invites his colleagues not to pressure homosexuals into
marriage
. All this bears the legacy of Tardieu: to French medicine, for more than a century, homosexuality was never normal but always a sickness; and as Daniel Borrillo says, “in trying to explain how one becomes gay, all medical theories take for granted that one should not become one.” Finally, discordant voices were not heard: Dr Thoinot, in
Attentats aux moeurs et perversion du sens génital
(Attacks on public morals, and perversion of the genitals), stressed, against Tardieu, the invisibility of homosexuals; and when Marc-André Raffalovitch affirmed in
Uranisme et uni-sexualité
(1896) that a large number of gays were very virile and not at all degenerate, he was met with ridicule and personal insults from the medical establishment. The growing medicalization of homosexuality did not prevent the parallel progression of police intervention, and this notwithstanding liberal principles of the Third Republic. At the end of the nineteenth century, morality squad raids multiplied around urinals and in the better known soliciting places, as in certain public cafés and dance halls patronized by gays. Service men were watched. The recording of information, already very important in Pierre Carlier’s time, was strengthened by the creation in 1894 of the “
brigade mondaine
,” a social brigade that was responsible for writing up “morals files” on the who’s who in Paris.