Abstract
Reviewed by: R. J. Arnold, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
The naked bottom of Marie-Louise O’Murphy winks out from the cover of Nina Kushner’s book, pointing towards, but also partly obscuring, the object of her study. François Boucher’s portrait of Louis XV’s teenaged mistress is one of those paintings, like David’s Tennis Court Oath, or Vigée-Lebrun’s depictions of Marie-Antoinette, that publishers are much addicted to as a means of signalling another lively exploration of the exotic mores of the decadent old regime. In this case, one is conditioned to expect a gossipy account of courtly concubinage, of the kind that might sit across the border between academic and popular historiography.
This is not what Kushner has to offer. Rather, she delivers a meticulous and measured survey of the thousand or so dames entretenues, the ‘kept women’ who worked (the verb is significant) as mistresses for elite men in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. Terminology can be changeable and loosely applied, and Kushner is careful to differentiate her sample from street prostitutes, who relied on passing trade, from those women who indulged in sexual dalliance without firm financial underpinning, or from those who might pass in and out of prostitution as circumstances changed. Her subject is given additional cogency by its grounding in a rich archive of surveillance reports compiled by a small but diligent unit of the Parisian police in 1747–71.
What emerges is a picture of a demimonde in the full sense of the word – not just a zone of dubious morality, but also one with its own peculiar ways of doing things. Kushner explores the variety of ways that women got into the business – some sold into it by their families, others moving in (with varying degrees of volition) from the retail or clothing trades, or from the theatres, where almost all women had at least some connection with prostitution (some women, conversely, entered prostitution with the hope of getting onto the stage). This material is at its most intriguing in its exploration of the professional dealings of kept women, which had the terminology and rigour of a contractual commercial relationship. This respectable solidity was much complicated, however, by the habit of forming subsidiary attachments to boyfriends, or greluchons, based on a need for protection, money or even love; some extraordinary dames entretenues even paid their greluchons for their companionship.
Kushner is particularly strong on the question of agency. She avoids the temptation anachronistically to hail the kept women as pioneers of liberation in a patriarchal society, something that could result from an excessive focus on those very few – such as O’Murphy, in fact rarely mentioned in this book – who made it to the top. Being a dame entretenue was lucrative: the women under surveillance earned on average 623 livres a month, not counting gifts, at a time when a grisette or wet nurse might be paid no more than 100 livres in a year. But a degree of financial stability reflected the considerable expenditures necessary to keep up with mondaine society, and paid for an abdication of rights, exposure to disease and prosecution, and the cruelly short viable career.
In Kushner’s view, previous studies have too heavily reflected the views of those looking in at prostitution from the outside. She is right, but as she also admits, her ambition to tell the story of the dames entretenues on their own terms is hampered by her almost total reliance on a police archive. She does not, indeed, entirely avoid the police’s perspective. Her first chapter provides great detail on the functioning of the Département des femmes galantes, and discusses an intriguing question: why, given the other demands on its finite resources, did the police think it worthwhile running such an extensive surveillance operation? If it was for blackmail, its records should have been more systematic; if (as some have suggested) to feed court gossip, they should have been more interesting. She concludes that the department acted more as a regulator and even facilitator of the trade than in an orthodox law-enforcement function.
The voices of the women themselves, meanwhile, are rarely heard. On the strength of the archive, there is perhaps not much that could be done about that, but a willingness to interrogate a more enterprising range of sources – including evidence from literature and the visual arts – might at least have provided some textural depth. Kushner is, it must be said, too much in thrall to her admittedly interesting archive. This would matter less if she were bringing something new to light, but this material is a fairly well-known quantity: it has formed the basis of previous surveys, including Erica-Marie Benabou’s landmark study of 1987, La Prostitution et la Police des Moeurs au XVIIIe Siècle, and was in large part published in 1911–14 by Camille Piton, whose introduction noted how much academic interest the collection had already had even by that date. The result of this caution is that Erotic Exchanges lacks the suggestive wider implications that might have followed from a more expansive approach.
Of course, Kushner does not claim to be trafficking in wider implications. Taken on its own terms, her book is a model of the scholarly method: its introduction is admirably concise, its prose limpid, and it avoids the thickets of sociological terminology that such a subject could so easily gather about itself. As an exercise in assimilating, analysing and transmitting a large and complex body of primary material, it is exemplary. If it leaves one wanting more, that is not a bad thing – just a rare one.