The 1975 French sex workers’ revolt: A narrative of influence

Abstract

The 1975 French sex workers’ strike is widely acknowledged by sex workers’ movement activists as the spark that ignited the contemporary European sex workers’ rights movement. Yet, significant scholarly research has judged the strike a failure because it neither achieved law reform, nor was it able to sustain a lasting presence. How then should we understand the disparity between how sex worker activists see the occupation and the judgment of academic researchers? This research extends the analytical frame of the 1975 movement’s influence beyond the disappointment of specific policy outcomes and instead addresses the role that the movement played in challenging attitudes towards sex workers, and building a new collective identity that fed into the emerging global sex workers’ rights movement. It argues that by defining and amplifying a set of shared grievances recognisable across borders the strike was a significant cultural achievement for the sex workers’ movement and this in turn established a narrative of influence.

Keywords

Activism France sex work sex workers’ rights movement strike

When we occupy the churches

You are scandalised

Religious bigots!

You who threatened us with hell

We have come to eat at your table

At Saint-Nizier

This was the first verse of a protest song written by French sex workers in June 1975 during their widely publicised eight day long nationwide strike, in the course of which they occupied six churches in French cities and towns. The strike, which began in Lyon, made national and international news headlines. Sex worker activists credit it as the spark that ignited the contemporary sex workers’ rights movement in Europe and the UK (Roberts, 1992: 347), and assert that the grievances aired by the 1975 strikers still resonate with the experiences and aspirations of sex workers in many different countries, cultures and legal frameworks.

According to Jeness, the sex workers’ rights movement emerged during the 1970s to ‘challenge the traditional views of prostitutes as social misfits, slaves, victims of pimps and drug addiction, and tools of organised crime’ (Jenness, 1993: 1–6). Today many sex workers’ movement organisations also focus on having sex work (defined as the consensual exchange of sex for commercial gain) recognised as a legitimate occupation deserving labour rights (Kempadoo and Doezema, 1998). The majority of sex worker led movements support decriminalisation of sex work as their preferred policy regime and share information and campaign strategies through organisations such as The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP, 2016). The International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (n.d.) includes 95 organisations in 31 countries across Europe and Central Asia. Each year many of these organisations celebrate 2 June, the date of the original Lyon occupation, as International Whores’ Day (McNeil, 2013). Yet, despite demonstrations of solidarity and collective memorialising, scholars judge the 1975 French sex workers’ strike as an overall failure (Corbin, 1990; Mathieu, 2001, 2003a; Tilly and Tarrow, 2015). Although they recognise that gains were made – following the strike, for example, street-based workers were no longer fined and threatened with imprisonment – the primary focus of research has been on the movement’s failure to achieve the most significant of its institutional goals: the repeal of laws that led to the closure of sex worker spaces, and the prevention of legal changes that would further criminalise ‘procurers’ or third parties. So why does the sex workers’ rights movement embrace a ‘failed’ protest as a moment of victory? How can we understand this paradox?

It is useful to clarify what is being assessed and where the line is drawn. If we limit the focus of analysis to the strike as a single protest then it was a failure, because following the strike circumstances changed little for the sex workers of France. But this research takes a longer historical view to explain why the global sex workers’ rights movement credits the strike as a significant achievement in that it inspired a social movement. Snow and Soule (2010) conceptualise social movements as collective rather than individual enterprises that challenge structures and systems of authority, acting outside of institutional or organisational arrangements but using some degree of organisation and continuity. As this article will demonstrate, the French sex workers’ strike was the culmination of three years of grassroots organising and advocacy, during which sex workers, with the support of allies, framed their grievances, and repeatedly presented them to hostile and unsympathetic local authorities.

Sex worker and activist Thierry Schaffauser, one of the founding members of the French sex workers’ rights organisation STRASS (Syndicat du Travail Sexuel), sees the occupation of French churches by hundreds of sex workers 40 years ago as ‘really the moment when the idea itself – that sex workers could organise themselves politically – all of a sudden the proof is there’ (Schaffauser, 2014). For him the movement symbolised the emergence of sex workers as political agents capable of organising a collective enterprise.

According to David S Meyer (2009: 56), ‘a story that describes only the defeats is not only incomplete but politically counter-productive. It provides no foundation for subsequent mobilization and reinforces futility among those who participated’. Meyer identifies significant failings in previous research in evaluating the impact and influence of social movements. These include the role of outside players, unexpected outcomes over time and the varied interpretation of documents and other materials in retrospective analysis and myth-making. Meyer asserts that although scholarly assessments of a movement’s impact often vary from its popular story, ‘the popular storyline … is far more likely to affect what happens next’ (Meyer, 2009: 56). In suggesting that the emergent story of a movement is generally neglected, he challenges researchers to extend the analytical frame beyond specific outcomes in order to establish ‘a narrative of influence’. This in itself constitutes an important social movement outcome (Meyer, 2009). According to Schaffauser, acknowledgment of the 1970s French sex workers’ movement serves a contemporary political purpose: greater awareness of it and its demands, he argues, could bolster the legitimacy of his organisation: ‘a lot of people criticise us [STRASS] as being unrepresentative, as a minority. But what we are arguing for today goes back [to 1975]’ (Schaffauser, 2014).

This article draws on Meyer’s critique, re-visiting the theory and criteria that scholars used in interpreting the 1970s French sex workers’ movement as a failure. It places the French movement in the larger context of research on sex worker labour movements and rebellions, and widens the analytical frame across time and space so we can better understand how and why the leaders of the French sex workers’ movement, and other activists who followed them, claim it as the spark for the sex workers’ rights movement in Europe and the UK. In particular, it seeks (following Meyer) to illuminate how an episode in a social movement’s development becomes part of a larger story – a ‘fortifying myth’ for those involved in the movement despite its failure to achieve immediate concrete gains. A fortifying myth, writes Meyer, ‘extends the historical scope of a story line, allowing activists to recognize past efforts as a foundation for organizing in the present and future’ (Meyer, 2009: 74). In conclusion, this article looks at how and why the assessment of the 1975 strike and occupations matter to the sex workers’ rights movement today.

Methodology

In recent years, scholars have drawn numerous connections between the methodologies of journalism and ethnography (Cramer and McDevitt, 2004; Hannerz, 2004; Singer, 2009; Vesperi, 2010). Boyer (2010) argues that journalism and ethnography are both narrative discourses (with different forms and representational registers), and that both are ‘social analysts’. Radio documentary production is one of the methodologies of journalism, and is capable of certain kinds of ‘thick description’ (Singer, 2009). It typically involves:

a sustained engagement with particular individuals and their communities and life-worlds; extensive interviewing, the recording of life histories, and an attempt to communicate to the audience the ways in which those individuals construct meaning in the context of their lived experience. (Morton and Müller, 2016: 280)

The author is a radio documentary producer who has conducted research on and with sex workers over two decades.¹ The scholarly reflection developed in this article derives from primary and archival research for the production of the radio documentary La Revolte des Prostituées broadcast by Radio France and RTBF in 2015 (Aroney, 2015).

The fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted over three visits to Lyon and Paris. It employed mixed methods based in ethnography and documentary production, including participant observation in locations where sex workers operate, structured and semi-structured interviews and location sound recording. Oral histories were recorded with two French sex workers who had participated in the strike in 1975, with Father Louis Blanc,² the Catholic priest who stayed with the strikers in the church during the occupation, and with Christian Delorme, then a young curate and social activist. In addition, eight current sex workers and activists were interviewed, including four from the national French sex workers’ rights organisation STRASS, and Elena Jeffreys, former President of Scarlet Alliance Australia’s peak sex worker representative body. Further interviews were conducted with sociologist Lilian Mathieu, staff from the Lyon-based sex workers’ advocacy organisation Cabiria, as well as clergy and church volunteers from the Church of Saint-Nizier.³ Interview material was cross-referenced against archival documents, media accounts and scholarly research. Feminist editor Christine de Coninck, who co-authored La Partagée with ‘Barbara’, one of the French sex workers’ movement leaders (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977), re-established contact with ‘Barbara’ for the purpose of this research. Although ‘Barbara’ was not available for a formal interview, there was consultation and communication with her about aspects of the research. In addition, the author conducted extensive archival research in the archives of Radio France, which had not been referred to by previous scholars.

The origins and story of the movement

In 1960, France ratified the 1949 UN Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. In doing so, the French parliament adopted the Convention’s preamble, which declares prostitution ‘incompatible with the dignity and worth of the person’, and as such endangering ‘the well-being of the individual, the family and the community’ (UN, 1949). Although France closed its state-run brothels in 1946, sex workers had still been obliged to register on public health files and to take regular health checks. The 1960 ratification ended this requirement to register as a ‘prostitute’, and according to official policy, sex work in France became ‘a private affair, a matter of individual choice and responsibility, outside the realm of state intervention’ (Mathieu, 2004: 153). The reality of how sex work operated in France was very different. The police and judicial authorities retained the right to prevent soliciting, on grounds that it constituted an act of public indecency. They continued to prosecute third parties profiting from prostitution, such as landlords of premises used for the purposes of prostitution, and others who lived off its earnings. In effect, the rebellion by sex workers in 1975 took place within a system that claimed to have given them the freedom to operate as individuals, and the laws to protect them, but in fact subjected them to constant harassment, prosecution, fines and sometimes imprisonment.

As part of a nationwide crackdown on corruption in 1972, according to the newspaper Le Figaro, police in Lyon fined 6290 sex workers for soliciting, imprisoned 43 pimps and closed down 41 hotels where the sex workers saw their clients (Le Figaro, 12 June 1975; Mazur, 2004: 126). This operation not only massively disrupted the sex industry, but also exposed police and political corruption. A number of police and politicians, including the head of Lyon’s Vice Squad, were tried for pimping and corruption in the months following. Those that replaced them adopted an aggressive campaign to shut down the bars and short stay hotels where many sex workers saw clientele. As a result, an estimated number of 400 additional sex workers were obliged to service their clients in cars and on the streets of Lyon. In response, around 30–40 sex workers held a street demonstration in August 1972, but the leaders were marched to the police station, and the protest ridiculed by the press. Violence against sex workers had also increased. A group statement drawn up in June 1974 at the first meeting of the Collective for the Defence of the Prostitutes of Lyon blamed police for ignoring an upsurge of deadly attacks: ‘Six or seven prostitutes have been murdered since 1971 […] They were ghastly murders and included torture. They still haven’t found the killers’ (Jaget, 1980: 36).

Among other concerns for the sex workers was a proposed government bill aimed at tightening pimping laws. Under these laws, even sex workers themselves were charged with pimping if they bought and worked in apartments together (Corbin, 1990; Jaget, 1980: 37). Sex workers had also recently been served with exorbitant backdated tax statements even though they were denied welfare or retirement funds (Mathieu, 2013).

These grievances came to a head on 2 June 1975, when around 100–150 sex workers took refuge in the Church of Saint-Nizier in Lyon and immediately hung from the steeple a large banner on which was written ‘Our children do not want their mothers to go to jail’. Aided by young curate, activist and aspiring journalist Christian Delorme (audio recording of an interview, 11 June, 2012), the sex workers launched a media campaign explaining that they had occupied the church in desperation following months of failed negotiations in an attempt to prevent the threatened imprisonment of around 10 women facing multiple charges for ‘incitement of debauchery’.

The sex workers’ main allies were representatives of a Catholic social activist and abolitionist movement called the ‘Movement du Nid’ (Nid means Nest). The Lyon members of the organisation took the approach that in supporting and educating the sex workers, they would come to realise the damage sex work caused, and leave the life voluntarily (a form of consciousness raising). Father Louis Blanc, who worked for over 10 years in a Lyon based community shelter for ‘reformed’ sex workers, claims that ‘the Nid only orchestrated a movement that began with the prostitutes … simply we were behind it to support their actions’ (Blanc, 2014). As Barbara explained, the Nid arranged meeting rooms and a lawyer to represent them, ‘but they never acted in place of us or on our behalf. Again and again they assured us that they were on our side and stressed “you are capable of speaking for yourselves, you are capable of defending yourselves”’ (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 50).

A small group of feminists and gay men (the latter shared the little laneways with the sex workers’, using them as their cruising ‘beats’) distributed pamphlets that summarised the strikers’ demands to crowds of Lyon onlookers (Chomarat, 2013). Within days, sex workers took sanctuary in churches in Marseille, Grenoble, Montpellier and Paris in solidarity. A Canadian newspaper singled out trans sex workers, reporting that striking ‘transvestites’ had ‘an extra gripe – a law that forbids men to wear women’s clothes in public except during carnival season’, and subsequently they received double the fines (Montreal Gazette, 1975: 49). Many of the remaining estimated 20,000–30,000 French sex workers across the country also went on strike, in some cases reluctantly. In Paris, a strip club doorman told journalist Paul Treuthardt (1975) that there wasn’t one girl working in the red light district of Pigalle: ‘Some of them tried early in the evening, then carloads of pickets came along and hustled them off’ (Treuthardt, 1975: 7).

International media reports also caught the attention of high profile US feminist and author Kate Millett, who contrasted the French occupations with efforts by the US sex workers’ rights group Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE). Describing its leader Margo St James as having been ‘quite successful’ in her role, Millett went on to tell French feminists that what she saw here was more a grassroots affair:

What you have here in France is so fantastic. The prostitutes themselves of their own accord they have the consciousness to strike, to confront society. What do they need? They need food, clothes, people to campaign with them to give them support – you know the means. It’s simple, they are fighting the fight. (Millet, in Roussopoulos, 1975a)

But the French government’s lack of response caused frustration for the strikers and as the week progressed a ‘mood of despondency’ descended on the Church of Saint-Nizier (Blanc, 2014).

When sex workers occupied the Chapel of St Bernard in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir visited, telling Reuters News Service, ‘I hope they are successful and I am ready, with my friends in the women’s liberation movement, to support this movement’ (Miami News, 1975: 23). But her support counted for little in practical terms. At 5.30 am on 10 June the churches were cleared of protestors. In the case of the Church of Saint-Nizier, it was a baton wielding display of force ordered by the Minister for the Interior, Michel Poniatowski, who told Radio France that he’d heard that the women were about to occupy other churches, including Notre Dame. The minister went on to claim that it was not the women who were behind the strike but their pimps, ‘So the public must be careful that their compassion and good faith isn’t betrayed by demonstrations which are, in reality, organised by the pimps who very often are the backbone of the drug and human trafficking world’ (Poniatowski, 1975). Not a single member of the government had agreed to meet with sex workers during or following the strike, despite their numerous appeals.

The scholarly assessment

The research of historian Alain Corbin and sociologist Lillian Mathieu is crucial for those wanting to understand the French sex workers’ movement of the early to mid-1970s. Although their inquiries took place over 20 years apart and employed different theoretical models, both were in general agreement: the French sex workers’ movement ended in failure because it was unsuccessful in achieving its major institutional goals (Corbin, 1990: 363). Before I turn to why global sex workers’ rights activists like Tracy Quan from PONY (Prostitutes of New York) re-fashioned this failed uprising into ‘our Stonewall’ (Quan, 1990), I examine the criteria used by Mathieu and Corbin in their analysis of the movement’s shortcomings, along with their recognition of what it did achieve.

It was in the 1970s, when sexuality and prostitution finally emerged as a legitimate area of historical enquiry (Walkowitz, 1980), that historian Alain Corbin wrote his monumental book Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. In its introduction, Corbin observes that in researching prostitution up until the 1970s, ‘what reality we can glean is mediated through male eyes: those of the policeman, the doctor, the judge and the administrator’ (Corbin, 1990: viii). But when exploring documents for his final chapter on the French sex workers’ strike or ‘the churches movement’ as it was coined, Corbin recognised that for the first time scholars like himself were able to publish an account of a sex worker rebellion drawing on the individual accounts of the sex workers who took part. He observed that the ‘novelty’ of using their voices contrasted with previous rebellious sex worker texts in which workers presented their views collectively to authorities, such as during the French Revolution and the Restoration (Corbin, 1990: 362–443).

Corbin’s ‘voices’ originated from various published testimonies and memoirs of the women involved (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977; Chantal and Bernard, 1978; Sonia, 1976; Ulla, 1976). But he singles out the work by Liberation journalist Claude Jaget as especially significant. Une Vie de Putain (Jaget, 1975) includes transcripts extracted from over 30 hours of recorded testimonies given by six of the protestors during the period of the occupations. Corbin acknowledges these interviews as being responsible for what he sees as the main accomplishment of the strike, ‘the emergence of a new discourse from the inside, the emergence of a mentality and behaviour that had previously been concealed and which the admissions dragged out of the women by doctors and psychologists had not revealed’ (Corbin, 1990: 363). Corbin believed this new discourse, fostered by a libertarian tradition, was one that saw prostitution as no longer ‘simply a dead end, the way of death’, but even sometimes ‘as a way of getting on in society’ (Corbin, 1990: 364).

This new attitude was also a result of structural upheaval in the French sex industry, a fracturing caused by the sweeping social and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Corbin argued that the contraction of jobs as a result of economic crisis in France, along with the influence of second wave feminism and the sexual liberation movement, had created a class of young women who were desperate for work but no longer felt morally bound to get married. Drawing on the testimonies of the French protestors (Jaget, 1975), he maintained that under these conditions those who chose sex work were more confident about the expression of sexuality outside of marriage, but less likely to submit to the influence of the procurers from the ‘milieu’, the French equivalent of organised crime. This, Corbin said, did not mean that exploitative conditions disappeared. Instead, the hierarchy evolved and the traditional stand-over man was replaced by those who owned and ran the bars and the short stay hotels where sex workers met and saw their clientele – some of these business people were former sex workers themselves (Corbin, 1990: 356–358).

But despite Corbin’s analysis of the 1975 movement as having contributed to a new discourse on prostitution, he judged the movement a failure for the following reasons. Firstly, the protestors were unable to prevent the passing of harsher anti-pimping laws. Under these conditions there was no chance that the short stay hotels would be re-opened, as landlords were also defined as pimps. Secondly, shortly after the strike in July 1975, the Minister for Health, Simone Veil, appointed the President of the Court of Appeals, Guy Pinot, to assess whether there were any judicial or administrative solutions that could be applied to the problem. Pinot met with the sex workers’ representatives and produced a report sympathetic to their demands and recognising their right to professional status (Pinot, 1976). However, the report was ‘buried’ (Mathieu, 2001: 128) and was never presented to the Council of Ministers. This was a major blow for the movement.

More than 20 years after Corbin, Lilian Mathieu began his research from the same position: because the French sex workers’ movement of the 1970s made no long-term impact on public opinion or law reform, it did not achieve its major aims and was therefore a failure. But Mathieu’s intention was not to re-affirm the obvious but to examine the necessary conditions for mobilisation of a group as ‘unorganised and lacking in protest conditions and means for action as prostitutes’ (Mathieu, 2001: 108). Mathieu draws on resource mobilisation theory, with its basic premise that the emergence and persistence of a social movement depends on the availability of resources, which it can accumulate and channel into continuing action (McCarthy and Zald, 2002). Mathieu applies this framework in relation to the sex workers’ choice of appropriate modes of action, their ability to assemble a significant number of participants and their ability to form alliances.

Mathieu looked for possible lessons that could be drawn from the case study for movements where ‘the protest group and its allies were guided by diametrically opposed objectives’ (Mathieu, 2001: 127). As outlined earlier, the main allies of the movement – the Movement du Nid – wanted sex workers to eventually cease prostitution, and the same was true for most of their feminist allies (Mathieu, 2001: 124–125). Sex workers, by contrast, insisted they be able to continue to work without harassment. While during the church occupations these ideological differences had been put aside, at a General Assembly in late June 1975 they came to the fore when some sex workers wanted to focus on the legitimisation of their work, instead of consenting to be ‘reformed’. According to Mathieu, these differences caused their allies (their most important resource) to withdraw, and this in turn weakened the movement, exposing the ‘prostitutes’ own inability to organise in a way that would give them both autonomy and stability …’ (Mathieu, 2001: 128). However, as Jaget points out, it was not only their main allies who withdrew. As the sex workers’ movement continued to lobby, organise protests and hold public meetings demanding the right to work, the press and the public became less sympathetic: ‘They [sex workers] didn’t know how to stay in their place […] – “poor things” are fine as long as they let themselves be pitied, but not when they rebel’ (Jaget, 1980: 186).

According to Mathieu, ‘the movement quickly declined and soon expired, in part because of their leader’s defection’ (Mathieu, 2001: 107). In his analysis, the leaders Ulla and Barbara retreated because they were ‘not fully convinced of the validity of pursuing the action, or the dignity of the marginal social world they were declaring themselves representatives of ’ (Mathieu, 2001: 129). However, in the case of Barbara (one of the two leaders of the Lyon protest), this research found that although she was ‘reluctant’ to claim leadership of the 1975 protest (Roussopoulos, 1975b), she had no regrets about her activist past and encouraged the production of a radio documentary on the condition that she be portrayed ‘neither as a victim nor a saint’ (Personal communication with Aroney, 31 May, 2014). In her book, Barbara claims that she continued to campaign for the movement until late February 1977, with letters of appeal to politicians and authorities asking for social integration programmes for sex workers and for the implementation of the Pinot report (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 231). She did not see it as a contradiction to be campaigning for law reform that would allow sex workers the right to safe working conditions, while also calling for programmes and support for those who wanted to leave sex work altogether – herself being one. In her autobiography, she explains that although sex workers read her eventual retreat as a betrayal, she still supported their cause:

If the prostitutes take up their struggle once again one day I will be with them because I hate every kind of oppression and I am one of them […] I will do everything that’s in my power to inform the public and try to convince them that prostitutes are women like all other women including married women. But for me Barbara is dead. (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 187)

What these examples demonstrate is that in Meyer’s terms there is a ‘non-exclusive set of factors’ that ‘affect the propensity of activists to get their version of the story out beyond the boundaries of the faithful to broad audiences’ (Meyer, 2009: 64). This background is important in the context of Meyer’s argument that the story a movement is able to create about itself, and the credit it is able to claim for effecting change through and with that story, should be seen as a significant (and previously under-examined) dimension of a movement’s success and influence. As Meyer argues, ‘the dominant narrative about the trajectory of a movement, or of the origins of a policy, becomes part of the culture in which movements arise (or not), legitimating certain kinds of claims, actors and tactics, while undermining others’ (Meyer, 2009: 71). Such a narrative will legitimate protest and reinforce the political significance of actors outside government if it ‘emphasizes effective and purposive efforts by citizens’ (Meyer, 2009: 71). Both the prehistory of the 1975 strike, and its aftermath, demonstrate ‘purposive and effective action’ by French sex workers, and provide strong grounds for seeing the strike as the foundational moment of a ‘narrative of influence’ (Meyer, 2009: 56).

In an interview in 2013, Mathieu also identified the positive achievements of the strike: ‘what was important was its media impact. An immediate international impact and that is now engraved in memories and continues to serve as a reference’. At the same time, he also described the churches movement as a ‘significant key moment in the history of the sex workers’ fight, a moment of impulsion, because it was the first real collective action to have such a mediatised impact and such power’ (Mathieu, 2013).

In both Corbin’s and Mathieu’s analysis it is clear that despite the movement’s institutional failures, in their view there were also achievements. But to understand how and why it came to be seen as a victory for the sex workers’ movement, we need to contextualise the protest within a wider body of research on sex worker labour movements and rebellions and extend the movement’s analytical framing.

All of a sudden the proof is there

During centuries of silence

And intolerance

We had become used

To being treated like animals

We have held our heads high

At Saint-Nizier.

As this verse suggests, an important goal for the movement was to be seen to be defending their rights with dignity. Even at the moment of their most crushing defeat after being dragged by the French riot police from the Church of Saint-Nizier, movement leader Barbara refused to play the victim:

The police van drove us to the Moliere Police Station. A police officer said to me: ‘And you are not even crying!’ Why would I have cried? We had won the most beautiful of all battles. We had forced people to become aware of our existence, and we had avoided jail. (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 87)

The women understood that in selecting the Church as the site of their protest they would attract the attention of the press – ‘we wanted to strike a decisive blow that the whole world would listen to us’ (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 59) – but the degree of attention they received had been far beyond their expectations:

Ulla answers the questions from the national newspapers and radio stations. She sends the journalists from the regional papers, the weekly journals and left wing broadsheets plus the foreign correspondents to me. My first interview is with an English TV station. Shortly afterwards the Italian journalists arrive with sweets. (Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 73)

But regardless of the unique situation in which the French sex workers found themselves, this was not the first time that such workers in the world had organised a rebellion.

A San Francisco newspaper reported that in 1917, 300 sex workers confronted Reverend Paul Smith, the leader of an anti-prostitute campaign, outside his church in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco (MacLaren, 1988). According to a summary of the article, the Reverend described his confrontation as ‘the most dramatic incident of my life’ and was shocked when the women told him that most of them were mothers and that they’d turned to prostitution to support their children. Across the Pacific and over 30 years later, a US newspaper reported that at least 641 prostitutes had gone on strike to protest an ‘insolent remark’ by a hotel owner at the hot spring resort of Peitou (now Beitou) in Taiwan. The representative from the sex workers’ organisation called the ‘Union of Families of Happiness’ said that, ‘the girls have their dignity and self-respect. The board chairman’s statement insulted them and overlooked the important contribution the girls have made to Peitou’. In response, one government official said that he hoped the strike ‘will last forever’ (Wilmington Morning Star, 1976).

But details of these and similar protests are rarely taken up by scholarly or even popular literature. Instead they remain stalled in brief media news reports with little analysis or serious consideration of the issues. If journalism is, in the formulation usually attributed to Washington Post President and Publisher Philip L Graham, ‘the first rough draft of history’, when it comes to stories of sex worker resistance and rebellion there have generally been few second drafts, either in the mass media or in scholarly publications.

The widespread and sustained print and electronic media coverage of the French sex workers’ strike makes it an exception in this regard. In this instance, there was a documentary film produced about the strike, those involved wrote books and media drew directly on first-hand accounts from a number of individual French sex workers speaking from various protest locations. That the sex workers were quoted representing their grievances as labour and human rights concerns was also exceptional at that time. As Mathieu pointed out when interviewed for the abovementioned radio documentary in 2014, ‘for the first time they [the sex workers] were being listened to without being ridiculed’ (Mathieu, 2014).

The aftermath: Echoes across time and space

The French sex workers’ strike not only captured the attention of the world media, but in the months following the occupations, ‘the women took advantage of press interest to hold a massive education campaign on prostitution. Public support for the French Collective of Prostitutes as they called themselves was strong’ (Pheterson, 1989: 5). This campaign continued at least until 27 April 1976 when three (unidentified) sex workers debated with a group of students at the University of Lyon. Explaining why they considered their movement a success, they said that the occupations gave them an opportunity to know and understand each other:

Before, when a woman was detained by police she was alone, today there are four others that tag along. Automatically the cops try to make peace, they say ‘Well, here they come – the delegation, they will make a fuss, they will make work.’ So they leave us alone; they insult us more discreetly, that is to say without the others to hear, whereas before it was different. (Mathieu, 2003b: 4)

As suggested here, the French rebellion enabled sex workers to realise the potential power of collective action in challenging authorities and injustice. As the personal testimonies in Une Vie de Putain show, some of the rebels had already been politicised: ‘in ’68, I was working in a factory; so I lived through it all, the factory occupations’ (Jaget, 1980: 98). Another describes how clients would laugh when they noticed the Collective of Prostitutes poster over her bed: ‘Personally I don’t find it at all funny. That poster is good way of sorting them out, it’s got all our demands on it’ (Jaget, 1980: 128).

The strike’s influence can also be measured in terms of its impact on sex workers in other countries, who despite cultural differences were able to closely identify with the French movement because of the startling similarities in laws and how they were applied to sex workers. The internationalised reporting of the strike attracted the attention of sex worker Grisélidis Réal, who travelled from Geneva to join the Paris occupation in the Chapelle de Saint Bernard. Réal would become a well-known activist and author in France and Switzerland in the years to come, but in the meantime following the strike in 1975 she met with US activist Margo St James in Paris at a meeting sponsored by UNESCO of the International Federation of Abolitionists (Pheterson and St James, 2005), where they were ‘allowed’ to speak (Pheterson, 1989: 6) on behalf of sex workers. On the same trip, St James and sex worker ‘Sonia’, who had also been involved in the 1975 strike, spoke with Simone de Beauvoir about the founding of an international sex workers’ organisation. Within a few years, over 20 sex workers’ rights groups had sprung up across Europe and as far away as Australia (Pheterson, 1989: 5–8).

The first to emerge in 1975 as a direct response to the French movement was the English Collective of Prostitutes (n.d.). The ECP approached feminist publisher Falling Wall Press to arrange the translation and publication of Jaget’s book Prostitutes Our Life (Jaget, 1980). This extended version included contributions from Margo St James from COYOTE and ECP members Margaret Valentino and Mavis Johnson who, in a homage to the church occupations, described it as an ‘enormous victory’ for sex workers (Jaget, 1980: 16):

Almost overnight you find the power to speak with courage and honesty impossible before; you see your own experience and your own history as part of all others; you have final proof that you are not alone, that you are not the only one to think; this is a mess. (Jaget, 1980: 10)

The ECP publication bequeathed the story of the French strike – told by the women themselves – to the English-speaking world and an emerging movement short on victories but big on sex worker community-building. And in one instance at least, this did not go unnoticed.

In 1974 the Australian government established a Royal Commission into Human Relationships to inquire into a wide range of issues, including ‘prostitution’. The head of the commission, Elizabeth Evatt, had been the first female judge of an Australian Federal Court, and the first Australian to be elected to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. In the Royal Commission’s recommendations in 1977, she refers directly to the French movement as an example of sex workers’ increasing capacity to organise: ‘French prostitutes went on strike, occupying churches and similar gathering places to hand out leaflets. They called for legalisation of prostitution and an end to police persecution. They also demanded the right to social security benefits’. Similar movements in the US and Australia meant that there was:

a greater confidence amongst prostitutes that public feeling is on their side. It also appears to indicate that the women are prepared to organise collectively and are not so much under the influence of pimps and male ‘protectors’ of one sort or another. (Evatt, 1977: 62)

The commission went on to recommend the decriminalisation of sex work and, according to Frances and Gray (2007: 315), this ‘added to the weight of opinion advocating decriminalization’, which was adopted by NSW in 1979.

Conclusion

Sex workers and their organisations around the world have fashioned a counter-narrative that challenges the assessment by scholars such as Corbin and Mathieu that the strike was a failure. Rather, they portray it as the beginning of a struggle that extends over time and space – literally, across half the world and over 40 years – to the achievement of civil and human rights for sex workers in jurisdictions such as NSW Australia and New Zealand where decriminalisation has been adopted.

This article has argued that the legacy of the 1975 strike transcends any failure to achieve institutional goals. While there were some bitter disappointments for French sex workers in not achieving policy reform, activists in France and beyond were able to mobilise its memory to legitimise their ‘claims, actors and tactics’ (Meyer, 2009: 71). The popular storyline – invoked by the contemporary global movement – reads the strike as the emergence of the sex worker as a political agent with genuine claims acting collectively on institutions. As one of the women who took part in the revolt of 1975 said at the time:

For me nothing will be as it was before. I have the impression that in these ten days I’ve experienced things that are hard to comprehend, that I would never have thought possible before … somehow it seems to me that all this will endure much longer than the occupation itself.

(Liberation, 13 June, in Barbara and de Coninck, 1977: 90)

For the sex workers’ movement, the strike marked a crucial foundational moment that became in Meyer’s words a ‘fortifying myth’ that is a way for the sex workers’ movement to continue mobilising in the face of defeats. It forged ‘a narrative of influence’, which in itself contributed importantly to building and sustaining a social movement culture (Meyer, 2009: 56).

The sex workers who occupied the Church of Saint-Nizier continue to inspire sex worker activists around the world in an ongoing struggle against discrimination and for civil and human rights (Jeffreys, 2014; Shaffauser, 2014). Even though there is still much to be achieved, global organisations such as Amnesty International and the World Health Organisation now support the meaningful inclusion of sex workers in policy reform and design – a goal that was in fact at the heart of the 1975 French sex workers’ movement.

Footnotes

Notes

Eurydice Aroney is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is also a member of Scarlet Alliance, the Australian Sex Workers Association. Since the 1980s, Aroney has worked with the Australian sex workers’ rights movement in producing radio documentaries for media broadcast. Her Twitter handle is: @eekiemout.

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