The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France

The publication a decade ago of The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (1993), a collection of impressive essays edited and introduced by Lynn Hunt, marked a turning point in our encounters with the “bad books” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since then, the questions asked about early modern pornography have not fundamentally changed, but a more complete history has been sketched and some of the answers have become more precise. With this turning point, we moved away from three paradigms that had dominated scholarship on early pornography: the liberal Anglo-American freedom of speech model shaped by a series of notorious censorship trials; the sexual liberationist and psychoanalytic model, which focused largely on nineteenth-century works capitalizing on distinctive sexual tastes and which treated pornography as the royal road into the repressed modern bourgeois male psyche; and lastly, the French and avant-garde transgression model that made the Marquis de Sade, for instance, into the persecuted Enlightenment precursor to the Surrealists. Practitioners of these models drew, in part, on the bibliographic and classificatory tradition established by nineteenth-century private collectors of pornography and given rigor in the closed collections of great libraries. Peter Wagner’s Erotica and the Enlightenment (1991) represents a particularly exhaustive modern attempt to organize the wildly different texts that have been called pornographic, erotic or obscene, into tiny genres and sub-genres. Until recently, early modern pornographic publications—rare, censored, undated, anonymous, and frequently reprinted in variant editions—have incited meticulous cataloguing on the part of scholars and collectors who have generally presented these elusive texts as dangerous, liberatory, extreme or exceptional remnants of a hidden past.

The Invention of Pornography, reviewed in ECS 29.1 (1996) assembled and applied a number of new approaches which together offered the compelling hypothesis that pornography was not exceptional but, as the book’s subtitle implies, formatively as well as quintessentially modern. On the surface, this linkage between pornography and modernity paralleled Steven Marcus’s thesis in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966). Yet while Marcus viewed pornography as an effect of the repression of sexuality requisite to bourgeois life in a period of modernization, Hunt and a number of her co-contributors posited that pornography was productive of identity in modernity. Essays by Hunt and Rachel Weil traced how sexual defamation of royal bodies contributed to the desacralization of the monarchy, and thus to a secularized modernity, in both England and France. (This area had already been examined by Lynn Hunt’s The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), among other works, and was further explored in From the Royal Body to the Republican Body (1998), edited by Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg.) Rehearsing the argument that would appear fully fledged in the first volume of Sex and the Gender Revolution (Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, 1998), Randolph Trumbach described the transition from an adult male sexuality that included sexual relations with both women and adolescent boys to a modern compulsory male heterosexuality built around claims of love in marriage, displayed through encounters with prostitutes, and, among some elite males, tied through works like John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, to a deistic cult of sexual libertinism. Paula Findlen ascertained how privileged homosocial Humanistic relations governed the restricted circulation of early Renaissance Italian pornography in contrast with the democratized access to pornographic literature and images in the marketplace created by print that would evolve over the next two centuries. And Margaret Jacob connected the emergent social atomism of urban life in the late seventeenth century first to the Scientific Revolution and second to the contemporary pornography that personified the principles of mechanism and materialism that was consumed by a newly cosmopolitan public.

This kind of approach was not invented with The Invention of Pornography, as Lynn Hunt’s introduction to the volume readily acknowledges. The work of Michel Foucault, Walter Kendrick, Robert Darnton, as well as feminist, lesbian, bisexual and gay responses to the pornography and culture wars of the late 1980s and early ‘90s had all set the stage for the reinvention of pornography’s history. Foucault’s work—specifically his argument on “the repressive hypothesis” and his search for the “power relations at work” in “discourses of sex,”   more broadly his notion of “power over life” and to a lesser extent his opposition between a scientia sexualis and an ars erotica—transformed pornography from the “fool’s gold” of early modern studies, as it was once called by Elizabeth Eisenstein, into a lever for shifting our understanding of modernity. Taking Foucault’s cue, The Invention of Pornography thus approached pornography’s “invention” as the development of a cultural and legal apparatus operating in conjunction with other cultural forms and institutions to define and sort peoples, behaviors and values in terms of legality, resistance, morality and normativity.

Walter Kendrick had argued in The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987) that pornography acquired the status of a regulated and recognizable category when print and visual culture became accessible to both a female and lower-class public—a process which he located as beginning in the mid-eighteenth-century and accelerating in the nineteenth. Yet Kendrick left unaddressed the crucial shift in content between a priapic classical pornography to a vaginal-penile model and gave only passing attention to the early modern period.

Robert Darnton, along with French historians of the book like Daniel Roche, painstakingly established the lack of distinction, within the domains of the Enlightenment book trade and book consumption, between what we might now wish to classify either as erotic books or as philosophic works. Indeed, police, publishers and readers alike relied on the generalized term “livres philosophiques” to cover a wide variety of clandestine publications. Ultimately, Darnton would rely on the heterogeneity and sexualization of livres philosophiques to argue broadly à la Lévi-Strauss that sex in the Enlightenment was a “tool for thought” (The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995); The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789 (1995); “Sex for Thought” in NYRB (Dec. 22, 1994). For Darnton, sex in Enlightenment writing functioned as the mental rubric or structure enabling development and exercise of the critical faculties that would ultimately make the end of the Old Regime conceivable to a French public. Writing as an inheritor of the Anglo-American freedom of speech approach, Darnton neither analyzed the relations of power expressed in livres philosophiques nor nuanced the idea that sex as a tool for thought proved psychically and politically liberatory for an emerging modern public. His work as a whole, however, forces us to consider early modern pornography’s historical specificity, its heterogeneity and its ties to the political—whether as a partial expression of alternative social relations imagined by newly rootless modern individuals or as a tool for attacking existing political and religious order. Paralleling some of Darnton’s claims about Enlightenment France, Ian Frederick Moulton’s Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (2000), reviewed in ECS 34.3 (2001), argues of seventeenth-century English erotic writing that it was both formally heterogeneous and served political and social purposes, particularly in the articulation of a notion of national gender identity.

Darnton rightly took to task Jean Marie Goulemot’s Ces Livres qu’on ne lit que d’une main: Lecture et lecteurs de livres pornographiques au XVIIIe siècle (1991), translated as Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France, for theorizing eighteenth-century pornography as the pure form of reading degree zero, in which the production of a reality effect (sexual stimulation) is the unified and realized aim of the genre. Goulemot, however, does identify the constant play of intertextual references and the recirculation of phrases among eighteenth-century “forbidden texts” that are the mark of a genre in formation. This issue of canon formation and narrative norms receives intelligent attention in Peter Cryle’s Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative (1994).

The contemporary cultural politics that informed The Invention of Pornography ten years ago, along with the theoretical and historical approaches the volume tied together, continue to shape work in the field. End of the twentieth century lesbigay and feminist performances, visual work and writing, challenged the formal and commercial frames of reference traditionally used to distinguish the “aesthetic” from the “pornographic.” This encouraged particular attention into how these frames of reference were erected and acquired institutional supports in the first place. Bradford K. Mudge’s The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 (2000), reviewed in ECS 34.3 (2001), pursues this direction by arguing that the novel became an elevated national form in England through a progressive differentiation from the morals, pleasures and styles that would be bound together in the genre of pornography.

Gay and lesbian criticism of the early 1990s began to assert that pornographic publications focused on homosexual practices were essential to group and individual identity formation, particularly for men and women trying to interpret their non-normative sexuality in isolation outside of urban gay centers. This was an idea that translated nicely to the early modern context not only (although importantly) for the formation of early homosexual or sodomitical subcultures, as Trumbach’s work suggests, and of the sentimental and sexual relations between women discussed in Elizabeth Wahl’s Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (1999), but also for urban and even provincial heterosexuals whose cosmopolitan self-imagining was mediated by reading about and performing novel sexual and contraceptive practices.

Key ideas within feminist debates included the argument that in twentieth-century pornography sex articulated gendered and often racialized relations of domination and subordination as well as the insistence that, despite its status as “text,” pornography could not be analyzed independently from the coercion involved in its production or from the social consequences of its consumption. Transposed onto the early modern period, these concerns prompted investigation into pornography’s role in consolidating modern gender roles as well as into its relation to sexual violence. Heavily influenced by Foucault’s language and by the work of Antoine de Baecque, Jean Mainil’s Dans les règles du plaisir (1996) considers the continuities in ideas about gender between medical and erotic discourses in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and argues that “more than any other literary or cultural production, obscene literature was one of the privileged channels for putting the binary model of the sexes into (clandestine) circulation” (212). James G. Turner’s Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685 (2002), goes farther than any other book I am aware of in establishing for the period he covers, an immediate link between violent sexual ritual and what he calls “pornographia.” Moreover, he carefully uncovers the two-way history of sexual emulation between popular crowd and members of the elite while also examining the challenging issue of pornographia’s relation to feminism. In its attempt to “neutralize women’s efforts to establish their own institutions,” Turner argues, pornographia frequently undermined itself by exposing “women’s achievement” and by designating as prostituted, feminized and corrupt the male institutions that it ostensibly sought to privilege (xiii). Turner’s latest book, Schooling Sex: Libertine Literature and Erotic Education in Italy, France, and England, 1534-1685 (2003), combines truly rigorous archival work on pre-eighteenth-century pornography with a focus on the “educational fantasy in sexual writing … the erotic-didactic nexus, as it evolves towards the idea of philosophical libertinism” (10). Addressing the problem of the pornographic appropriation of the female voice, it develops further the concept of pornography’s self-undermining misogynist gender politics. It also traces a history of the early modern ars erotica—of which Foucault was the late twentieth-century inheritor—in which intellectual liberty became firmly tied to a care for the sexual self.

Since this essay was originally commissioned as a review of Joan DeJean’s The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (2002), I will give it somewhat lengthy attention here. Expanding from points she first explored in an essay for The Invention of Pornography, DeJean argues that the seventeenth century was the crucial period and France the crucial place in which pornography for the first time shifted its gaze to female genitalia. She transfers onto the French seventeenth-century context the Anglo-American tactic of probing the changing definitions of what is censorable to emerge from well-chosen censorship cases. Her key word is “obscenity,” a term that neither evolved nor remained in circulation after antiquity until its reinvention in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. DeJean correlates the disappearance of the word with the restriction of sexually transgressive material to a limited elite, male audience. Obscenity resurfaced as “obscenité” in the French state’s incoherent attempt to limit the production of cheap editions of bawdy works available to a broader public. These attempts suffered from a fundamental inability to define writing about sex as a violation of civil norms, even as the state sought to reclaim the regulation of both sexuality and print from the church.

Civil censorship was incited, in particular, by the use of a new typographical convention in 1622 that drew attention to the public indecency of Théophile de Viau’s sonnet to Phylis (the ellipsis substituting for the end of a ‘four-letter’ word). Théophile’s transgression was to insist on representing through this typography what had recently become “unrepresentable,” both homoeroticism and a male desire that did not discriminate between male or female anal intercourse. The group or “print collective” that was prosecuted for the 1655 edition of L’Ecole des filles transgressed, while also “test-marketing new images of desire” (21), by transferring agency in the quest for sexual knowledge and gratification onto women and, most threateningly, onto the sister, daughter or wife of any bourgeois household. Finally, Molière publicized the images tested in L’Ecole des filles by situating his play L’Ecole des femmes in the anonymous city street in front of a bourgeois dwelling and by drawing attention to the public unnameability of the female genitals that had now become the primary pornographic object in the infamous scene of the the (where “le” substituted for but also clearly designated female genitalia). In his response to the emergence of a new kind of popular journalism attacking him and his work, Molière in fact proferred the word “obscenité” to the public in 1663 as a way of designating the naming of the sexually unnameable.

The book is most successful at piecing together a history of the French book trade specific to the seventeenth century. It throws light on the ineffectiveness of early attempts at regulation and, through some nice detective work, identifies, for example, the butcher’s son who was “the first” non-elite consumer of sexually transgressive poetry and the young ladies-in-waiting who were dismissed after they were discovered reading L’Ecole des filles late at night. It clarifies how authors, beginning with Molière, anticipated profiteers who published unauthorized versions of their work by claiming responsibility for authoritative editions. Imparting concreteness to suspicion that authors were personally engaged in the behavior represented in their work, this generated a whole new form of scandal-mongering in print focused on the private lives of famous authors. Moreover, obscene works could not be claimed by “authors” for fear of prosecution. Thus, “In Molière’s career, and in the history of print culture in general, the status of the author and modern literary obscenity came into existence at the same moment. This intersection between the author as he who holds the copyright (privilege) and he who can be censored or held liable for his work may have been accidental. When he launched obscenity, however, Molière opened a Pandora’s box for the modern writer he would incarnate for the French tradition” (121).

Lively and smart in ways that reflect tremendous knowledge of seventeenth-century French culture, The Reinvention of Obscenity frustrates because of its brevity—a contemporary censorship of sorts enforced by our own book market. DeJean frequently emphasizes historical simultaneity (as in the passage quoted above about authorship and obscenity) to gesture towards causal relations. Ultimately, her approach—which pulls backwards in time influential arguments made about reading and bourgeois identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (for instance, by Benedict Anderson)—seems to involve some notion that a distinctive French bourgeois and heteronormative sexuality coincided with the emergence of modern obscenity in the mid-seventeenth century. This is worth considering, but it will take more than the three wonderfully suggestive case studies in The Reinvention of Obscenity to do it full justice.

While the history of pornography has truly been reinvented, there are many areas, sketched out particularly in the work of Turner and DeJean, that will benefit from further attention. Why was the new model, tested in L’Ecole des filles, of the bourgeois woman’s access to sexual desire and gratification so rapidly eclipsed by the figures of the prostitute and of the male libertine/sexual educator? Why was France the country in early modern Europe that reinvented obscenity and became notorious for the “bad little books” to which the term was applied—was it only because French succeeded Latin as an international language for the Republic of Letters? Is the textual reign of female genitalia after the mid-seventeenth century as hegemonic as DeJean suggests? What precisely was the relationship between the changing politics of social rank in Britain, France and other parts of Northern Europe and the new focus on the display of female genitals in pornography or the promotion of an exclusive libertine erotic education? Under what conditions did pornographic works and sexual violence feed each other? Why did pornography lag behind the novel in exploiting themes of racial difference and cultural alterity other than Orientalism? To what extent did early modern pornography naturalize in an emerging public sphere the idea that sexual transgression is equivalent to political resistance or intellectual transcendence? In the decade since The Invention of Pornography it has become difficult to use the introductory line that was de rigueur for so long—that the history of pornography has yet to be written. In part, this is because so much work on the subject has been published; in part, it is because this work has made it impossible to treat early modern pornography as an isolated genre with an exceptional history rather than as part and parcel of our repressive hypotheses, our institutionalized inegalitarianisms and our elusive promises of rules for pleasure.