The best books on sex and the city in modern France

Although best known to Anglophone readers for her novel Gigi (1944), Colette considered Ces Plaisirs (These Pleasures) later titled The Pure and the Impure, one of her best works. A titillating exploration into the erotic underground of early twentieth-century Paris, the novel’s semi-autobiographical characters pursue a range of sexual experiences and sensual pleasures. Traversing the capital city’s carnal playgrounds, from its fashionable opium dens to its commercial boudoirs, Colette troubles the complicated relationship between sex and love – presenting both as a worthy if ultimately futile human pursuit.

In Before Trans, literary scholar Mesch explores the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three authors whose gender non-conformity challenged nineteenth-century notions of French womanhood. Mesch’s sensitive, engagingly written account uses the personal stories of these individuals to reveal how the complicated identity politics of fin-de-siècle Paris were rooted in immutable definitions of sex difference. An original work, and one of the first to examine the history of the modern transgender identity, Mesch’s book challenges us to think more carefully and more critically about sex and its utility as a signifier of identity.

Public City/Public Sex offers a provocative foray into the dance halls, brothels, and even the public urinals of nineteenth-century Paris. By centering sexuality conceptually and geographically, Ross advances the novel argument that public sex constituted public culture in the capital city. Vividly illuminating how urban clandestine and public sexual encounters (between men and women, men and men, and to a lesser extent, women and women) necessitated a new form of civic management, Ross cleverly demonstrates the intricate, intimate ways in which sex was implicated in, and developed alongside, the modern city.

Taking us inside the artist balls, music halls, and into the hidden bohemian enclaves of Paris, Kerley examines the myriad ways that the sexualized female body was commodified and spectacularized at the turn of the twentieth century. At this time, the nude female body reigned supreme as a subject of fine art as well as on the commercial stages of the bustling metropolis. Nude women were everywhere, even as respectable women were increasingly told to cover up. How to reconcile the contradiction between woman as housewife, woman as a harlot? This is a central question of Kerley’s beautifully written, thoughtful book.

Tilburg transports us from the world of art and artistry examined in the texts above to examine how new notions of sex and sexuality impacted the lives of ordinary working women. Through the figure of the idealized working Parisienne, the midinette, and the real-life woman worker she represented, Tilburg demonstrates how contemporaries evoked women’s working bodies as symbols of French taste and craftsmanship while also regarding them as potentially dangerous sexual and political subordinates. A painstakingly researched book, Working Girls brilliantly captures the insidious ways in which woman as cultural symbol covers over the socioeconomic hardships and political limitations real women encountered in everyday life.