Sex in the Cities. Volume 3. Paris. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

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      Guide secret pour étrangers et viveurs

      (Secret Guide for Foreigners and Roués), 1910. Book cover.

      Introduction

      Paris: The City of Love?

      Throughout the world, Paris is regarded as the “city of love and the erotic”. To this day, the ideal destination of any honeymoon is a trip to Paris. But it is not only for loving couples that this proud city continues to be an attraction – tourists in search of extra excitement in love also pursue their fantasies about Paris. This is made apparent in a rather dubious joke:

      A man confesses to his male friend: “I’m off to Paris!”, his friend replies: “You bastard!” The man about to set off corrects him: “No, I’m not going on my own! I’m going with my wife!”; “You stupid bastard!” his friend immediately counters.

      What does one expect to find in Paris that can’t be found in any other city nowadays? What is so special about its history that has given rise to this myth? In 1896, Pierre Louys made two comments in the foreword to his novel Aphrodite:

      It seems that the genius of nations, as well as individuals, is, above all, sensual. All the cities that have ruled the world – Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Venice, and Paris – have, as if following a universal rule, been all the more powerful according to how dissolute they were, as if their licentiousness were essential to their glory. Those cities, whose law-makers strove for an artificial, narrow-minded, and unproductive virtuousness, saw themselves condemned to destruction from day one.

      Apart from Paris, the splendour of the other cities has long since faded. Paris, however, still has a magnificent allure. Accordingly, we will need to pursue the “history of sensuality” in order to explain what historical experiences have gone into our image of Paris as the “world’s most immoral city”.

      These historical experiences have also left their mark on the history of erotic literature and erotic art. We cannot separate this aesthetic area from the sensual one. Cultural history lives on in collector’s items that can often be found in museums today.

      Comments and assessments made by foreign visitors to Paris will also always be of interest to us. As travellers they will have carried Paris’ reputation out into the wide world and thus helped to create the myth of Paris – in a double sense, for they have often come to the city not only as distanced visitors, but also as involved, participating observers, in search of pleasures not found at home. To this extent the reputation of an “immoral Paris” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In allowing themselves to act out their illicit fantasies there, they could, upon their return and from the comfort of their own homes, condemn them as “licentious”, and thus restore their inner “moral harmony”.

      The erotic myth of Paris has been fed by two different sources – not only the concrete developments in moral history whose main features we have attempted to outline here, but also by the fantasies which, especially from the 19^th century onwards, have been projected onto Paris. This myth is an amalgam of fantasy and reality. And anyone who understands it properly will always find a certain sensuous open-mindedness in it. Paris is not a city for moralists.

      Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Arc de Triomphe, 1904.

      Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,No. 19 – La Bastille, 1904.

      Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,No. 21 – La Grande Roue (The Ferris Wheel), 1904.

      Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Place Vendôme, 1904.

      Coloured lithograph, c. 1940.

      The Parisienne – a Chimera?

      “The Parisienne [Parisian woman] is the undisputed mistress of the city – now as ever, the city owes all its allure to her. To convince yourself of this, all you need do is go to the races or the parks, to stroll along the Avenue, the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de la Paix or along the boulevards – or even wander through the working-class districts. Everywhere you go, the Parisienne is a feast for the eyes, and nothing is safe from her influence… Strangers to Paris are soon in for quite a shock for the eyes, as there is little difference in the way a wealthy woman, a petite bourgeoise, a salaried employee, or a working-class woman dress. Whilst in every other city in the world you can almost always tell at once a passing woman’s social class and income, in Paris this is extremely difficult. Even ordinary workaday women and girls look stylish and tasteful, always dressing in the latest fashion. How they manage this is their secret.”

      These words open Pierre la Mazière’s essay on “The Parisienne and her World”. But what are her characteristic qualities? What constitutes that “certain something” particular to the Parisienne, which accounts for her special charm? La Mazière answers the question as follows: “A unique mixture of sensibility and subtlety, of humour and grace, of good taste and sensitivity to nuance – but first and foremost an ability to make her body, her face, her whole personality into a work of art and – like no other woman in the world – her skill in wearing only the clothes that suit her… She exudes the loveliest gift that heaven has given her – her superiority – her genius!” Her fashionable elegance is constantly mentioned.

      But her attraction is not limited to fashion-consciousness. She is surrounded by an erotic flair, something often misinterpreted as frivolity or casualness. First and foremost the Parisienne is a work of art, an artefact created in the heads of other people who long to meet her. In her, being a woman becomes something of a fetish: “On every step of the social ladder a woman in Paris is a hundred times more a woman than in any other city in the world,” Octave Uzanne writes in his study The Parisienne (Dresden, 1925). Uzanne continues:

      People have written more thoughts, paradoxes, aphorisms, treatises, physiologies, and books both thin and thick on the Parisienne than they ever have about any other woman on earth. Thanks to the Parisienne, for all artists and lovers, streets in Paris turn into a magical Eden of sudden desires, of lightning acts of worship, and strange adventures… The man who has learnt how to gape long and lovingly can, at any stage of life, refresh himself just by looking, admiring, approaching, and overhearing these pretty female walkers with their lively glances and well-scrubbed faces. His enamoured spirit constantly serenades these graceful daughters of Eve, whom he may never get to know, and his senses remain pleasantly aroused long past manhood’s curfew and twilight hour.