A collection of documents on the policing of homosexuality in 18th-century Paris, is published by Penn State University Press. The editor/author is Jeffrey Merrick, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
The book is part of a wider project hosted by Colorado College which aims to make widely accessible the records amassed by eighteenth-century Paris police concerning same-sex activity.
Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or similar acts in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. These remarkable documents, curated and translated into English by Jeffrey Merrick, allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions about sources, patterns, and meanings in the history of sexuality.....
This volume centers on two cartons of paperwork from commissaire Charles Convers Desormeaux. Dated from 1785, the cartons contain 221 dossiers of men arrested for sodomy or similar acts in Paris. Merrick translates and annotates the police interviews from these dossiers, revealing how the police and those they arrested understood sex between men at the time.
New Book | Policing Same-Sex Relations in Eighteenth-Century Paris | Enfilade (enfilade18thc.com)
"Policing Male Homosexuality in 18th-Century Paris" - Project website
Jeffrey Merrick's previous book on the subject, published in 2013:
Homosexuality in French History and Culture - Jeffrey Merrick, Michael Sibalis - Google Books
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