queer masculinities

212 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
Records of repression
In strict legal terms, sodomy was any sexual act not leading to procreation,
including fellation, anal intercourse and even bestiality. In
common usage, however, sodomy meant sexual relations between two
persons of the same sex (usually male). Men who engaged in sodomy
were ‘sodomites’ or (more rarely) ‘buggers’. By the latter half of the
eighteenth century, ‘pederasts’ (with no connotation of cross-generational
sex) had become the more usual term. People also used
euphemisms like ‘vile creatures’ (infâmes) or (more humourously) ‘men
of the cuff’ (gens de la manchette) or ‘knights of the cuff’ (chevaliers de la
manchette), possibly an allusion to the fancy cuffs worn by effeminate
aristocrats. Homosexuality (the word dates only from 1869) was then
called sodomy, buggery, pederasty or even ‘the philosophical sin’,
because of either the alleged practices of ancient Greek philosophers or
the supposedly lax morality of Enlightenment thinkers who rejected
Church teachings. Homosexual acts were ‘anti-physical’, which is to
say outside the natural order; by extension this made homosexuals
‘anti-physicals’. 4
French jurists considered sodomy a heinous a crime that deserved
the severest punishment. According to one legal text from 1715, ‘The
penalty for sodomy could not be strong enough to expiate a crime that
makes nature blush, to put the active one and the passive one to death
by fire that consumes them and have the ashes thrown to the wind.’ 5
In practice, however, French law courts tried sodomites infrequently
and rarely imposed the death sentence. Claude Courouve has counted
only 53 sodomy trials in France between 1317 and 1783 and only 39
executions for sodomy (of 66 men charged). His figures are undoubtedly
incomplete, but harsh repression was the exception rather than
the rule. 6
Prosecutions of sodomites produced trial records, but few survive.
Some records may have been burned along with the condemned –
apparently a customary practice – and others simply thrown out over
the centuries. In the eighteenth century, somebody put together two
manuscript volumes comprising the recopied records of ‘trials of
diverse sodomites judged before the parlement of Paris’, which was the
highest law court for half the country. The first transcribes the records
of ten cases of sodomy (in addition to cases of incest, bestiality, etc.)
tried between 1540 and 1692; the second deals entirely with the celebrated
sodomite Benjamin Deschauffours, burned in 1726 for abducting,
selling and sometimes murdering boys. 7 Historians have often