queer masculinities

Michael Sibalis: France 227
representatives,’ his sexual practices ought not to be subject to legal
restraint: ‘I can dispose of my property, whatever it is, according to my
taste and whims. Now my cock and balls belong to me and whether …
I put them in a cunt or an ass, no one has the right to complain.’ 77 But
it would be naive to believe (as the editors of one anthology do) that
pamphlets like this one represent ‘the first time lesbians and gay men
organized as such to address a national government’ and to claim their
rights. 78 Such pamphlets were satirical, pornographic and, if anything,
politically counter-revolutionary. They implied that the French
Revolution and its principles had subverted the natural order. Even so,
they were premonitory. In the autumn of 1791, the National
Constituent Assembly passed a new penal code that decriminalized
sodomy, along with other ‘phoney offenses, created by superstition’
(meaning religion) like blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege, witchcraft, bestiality
and incest. 79 The Revolution opened the modern era in which,
whatever social opprobrium French homosexuals might still encounter
in their daily lives, they need no longer fear legal penalties.
Notes
1 Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime: Royaume de France XVIe–XVIIIe siècle, ed.
Lucien Bély (Paris: PUF, 1996).
2 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ‘Pourquoi le Pacs contredit l’héritage judéochrétien’,
Le Figaro, 19 Oct. 1998.
3 Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, ed. Jeffrey
Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
4 Claude Courouve, Vocabulaire de l’homosexualité masculine (Paris: Payot,
1985).
5 Antoine Bruneau, Observations et maximes sur les matières criminelles (Paris:
Guillaume Cavelier, 1715), 403, translated in Merrick and Ragan,
Homosexuality in Early Modern France, 18–19.
6 Claude Courouve, ‘Sodomy Trials in France’, Gay Books Bulletin 1
(1979):22–3, 26. According to Alfred Soman, ‘The Parlement of Paris and
the Great Witch Hunt’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 9/2 (1978):36, n. 7, the
Paris parlement, whose jurisdiction covered half of France, heard 176 appeals
in cases of sodomy between 1565 and 1640 alone, and confirmed 77 of 121
death sentences imposed by lower courts.
7 Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. fr. 10969–10970, ‘Procès faits à divers
sodomites jugés au Parlement de Paris.’ See excerpts in Ludovico
Hernandez, Les procès de sodomie au XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris:
Bibliothèque des curieux, 1920).
8 Alfred Soman, ‘Pathologie historique: le témoignage des procès de bestialité
aux XVIe–XVIIe siècles,’ in his Sorcellerie et Justice Criminelle (16e–18e siècles)
(Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, 1992), 160–1.