Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (29 page)

The evidence against de Viau consisted of his poems as well as rumors of his own promiscuous behavior. The hearsay about his debauchery was easily disproved, but the “sodomite sonnet,” as Garasse called it, was there in black and white. De Viau had also written another sonnet containing a line—“And you will jack off my lance”—that prosecutors argued was an invitation by the author to another man to masturbate him. De Viau argued that the speakers in his poems were products of his imagination, not records of his own experiences: “To write a verse about sodomy doesn’t make a man guilty of the deed; poet and pederast are two different occupations.” His defense was taken more seriously than might have been expected, and as there was no direct proof that he had actually committed sodomy, he was banished and not executed. Nevertheless, his years in the underground dungeon had ruined his health. He died the following year.

Other than weakening de Viau to the point of death, the
Le Parnasse
trials accomplished several ends. First, they affirmed the role of the French civil (as opposed to religious) authorities to punish people for pornography. Garasse was responsible for instigating de Viau’s retrial, but his role was limited to whining, not judging or sentencing. The trials also made the explicit naming of body parts illegal. The publisher’s replacement of the word “prick” with a single letter highlighted the fact that the penis was dirty enough not to be named, but by leaving the word for “ass” intact, and implying that it was there to be penetrated,
Le Parnasse
had gone too far. The trials also put authors squarely at risk for obscenity prosecutions. De Viau had had no idea his sonnet would be published in
Le Parnasse
, and in fact he had lodged a complaint against the bookseller who printed it. Nevertheless, it was de Viau himself who paid the price. Indeed, while he was incarcerated, the publisher capitalized on a good marketing opportunity and put out another edition.

THE NEXT MILESTONE in obscenity suppression, in 1655, involved a work that did much more than simply recite dirty words.
L’École des filles
(literally “the school for girls” but translated into English in the eighteenth century as
The School of Venus
) made the act of reading a sexual (i.e., masturbatory) experience.
L’École
was one of the first of what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called, in his
Confessions
, “those dangerous books . . . that can only be read with one hand.” Its tremendous international success reflected the public’s craving for longer, more detailed, and more purely fantasy-inducing texts. It had none of the social commentary or blasphemy of its predecessors, though it did not contain the violent and kinky stuff that infused so much later pornography, either. Rather,
L’École
occupied a safe, middle-class world far from religion and politics. The book’s sexual actors were neither whores nor aristocrats. They were girls next door, well raised but ready to abandon themselves and more than happy to repeat the magic words “cock,” “cunt,” and “ass” as long as the printer’s ink supply lasted.

The “school” of the title is a girl’s bedroom in a bourgeois French house, where two intimate dialogues unfold between the beautiful sixteen-year-old maiden Fanchon and Suzanne, her experienced cousin. Suzanne has been recruited by a young man named Robinet (meaning, appropriately, “faucet”) to impart some basic sexual knowledge to Fanchon, whom he fancies. Fanchon has been raised in such perfect innocence that she is unable to understand what Robinet wants from her, or why he “sighs” and “groans” when they are together. Suzanne tutors her admirably. In the first dialogue, she gives Fanchon thorough, detailed descriptions of male and female sexual equipment and of how it is used to “arouse the greatest excitement and pleasure in the world.” By the time the conversation is complete, Fanchon is primed and ready to make use of Robinet’s “good, stout weapon.” Suzanne exits the room and Robinet enters, finding Fanchon on the bed, her heart pounding.

By the start of the second dialogue, Fanchon is innocent no more. She recounts every adventurous detail of her sexual experiences with Robinet. “It is the only thing in the world worth doing, love,” she confides, adding that every day she grows “bolder and bolder, my fucking friend assuring me he will so well instruct me that I shall be fit for the embraces of a king.” She continues:

I believe we were created for fucking, and when we begin to fuck we begin to live . . . Heretofore, what was I good for but to hold my head down and sew? Now nothing comes amiss to me. I can hold an argument on any subject.

Suzanne is impressed with Fanchon’s new attitude, observing that Robinet “must be a good fuckster” and confessing that she was becoming “mad for fucking” just hearing her pupil’s stories. And so on.

L’École
was clandestinely printed without government approval in Paris. The police learned that the book’s promoters, Jean L’Ange and Michel Millot, had copies of the work and had begun selling it. L’Ange was arrested at his rented room, and all his copies of the book were confiscated. The police then went to Millot’s residence, where they found a pile of books—but somehow Millot escaped and fled Paris. (Whether his thugs had overpowered the police, as the officer on the scene reported, or whether he paid them off is still the subject of some doubt.) Millot’s absence made it easy to pin
L’École
’s authorship on him. At the end of a trial for conduct “contrary to good morals,” he was hanged and burned in effigy on Paris’s Pont Neuf along with copies of the book. L’Ange was forced to do penance, fined, and banned from Paris for five years.

The spectacle of a man-sized dummy being set alight for writing a sex book is likely to have appeared rather silly to spectators. Everyone knew the monarchy had thus far failed to ban undesirable books, and a little bonfire did not look like success. Paris’s seventy-five or so printers had churned out seditious political pamphlets for decades by that point, ignoring laws aimed at controlling the printing trade—such as the 1629 declaration by Louis XIII that the state had the right to censor books prior to publication, including those that “corrupted” morals. Paris was awash in unapproved books and pamphlets. The prosecution of L’Ange and Millot in the same manner reserved for politically subversive writers only highlighted the government’s ineptitude.

The book burning on the Pont Neuf was also incomplete: Eight or nine manuscripts had already been distributed, and would soon be reprinted and smuggled throughout Europe. The dirty talk between Suzanne and Fanchon became an underground classic. In 1661, corruption proceedings against Louis XIV’s finance minister Nicolas Fouquet revealed that he kept his copy of
L’École
hidden in a locked table in a secret room he maintained for his mistress. Later, in 1668, the English diarist and serial adulterer Samuel Pepys inspected the book in a London shop and found it “the most bawdy, lewd book I ever saw.” A few weeks later he went back to the store, where he stayed for three hours to read the book again. Finally, Pepys bought himself a cheap edition, reasoning that he needed to “inform” himself of the “villainy of the world.” He spent the next day reading through
L’École
twice more—and achieving at least one orgasm. Pepys burned the book the next day, writing in his diary that he was ashamed to have the book in his collection.

Pepys had conflicted feelings about
L’École des filles
, but at least he did not have to purchase the “idle, roguish book” under the counter. Had he tried to buy it a few years later, though, it would have been much more difficult: In 1677, a London bookseller was forced to close for selling the book in French, not long before another bookseller and a printer were fined for putting out an English translation. The penalties must have been quite mild, however, as both booksellers were charged for the same offenses the following year.
⁸

FOR MOST OF the seventeenth century, wrist-slap punishments were common in England for smut peddlers. This is not to say there was a free marketplace of ideas related to sex, only that the government’s fury was reserved for troublemaking political or religious material. By contrast, a Protestant cleric was flogged in 1686 for writing a tract urging his coreligionists not to fight for a Catholic cause, and a nineteen-year-old boy was hanged some time later for printing a subversive leaflet. After the ascension of Charles II to the throne in 1660—a monarch of a more liberal bent, as noted earlier—indecency received an informal royal imprimatur. The shows at London’s newly reopened theaters were bawdier and more explicit than ever, to the great pleasure of the king. Much of the erotic material being circulated lampooned sexual activity at the court.

In the late seventeenth century, English obscenity law entered its formative stages. One colorful 1663 court case would lay the foundation for legal action against pornographers in the coming decades, though in a rather unpredictable way. It began at the Cock Tavern in London’s Bow Street, where roguish nobleman and member of Parliament Sir Charles Sedley was drinking with his mates. After a few too many, they went out onto a balcony and dropped their trousers. According to a contemporary account, the men then “excrementised in the street. Which being done, Sedley stripped himself naked, and with eloquence preached blasphemy to the people. Whereupon a riot being raised, the people became very clamorous.” Sedley was brought into court, where a judge ordered a heavy fine. Sedley observed that he must have been the “first man that paid for shitting.” (Charles II himself loaned Sedley the money to pay the fine.) Sixty years later, in 1724, Sedley’s conviction gave a London court the precedent it needed to hold a man guilty for publishing two books of pornography. The judge found that the books dirtied up public morals and disturbed the peace just as Sedley had done by “exrementising” off a balcony. The publisher was fined and pilloried, although public opinion seemed to be on his side. No one threw anything at him while he was in the stocks, and after he was freed supporters took him to a tavern.
⁹

PESTIFEROUS, PESTILENTIAL, UNNAMEABLE CRIMES: SODOMY, WITCHCRAFT, AND GOATS

Pepys’s libido was unusually powerful—he could bring himself to orgasm by just thinking about sex—and his diary, eccentricities notwithstanding, is a fascinating peek into English middle-class sexual habits of the late 1600s. The Navy Office bureaucrat’s methods for getting sex were typical, especially his repeated demands for favors from female subordinates. Tavern girls, friends’ wives and daughters, almost any female over whom he had some power were game. One seaman’s wife came to Pepys several times seeking a promotion for her husband. The seaman got the job, but only after his wife masturbated Pepys in a moving coach and allowed him to kiss her breasts and grope her under her skirt. The chambermaids who combed the lice out of Pepys’s hair and helped him dress could expect his hands to travel up their legs while they worked. At the same time, he expressed no shock when his own patron, Lord Sandwich, tried to seduce his wife—that was Sandwich’s prerogative.

Pepys was shocked by the stories about Charles II’s exploits, although the diarist frequently engaged in similar behavior. There were also rumors of homosexual horseplay at court, and Pepys would undoubtedly have had opportunities to experiment in that direction too, but for him sex was an exclusively heterosexual adventure. In his diary entry for July 1, 1663, Pepys records how he was told that “buggery is now almost grown as common among our gallants as in Italy, and that the very pages of the town begin to complain of their masters for it. But blessed be God, I do not to this day know what is the meaning of this sin.”

This attitude was representative of the time. Male-male sex had been openly discussed since at least the reign of James I (1603–25), whose devotion to his male favorites was well-known. Sodomy was a capital offense in England, but few were anxious to see men put to death for it. Unless same-sex behavior was associated with something more troublesome like sorcery, rape, or bestiality, it was mostly overlooked.

England had made “buggery committed with mankind or beast” a civil offense in 1533 under Henry VIII, but that law was passed more to strike a blow against church power than to make drastic new moves against “sodomites.” The law stripped religious courts of their jurisdiction over buggery cases even when the defendants were clerics themselves. The statute was reaffirmed several times, but for many years few people were prosecuted under it, even when the offenses were clear. In 1541, for example, the headmaster of the prestigious Eton College, Nicholas Udall, was fired for molesting students, but never charged with a crime. Instead he was given a severance package equal to a year’s salary and was eventually installed as the headmaster of a school in Westminster.

It took nearly a century for prosecutions under English antibuggery law to begin, but the luridness of the first prosecutions made up for lost time. In 1622, George Dowdeny of Somersetshire got into bad trouble after he’d pestered a number of his neighbors to have sex with him, possibly raped a boy, and took unnatural liberties with a neighbor’s horse. The exact outcome of Dowdeny’s case is not known, but given his penchant for bestiality it seems clear that there were few people ready to defend him. According to the depositions, it was his attraction to farm animals rather than boys or men that caused the most horror.

The first known major prosecution under the antibuggery law was against Mervin Touchet, the second Earl of Castlehaven, although homosexual sex made up only part of the case. In April 1631, Castlehaven was convicted of sodomizing one of his servants and helping another to rape his wife. The earl had given prosecutors a lot to work with: The evidence showed that he had regularly sodomized several male household staff members, and pressured one of them into committing the rape. Perhaps worst of all, he had expressed his intent to leave his fortune to a favored male servant at the expense of his eldest son, James.