And in the spring of 1946, the loi Marthe Richard was passed, set to take effect in October, legislation outlawing the legal brothels, which had operated in France since 1804, and pimping, while allowing prostitution itself to remain a lawful activity. Since there were some 7,000 registered prostitutes in France there were justified fears that the law would simply swell the number of those working illegally on the streets and disease would spread. Richard herself, like the new law, was controversial. A former prostitute, she may even have been a double agent, who had spent months profiting in Vichy eventually returning to Paris where it was said that she procured girls for evenings attended by Germans, practised some small-time swindling and eventually joined the resistance, just in time. She became a councillor in 1945 and worked to promote the anti-brothel laws, but her motives seemed dubious to many who saw the new law as an attack on French culture. Among those who lamented the end of the grand Parisian maisons closes was the British Ambassador, Duff Cooper – and some commentators believed that, at a time when France was suffering shortages of everything from electricity to potatoes, this should not have been a priority. Was ‘Gay Paree’, the world’s capital of pleasure, succumbing to post-war prudery?
But there were other motives behind the change in the law. One was that the existing system, with its myriad rules and inspections, was open to police abuse and corruption. More significantly, the brothels had flourished during the Occupation, as Fabienne Jamet, owner of one of the most notorious, the One Two Two, recalled: ‘I’m almost ashamed at having to admit that I’d never had such a good time in my life … Those nights of the Occupation were truly fantastic … The brothels of France were never as well run and kept as while they [the Germans] were here.’ It was not that the girls themselves or even the madams were pro-Nazi or collaborators. A few of the best-known houses had been requisitioned exclusively for officers’ use and so the girls who worked there had no choice. But the whole industry was tainted and it was well known that those who wanted the brothels closed down included such bizarre bedfellows as the communists and the de Gaulles. Even though he was no longer in power by the time the law was passed, the General and especially his wife Yvonne loathed the very idea of state-approved brothels in post-war France.
Clearly, closing the brothels was not about supporting women. It had more to do with trying to establish normality in Paris and other cities, and not allowing the Americans to dictate how the city functioned. Just like the Germans before them, American soldiers saw Paris as one ‘tremendous brothel’, to quote Life magazine’s reporter Joe Weston. But there was one critical difference: the Germans had regulated the brothels used by their officers, keeping prostitutes under strict medical supervision with weekly doctors’ visits to ensure that, in an era when penicillin was not widely available, their men were not infected by syphilis. In the chaotic post-Liberation months the system floundered, as the French could recruit neither adequate medical care nor sufficient police oversight in the face of what came to be known as the ‘silver foxhole’, a magnet for GIs on leave serviced by women and girls from all over France flocking to the big city hoping to make money. According to Mary Louise Roberts, the author of What Soldiers Do, a study of sex and the American GI in France in the Second World War, the French did make an attempt to introduce rudimentary government medical care, which the prostitutes did their best to avoid. ‘The treatment awaiting them was at best ineffective, at worst physical torture. Examinations were given under poor lighting and in unsanitary conditions. Often no effort was made to wash the speculum in between examinations, or for that matter to change the linen and the pot of Vaseline. The sickest of the women ended up in locked hospital wards, where nuns did their best to wage a battle against alcohol, bad language, and lesbian sex.’
When American military authorities first took over the Petit Palais, a beautiful 1900 exhibition centre in the centre of Paris, one of the first things they did was put up a large sign announcing distribution of free condoms to US troops. The US military did not really care if a GI had sex with a French woman. What it did care a great deal about was that a soldier did not contract a venereal disease. But the men themselves, who faced violent death every day, were not easily scared by the threat of a curable infection. Since the authorities in 1944 could neither ban brothels nor monitor the hygiene of individual French women, they tried to manage with enormous stocks of condoms. But because supplies could not be well organized behind a rapidly moving army, condoms were often nonexistent and army-issue products generated an endless stream of complaints. Furthermore, some American officers concluded that trying to control the sexual behaviour of a soldier ‘operating in a place like France … was tantamount to making him eat raw carrots in a steakhouse’.
‘In both popular American culture and high diplomatic and military circles, the whore came to represent “Frenchness” itself,’ explains Roberts, and selling her body was seen as part of a broader French subservience to American money and power.
Some American soldiers behaved as if, when it came to young French women, anything can be bought. SHAEF’s [Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force] frustration with French regulation and its inability to see French women as infected as well as infectious had a significant impact on Franco-American relations. Besides reinforcing American prejudices about France as decadent, the ‘problem’ of VD inspired further condescension, invited American intervention into French affairs, and naturalised the army’s ‘right’ to manage the freedom of the civilian population … The supposedly ‘infectious’ body of the prostitute became the site of a power struggle, but it operated at a more symbolic level as well.