1 The differences in outcome in France between the protest movements of prostitutes in the spring of 1975 and the fall of 2002 prove, if any such proof is still needed, that similar causes do not necessarily produce the same effects in the social world. The basic identities behind these two mobilizations were, however, roughly the same, and can be summarized as follows: a predominantly female group of people who were socially stigmatized because of their sexual deviance—their involvement in prostitution—who, 27 years apart, found themselves exposed to police repression and sought to mobilize against it on both occasions. During the first occurrence, the protest movement immediately garnered broad support from the feminist movement, whereas its second edition followed a completely different course. Not only did a majority of feminists refuse to support the prostitutes’ cause on the second occasion, but the focus of debate shifted from challenging police repression to a controversial debate about the very existence of prostitution itself, and about the legitimacy of the people who practice this “profession” to enter as such in public debate.

2 This article hypothesizes that the principal reason for the process and outcome of these two events being so dissimilar, although the starting premises were so similar, lies in developments over the course of the intervening 27 years that separated the two events both in the area of prostitution itself and in the feminist movement and healthcare and social assistance sector.

1975: “All Prostitutes”?

3 On the morning of June 2 1975, when a hundred prostitutes occupied the church of Saint-Nizier, situated at the heart of the “traditional” red-light district in Lyon, they did not imagine for one moment that they were participating in an event of significant “historic” impact. [1] In fact, the protest they intended to make by occupying this religious site was in response to local issues. Since the scandal of the “pimp police” three years earlier, [2] the local police had indulged in a brutal repression of prostitutes. It was not only the new police recruits of the vice squad who seemed determined to show by a firm crackdown that the time of troubled compromises with the world of organized crime had passed, but the entire city police force from then on had the right to monitor and, above all, to repress prostitution. Constrained to meet their clients in the street as a result of the closure of prostitute hotels, prostitutes had become more visible and therefore more exposed to being charged for passive solicitation by the police on an increasingly regular basis. There were also frequent raids and prostitute arrests in such a way that there was an ever-present atmosphere of anxiety reigning in the red-light streets of Lyon.

4 Two factors contributed to the rise in anger on the street, to the point of unleashing an uprising of prostitutes. The first was an increase in the number of assaults. Between the months of March and August 1974, three prostitutes were murdered without the police finding the guilty parties (due to a lack of detective work, according to the victims’ colleagues), nor in any way relaxing their repression. The second was the tabling of a bill to recriminalize passive solicitation in the French Penal Code at the beginning of 1975, which would condemn repeat offenders to prison sentences. The prospect of imprisonment aroused strong emotion among prostitutes who risked having their activities exposed to their relatives in the event of incarceration and having their children taken away from them by the Regional Health and Social Security Department (DDASS).

5 Mobilized around the slogan, “our children don’t want their mothers to go to prison,” the occupation of the Saint-Nizier church immediately attracted attention that largely surpassed the hopes of even the most optimistic of the prostitutes. Not only did the church become the center of media attention, but the prostitutes’ cause gained support from the entire spectrum of left-leaning and far-left trade unions, non-governmental organizations, and political movements. Moreover, prostitutes from other French cities (notably Paris, Marseille and Grenoble) identified with their fight and also began to occupy religious buildings. This rallying led to a noticeable change in demands: in addition to the protests of the Lyon prostitutes against police harassment, Parisian prostitutes now sought access to social security and the decriminalization of some forms of solicitation. Having remained deaf for over one week to the prostitutes’ requests for talks, the government of Jacques Chirac ordered their eviction by the police, thus ending the church occupations, in addition to commissioning a fact-finding mission on “the human problems of prostitutes” presided over by Judge Guy Pinot. Submitted to the government at the end of 1975, and while it was consensual and sensitive to the prostitutes’ sufferings, the report did not, however, offer any concrete solution. Unable to establish an organization to engage in a long-term combat and weakened by the defection of its main leaders Ulla and Barbara, the prostitute protest movement came to an end in the spring of 1976.

6 The mobilization of a sector of the population as devoid of political skills or tradition as prostitutes could not have seen the light of day without the support of battle-hardened activists willing to lend their knowledge to the cause. The prostitutes found this decisive support in the form of activists from the abolitionist association Mouvement du Nid. [3]While the Nid was indeed working for a world without prostitution, its members hoped that a campaign would help the prostitutes become aware that their profession is alienating, thereby encouraging them to abandon the activity. By contrast, feminists took no part in the preparation for the church occupation. Unlike the activists from the Nid, they had no prior contact with the prostitutes, and thus joined the action and gave their support only after the protest movement was launched. For the feminist movement, who over the preceding months had been focused on legalizing abortion, prostitution constituted a rarely-debated subject but one that it was impossible not to be drawn into.

7 Left to “jump on the bandwagon,” as one activist from Lyon put it in an interview, the feminists struggled to draw up a clear position on a subject they knew little about. Moreover, they were faced with demands from the prostitutes that conflicted with their own conceptions of women’s sexuality and autonomy: “What the women of Saint-Nizier wanted was not the same as what we wanted. We didn’t know if we had to support the prostitutes’ fight just like that, or if it was better to actually express our own positions on prostitution, even if it meant that they were contradictory. In short, they wanted to practice their job in good conditions and we wanted, even if we weren’t able to say it, the eradication of this job” (cited in Clef 1989, 66). Nevertheless, this difference in values did not stop the feminists from supporting the prostitutes by linking their fight to the wider feminist cause. [4] Both over the course of the church occupations (where the Parisians received a visit of support from Simone de Beauvoir) and following their eviction (the Family Planning association, for example, took over the organization of the Assises nationales de la prostitution in the fall at the Mutualité conference center in Paris), the prostitutes could count on the solid support of the feminists—so much so that the Mouvement du Nid was reduced to a minor role, leading to accusations of hijacking on its part.

2002: Perpetrators, Victims or Workers?

8 We can trace the beginning of the recent debate on prostitution in France to the evening of May 8 2002, when, followed by a TV crew, new Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy participated in a strong-arm police operation on the streets of the seventeenth arrondissement in Paris. The intent of this operation, which came in the wake of a presidential campaign dominated by the subject of insecurity, was clear: prostitution and its associated problems (which vexed residents in red-light districts, who were increasingly joining together to make their discontent heard) are clearly matters of crime and, therefore, had to be addressed as such. The Minister announced that a bill he was preparing on domestic security would include provisions authorizing the deportation of foreign prostitutes guilty of solicitation, and that the crime of passive solicitation, withdrawn from the Penal Code in1994, would be reintroduced, thus exposing its perpetrators to prison terms and hefty fines.

9 Reactions to this announcement did not take long to arrive and the question of prostitution, which had been relatively absent for several years, [5] once again became an issue in political debate during the summer. For example, UMP Deputy for Paris Françoise de Panafieu caused a sensation in the Journal du dimanche of June 30, 2002 by proposing a “reopening of brothels,” which, in her opinion, would help regulate and monitor prostitution activity while keeping its most shocking public facets hidden. This proposal incited immediate indignation from the left, and in particular from Christophe Caresche, Deputy Mayor of Paris responsible for security, who condemned her “cynicism” and declared himself in favor of a penalization of the clients of prostitutes for a simple reason: “There are prostitutes because there is demand. If we eliminate this demand, supply will weaken.” [6]

10 Unable to wait for a positive opinion to develop in favor of one or the other of these two options, nor for the provisions of the “Sarkozy Bill” to come into force, the mayors of several towns, often under pressure from residents’ associations, took the initiative and adopted municipal by-laws banning prostitution. The municipality of Orléans was the first to adopt such a by-law, soon followed by those of Strasbourg, Metz and Aix-en-Provence. On July 29,the city council of Lyon, under Socialist Mayor Gérard Collomb, issued a by-law prohibiting prostitutionin a large portion of the city’s urban area. Such a decision took on special significance. This time, it was a left-leaning municipality that engaged in a repressive policy on prostitution, illustrating the spreading of the security ideology beyond the traditional political divide.

11 As soon as it was passed, the Lyon by-law gave rise to controversy within the municipal authority, where the measure’s “brutality” was denounced. However, protestation was most vehement among non-governmental organizations. For example, Cabiria, an association for the prevention of AIDS among prostitutes, denounced the city council for “attacking the weakest people and [. . .] making them even more fragile. By removing them from the public eye, the mayor is wiping his conscience clean. However, in being pushed to the city’s outskirts, these women will become more vulnerable and their position even more precarious.” [7] 27 years after the occupation of the Saint-Nizier church, it was once again in Lyon that the first signs of collective resistance by prostitutes against repression appeared. Encouraged by Cabiria, which conducted a community health campaign to which several prostitutes made direct contributions, around 40 prostitutes gathered in front of the Lyon city hall on August 13.Anxious to keep their anonymity, several of them wore masks. The gathering, while significant in terms of numbers, given the reticence of the group concerned to undertake public action, was not enough to lead the mayor to repeal his decision.

12 Parliamentary debate on the domestic security law then gave the prostitutes’ protest a national dimension. A demonstration against the Sarkozy Bill, which the Senate had just begun to examine, was organized for November 5 in response to calls from the Prostitutes’ Collective of Paris, PASTT, [8] the Paris Greens, ACT UP Paris, and Cabiria. According to Le Monde of the following day, the event brought together “a few hundred” male and female prostitutes, most of whom wearing masks, as well as several activist associations, including many involved in the fight against AIDS. Although this demonstration gained widespread media coverage, and a delegation of six prostitutes and activist organizations met with Communist and Socialist groups in the Senate, it was hotly contested within the feminist and abolitionist movements. The Mouvement du Nid was reportedly “shocked” by the demonstration, deeming it to be “really sad to see these girls attaching their identity to prostitution.” [9] However, although allied to the prostitutes’ cause in 1975 (though not without internal dissension—cf. Mathieu 2001, 55), the Nid refused to support the mobilization against police repression on this occasion and denounced it as an attempt to legitimize prostitution.

13 The abolitionists were not the only allies who had been present alongside the prostitutes in 1975 but not aligned with them 27 years later: the feminists—or at least a large number among them—also declined to show solidarity in their struggle. Certainly, the feminists were not indifferent to the repression authorized by the Sarkozy Bill, and they also denounced the recriminalization of passive solicitation and the deportation of foreign prostitutes. Nevertheless, they refused to side with the prostitutes’ demonstration because the feminists found some of their claims unacceptable, such as the official recognition of prostitution as a profession, and the legitimacy of their spokespersons was doubted as they were strongly suspected to have been manipulated by procurers.

14 Fundamentally, the feminists viewed prostitution as violence against women and those who engaged in the activity as victims of a patriarchal system. [10] The inability of the prostitutes and feminists to unite was reflected most strikingly by a demonstration organized by the French National Collective for the Rights of Women on December 10 and built on a three-pronged slogan: “No to the prostitution system, no to the Sarkozy Bill, yes to a world without prostitution.” The march, which passed through several red-light districts of Paris and assembled several hundred female protesters behind a banner proclaiming that “human beings are not commodities,” also comprised around 30 masked prostitutes, who distributed a leaflet denouncing what they considered to be feminist hostility against them. That same day in the newspaper Libération, Claudia, head of the recently founded organization France Prostitution, asserted that “these feminists who have fought for the free disposal of their bodies want to take this right away from us, on the pretext that we do it for mercenary reasons. We have to ask ourselves who are our allies and who are our enemies.”

15 United in 1975, feminists and prostitutes were unable to find common ground when the time came to once again contest police repression, and the Interior Minister was able to impose the law much more easily since there was no united opposition front. So, while the feminist abolitionists clashed with prostitutes’ rights campaigners, the French Parliament passed the Domestic Security Law, providing for a two-month prison term and fines of 3,750 euros for passive solicitation. In addition, convicted foreign prostitutes were now liable to deportation.

The Growing Precariousness of Prostitution

16 The different outcomes of the demonstrations of 1975 and 2002 are in part related to important sociological and demographic transformations that occurred in the area of prostitution and which particularly affected the ability of prostitutes both to mobilize collectively and to form alliances with those able to provide the political resources.

17 In the mid-1970s, the prostitution demographic was composed almost entirely of females, the vast majority of which were French nationals. Available data from the era (Feschet 1974; Jaget 1975) indicate that prostitutes were mostly young women from working-class backgrounds (according to Feschet, 53% of prostitutes who used social services had a father belonging to the “laborer” or “domestic services” categories) who, afterf amily break-ups—many of them were unmarried mothers—and checkered careers, either became dependent on a procurer or independently entered the profession. The series of accounts published by Jaget (1975) show that prostitution is an activity of last resort, against the backdrop of a labor market closed to unskilled women and inaccessible or insufficient social security services. [11]

18 While it was difficult to estimate the proportion of prostitutes under the control of procurers, available information for the city of Lyon at the time of the Saint-Nizier church occupation paints a picture of a market in the hands of two or three networks with links to organized crime. This situation did not rule out the existence of independent prostitutes, [12] nor that women controlled by procurers had relatively favorable conditions. Working most often in the “hot streets” of city centers—where they were “faces” known to residents—and in a social environment specific to prostitution which enjoyed a relative cohesion, many had their own accommodation (distinct or otherwise from the “studio” where visits took place and which they often owned), and were aware of the health and social welfare measures available to them, which they frequently used. While alcoholism and medication dependency were relatively common, addiction to hard drugs was rare (Coppel et al.1990). However, this relatively favorable situation, compared with that facing a number of prostitutes today, should not create any illusions: these women were already particularly exposed to assaults by clients, police repression, and extortion from procurers.

19 Several important developments took place in the 1980s. First, procurers suffered a relative loss of control as their principal networks, for example in Lyon, [13] were disbanded by the police. Deprived of their main supervisory body, the prostitutes were left to their own devices, which had several consequences. First, there was a desertion of the “traditional” red-light districts, where workers leaving the streets as they aged were not replaced. Then there was an exacerbation of the competition and rivalries between prostitutes, which took a more violent turn: whereas disputes were previously resolved “between men,” prostitutes now found themselves directly in charge of regulating their “market.” Another important development occurred during this time, namely the mass emergence of transvestites and transsexuals. While male prostitution was not a new phenomenon, it had previously remained minor in statistical terms, confined to different areas to those used by women, and restricted to a small clientele. From the 1980s onwards, cross-dressers became more visible in female prostitution areas, and began to capture part of the market from their female colleagues. Without a doubt, this also implied a number of violent disputes.

20 Concurrently, a new type of prostitution emerged in the form of hard-drug addicts. Mainly female, this group was characterized by its extreme precariousness. Often without fixed abode and suffering poor health, they tried to survive in the short term by prostituting themselves at low prices. The areas they worked in were not the traditional prostitution districts, but more often on the side of major roads where conditions for practicing their trade were more precarious and dangerous. As they tended not to recognize themselves as prostitutes—rather more as addicts—and seldom had any contact with the “older women” who could have passed on their experience, they often ignored the “rules” of what for them was not a “profession” but the only means of rapidly earning the money necessary to obtain the substance on which they were chemically dependent (Coppel et al.1990). Illustrative, within the sphere of prostitution, of the heightened precariousness besetting the most destitute lower-class segments, and therefore prominent in issues of exclusion, this new and particularly vulnerable population to the HIV epidemic became the main target of AIDS prevention organizations created in the early 1990s.

21 The final major transformation in the sphere of prostitution took place in the late 1990s, with the arrival of huge numbers of young female prostitutes, mostly from Eastern European countries and, to a lesser degree, sub-Saharan Africa. The presence in France of groups of foreign prostitutes was not in itself a new phenomenon: the 1970s and the 1980s had also seen waves of transvestites arriving from Latin America, while the first African female sex workers arrived in the early 1990s. The novelty resided more in the origin of these new prostitutes, whose cross-border movement had been made easier following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, as well as by the organized crime networks through which they were trafficked. The brutality of procurers as well as the young ages of the women subjugated to them provoked a strong public outcry, which paved the way for a return of prostitution to the political agenda. Largely driven by the media, the subject of “white slave trafficking,” which had remained forgotten since the start of the 20th century, forced politicians to take concrete measures (particularly in terms of police cooperation at the European level), while new tensions boiled on the streets: viewing them as competitors whose youth would capture their clientele, the “local” prostitutes on occasion tried—mostly in vain—to block the arrival of Eastern European girls (for example in requesting their expulsion by the city prosecutor, as in Lyon, or by street demonstrations, as in Limoges).

22 These developments in the sphere of prostitution seem largely unfavorable to the emergence of a protest movement. While an internally-organized, cohesive, and homogeneous population is better armed to engage in collective action (as was the case in 1975to a certain extent; Oberschall 1973), the world of prostitution was now disorganized and divided into multiple rival factions, women against transvestites, “clean” versus addicts, French against foreigners, and so on (Pryen 1999; Mathieu 2000a).

23 This lack of internal cohesion was reinforced by the growing precariousness in the living conditions of male and female prostitutes, which placed them in a situation of heightened competition for scarce resources. Because short-term survival required immediate responses, individual strategies appeared more viable than collective action to uphold common interests, which had more long-term and uncertain results. Disorganized, and more powerless than 27 years before, prostitutes thus found themselves even more dependent on the support of allies from outside their group when they attempted to confront the Sarkozy Bill. However, the sources of support on which they could rely in 1975 had also undergone some significant changes, which largely affected their ability to help.

Competition in the Social Assistance Sector

24 Since 1960 and its ratification of the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, France has been an abolitionist country which, while not criminalizing prostitution, has nevertheless considered it as a social wrong. As a result, specialized social services were set up to provide assistance to prostitutes in distress and to help those wishing to abandon the activity. Such mechanisms, based on a social and not a health definition of prostitution, were destabilized by the appearance of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. [14] Faced with the spread of this new sexually-transmitted disease—for which the media were quick to point the finger at prostitutes—social work services as well as abolitionist organizations adopted a defensive attitude. Fearing that the new epidemic would serve as a pretext to reintroduce health controls for prostitutes, they refused to take up the fight against HIV and left this sector of activity to others.

25 Faced with this refusal, the public authorities (in particular the French AIDS Prevention Agency, created in 1989) turned toward new players which were willing to engage in preventative measures yet held radically new views on prostitution and the assistance to be provided to such workers. Stemming from non-government organizations committed to AIDS prevention (in particular the organization AIDES), from the health sector, (primarily nurses), as well as from the world of prostitution itself, these actors created associations reserved for prostitutes to combat AIDS in several cities (Cabiria in Lyon, PASTT and the Bus des femmes in Paris, and so on). A common trait of these associations was that they were composed of both health professionals and prostitutes or ex-prostitutes, who were promoted as agents for prevention because of their experience in practicing prostitution.

26 Because of this original composition (which led them to have a more positive conception of the prostitute experience), but also because they were providing health rather than social services and were giving priority to the most precarious segments of prostitution (addicts in particular), these associations, which saw themselves as belonging to the community health sector, diverged from the abolitionist vision of prostitution. Adopting the view that prostitution was an activity that allowed its workers to earn a living, and that the majority of them did not want (or were unable) to stop practicing it, they saw prostitution more as a profession which, while illegal, nevertheless demanded recognition of its equal dignity. From this perspective, it was no longer prostitution as such that posed the problem, but its stigmatization, which was expressed on a daily basis by multiple discriminatory actions that led to the exclusion of prostitutes. Ending their difficulties and sufferings no longer presupposed eradicating their profession, as advocated by abolitionists, but rather the full recognition and regulation of this activity in order to provide prostitutes with access to the same rights and social benefits as the rest of the population.

27 The views and practices of the AIDS prevention associations immediately provoked an outcry from the abolitionist camp. Both social workers—whose monopoly in providing assistance to prostitutes had come under threat—and abolitionist organizations denounced the community health associations as being party to legitimizing commercial sex that would “play into the hands of international pimping.” Because they sought to improve the living conditions of prostitutes without making their rehabilitation a central issue, they were also accused of allowing them to “better ply their trade” and, ultimately, of “making the practice of prostitution ‘more acceptable’ and ‘secure’.” [15] The Mouvement du Nid was the most vocal in denouncing the AIDS prevention associations and led the remobilization of abolitionism. Thus it also led the initiative to create the European Federation for the Disappearance of Prostitution (FEDIP) in 1996 and to organize the first “European Days” for the prevention of prostitution. [16] In addition, it lent its support to the publication of Le Livre noir de la prostitution in 2000, a sort of resistance manifesto against the “neo-regulationist” leanings of the AIDS prevention associations. The abolitionists also drew support from parts of the feminist movement which saw prostitution as a form of violence against women. This rapprochement between feminists and abolitionists was driven in particular by Association contre les violences faites aux femmes au travail (AVFT, an association against violence toward women at work) followed by Mouvement pour l’abolition de la prostitution et de la pornographie (MAPP, for the abolition of prostitution and pornography). [17] Their initiatives took the form of several appeals lobbying the French State and the European Union to introduce policies to combat prostitution, which was considered as “an offense against women and, through them, human beings.” [18] So toward the end of the 1990s and under this feminist influence, abolitionism—a term that tended increasingly to denote the complete eradication of prostitution rather than its regulation—was asking France to implement repressive policies with regard to prostitutes’ clients in line with the Swedish legal model, which criminalized the purchase of prostitution services in 1999.

28 Thus, the varying positions on prostitution were already entrenched well before the debate surrounding the Sarkozy Bill. Broadly speaking, they comprised two antagonistic groups. The first was composed of the social services, the old abolitionist organizations and feminist strands that viewed prostitution as violence against women. The second was made up primarily of community health associations and the prostitutes who were campaigning for the recognition of their profession. As the debate on prostitution gathered momentum, the second group gained the support of several organizations from the AIDS prevention movement (such as ACT UP) as well as a number of personalities, who, while declaring themselves feminist, advocated a less “miserabilist”—even positive—view of prostitution.

A Rift in the Feminist Movement

29 Competition and divergent views on commercial sex among prostitution aid organizations constitute one of the main explanatory factors of the polarization of recent debate on prostitution. However, they do not explain why feminists, who supported Ulla and her “sisters” in 1975, were so unsupportive for the most part when it came to the prostitutes’ campaign against the Sarkozy Bill.

30 As mentioned above, in 1975 the feminists were caught off-guard by the sudden burst of public debate on a major issue which, nevertheless, directly concerned female sexuality and identity. They had yet to engage in any deep reflection on the issue. In the short term, theirs upport arose from a conviction to immediately rally behind the cause of all dominated people—and even more so when the dominated were women. In addition, for a movement deeply anchored in the political left during those post-1968 years, it provided them an opportunity to deal a blow to a right-leaning government. Nevertheless, the divide felt during the church occupations between the position of the prostitutes, who demanded the right to continue to practice their profession under better conditions, and their own conception of mercenary sex as submission to the patriarchy fuelled feminist thought on the issue in subsequent years.

31 Cahiers du féminisme (1978), a journal written by feminists from the French Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), asserts for example that “prostitution is the place where women live their oppression to the maximum,” but attribute responsibility above all to the “male capitalist society” and posit that “in a real socialist society, that is to say a truly feminist society, prostitution would not exist because the elements necessary for its existence [. . .]would have disappeared” (Cahiers du féminisme,21). The socioeconomic interpretation of prostitution (emphasizing the working-class origin of most prostitutes and their lack of professional qualification) adopted by the LCR feminists led them to reject any official status of prostitution and, instead, to demand “the necessary material means for those who want to leave prostitution” (Cahiers du feminisme, 37). The distancing from prostitutes’ demands is even clearer in Annie Mignard’s “Les propos élémentaires sur la prostitution” published in 1976. Here, the author discredits the prostitute movement from the outset as heteronomous on two accounts. First, it was led by women who were victims of the alienation inherent to prostitution, and, second, they were manipulated by procurers who saw the recognition of this activity as a source of profit. The prostitute uprising was deemed to be deficient, because it was “not carried out against the nature of the service provided to the client, the use of their bodies for money, nor against the props supposedly indebted for their work” (Mignard, 1529), but also counter-productive, since “claiming a status, whatever it may be, is obtaining silence” (Mignard. 1529). Finally, the very existence of prostitution was rejected as a paradigmatic form of male domination: “Why should a certain number of women have to be the trashcans or punching bags of pathetic men who lack any better idea?” (Mignard, 1543).

32 Mignard’s article formed the basis of the French feminist vision of prostitution for a long time, namely one that above all viewed it as a form of sexual violence against women. [19] Thus established, the feminist position on prostitution changed very little in the following years. In particular, this was due to the fact that, as prostitution was no longer in the spotlight, feminists remained relatively disinterested in the issue (in addition to which the feminist movement also suffered loss in numbers). As for feminist intellectuals, they showed as little interest in prostitution as, more generally, in questions of sexuality, being more concerned with issues pertaining to employment, household labor, and political equality. This was reflected in the mid-1980s by the feeble echo in France of the lively debate in the United States on the subject of pornography, and more broadly, sexual politics between radical and libertarian feminists (Ferguson et al.1984; Berger, Searles, Cottle 1990). The former considered sexuality as one of the major spheres of male domination and campaigned for sexuality to be redefined from a female point of view. The latter, on the other hand, fought against the censure imposed by a sexually-repressive patriarchal society, and saw in all forms of sexuality (including pornography, sadomasochism, and prostitution) a form of “liberation,” provided they were exercised freely.

33 In the 1990s, the AIDS epidemic and the formation of community health associations gave rise to renewed interest in prostitution within some strands of French feminism in the 1990s. At the time, the French feminist movement was in defensive mode. As alluded to above, the concept of prostitution as violence against women had been threatened by the much more positive view of mercenary sex espoused by community health associations, and had led to the coalition between abolitionists and feminists. For their part, the community health associations sought out intellectual resources capable of underpinning and legitimizing their positions, which they found in particular in the works of anthropologist Paola Tabet (1987) and sociologist Gail Pheterson (1996). These two feminists’ reflections on prostitution had already fuelled mobilizations of prostitutes in other countries (Mathieu 2001, part two). The spread of their analyses—which posited that the stigma afflicting prostitutes threatens all women attempting to become sexually and economically independent from male power—contributed to both reviving and dividing feminist debate on prostitution in France. [20] For example, the Dictionnaire critique du féminisme contains two articles with different positions on prostitution. The first, written by the abolitionist Claudine Legardinier, asserts that “objectified and therefore subjected to violence, women [here: prostitutes] are reified at the service of men’s unaccountable sexuality” (Legardinier 2000, 162), while the second, written by Gail Pheterson, advances the notion that “for women, prohibition of these phenomena [prostitution and pimping] do not mean [. . .] an end to violence, but rather an increase in social and police control, physical harassment, and economic deprivation” (Pheterson 2000, 169).

34 Several factors, both internal and external to feminist thinking, fed into and consolidated this rift in the late 1990s. The first was something of a materialization of the antagonism between two opposing policies introduced almost simultaneously in Sweden (the criminalization of the prostitute’s client) and the Netherlands (which, in 2010, allowed prostitutes to become employees of henceforth-legalized prostitution establishments). Since the implementation of these policies, debate has centered in large part around these two opposing options. A second factor was the spreading in France of reflections emanating from gay and lesbian studies, as well as queer theory. Close to the “libertarian” strands of North American feminism, to varying degrees of depth and explicitness, this thinking fuelled the positions of the intellectuals who lent their support to the prostitutes during the controversy surrounding the Sarkozy Bill. [21] They also found ideological allies within AIDS prevention movements such as ACT UP, which sought to develop a “minority politics,” that is to say, a politics that considered minorities of all kinds (but especially sexual ones) as potential spearheads of a radical cultural and social transformation. Interest in these currents of thought on gender and its transgression finally gained in significance in an area of prostitution in which, henceforth, transgender individuals (both cross-dressers and transsexuals) occupied an important place. [22]

35 Thus, debate on prostitution during the summer and fall of 2002 in France appeared to crystallize internal rifts in thinking on sexuality: on the one hand feminist intellectuals and activists attentive to issues of violence and domination, and, on the other, those closer to gay and lesbian activism and campaigners for a “libertarian” view of sexual behavior. Played out in the traditional platform of opinion pieces in the press, this debate exacerbated these diverging positions. The “Freedom to prostitute oneself” defended by Daniel Borrillo (Libération, July 5, 2002), the need to “give prostitutes a voice” asserted by Elisabeth Badinter (Le Monde, July 31, 2002), or “free prostitution areas” called for by Marcela Iacub, Catherine Millet and other female writers and artists (Le Monde, January 9,2003) were contested by such opposing views of prostitution as “the paroxysm of non-power of a woman over herself” penned by Gisèle Halimi (Le Monde, July 31, 2002) or as “the touchstone of the patriarchal system” in the words of Marie-Victoire Louis (L’Humanité, February 20, 2003). Potential alternative views struggled to make themselves heard.

36 Ultimately, it could be noted that, in a way, this confrontation confirms the autonomy of the intellectual field and the propensity of those who are part of it to form a uniquely intellectual relationship with the aspects of the social world they debate. In their disagreements over prostitutes’ “freedom” of “choice,” over credibility in siding with their demands, and over the ethical status to confer to the “commodifying of the body,” [23] it was most often forgotten that the debate on prostitution centered around a draft bill—rarely evoked in exchanges—intended to grant the police additional means to repress a sector of the population that was already particularly fragile and precariously placed, and which was the fruit of an ideology that criminalizes poverty.