Nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois’ society – and it is doubtless still with us – was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion […] It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures. The frozen countenance of the perversions is a fixture of this game. (Foucault 1984: 47–8). It would be difficult to put it better. All historians have in fact asked themselves whether the nineteenth century helped to eroticize sexual pleasures or whether, on the contrary, it encouraged their repression. If we look more closely, we find that, far from being contradictory, the two attitudes are perfectly complementary. And it is their very complementarity that allows us to understand how the stigmata of perversion – if not perversion itself – became an object of study after having been an object of horror. From 1810 onwards, the French Penal Code, which was a product of the Revolution and the Empire, transformed the legislation on sexuality from top to bottom.
