Item #4820 Arrest de la Cour de Parlement, Qui condamne Marie Madeleine Fougereux […] à être promenée sur un âne, le visage tourné vers la queue…. PROSTITUTION/ LAW.
Arrest de la Cour de Parlement, Qui condamne Marie Madeleine Fougereux […] à être promenée sur un âne, le visage tourné vers la queue…
PROSTITUTION LAW AND PUNISHMENT IN 18th c. PARIS and ORLEANS
Colophon: Paris, Simon, 1780.

Arrest de la Cour de Parlement, Qui condamne Marie Madeleine Fougereux […] à être promenée sur un âne, le visage tourné vers la queue….

4to. 4 pp. Unbound. Minor spotting, but a very good copy.

Extremely rare pamphlet issued by the Parliamentary printer, P. G. Simon, summarizing the scandalous case and fitting punishment of Mme. Fougereux, convicted of having ‘tenu lieu public chez elle depuis un temps considerable’ – of having run a brothel for a considerable amount of time.

 

Amidst the heyday of Enlightenment hedonism, the Court finds Mme. Fougereux guilty on a number of counts: ‘of having received suspect persons; of having unwittingly attracted to her establishment underage girls, unbeknownst to their parents, and of having prostituted them after having seduced them; of having allowed and abetted prostitution under her very nose; and by the debauchery which she allowed at her establishment, of having disturbed the peace and caused scandal’.

           

Included in the summary are charges against three of Mme. Fougereux’s girls, who are also punished ‘for having shared in this debauched lifestyle’. Unlike their mistress, they escape with a 10 livre fine and a warning to ‘be more regular in their future conduct’. Fougereux, however, is subject to a most unusual punishment: she must ride an ass facing backwards, wearing a straw hat and two placards in front and behind her with the words ‘Public Pimp’; in this condition, naked at the shoulders, she will be beaten with a cane [with just the slightest hint of double-entendre in the word ‘verge’ – also ‘staff’ or ‘rod’] at various locations around Orléans, including on her own doorstep. She will then be branded with a fleur-de-lis. Although the original sentence recommended banishment from the city for five years, this has here been commuted to a five-year imprisonment at the Hôpital Général de la Salpêtriere in Paris.

 

As the present work notes, this remarkable case was ordered by the Court to be printed and displayed in the Orléans area as well as around Paris and its suburbs, no doubt as a warning to other libertines.

No copy of the present work is recorded on OCLC; our work collates, however, with the 2 copies located in the CCF (BnF and Orléans).

* BnF 33729009

Price: $1,650.00

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