Sex in Paris ain't what it used to be

Last tango in Paris
Paris was once the sex capital of the world. But a crackdown on prostitution and the rise of porn megastores are destroying a unique, secret heritage. Andrew Hussey reports

Every day of the week, from mid-morning until the early hours, the Club 88 on rue Saint-Denis in central Paris does a brisk trade. From the outside at least, there is little to distinguish it from the dozen or so rival sex shops which line the streets in this part of Paris, in between the stalls flogging cheap hip-hop gear and drugs paraphernalia.

This part of the city has always had a seedy reputation. Since the Middle Ages, it has been known as the haunt of hustlers, thieves and whores - the street signs around here give the game away (la rue de la Grande Truanderie - "the street of great criminality", named in the 15th century, is still home to evil-looking dope dealers). The upper end of rue Saint-Denis is lined day and night with prostitutes of all prices and races. The lower end is less lively but nonetheless grim. As recently as the 1970s, when the vast outdoor market of Les Halles was finally pulled down, it still enjoyed a reputation for gamey, sinful pleasures. Now that Les Halles has been replaced by a shopping mall, this part of the city is avoided by most native Parisians and abandoned to tourists and banlieusards - the kids from the wretched council estates surrounding Paris who come here by a fast, direct train to get wrecked and cause low-level trouble.

The bleak surroundings make it all the more remarkable that Club 88 and its rival sex megastores have become the latest battlefield in Parisian culture wars. On the one side are young intellectuals of (usually) the radical left who embrace porn, even in its wildest forms, as part of their libertarian philosophy. This explains, for example, how Philippe Azoury for the ultra-hip magazine Les Inrockuptibles, evoking the writer and erotomaniac Georges Bataille as his guide, can - without any shred of irony - describe Club 88 as "probably the best club in the world" on the grounds that it offers both pleasure and excitement open to all.

A quick tour around Club 88 reveals the truth of this statement. Although the exterior is discreet and vaguely stylish, inside, beyond the rows of standard specialist material (bestiality to coprophilia), there is a labyrinth of cubicles, private rooms and viewing areas. The central area is patrolled by girls, most of whom seem not to be French, but who cheerfully offer, in a variety of languages, a sex massage. A Tannoy reminds the idling would-be customer that "l'amour sur scène" takes place at regular intervals if enough tickets are sold. On the upper floors, which are dimly-lit and apparently designed to be as disorientating as possible, it is possible to see over 400 different porn films an hour on the multi-screen channels. There are dungeons and ante-chambers to God knows what. Business reaches a peak at lunch-times and in the early evening - this is when you notice most of all the sociability and the buzz of the crowds (mostly male it has to be said but with a surprising number of couples, chatty lesbians and lone females).

The sex megastore is now a staple feature in the famous red-light districts of Paris (other big names here include Scarlet and Sexodrome in Pigalle). However, despite the DVD viewing cabins, the lifts and escalators, the mumsy female staff and the credit-card friendly ambience which make them feel like a particularly kinky branch of Waterstones, they are not universally popular. The problem here, the argument runs, is that there is nothing specifically "Parisian" about this environment.

More to the point, the rise of the sex megastore has gone hand-in-hand with Nicolas Sarkozy's loudly stated mission to clean up the city. This began in the summer of 2002 when Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, introduced harsh fines on streetwalkers around rue Saint-Denis. Those he hit hardest were the independent working women, almost all of whom were native Parisian-working class women, known as les traditionelles (the traditional ones). These girls were also known as parigotes (a parigot is the rough Parisian equivalent of a cockney) and prized for their gouaille, a form of sarcastic wit. The traditionelles of rue Saint-Denis found themselves driven out of the city centre by the harsh laws on street-walking. Many were reduced to working out of vans parked at Porte Dauphine or Vincennes, hoping to pick up trade from passing motorists. The newspaper Le Parisien reported angrily on the way on which these native Parisians were being driven out to be replaced by girls from sub-Saharan Africa run by gangs from Kosovo and Romania. Le Parisien did its best to explain that its complaints were not driven by racism but that traditionelles were as Parisian as steak-frites, cheap red wine and Gauloises cigarettes, and, when they left, the city had lost a vital component of its underground culture.

The likes of "Sandrine", who had worked rue Saint-Denis for nearly 20 years complained in the press that, not only was she being driven to penury, but that the city was losing part of its essential character. She clearly hit a nerve; the likes of Club 88, it was argued by those who took up the traditionnelles' defence, could be anywhere in Europe, from Barcelona to Hamburg. At stake, it was further argued as the old generation of whores began to leave the city in droves, was the very soul of Paris itself.

It is easy to see this as a typically Gallic overstatement. It is a fact, however, that the history of prostitution in Paris is, for many, inextricably linked to the political fortunes of the city.

This tradition can be traced to 18th-century Enlightenment ideology and the rise of a new class of thinkers, the libertins, who were avowedly atheist and sceptical about all other entrenched beliefs such as the power of monarchy. During this period, the city swarmed with whores and to call for their suppression was to be in favour of Church and King and other superstitions.

The growth of widespread prostitution in Paris was paralleled by the rise of the new literary genre of pornography. Much early pornography was entirely functional, providing a guide to well-known brothels, such as Le Gros Millan on rue du Beaujolais or Le Grand Balcon on rue de la Croix des Petits-Champs. The genre soon became an entertainment in its own right and a great deal of police energy was wasted on pursuing printers, publishers and readers of work that was deemed to be anti-Christian and anti-social but which most Parisians found as life-enhancing as any of their other pleasures. Popular titles such as The Nun in her Nightdress and John, The Fucker Debauched, were both bestsellers and intellectually respectable in the 18th-century city.

During the Revolution of 1789, the Palais-Royal, the great colonnaded space then at the heart of the city, played host to nightly sex shows. One of the special amusements in the brothels on the upper floors was the availability of sosies de vedette, whores who looked like or dressed up as famous women of the day. Sexual activity only intensified during the height of the Terror, when the girls wore red, white and blue bonnets and offered a special price to the top members of the Assembly. The real point was, of course, that liberty, equality and unbridled sexuality were all part of the indissoluble Rights of Man.

It is this tradition of mixing high political idealism and low carnal pleasures which informed the Parisian sexual underground of the 1920s and 1930s, which was documented by the likes of the philosopher Georges Bataille and the photographer Georges Brassaï. Bataille declared at the beginning of one of his most famous texts: "whoever is afraid of whisky, naked girls and the obscene will never understand my philosophy". The erotic life of the city during this period - when the likes of Bataille and his friends and lovers (the poet Colette Peignot, who was his lover and intellectual muse was an eager participant in these adventures) could buy a whole orgy at one of the clubs on rue Saint-Denis - was beautifully photographed by Brassaï and enhanced Paris's reputation as a city of endless erotic powers.

This subterranean sexual city was effectively wiped out by 1946, when the authorities, disgusted by the close relationships between brothel owners and the occupying German forces, shut down more than 180 of the notorious maison closes - the legal brothels scattered throughout the city, but especially clustered around rue Saint-Denis. This was done on the orders of the politician Marthe Richard, who had herself been a prostitute and spy. These establishments, including such famous names as Le Chabanais (which dated back to 1820), Le Sphinx, Le One Two Two (this has survived into the 21st century as a swingers' club), were not only a part of Parisian folklore but had stood as elaborate and rich monuments to all forms of human sexual activity.

Somewhere such as Le Sphinx or Le One Two Two not only offered the regular forms of coupling that could be bought all over the city, but specialised in "shows" and "spectacles" constructed to the whim of clients, who dined well in the attached restaurants as a prelude to more carnal pleasures.

The debates around the closure of the brothels are still, surprisingly, very much a live issue in Paris. One of the most powerful cases made in favour of them has been regularly made since the early 1990s by Michèle Barzach, the Conservative ex-minister for health, who argued for controlled brothels, both gay and straight, as a way of dealing with Aids. The enemies of this coalition are, however, surprisingly not all the puritans of the Right or the "new Left" (although Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party's president-in-waiting does campaign on an anti-porn agenda). They are also often artists and writers, usually of an older generation. More to the point, they too would describe themselves as keen on sexual transgression if not as downright erotomaniacs.

They include the likes of Yves Trentret, the academic and satirical novelist, who deplores the commercialised, "industrial erotica" of rue Saint-Denis. "I am of a generation that can just remember the erotic life of Paris as it was," he says when we meet in a mainly Algerian bar, L'Aec en ciel, in the 13th arrondissement, which has a stock of mainly Arab whores, "But that way of life has gone for ever. Paris was once known throughout the world as the capital of sex, but even if foreigners come now, they do not find what they are looking for. For me, it is worse still that the younger generation who celebrate hard-core porn do not seem to realise that they are celebrating hard-core values, and that these are the values of hard-core, globalised capitalism."

This is also an argument made by the film director and porn actress Ovidie, who came to national prominence in France in 2002 with her book Porno Manifesto, a polemic in defence of porn. Ovidie's big idea then was that everyday Parisian life had been invaded by "porno chic" - the use of pornographic imagery in advertising - and that this was a betrayal of the intentions of those who, like her, both used prostitutes and made "real porn".

I was then writing a book about Paris which, among other things, set out to cover the underground sexuality of the city and, inspired by her call for a return to older Parisian traditions of sexual experience, I went to speak to Ovidie for the first time on a chilly September morning in a café near rue Saint-Denis.

In those days, Ovidie was tiny, pierced and dressed in black pyjamas like a junior Maoist. She began by quoting the contemporary thinkers Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille and Guy Debord, who, all in different ways, made the case for sexual freedom, and cited the popularity of porn in pre-Revolutionary Paris, before explaining her notion that, because it is based on a universal need, in the right hands, "porn can set you free" .

Ovidie went on: pornography, she said, was about nothing more than the promise of human happiness. The physical and economic exploitation that are undeniably involved in the sex industry, she said, are wrong only because they are a betrayal of this original, quite innocent trust. The exploitation of women in particular, she said, was a betrayal of the original liberating aims of 18th-century pornography. It was this egalitarian philosophy that Ovidie claimed to recapture in her work. This did not preclude payment: indeed quite the opposite. "I have sex for money," Ovidie said, " and, of course, that demands respect."

I met Ovidie again a few weeks back in Neuilly, the posh part of Paris where she now lives - presumably having made a packet from her films with titles like Orgie en Noir and Lilith. It was three years since we had last met and she was now a mother. She was also a little heftier around the edges but still with a definitive view on her own activities and the present state of sex in the city.

"The problem is with Paris itself, and probably France itself," she told me. "They are both changing for the worse. Parisians are unhappy and that is expressed in their sexuality. A place like rue Saint-Denis represents everything that has gone wrong - it is not a place to go and have sex happily, as a person or as a couple. It is now just gangsters and girls who are sex slaves from Eastern Europe and Africa. The myths of the orgies to be found there, that you read in Georges Bataille, may not have been entirely true but they did correspond to some form of reality. Now it is practically impossible to have good sex with strangers in Paris."

We talked of the vogue for échangisme ("swinging") which was in vogue in Paris in the late 1990s and - as famously documented in the memoirs of Catherine Millet and the novels of Michel Houellebecq - is far from being the naff and suburban activity that it is in Great Britain, was briefly the height of Parisian chic.

"I know of some échangistes clubs that are still charming and passionate," Ovidie says, "but really all that too has gone. Catherine Millet is intelligent but her work is boring. And Michel Houellebecq is not Georges Bataille - he is really a moralist and his work does not celebrate sex like Bataille but condemns it. So why read Houellebecq or Millet? I think the problem is political. French people despair of the future - which is unstable and dark - and they are too morose to have sex properly." The conversation moves on to a discussion of rising violence in the suburbs, a disintegrating economy and the lack of a political solution.

But notwithstanding the prevailing gloomy moods in the city, individual Parisians still take a chauvinistic pride in their horror of prudery. They still lament on the pages of Le Parisien not only how the old-style whores are being driven from the city but how, over centuries, people's pleasures have been policed by town-planning. As the city was made more "modern" in the 19th century, for example, it was also governed by public prudery.

The first and clearest sign of this was the changing of street names in the brothel-ridden streets of Saint-Denis and Les Halles. In 1809, rue Tire-Boudin ("Sausage-Puller street") became rue Marie-Stuart; rue Trousse-Nonain, or "Tumble-Nun street", already disguised in official documents as Tasse-Nonian, became rue Beaubourg; rue de la Pute-y-muse, or "Idling Tart street", became Petit-muse, while the scatological collection of rues Merdeuses, Merdelet, Chieurs and Chiards all disappeared from Haussmann's new maps of the rational and hygienic city.

Nowadays, one of the last bastions of a uniquely Parisian approach to sex is Le Beverly, the only true porno cinema in the city centre, which, over the past few years, has been regularly preparing to close its doors for the last time. This cinema stands at the top edge of the red-light district of rue Saint-Denis, almost but not quite in the rapidly gentrifying area of Montorgueil St-Denis. Over the door, there is a photograph of the poet Rimbaud and his famous line "Il faut réinventer l'amour" (" Love must be reinvented"). A poster in felt-tip pen offers special rates for couples on Thursday nights.

Most of the old-style porno cinemas in Paris were swept away in the 1980s, victims of the booming video trade and the regular appearance of hard-core porn on mainstream television. Le Beverly somehow struggled through the 1990s. Most of the customers who now come are visibly die-hards. Some of them looked too old to be even interested in sex. Perhaps they come for companionship and out of loyalty. Others look sinister and sheepish in equal measure. A handful of third-world immigrants sit back in their seats, smoking.

Le Beverly has never been respectable - the atmosphere in the pitch-black salle de spectacle is tense and fervid, with more than a hint of real physical danger. But to visit this place, in all its sleazy glory, is to take a trip to a bygone era: a time - maybe this was the 1960s or 1970s - when showing sex in a public space was a real transgression and possibly a real thrill.

These days, as a short stroll down rue Saint-Denis or through the back streets of Pigalle - where porn DVDs are on sale at knock-down rates - reveals the opposite is true. I left the Beverly intrigued but not quite convinced by Ovidie's argument that writing or screening sex is in itself a genuinely subversive statement of wilful and unrepentant erotic intent.

This may have been the case in the 18th century, or even in the 1970s, but, nowadays, I felt the vision of the writer Michel Houellebecq - who, in one of his poems, brilliantly describes, with appalled precision, the deadly routine of the hand-jobs and peep-shows available to fit in with the office hours of the central city - was indeed a more grimly accurate vision of 21st-century Paris. "Our civilisation suffers from vital exhaustion," Houellebecq writes elsewhere, "We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and its abundantly clear that we rather doubt this."

Paris is evidently no longer the capital of sex but it is mutating into something else; an international sex theme park. As I walked away from Club 88 and then Le Beverly, it seemed to me that this theory explained the strangely drab and haunted faces on the whores I passed at the top end of rue Saint-Denis.

('Paris: The Secret History', by Andrew Hussey is out now.)