The Sexual Radicals
De Saint-Simon’s most passionate followers planned to redesign families rather than businesses. Under the leadership of Prosper Enfantin, they became known as sexual rather than economic radicals.
Enfantin, literally ‘‘the childlike one’’, or, with his preferred title, Father Childlike, displayed theatrical flair. His followers dressed in blue waistcoats with red sashes, outfits that buttoned behind and therefore required mutual cooperation (you fasten me and I’ll fasten you). Enfantin announced that the sentiment of love was superior to the faculty of reason and called for a new church with a Mother as well as a Father. 13 Like de Saint-Simon, he exhorted everyone to express his own true nature. Men and women alike should enjoy the freedom to change partners if they so desired.Most appealing to Enfantin’s female followers was his attack on the sexual double standard, accompanied by his denunciation of prostitution. Since about 1803, the French had sanctioned and regulated the sale of sexual services in two ways. Official tolerances were awarded to brothels that submitted their workers to periodic medical examination and observed certain rules, such as not locating near a school or a church. At the same time, the police could arrest virtually any woman they believed to be soliciting on the streets. With no right to trial or due process, women were legally subject to forced examination and possible incarceration.14 Male clients enjoyed the benefits of medical supervision (a not inconsiderable benefit in the age of syphilis), while poor and working-class women were vulnerable to police harassment whether they sold their sexual services or not. Official policies were legitimated by an engineer named Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet, whose quantitative analysis of prostitution in Paris proved enormously influential.15 When asked why even the most debauched men were not subject to arrest for solicitation, he explained that they would never stand for such an obvious abrogation of ‘‘the sacred principle of individual liberty.”16
Aquinas had likened prostitution to a sewer system (see Chapter 1).
Parent-Duchatelet's previous research (which he explained had mentally and physically prepared him for his new investigations) had focused on Parisian sewers. Still, he preferred a more modern, industrial metaphor for prostitution, likening it to the safety valve on a steam engine. 17 This particular safety valve let off impressive quantities of steam. By mid-century, the number of registered prostitutes in Paris, surely an underestimate of the total, numbered about 34,000, many of them lodged in official brothels. 18 This was almost three times the number of women the 1851 census enumerated as employees of textile mills; it amounted to one prostitute for about every sixteen married women.De Saint-Simon’s enthusiasts considered legalized prostitution the embodiment of bourgeois hypocrisy. Some women endorsed Enfantin’s concept of free love as an alternative to the sexual double standard, wearing red ribbons to signal their own enthusiasm for what he called the ‘‘rehabilitation of the flesh.’’ But free love was far riskier for women than for men. Out-of-wedlock births were on the increase, representing between 30 percent and 50 percent of all births in Paris and Lyon by mid-century. 19 Since the French Civil Code denied unmarried women legal recourse to paternity suits, abandonment was common. An illegitimate child himself, Enfantin had refused to marry the mother of his own son Arthur. Instead, he asked the men of the group to ceremonially accept joint responsibility for the boy as ‘‘social fathers’’. Arthur’s specific fate remains unknown.20
Some of Enfantin’s apostles traveled to England to woo influential thinkers like Thomas Carlyle and the young John Stuart Mill. Both Britons liked the emphasis on equal opportunity and the abolition of inherited privilege. Mill, at least, appreciated the criticisms of patriarchal power. But when French authorities arrested Enfantin and others on charges of public immorality in 1832, free love and prostitution trumped discussion of all other issues. Enfantin denounced French law for treating prostitutes as grapes harvested, fermented, and bottled for men’s enjoyment, and announced that two of his women followers would present his case.21 The judge promptly ordered the women removed and sentenced the defendant to a year in jail.
Some of the apostles retreated to a rural estate where they vowed to live together chastely and share domestic tasks. Widely-circulated cartoons ridiculed men doing laundry and scraping carrots, and the group gradually disbanded.22 Its more restless members traveled to Egypt in search of a new Messiah and more sunshine.