In fact, Parisian sex has become so endangered that it now has its own museum …
A trip down memory boulevard
The section of the boulevard de Clichy between the métro stations Blanche and Pigalle is dotted with sex shops (many of them looking decidedly jaded) and lapdancing clubs, and if a male walks along the north side of the boulevard, day or night, every 10 metres or so he will be approached by a man or woman who steps out from a velvet-curtained doorway and invites him to come in and check out the girls. Personally, though, I’ve never seen them pull in any punters. Well, no one sober, anyway.
The area is also home to a much more successful place that sells sex toys, pornography and ‘intimate’ jewellery, and attracts both male and female customers day and night despite the fact that it has no one outside touting for business—it’s the Musée de l’Érotisme, and it’s so respectable that it figures in the city’s museum listings, alongside the Louvre and Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides.
Hoping to get an insider’s view up the skirts of Pigalle, I made an appointment to talk to the museum’s curator, Alain Plumey. He is a diminutive, shaven-headed, pale-skinned sixty-year-old, dressed like someone who might sell second-hand books at a flea market. He is, however, a retired porn actor. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Plumey did his stuff in 129 hard-core movies with typically descriptive French titles like Suce-moi, Salope (Suck Me, Slut), Cuisses en Délire (Delirious Thighs), Blondes Humides (Wet Blondes) and Déculottez-vous, les Starlettes (Panties Off, Starlets).
I must admit that even I feel a tinge of nostalgia when I read those titles. Not that I’ve seen any of the films. No, before the internet and DVDs killed off Paris’s porn cinemas, the listings magazines used to publish the names of new X-rated releases, and they were often hilariously explicit, especially when translated literally into English—my all-time favourite was Il y a la Fête dans Mon Cul—There’s a Party in My Arse. It’s an image to make anyone’s eyes water.
But Plumey is not at all what you might expect of an ex-porn star. No open-chested shirt, gold medallion and leather trousers for him. When he speaks, however, there is no mistaking which industry he is working in.
‘I got into porn acting because I wanted to have lots of sex,’ he told me. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by sex. When I was a kid, there was a permanent funfair along the middle of the boulevard, and I used to crawl under the awnings to watch the girls in the striptease tents. They were often purple because of the cold.’
This part of Paris, he said, has been associated with sex since the reign of François I, King of France from 1515 to 1547. Apparently François used to venture outside the city walls to visit the convent at Abbesses. As Monsieur Plumey put it, ‘The mother superior was the biggest pimp in Paris, and used to rent out the nuns. And at that time, the windmills in Montmartre were all brothels. The millers used to provide girls to entertain the farmers while they were milling the grain. That’s why we have the phrase to enter a place comme dans un moulin, meaning to be able to walk in freely and feel at home. The windmills were open to anyone who wanted to have a girl. Then later on, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rich people built folies here, outside the city walls, to meet up with their mistresses in private.’
Folies were elegant country houses, often hidden behind discreetly planted trees, that became notorious venues for orgies, and served as models when Paris began to build its most luxurious brothels in the mid-nineteenth century. Even after the rapidly expanding city made the folies too urban to be discreet, the lower classes maintained the area’s erotic reputation with cheaper bordels, girlie bars and streetwalkers. The Folies-Bergère can-can show is a reference to the former rendez-vous houses, just as the Moulin Rouge harks back to the hospitality provided by millers.
In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, though, despite all the cheap sex on sale, the atmosphere in Pigalle was far less seedy than today, Plumey told me, because it was much more open.
‘The brothels were often run by dangerous criminals, but they were rogues who excited the ladies,’ he said. ‘And the filles*** were everywhere, they were a part of life. Back then, no single working-class woman could support herself on her meagre salary, so they were all looking for a gentil monsieur [kind gentleman] to supplement their income. Part-time prostitution was the norm. And there was no shame involved—artists and writers celebrated the prostitutes. They were Picasso’s and Renoir’s models. Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was a group of Montmartre hookers. He painted it just up the road from here at the Bateau-Lavoir. And some of the most popular songs of the time were about prostitutes—the singers used to come out on to the boulevard, busk and sell the sheet music. People would take it home and sing the song around their piano.’
My own grandparents used to buy a lot of songsheets, and I’ve tried to picture my proper, white-haired grandad singing about ladies of the night while my granny nibbled fruitcake. But no, it doesn’t compute. And somehow I couldn’t picture respectable middle-class Parisians doing the same thing in the early-twentieth century, either, especially if Monsieur wanted to hide the fact that he was a client of the ladies in the songs. Here, I felt, the Parisian romanticism was kicking in. After all, alongside the chic brothels,
