Before Parisian brothels became illegal in 1946, they attracted almost as many tourists as the Louvre. Though you weren’t allowed to touch the Mona Lisa. Here, prostitutes in a luxury bordel wait for rich clients.
The most intriguing insight into the sexual past, though, was a frame displaying a prostitute’s notebook, written in 1942. Each page was a record of the day’s business, and she had listed all her customers and the prices she charged them. The teacher had to pay 40 francs, the beau garçon only 30, while the chanteur (singer) got a special deal—27.50. This wasn’t her lowest price, however. The petit Juif (small Jew) paid 25 francs, as did the aveugle (blind man) and the writer (a poorly paid profession, obviously). And she even gave student discounts, charging the étudiant only 20. Her highest prices were for the grand gros (tall fat man), who was made to pay 45 francs, as was the louche-sounding type à lunettes (guy in glasses).****
In any case, the girl’s services all came pretty cheap—using the official conversion tables provided by France’s economic-statistics institute, the INSEE, I calculated that her highest price, 45 francs, would have been the equivalent of around 15 euros today, the price of a salad and a glass of wine in a cheap Parisian café. Even if she got tips, or deliberately recorded lower prices so her Madame didn’t take such a big share, it looks as though the massive supply of sex for sale kept the prices very low. All of which explains her high tally of punters per day—fifteen or sixteen was about average, which wasn’t maison d’abattage standard, but still meant she was having sex with 100 men a week. After reading her notebook, any romantic notions about what went on in Parisian brothels go flying out the window.
Parisian sex today—strip but no tease
The streets of nineteenth-century Paris might have been paved in prostitutes, but it was of course rare to glimpse more in public than a stockinged ankle or a hint of décolleté. To see larger expanses of bare female skin, men would have to go to a brothel or, for less hands-on action, to one of the theatres or cabarets. This was when the Moulin Rouge, the Folies-Bergère and the Lapin Agile grew up, and kept starving artists like Toulouse-Lautrec in food and absinthe by commissioning them to create advertising posters.
Here, can-can dancers would show underwear and even a bit of thigh, cleavages would be allowed to breathe, and risqué songs would add to the atmosphere of mass titillation.
Meanwhile, rich gentlemen would catch the eye of the dancers—or was it the other way round?—and in between dances, presents would be offered and promises made, and the girls would make appointments to supplement their income.
You can still go to these cabarets today, though the Lapin Agile has transformed itself into a chanson française music club, and the other two have become big-time tourist shows, giving visitors to Paris an evening of can-can, feathers and ooh-là-là. The Lido, on the Champs-Élysées, is a more modern version, with men and women putting on a Vegas-style extravaganza of long legs and occasional glimpses of bare curves.
These days, however, the club that keeps Paris’s history of choreographed eroticism alive is one of the newest of all—the Crazy Horse, founded in 1951 by an ‘insatiable admirer of women’ called Alain Bernadin, who clearly didn’t give a damn about belonging to the Moulin-Lapin-Folies tradition because he named his club after a Sioux chief and opened it a long way from Pigalle, near the Champs-Élysées.
The club attracts far more Parisians than outsiders, many of whom go along to see the regular guest stars who come to bare all on stage. Recently, Pamela Anderson, Dita von Teese and an actress called Clotilde Courau (better known in French celeb mags as the wife of the grandson of the last king of Italy) have slapped on the all-over body make-up and attracted big crowds.
If you ask a Parisian what goes on at the Crazy Horse, he or she might not have been there, but they’ll know that it’s all about nakedness. The girls on stage are famous for wearing more square millimetres of covering on their feet than on the rest of their body put together.
And so it was that I convinced my Parisian feminist amoureuse to spend an evening ogling naked female flesh. Vive Paris, I thought—there probably aren’t many cities where the feminists would do that without taking along some spray paint to graffiti the girls.
The Crazy Horse (or le cray-zeee orrss as the French call it) is just opposite the Chamber of Agriculture and the Paris headquarters of Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent—sex, fashion and food, the heart of the Parisian consciousness.
Inside, the décor is plush velvet carpeting, muted lights and black woodwork—very illicit-feeling. A staircase leads down into the basement, and emerges in a surprisingly small theatre with tight rows of cabaret tables facing a tiny stage. It’s clear that the audience is going to get very close to the girls indeed.
I look around at the audience and am surprised. Next to us are a middle-class, middle-aged couple—the type of people who sold me my bank loan and washing machine. There are also small groups of young women, pairs of businessmen getting some R&R, and what looks like a daughter and her parents—checking out career prospects, maybe. Most of them are in slightly formal evening wear, and only
