Histoire de la prostitution (Paul Lacroix)  

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"It does not appear that the number of the dicterions was diminished by the laws of Solon and the Areopagus. This particular industry possessed the right of creating, at least outside the city, establishments of this sort and of organizing them for the benefit of the entrepreneur, provided the tax was exactly paid into the public treasury, and this tax might have been and, in all probability was, a fixed one and payable by the head of the dicteriades. There is nothing to lead us to suspect that it was proportional and progressive. A dicterion that was in vogue produced fine revenues for its proprietor; this latter was not necessarily a foreigner but often a citizen of Athens, who, possessed of the love of gain, devoted his money to this villainous speculation and grew rich from the products of public debauchery by exploiting, under a false name, a shop of Prostitution. The comic poets picture for the contempt of honest folk the avid and cowardly complacencies of those who rented their houses to the dicteriades; the master of such a house was called pornobosceion. This concurrence multiplied enterprises of the sort, and the old courtezans."--Histoire de la prostitution


"Histoire de la prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde depuis l'antiquité la plus reculée, par P.Dufour (Paul Lacroix). Paris, 1851, 6 volumes in-8 avec 20 gravures, 30 fr. Cet ouvrage, qui ne conduit pas son sujet jusqu'à l'époque contemporaine, ne paraît pas entièrement terminé et ne l'est pas, en effet, l'auteur ayant été obligé, par toutes les criailleries qui s'élevèrent contre lui, de discontinuer sa publication et même de faire des cartons en si grand nombre pour son 6 e volume, qu'il est très-difficile de les indiquer. Le volume cartonné a 6 ou 8 pages de moins que le volume non-cartonné ; les onglets exigés forment plus de 3 feuilles. Il n'existe pas plus de 150 exemplaires de ce volume inexpurgés. Du reste, la plupart des suppressions demandées étaient puériles et portaient sur des minuties. — Les tomes Vil et VIII de cet ouvrage ont été aussi, ainsi que les six premiers, imprimés à Bruxelles. En 1854, ils ont paru à Paris, chez Marli- non, sous ce titre : Mémoires curieux sur l'hist. des mœurs et de la prostitution en France aux dix -septième et dix- huitième siècles, p. P. Dufour. 2 vol. in-8, 10 fr. Epoque de Louis XIII et de Louis XIV."--Bibliographie des principaux ouvrages relatifs à l'amour


"Take the subject of Prostitution, for example. For thousands of years, since long before the dawn of history, Prostitution has been the most glaring of social phenomena. Religious leaders, from Buddha and Confucius to Socrates, Christ, Mohammed and St. Augustine, have fulminated against it; legislators, from Moses and Lycurgus to the contemporary Comstocks, have drawn statutes to crush it, or at least have endeavored to curb its ravages; yet scholars (even today, when sociology is an educational fad) have left it almost wholly untouched. It is, it seems, one of the tribal taboos. The few who have dared to touch it — our Krafft-Ebings, our Forels, our Havelock Ellises, etc. — find themselves, more or less, contraband authors on our bookstalls: I shall not forget the severe snubbing I received when I made inquiries of a metropolitan book-clerk regarding the “Psychology of Sex”!" --Histoire de la prostitution, preface to the English translation


"The noted bibliophile Paul Lacroix composed his complete History of Prostitution in 1851-3. This is the first comprehensive work written on this important subject, and it remained decisive until the appearance of Bloch's monumental work. Unfortunately, it remained a torso, for Lacroix, weary of perpetual legal persecutions, lost all desire to complete his task. One seeks in vain for sources or exact quotations of contemporary material, so that scientific verification is extremely difficult and the usefulness of the work is thereby impaired. Despite the subject matter there isn't a loose allusion in the book. Quite on the contrary, so often do angry protests occur, that one gains the impression that the author was a prudish moralist; but other scientific writings by Lacroix prove that he had a fine understanding of erotic and pornographic literature."--The Erotic History of France

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Histoire de la prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde depuis l'antiquité la plus reculée jusqu'a nos jours (1851-1854) is a book series of six volumes on the history of prostitution published by Paul Lacroix under the pseudonym Pierre Dufour.

For his discussion on Greek prostitution, the author relies heavily on Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae (Kendrick, 1987).

Athénée, qui puisait à pleines mains dans une foule de livres que nous ne possédons plus , caractérise par leurs surnoms beaucoup de dictériades, dont toute l'histoire se borne à ces sobriquets parfois amphibologiques. Il énumère, avec tout le flegme d'un érudit qui ne craint pas d'épuiser la matière, les surnoms que lui fournissent ses autorités Timoclés y Ménandre, Polémon et tous les pornographes grecs [1].

Reference

Histoire de la prostitution chez tous les peuples du monde, depuis l'antiquite la plus reculee jusqu'a nos jours par Pierre Dufour. [Six Volumes] by Lacroix, Paul. [Dufour, Pierre (pseud) and Jacob, P.L. (pseud)]


English translation

The History of Prostitution (Lacroix translated by Putnam)

See also




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