Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1500 and 1700, French attitudes toward prostitution changed. After centuries of toleration during the Middle Ages, in 1560 the French king issued the ordinance of Blois which made brothels illegal. This decree did not come in reaction to the appearance of syphilis in Europe in 1494. Rather, it stemmed from concerns about public order, in particular the host of vagrants and thieves who, the authorities believed, gathered in brothels. The authorities found it difficult to apply the new law because it was hard to prove that a landlord intended for his property to be used as a brothel. The courts tended to ignore the new laws. Only pressure from religious reformers prompted the judicial authorities to act. A good example of such pressure was the reforming priest, Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–87), who spearheaded an effort to close brothels and banish prostitutes from his parish, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The quarter’s magistrates bowed to Olier’s demands and closed an unusually large number of brothels. The Catholic reformers had a particular dislike for a new kind of prostitute: the courtesan. Though long established in Italy, it was not until the seventeenth century that courtesans, venal women of some social standing and elite manners, appeared in France. Ninon de l’Enclos (1623–1709) is the most famous of these women. The daughter of a minor noble who abandoned her at an early age, Ninon was forced by poverty into entertaining at women’s gatherings and eventually accepting paying lovers. Celebrated in poetry and prose, Ninon came to embody the notion of a high-born, free-thinking courtesan who rejected the greed and duplicity attributed to most prostitutes. Meanwhile the criminalization and harassment of ordinary prostitutes increased. In 1667, Louis XIV created the post of lieutenant general of police, thereby preparing the way for the growth and greater authority of the police. Police practices changed, moving from the elimination of brothels to the incarceration of individual women. In the 1690s, the police acquired the manpower and authority to apprehend and incarcerate delinquent women found abroad at night. Repression was also fierce in France’s struggling colony of Québec. There, the religious authorities pressed for the arrest of women who engaged in sexual commerce. By 1700, criminalization of prostitution was the law both in Canada and France, but it did little to contain or control sexual commerce. Criminal laws and the growth of the police in Paris fostered the multiplication of third parties who appropriated a portion of the prostitutes’ wages, usually by force. Violence increased while prostitutes continued to solicit on the street and receive clients in brothels.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".