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Record W4414600362 · doi:10.1215/00161071-11781717

The Sodomy Consultant of Paris

2025· article· en· W4414600362 on OpenAlexaff
Benjamin Bernard

Bibliographic record

VenueFrench Historical Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicHistorical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
Canadian institutionsCanarie
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSodomyRegentEliteQueerGrammar school

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Through the 1720s in Paris, the morals bureau of the Lieutenancy General of Police tracked so-called sodomites through the gardens and alleyways of the city, arresting and imprisoning several hundred people. How did the morals police learn enough about this “sodomitical subculture” to police it effectively? This article demonstrates the central role played by Nicolas Théru, a grammar regent at the Collège Mazarin from 1688 until his retirement in 1732. By day this abbot taught teenage boys Latin, but by night he managed information collected firsthand and secondhand to help police arrest queer men. While such activities may seem surprising for a teacher, they fit the collège's imperial mission for the ethical instruction of elite provincial youth following absolutist conquest. The case illustrates how modern policing of sodomy emerged from the moral aims of higher-education institutions under absolutism.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.154
Threshold uncertainty score0.517

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.002
Scholarly communication0.0030.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.1540.014

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.

Opus teacher head0.083
GPT teacher head0.296
Teacher spread0.212 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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