Читать книгу Sex in the Cities. Volume 3. Paris - Hans-Jürgen Döpp - Страница 3

Throughout the world, Paris is regarded as the “city of love and the erotic”. To this day, the ideal destination of any honeymoon is a trip to Paris. But it is not only for loving couples that this proud city continues to be an attraction – tourists in search of extra excitement in love also pursue their fantasies about Paris. This is made apparent in a rather dubious joke:

A man confesses to his male friend: “I’m off to Paris!”, his friend replies: “You bastard!” The man about to set off corrects him: “No, I’m not going on my own! I’m going with my wife!”; “You stupid bastard!” his friend immediately counters.

What does one expect to find in Paris that can’t be found in any other city nowadays? What is so special about its history that has given rise to this myth? In 1896, Pierre Louys made two comments in the foreword to his novel Aphrodite:

It seems that the genius of nations, as well as individuals, is, above all, sensual. All the cities that have ruled the world – Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Venice, and Paris – have, as if following a universal rule, been all the more powerful according to how dissolute they were, as if their licentiousness were essential to their glory. Those cities, whose law-makers strove for an artificial, narrow-minded, and unproductive virtuousness, saw themselves condemned to destruction from day one.

Apart from Paris, the splendour of the other cities has long since faded. Paris, however, still has a magnificent allure. Accordingly, we will need to pursue the “history of sensuality” in order to explain what historical experiences have gone into our image of Paris as the “world’s most immoral city”.

These historical experiences have also left their mark on the history of erotic literature and erotic art. We cannot separate this aesthetic area from the sensual one. Cultural history lives on in collector’s items that can often be found in museums today.

Comments and assessments made by foreign visitors to Paris will also always be of interest to us. As travellers they will have carried Paris’ reputation out into the wide world and thus helped to create the myth of Paris – in a double sense, for they have often come to the city not only as distanced visitors, but also as involved, participating observers, in search of pleasures not found at home. To this extent the reputation of an “immoral Paris” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In allowing themselves to act out their illicit fantasies there, they could, upon their return and from the comfort of their own homes, condemn them as “licentious”, and thus restore their inner “moral harmony”.

The erotic myth of Paris has been fed by two different sources – not only the concrete developments in moral history whose main features we have attempted to outline here, but also by the fantasies which, especially from the 19^th century onwards, have been projected onto Paris. This myth is an amalgam of fantasy and reality. And anyone who understands it properly will always find a certain sensuous open-mindedness in it. Paris is not a city for moralists.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Arc de Triomphe, 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,No. 19 – La Bastille, 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,No. 21 – La Grande Roue (The Ferris Wheel), 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Place Vendôme, 1904.

Coloured lithograph, c. 1940.