Although Google Books continues to improve as a research source, I continue to believe that the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is easier to search and use for those interested in French language sources. The two most recent posts on the Gallica blog piqued my interest. First up is a list of the fifty most-downloaded documents. The list includes a number of notable names, but is otherwise most surprising for its eclecticism. The second post introduces readers to a newly digitized collection of images documenting Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century. I’ve only gone through a few pages of them, but they are too most notable for their very banality. Here’s one example, not chosen at random:
I came across this particular image by searching within the collection for the “Quai de l’hôtel de ville,” a street as the name implies that progresses along the river and forms one border of the Place de l’hôtel de ville. This specific street has stuck with me since my archival research because it was one of the few locations noted by the police has being the site of bars and cafés catering to men who sought sex with other men during the 1880s and 1890s. There is little in the image itself to suggest male-male eroticism, unless we stretch ourselves a bit and imagine that the two figures to the left are pressing together — certainly not an impossibility, however unlikely.
But I do get a bit of pleasure knowing that this kind of ordinary socializing was precisely what one would most likely have encountered had you entered one of the cafés whose clientele consisted of men who sought sex with other men. The police frequently noted how the men who went to these locations utilized various techniques — playing cards was mentioned a couple times — to deflect away any accusation that their intensions were anything other than honest male sociability. In other words, although there is nothing explicitly in the image to suggest that the men it depicts were anything but upstanding citizens, there’s also nothing to suggest that they necessarily were. Some would perhaps argue that I’m seeking out ambiguity where there isn’t any. I would respond by arguing that to understand the urban spaces of the late nineteenth century as anything but ambiguous is to fundamentally misconstrue the meaning of the transforming city.