Brief Review: Anne-Marie Sohn, Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950)

Anne Marie Sohn’s Du premier baiser a l’alcove (1996) argues that the movement towards sexual liberation began in the century prior to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.¹ Explicitly contrasting her study against those that have focused on expert discourses on sexuality — a trend that she blames on the work of Michel Foucault — Sohn attempts to recuperate the sexual lives of “ordinary people.” Through an analysis of a dazzling amount of judicial records drawn from all over France, Sohn describes the sexual mores, practices, beliefs, and fears of both elite and popular classes.

However, the shear breadth of the material leads to two problems, one historical and the other theoretical. First, the evidence is presented without a great deal of context. While there are exceptions where Sohn effectively signposts moments of historical change, more often we are left wondering when exactly these various beliefs and practices went into and out of vogue. Second, the sheer volume of material leads her to a form of analysis through description. Rather than questioning the source material, she treats it largely as a transparent window onto historical truth.

The book therefore remains extraordinarily useful for researchers such as myself because of its documentation and narrative sweep. But it ultimately reifies the “repressive hypothesis” not simply through its argument that the Third Republic saw “a moral rupture which paves the way towards sexual liberation” [une rupture éthique qui ouvre la voie à la liberté sexuelle], but also through its unwillingness to complicate and situate its sources.² Foucault’s lesson was not simply to pay attention to discourse, but to recognize the ways in which the “reality” that Sohn seeks to recover does not exist outside it.

^{1. Sohn, Anne-Marie. Du premier baiser à l’alcôve: La sexualité des Français au quotidien (1850-1950). Paris: Aubier, 1996↩}

^{2. Ibid, 307↩}