Sodomites and police in Paris, 1715

The Archives of the Bastille in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal include hundreds of police reports, none of them currently available in English or even in print, about male same-sex relations in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century. The documents translated here, interrogations of eight men arrested in 1715, provide information about networks and prostitution, age and class, surveillance and deception in the sodomitical subculture of the capital.