Introduction

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, efforts by social reformers to address urban squalor coalesced around urban vice establishments and the prostitutes who conspicuously represented urban decadence and despair. American and European reformers increasingly sought to abolish prostitution, challenging regulatory approaches that tolerated prostitution, and brothels in particular, as a “social evil” to be geographically confined (in the U.S.) or state-supervised to prevent the spread of venereal disease (in France). American abolitionists were more successful than their French counterparts in shutting down brothels because they relied on undercover tactics to outflank public authorities and to control and publicize the definition of deviance. In the United States, undercover tactics framed moral panics around prostitution as well as immigration, racial mingling, gambling, alcohol, and narcotics—all of which could be investigated by the undercover tactics that private reform societies normalized. By contrast, French regulationists sought health inspection of prostitutes, not the outright suppression of brothels. In France, neither regulationists nor abolitionists used undercover tactics to enforce or publicize their agendas, and the French government would strongly oppose U.S. efforts to advance an abolitionist agenda on the world stage, by pushing back against the American private reformers’ reliance on undercover tactics.