The Irrelevance of Undercover Tactics to the French Conflict Over Whether Prostitution Should Be Regulated or Suppressed

Memoirs of French police commissioners, prefects, and heads of the Paris Surete suggest how differently French authorities regulated prostitution. Neither French abolitionists nor the police themselves relied on undercover tactics to enforce or to publicize a preferred narrative about tolerated prostitution. By contrast, heavy reliance on undercover tactics by private sector reformers helps explain the distinct path of American abolitionism in comparison to its French counterpart, and its tendency not only to invest the public sector with its own methods and aims but also to expand the reformers’ abolitionist agenda to reach a much broader range of vices, culminating eventually in alcohol prohibition (which was short-lived) and an international war on drugs, which continues. French abolitionists organized politically, took part in protest marches, and even produced fake police memoirs to challenge the dominant regulationist paradigm–without resorting to undercover tactics to infiltrate vice establishments. French regulationists, in turn, tolerated prostitution and recruited prostitutes as informants, while registering prostitutes for supervision by public health authorities. The very different tactics adopted by French and American abolitionists might help to explain both the greater influence American abolitionists were able to exert on political authorities and why French and American abolitionism diverged from their shared British origins.