Daily Life in the Old Regime347The double standard remained a feature of the re-
laxed sexual standards. Tribunals assessing sex crimes
typically gave harsher sentences to women, particularly
for adultery. Women at the highest levels of society
might act with some freedom if the legitimacy of heirs
were certain. But European culture attached a value to
female virginity and chastity and still associated a man’s
honor with the chastity of his female relations.
One of the foremost disincentives associated with
eighteenth-century sexuality was the circulation of the
venereal diseases (VD) syphilis and gonorrhea. These
diseases, commonly called the pox, were rampant in the
ruling classes and found in most of the royal families of
Europe. Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Napoleon all had
VD. Syphilis was not as fatal as when epidemics of it
swept Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
but it remained a debilitating disease. Gonorrhea was
pandemic in urban Europe. The famous Venetian lover
Giovanni Casanova contracted eleven cases of VD dur-
ing his life although he survived until age seventy-
three. James Boswell, the distinguished British writer,
caught gonorrhea seventeen times. Physicians could
provide only limited help; their favored cure was treat-
ment with mercury, a dangerous poison.
Prostitution was one of the chief sources of the
spread of venereal diseases. It was illegal but generally
tolerated in public brothels. The open prostitution of
the Middle Ages, with municipally operated (and even
church-operated) brothels, no longer existed. Yet large
numbers of prostitutes were found in all cities. King
Frederick I of Prussia tried to end prostitution in Berlin
by closing all brothels in 1690, causing an increase of
prostitution practiced in taverns. When the Prussian
government decided to tolerate brothels again, a survey
of 1765 found that Berlin contained nearly nine thou-
sand prostitutes in a population of approximately
120,000 people. The Parisian police estimated an even
higher number of prostitutes there—between twenty
thousand and thirty thousand, or one of every eight
women of marriageable age. Even in the shadow of the
Vatican, 2 percent of all adult women were officially
registered prostitutes.
Draconian measures did not eliminate prostitution.
The Austrian government sought to end it in Vienna in
the 1720s with harsh treatment of prostitutes. After the
failure of such punishments as the pillory or being
made to sweep the streets with shaved heads, the gov-
ernment staged a public decapitation of a prostitute in
- Yet the empress Maria Theresa soon created a
Chastity Commission to study the subject anew. Gov-
ernments chose to control prostitution by limiting it to
certain districts and keeping it off the streets or by reg-
istering prostitutes, thereby permitting some public
health control and taxation. Governments were mostly
concerned about the spread of disease (particularly to
military garrisons) more than the condition of the
women (frequently domestic servants who had been se-
duced or girls from the country who could not find em-
ployment) driven by economic necessity to prostitute
themselves.
Another subject of social concern about eighteenth-
century sexuality was the general increase in illegitimate
births (see table 18.6). Illegitimacy had been relatively
uncommon, particularly in rural areas, in the seven-
teenth century. The rate for rural France had been only
1 percent of all births. During the eighteenth century,
and particularly after 1760, both illegitimate births and
premarital conceptions increased significantly. The
illegitimacy rate remained high because the practice
of birth control was limited both by Christian moral
injunctions and by slight knowledge of effective proce-
dures. Tertullian had established the theological view of
birth control in the third century, asserting that “to pre-
vent a child being born is to commit homicide in ad-
vance.” Religious opposition to birth control continued
in the eighteenth century, even in Protestant Europe: It
was the divine will that people “be fruitful and multiply.”
Despite Christian teaching, a significant percentage of
the English upper classes and the general population of
France practiced some forms of birth control in the
eighteenth century, and both populations experienced a
decline in their fertility rate compared with the rest of
Europe. France had a birthrate of forty per one thousand
population in the mid-eighteenth century, falling to
thirty-three per one thousand at the end of the century,
thirty per one thousand in some areas. Many people
clearly had found economic advantages in smaller fami-
lies and had chosen to put economic factors above reli-
gious ones.
Judging the extent to which knowledge about birth
control circulated is difficult. Christianity offered one
traditional method: abstinence. Coitus interruptuswas
practiced, but its extent is unknown. The French
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau discussed (with dis-
approval) that method of birth control (“cheating na-
ture”) in his Discourseof 1753 as well as many forms of
nonreproductive sex, such as oral and manual sex.
(Rousseau also fathered five illegitimate children and
abandoned them to foundling homes.) Those who
practiced birth control employed such methods. Con-
doms (made from animal membranes) had been virtu-
ally unknown in the seventeenth century but were
available in late eighteenth-century London and Paris,
although they were chiefly employed against VD, not