Preserving the French Race: Prostitution Regulation and Interracial Sex in the French Atlantic

With the consolidation of colonial rule in the late nineteenth century, sexual-conjugal relations across racial boundaries became increasingly stigmatized across France and its empire. Yet unlike its American or British counterparts, French policymakers did not devise laws banning interracial concubinage or marriage, in part because in the wake of the abolition of slavery, race was no longer a legal category in imperial France. In this presentation, I argue that prostitution became a backdoor to racial regulation in imperial France, despite claims of racial-blindness. Using the French Atlantic port cities of Dakar and Bordeaux as examples, I show how the implementation of a regulation system of prostitution at a city level—which called for the police registration and forcible medical inspection of women deemed prostitutes, as well as the creation of state-tolerated brothels—aimed to respond to both the purported sexual needs of white and nonwhite men circulating between metropole and colony for work, war, or pleasure. Whether these brothels condemned or tolerated interracial sex within their midst, they shared a unifying goal: to curb the development of interracial sexual-conjugal relations outside brothels. Ultimately, this presentation makes three important contributions to the existing literature on race and sexuality in France: 1. It highlights the role of sex in producing and perpetuating the politics of racial difference in imperial France; 2. It emphasizes how scaling down to the local level allows one to uncover how race was policed in France; 3. It reveals the complexity of French racial thinking in the first half of the twentieth century, by illuminating diverging attitudes towards interracial sex vs. interracial intimacy.