“A Fabric of Infamy”: The Sodomitical Life of Jean François de Rougemont

Abstract

Most of the published research on male same-sex relations in eighteenth-century Paris explores patterns and changes in the sodomitical subculture rather than the individuals who composed the subculture, if only because we do not have much information about them. Two complementary memoirs about one man arrested in 1723 document not only his arrest but also his adventures during the preceding decades. This analysis of one remarkable case makes a point about all cases in this time and place: We should study sodomites not only in the subculture but also in the larger society they inhabited.