Pornography on Rails

Trains and Belgium’s ‘War on Pornography’ (1880-1891)

Abstract

In the period 1880 – 1891, Belgian politicians from the Catholic Party made banning of the transportation of pornography in the railway system an important part of their political agenda. In 1882, Jules Lammens, Catholic member of the Belgian senate was shocked by pornographic prints on display in bookstore at a Belgian railway station and demanded that the government did something about this. Throughout the 1880s, the Belgian government took increasingly stringent measures to prevent the transportation of pornography in the country’s railway system, culminating in a declaration of war on pornography by the Belgian minister of Railroads, Mail, and Telegraphs Jules Vandenpeereboom, and a complete ban of transportation of ‘pornographic’ journals by mail and train in 1891. The year before, Vandenpeereboom had ordered the closure of all bookshops in Belgian railway stations to stop the circulation of pornographic literature. In Belgium, as in most Western European countries, pornography had become a major social problem in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article analyzes parliamentary debates and contemporary reporting by the press, and argues that it was the perception that pornography was ‘on the move’ by various modes of transportation, which made the matter a major policy issue in the country.