ABSTRACT
As suggested by the Baudelaire's verse poem, 'Le Crepuscule du soir', whose first manuscript version dates from the beginning of the Second Empire, prostitution was both ubiquitous and covert in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Alexandre Parent-Duchatelet, the leading French authority on prostitution during the July Monarchy, noted that 'donner aux prostituees une marque distinctive, ce serait infecter les lieux publics d'enseignes ambulantes du vice'. The difficulty of 'reading' prostitutes, of distinguishing them from other women on the streets of Paris, was a significant social and political issue during the reign of Louis-Philippe. The problematic legibility of the prostitute was still an issue under the Second Empire and the Third Republic, when working-class women in public places were often mistaken for unregistered prostitutes, or 'insoumises'. In the nineteenth century, prostitutes were frequently encoded as monstrous by the dominant discourse, despite the fact that they were considered to provide a useful libidinal drainage system.
