ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to show how urban governance and daily policing of the city were influenced by different systems, from local specificities to transnational trends and international events. It starts with a brief reflection upon the process of comparison in social history before analysing the various levels of influence in the response of the municipalities to growing concerns over prostitution. National legislation in both England and France on eighteenth-century prostitution remained extremely vague. Prostitution in itself was not an offence; however legislators were aware of the existence of a network surrounding these women that needed supervision. Instead of implementing national laws and national ideas through local organizations, as was the case in Bristol, governance in Nantes during the Revolution favoured the transplantation not just of ideas but also of officials. These differing approaches did however have one thing in common: the idea of national control over local contexts was constant in both France and England.
