ABSTRACT
An all-important shift in attitudes towards homosexuality came with the new approach of psychiatric medicine, with the work of Drs J. M. Charcot and V. Magnan, a shift from a criminal model for the homosexual to a pathological. If there was a culturally specific content to the debate in France, it lay in the absence of any criminal charge for homosexual acts in private, in contrast to England and Germany. This raises the most puzzling question like a less severe form of surveillance and regulation in France inhibit or weaken the emergence of any self-conscious homosexual movement. The breakthrough in the interpretation of homosexuality in France was signalled by an article in the Archives de Neurologie. S. Freud quoted homosexuals as neither criminal, nor sick. Yet psychoanalysis defined homosexuality as a neurotic condition. Altogether more problematic for the medico-legalists were the new ideas of the psychiatrists on the aetiology of homosexuality.
