The End of Sodomy: Law, Prosecution Patterns, and the Evanescent Will to Knowledge in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 1770–1830

Abstract

This article analyses discourses concerning male same-sex sexuality produced in the context of law and policing in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands between 1770 and 1830. Intervening in the debate over the making of “the homosexual” and the change from homosexual “acts” to “identities,” I argue that shifts in sexual discourses were not linear. In the late eighteenth century, the courts and the police displayed a strong “will to knowledge” in same-sex sexual matters, collecting, requesting, and recording discourses on inclination and, in some regions, even innateness. This will to knowledge all but disappeared in the early nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the official decriminalization of sodomy, same-sex sexual acts became mostly devoid of further meaning in legal and police records. The emergence of sexual discourses was therefore uneven.

‘Those rascals chased from Holland!’ Sodomy, migration and identity building in eighteenth-century Antwerp

“…Most of the handful of recorded sodomy court cases were dismissed, either for lack of evidence or because the local authorities were forced to do so by the Privy Council, which made active use of its authority to overrule criminal sentences imposed by local bodies. 7 Apparently, it was felt that such behaviour within the city was better regulated by discreet confessions with a local priest at regular intervals rather than by public executions. 8 Those rare eighteenth-century accusations that did lead to an actual trial resulted in considerably milder penalties than had been the case in previous centuries.…”