Abstract EN:

Combining ethnographic, press, and archival materials, this thesis offers a socio-historical and sociological analysis of the police control of prostitution in Paris between 1946 and 2008. From the perspective of the police, the thesis highlights the absence of a unified and coherent sexual policy. The sociohistory of the vice squad shows that the issue of “vice” in the police control gradually waned during the 2nd half of the 20th century. The loi pour la sécurité intérieure, in effect since 2003, constitutes a case in point for studying, through the analysis of different professional groups, a legal framework that is contradictory and indeterminate : police routines and professional hierarchies produce the law from the bottom up. Moreover, this research contributes to a political and moral anthropology : the tension between compassion and repression that is inherent to contemporary prostitution policies is analyzed through the practices of “street-level bureaucrats” of moral evaluation and categorization of individuals. This enables a nuanced description of how the moral and professional dimensions intersect in the daily interactions that constitute the police control of prostitution. By paying close attention to categorization processes, the research elucidates how the police definition of prostitution contributes to producing gender for both the controlled populations and those who control. By analysing the ways in which the police’s professional rhetoric absorbs the public discourse as well as the production and circulation of the police’s know-how, it shows how the State develops its categories of thought “from the bottom up” in the case of the prostitution control.