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Hannah Frydman, "Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Hannah Friedman about her book titled between the Sexuality Classified Advertising and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Now this is really interesting because we're going to be going into third Republican Paris where there is a whole lot going on. There's a whole lot that we often think, think about and talk about in academia, in kind of popular culture. You know, there's lots happening here, but I think there is actually an area that we don't necessarily look at that much, which this book does, which is a section of newspapers, not even just like newspapers in general, but like the classified ads. Right. Which might seem really boring. Like, hey, I have a chair. Do you want to come buy it? Right. Like, it is that kind of thing. But as this book helps us understand, it's a lot more than that. It turns out by looking at this seemingly sort of pedantic section of a newspaper, we can unpack, like, this entire world that's otherwise pretty hidden. At least it's hidden to us. Because another thing we're going to be talking about, as the subtitle of the book suggests, is that there were people who could read between these lines and were not thrilled about it and had some concerns about it. But then, of course, there's the people doing it in the first place who thought it was great. So all of that's to say that we have a lot to discuss. Hannah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Thanks so much, Miranda, for having me and for that great introduction to the book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of introductions, can you introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
That is a good question. So I am an assistant professor at Harvard in the Romance Languages and Literatures department, where I specialize in French studies. I did my degree, my PhD in. And so it's a book that's kind of straddling these two fields of history and French studies. Although I didn't know it when I first started writing the book, I think that the project kind of came to me more than me coming to it. I thought I was going to write a dissertation about female intellectuals. And there maybe is a little bit of a link to the book, which I can talk about at some point. But when I was kind of trying to do research and I was in the US and the archives were in France, and I was not yet there, I spent a lot of time looking at Gallica, which is the French National Library's digital library. And I kept getting stuck on the back pages of the newspaper in these classifieds, which was not what I was supposed to be looking at. But they kind of kept drawing my attention because they were weird. They weren't what I expected. They weren't just like, do you want to buy a chair? There was some of that. There were some lost dogs, but there were some that I was like, I think that there's, you know, they're selling sex. There's this sounds like abortion. That was not what I was expecting to find in these newspapers. And So I kind of just kept digging. I kind of couldn't stop. And so that's kind of where I started to realize that as you said, there was this kind of whole world here that required a lot of close attention. And I, for whatever reason had this desire to, to pay this close attention and figure out what was going on in this part of the newspaper that it doesn't look like much. It's these kinds of long columns, it's just a bunch of text. It's not image based advertising. So figuring out what was going on there is kind of how I got into this project.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think so many cool things come up in archives that we're not expecting. And it's sort of like, wait a second, what's going on here? And of course that's the big kind of overarching question of the whole project. And the whole book is like, wait a second, what's up with these bits of text? But of course, any project has kind of more specific questions underneath that big one. So what are they in this particular case and how did they develop from that initial sort of flicking through in the archive?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, so I think that when I first started looking at these texts, the main question was just like, what's going on here? How can I figure it out? And when I, in the dissertation version of this project, it was very much kind of seeing these as different kinds of professions. So I was looking at kind of, okay, here's what's going on with prostitution, here's what's going on with abortion. I also was looking at kind of like beauty institutes and trying to figure out what would it be like to try and start a beauty institute when that also is kind of a code for prostitution. And you, or you're really, you know, a massage therapist. And that's assumed to be something else. But after I finished the dissertation and was kind of working on this as a, as a book project, what became really clear to me is that yes, it's important to know kind of what kinds of lives it was possible to build in the classifieds, what kinds of professions came out of it. But that this really was a project that was actually about the third republic, which ran from 1870 to 1940. So it's the kind of first long, long lasting republic in, in France's or France's history. And what became clear was that this was something that people were really concerned about. It was kind of a problem for the high, high politics, which again is not what you expect to be coming out of these small texts. And part of it was that the Third Republic is trying to prove itself to be a source of kind of moral order and saying, okay, more people are going to have rights, but this is not going to throw society into disarray. We can be, you know, inform our citizens and create this space where all men can vote and society can still be stable. The classifieds being run in the press, which becomes free in. In the. In 1881, becomes this space where, okay, this is a reflection on the Third Republic because of the way it aligns itself with the free press. And if what's being sold in the back pages kind of secretly of the press is sex and abortion in this moment, where there's a lot of concern about immorality, but also about the birth rate, that becomes kind of a big issue for the Republic that has freed this space. And so I think that became kind of the big question for me of the book is kind of like, how did this space become something that seemed so dangerous? And then the way that. That also became a kind of flashpoint for press freedom. How much freedom is too much and what kind of freedom is good and what kind of freedom is actually quite dangerous and for whom?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
See, this is why looking at things in archives that may not be literally visually sexy, right? They don't have big images. Turns out there can be a lot there. So taking up then these questions of press freedom and censorship, the fact that there is a debate going on around kind of how much freedom is okay, suggests that obviously there have been times in the past where there wasn't press freedom like that in France and of course, many other countries. So when, how and why do we get to the point where there is even enough freedom that there can be classified ads in French newspapers that are definitely about sex?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
So, yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that there's this. The way in which the press is. Is a space that's quite dangerous for. For power from, you know, basically its inception. The. The classified ad itself is created in the 17th century, and it's almost immediately there's the concern that it is a site of charlatanism. But it's not until the late 19th century that sexuality becomes the site of concern around the classified ad. And this is linked to the way that. That's the kind of new concern for the press itself. Previously, across the 19th century, the fear about the press was really about the way that it could speak back to power, the way that it's critiquing often the king, sometimes the emperor. France has a Lot of different regimes that take place over the 19th century, but by the time that we get to the Third Republic, by the time that they implement freedom of the Press in 1881, the concern really shifts to not being about speaking truth to power. The idea is, is that under a republic you can at least to some extent, but the. The new fear is about sexual morality. And so at the exactly the moment that France is passing freedom of the press, they're also very concerned that the press is becoming pornographic. There's in 1880, right before the passage of freedom of the press, a big kind of press to do about the fact that the. The press has become pornographic and that this is kind of a redefinition of the very word pornography to be about kind of what we know it to be today, instead of about writing of any kind about prostitution. And so when we get this opening toward press freedom, that's also a concern about prostitution, about pornography, it's in this moment that with the opening, but also with the kind of different things that make it possible to print more newspapers, which are coming at exactly the same time that we get this outpouring of a kind of press that's trying to please all readers, at least as much as it's trying to inform them. And so it's in this moment that we get a lot more sex in the newspaper. Just kind of generally, it's on every page, it's everywhere. It's also makes it a lot easier to have not just these kinds of ads, but to have them in a way that people will understand what's going on in them because there's enough sexual content in the newspaper themselves that you kind of start to think, okay, there's probably sex on this page too, even if it doesn't seem like it at first glance. So there's a lot going on to make this kind of move possible, but it's part of a bigger movement towards this kind of idea that we're still living with, that sex sells.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is definitely key to kind of have that broader context. But I think one particularly interesting aspect about the classified section of the newspaper is that it's not really a section where it's like, up to the newspaper, what's in it. Like, to some extent it is, right? But other sections, there's journalists writing articles and editors choosing what to cover, whereas these are advertisements. Like, all the newspaper really has to decide is like, do we stick it in or not? They're not the ones coming up with these advertisements deciding to put them in the paper. So who actually is placing these advertisements and why was this kind of a way for some people to create opportunity for themselves? They couldn't otherwise.
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, I mean, so the newspaper really loves that this isn't on them. Right. That's part of their whole kind of argument is like, this is not our fault, what's happening here. We're just like a bulletin board and people can post on it if they want. And lots of different people do want to. It's a pretty affordable way to kind of put, I mean, especially if you're advertising in some of these, the mass journals, which at this moment, at the kind of turn of the 20th century, have huge circulation, something like, you know, a million sales each day. And more people than that read, read them because more than one person reads every issue. And so I think that there's a way in which like this really opens things up to all different kinds of people. And so again, you know, some of them are, you know, actually renting rooms or selling umbrellas or something like that. But it makes it possible that you could kind of say, okay, I'm going to start a business in my apartment. And you go to the newspaper and you place your ad and suddenly everybody knows that in your apartment you are running some kind of business. And so it makes this kind of new opportunity that really hadn't existed before. You know, there had been ads before, there had been attempts to have kind of affordable advertising. But this is the first time that it really takes off and allows everybody, including I think, you know, a certain kind of working class woman, which is really the focus of my book, allows them to, to create something different with, with very low overhead.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So can women use these ads? Like, are they a big enough deal to place them that like, you could make enough money to have independent lives? Or is it more like pin money that we're talking about?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, I mean, I think that people use them differently and there's definitely a kind of hierarchy of, of different. You know, some people are much more successful than others. There. There's a huge amount of concern really that some people are getting rich off abortionists in particular, because there's this sense that, okay, if you practice as a midwife, it's not very lucrative. So if you're placing these ads, which can be quite expensive if you add them up and you're placing the ads every day, there's this kind of sense of, okay, you actually couldn't make enough doing what you say you're doing to place these ads. But they're are, you know, you could support yourself. And this is in a moment where most work for women did not support, you know, an independent life. There was the sense that, you know, if women were working, it was for pin money. It was because they already were being supported, ideally, by some other kind of man. And so this is, you know, really in a situation, and lots of scholars have shown how, you know, know, sex work was one of the only ways actually that. That women could make enough money to. To lead an independent life. And this kind of space made it much easier to reach an audience, to kind of grow your business and. And have this, you know, a certain kind of independence. Not every woman was kind of working independently. I know that, you know, I've talked to some people who were like, well, weren't there actually a lot of men that were, you know, supporting women or you acting as pimps? And what. What really surprised me was I actually didn't find as much of that as I was expecting in these spaces. There really was this way that. That people were kind of able to. To build out a different, more independent life for themselves. And, you know, I think there's kind of a trope that I found that also surprised me a little bit that there was this sense that kind of women would train to be school teachers, and then there wasn't enough work. And this is kind of where they would pivot to. Because this is a way to make enough money to live in a context in which that really was not the norm.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Speaking of lives that were not exactly the mainstream norm, if we think about opportunities for women here, can we also see queer possibilities or even realities in these ads?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, I think that we can. I think it's harder to see. And so that was one of the things that I was really excited to find was that this was. I mean, maybe I shouldn't say excited, because part of it was that there was concern about this. So that part of it is about cracking down on these opportunities, and that's what allowed me to see it. But the first time that I really kind of got a sense that there were quite a queer possibilities in these ads was when I was reading a kind of Senate discussion that was happening among senators about ads. There's one senator, Rene Beranger, who's kind of known as Father Modesty, was really a moral crusader. Lots of what I know about the classifieds are in part because he was such a kind of close watcher of the classifieds. But he stands up in front of the Senate and he's reading classified ads. And one of the Ads that he reads is about. He talks about Colette's Claudine, and he says, you know, I assume that everybody knows what this means. I will not assume that readers know what this means. But Colette wrote these really wildly popular Claudine novels in the first kind of five years or so of the 20th century. And Claudine is a kind of queer character. She has relationships with men and with women. And so using her name, the name of Claudine in the classifieds could serve as a kind of queer signal. But the fact that this is being read in the Senate, that there's this kind of sense of. Kind of like, okay, if you know anything about these novels, you know that there's kind of this queer potential of the back pages. And so the more that I looked, the more that I saw queer possibilities. And I think that, you know, what is kind of difficult is how I think with kind of sex work, I could verify that. I could go to the Khalees archives. They also were interested in what was happening. They were also following up, but they didn't have the same level of, you know, concern or interest where these kinds of queer ads came, in part because there's. There's a difference in ads for a business are going to operate differently. They're going to have an address that you can follow, so it's a lot easier to surveil. Whereas some of these others was more about, okay, write to me, post restaurant, kind of, you know, send it to this private post office, and we'll. We'll correspond kind of offline. But so I think that there's this sense that I have to say I can see these possibilities. And part of it is about kind of learning to read, learning what these codes might have been. So it required a kind of deep immersion into the print and popular culture of the moment to start to be able to see how people were talking to each other in code, but in ways that weren't just among kind of initiates, that basically, if you were a reader of a certain kind of print culture, you could also follow along and at least imagine things. But I do think that there were queer realities here as well.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
If people could figure out the code, which sounds pretty intriguing, to be honest, though clearly from what you were describing there, there are also people reading the code who are not excited about this, not at all. So can you tell us more about who was concerned about all possibilities opening up and why they were so bothered?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yes. I mean, definitely. There's a certain kind of moralist, Rene Beranger, who was talking about the senator, he's very Republican, but he's super concerned that, you know, that society is kind of veering on the wrong track. And he wants to protect kind of women and children and working class men from these kinds of dangerous potential. And so he, I mean, he truly spends, I don't know how much time reading the newspaper. He's kind of constantly marking things up. There's lots of things with his little blue pencil that you can find that he's sent into kind of the police, the like, ministry of, you know, justice and Interior. He's kind of always concerned, always trying to, to send things out to say, like, shouldn't we be concerned about this? Isn't this something that we should take on? And he's, you know, behind some of the legislation that happens that, that targets classified advertising more directly. But he isn't alone. The police are also very, you know, assiduous in, in their reading of the classifieds. They will follow up. They do a lot of kind of reconnaissance work. They send people in to see what's happening. They do raids. And it's interesting because sex work isn't illegal in this moment. It's regulated by the police. But this is one of the main ways that they find clandestine prostitution. There's also certain regulated houses of prostitution that place ads, although they are not supposed to. So part of what the police are doing is going and saying, okay, like you shouldn't place advertising. You need to be more discreet. So there's this way that here too, okay, things can exist, but we don't want them to be public. So there's always this kind of play between visibility and invisibility. But there's this sense that this is not how we want the press to be operating. We don't want this to be so accessible, so easily passed from, from one hand to a next. Because I think part of the concern is that these newspapers, a lot of, you know, one of the main newspapers that I talk about, the Journal, is this kind of. It's literary, but it's a mass daily. It's one of the kind of four biggest mass circulation periodicals of the time. And it's known for its classifieds. But there's lots of other reasons to read it. It has kind of short stories, it has the news. So there's the concern that people are going to buy it and it kind of just sits on the table at home and. But then what happens if there's kind of queer ads, ads for sex work, ads for abortion, who knows what else in in these papers that are sitting around, especially concerning, for those that have, you know, maybe a young daughter that could get caught up in some of these things. Things. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to understand kind of the fears around these topics. And to some extent, I was kind of expecting this. Right. Coming into this book, I was like, all right, classified ads. Haven't thought about that very much. But as soon as you start to get into it and you're like, oh, advertising things that could be prostitution, things that could be abortion. Yeah, okay. I'm guessing there's going to be some people wandering around who are not super psyched about this.
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those things kind of seemed clearly linked ways in which women could have more independent lives or queer people could have more independent lives and figures who were not particularly excited about that happening. Those connections sort of made sense to me going into this, I think because of a lot of how those things are still linked now. I was a lot more surprised to sort of then turn the page and suddenly be reading about concerns of white slavery. Like, that kind of seemed to come out of nowhere, like sex trafficking. I was like, okay, I can see how this is linked. But then white slavery comes up, and somehow that's related to ideas of the free press. So how does that fit in?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, so, I mean, I think that to a large extent, white slavery is sex trafficking. And I think that the. The way that that is given this name that's meant to sensationalize, there's a, you know, people, it's in a second abolitionist movement. So there's a desire to say, oh, this is just as bad, maybe even worse than Sl. Slavery. So this comes out of, you know, so the, the kind of racialized nature of. Of the concern, I think is important to note. But there's. There's definitely the, the question of white slavery in this moment is quite problematic for the Third Republic. It uses the. The language of white slavery, the kind of discourse around white slavery, which is not just a French one. This is kind of a, you know, transatlantic concern in. In the early 20th century, in particular, this kind of concern that maybe we still have around sex trafficking. But, you know, these kind of innocent white girls are going to get, you know, kidnapped and sold into lives of. Of sexual slavery abroad or, you know, it involving kind of racialized men in some ways. And so I think that that's useful to the Third Republic because it can say, okay, we need to protect our women. We need to keep them at home. We need their reproductive potential to stay here. But it becomes more complicated when Part of that fear and a lot of the kind of stories about the white slave trade, it can happen in numerous places. It can happen at train stations with provincial women coming in and they're new to the city and some dangerous man picks them up and says he can help them or at kind of employment bureaus or at the dance hall. But the, the newspaper is also this site where it's kind of like, oh, here's a great job. You don't have to work very hard. Maybe it's, you know, you're going to dance in a South American tour. There's lots of kind of narratives here. But the idea is that, you know, it's kind of easy money. And who doesn't want easy money? Especially in a moment, as we've said, where easy money was not exactly what was being offered to women in most, in most cases. And so the, the press becomes also seen as kind of this gateway into being trafficked for the kind of innocent victim that, you know, didn't know that this is what she was going to go do. So much of the research says that women often sold sex in France before, you know, moving abroad in what was seen as white slavery, but that, you know, maybe the conditions weren't as good as they thought that they would be, but they, they did kind of know. But again, I think that its place in the newspaper with the kind of ad as the lure into being trafficked made it again, kind of more dangerous because again, it could travel into the home and pick up these especially innocent women that weren't at the dance hall and weren't traveling outside of their parents home or even their husband's home. And so this becomes dangerous for the Third Republic because then it's the Third Republic's free press that's making this possible. And in one of my chapters I also look at the way that it becomes the site for this child prostitution ring that's also cast as a form of white slavery in which these kind of mothers and the newspaper proprietors and even a Republican schoolteacher are caught up in this scandal. And there's this sense that, okay, the newspaper is actually working to pervert France's youth and the French republican school system is working to pervert France's youth. And so white slavery becomes this thing that can also be used against the Third Republic and is used against the Third Republic especially by a kind of right wing, monarchist, anti semitic press that says, okay, the Third Republic is actually a sexual danger for, for the nation. And so I think that this all becomes quite, quite Complicated. But what it comes back to is, again, what the classifieds make possible. And I think I try really hard to show in the book, even as I'm interested in the ways that this makes, you know, women's independence, kind of queer lives possible in all of these really kind of, I think, important and exciting ways that I also don't ignore the fact that this is a site that could also be used to exploit people and often was. And some of these women that are making independent lives for themselves are also exploiting others. Often, you know, the women that have a successful business, as, you know, in sex work, become, you know, pimps in their turn, and they're the ones placing ads to sell the sex of other kind of more. More vulnerable women. So. So this is not just a kind of happy story that I'm telling here, but. But a quite. A quite complicated one for everyone involved. Yeah.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I think that that complexity is a key part of what you've uncovered and pieced together with all of this. And one aspect that's definitely complicated is one of the kind of reactions or pushback against this that we haven't really talked about yet. Because it is, of course, sort of famous people that get attention saying this is bad. Right. They are running around saying those things. But the law also gets involved, too, in trying to not like, get rid of all freedom of the press, but just like some of it.
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Which is, of course, tricky to do. So can you walk us through the complexities of how the law tried to get involved?
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Dr. Hannah Friedman
Absolutely, yeah. So there, you know, as I was saying earlier, freedom of the press happens in 1881. By 1882, there's a kind of new press obscenity law, this kind of outrage against good morals. And they've gotten rid of some of the old forms of obscenity that were more about kind of like outrage against religion. So there's kind of like saying that this is. This is no longer kind of based in a religious moral system, which is important because the Third Republic is incredibly secular. They're very invested in kind of secularizing society. But again, we're still concerned about the kind of morality of what's being put out into the world. And so by the kind of 1890s, there is this rising concern about kind of sexualization of the classifieds. And so there's a law passed, you know, in large part thanks to Rene Beranger, who. Who kind of pushes for it, that includes obscene classifieds in its purview. And this seems very good at first, that this is going to help them. Because it's hard to, you know, get at some of these ads because they're not actually, you know, saying anything obscene in, in what they're actually saying, you know, that an ad for sex work might be an ad for a pita terre or it might be for a furnished room. And it's really hard to say that that's sex work. And so from the beginning, they're trying to say, okay, we're going to target these, these ads because. Because they're obscene, because they're selling sex. Of course that's obscene. And like, there's kind of. Each time this, this doesn't work. There's this. The law is like several amendments to the law happen. They're always trying to say, okay, we can now definitely say that these are obscene. But. But it keeps posing a problem because they're not obscene. There's nothing in the words that's obscene. And so it's all about kind of reading between the lines. It's all about saying like, okay, this was an obscene intention behind this ad. But how do you know? It requires kind of going beyond the printed page. And this law, as an obscenity law is a press law. So it's supposed to be about kind of the dangers that are being vehiculed by the press itself, not by kind of other things that we know. It's not supposed to be going after the kind of embodied act itself because that's not what this press law is interested in. And so there's continuously over, you know, about, like, you know, in the 1890s and 1900s, this kind of pushback against, okay, we've passed this law that we think is going to let us get at these ads. But when it goes to judges, judges are kind of concerned about what it would mean if we say, okay, this is obscene. When it's just like for a language lesson. What does that mean for people that actually, you know, we should. We're in a globalizing world. We want to be able to learn English. English is also a code for flagellation in this moment. So there's this kind of, okay, we know these things and we think that we can read these things and with police help, we can go in and say, okay, this is definitely not an English lesson in the way that, you know, would be. Would be a non obscene English lesson. But there's still, when it comes into the courtroom actually saying, okay, when we read this, we know this is obscene because. And some courts do try and do that, but right before World War I, the biggest like the kind of highest court, the court de cassation says, okay, no, like, these are, These are not obscene, except, you know, maybe in their intentions, but that. That's not what the law covers. So there's this, this continued concern that, okay, we want to get rid of these ads, but the law, at least through this kind of obscenity law, kind of using that as our way to get at these ads is actually quite dangerous for the kind of freedom of speech of all and freedom of the press of all. Because where can we stop if we say that this means something else and can kind of say, okay, you're gone. What does that mean in other cases? And it's really interesting because there's this group of artists that form a kind of league for the freedom of art, and they end up defending the sex worker who places ads for furnished rooms, not because she's an artist, but because they can see the relationship between saying that an ad for a furnished room is obscene and, you know, saying that anything that, that an artist does is as well. Because so much of, you know, art is about being able to. To. To talk about difficult things and, and to say things in, in ways that are, you know, maybe kind of complicated and, and, and elusive. So I think that that kind of protection of the full. Being able to use a full range of language, you know, anything. Be able to be called obscene seemed really important in those years.
- [36:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is why I said the law tried to deal with all of this, because those experiences have kind of. And then it goes into the courtroom and the judge goes, right. Is definitely a big part of this. But in fact, the piece I'd love to pick up from. The answer you just helpfully explained to us is the before World War I piece. What changes during and after World War I?
- [37:16]
Dr. Hannah Friedman
Yeah, yeah. So there's something kind of sad about all of this, because when I first started working on the project, it was really in this kind of belly puck moment that I was interested in pre war, where it just seems like everything's possible with World War I. The classifieds start to shut down around World War I, in part because they're concerned that there's going to be German science spies using this space to communicate with each other. And so they create a visa system where basically you have to submit the ad in advance. It has to be verified. You kind of have to say that, like, what's happening here is actually a real offer. It's not from a spy operating kind of clandestinely. And basically there's this sense that, okay, this is not very kind of tenable for the kind of work that a lot of women and kind of non normative people were using the ads for. And some of the like, including Les Jour, now just kind of shut entire sections entirely. So there's this kind of shutdown during World War I and it starts to come back, it feels like after the war's end and the kind of newspapers pick back up, but nothing is ever quite the same. The kind of, the newspaper culture of the pre war moment itself doesn't fully come back. The kind of four big newspapers of pre war France just are not, they're not, they're not there afterwards. They're, they're much reduced. And so I think that there's a way that for the war when the press hasn't really come back, there's also this, a greater sense that the decline of the natality of French society is just such. With the number of men that died in World War I. I think that there's also the kind of the pronatalist concerns that had been with the French since the 1870s and the kind of very embarrassing defeat in the Franco Prussian War that's always, that's been there and that, that reaches you know, a certain kind of fever pitch in the 1890s, which might explain some of the, you know, concern around non normative sex, but with the kind of like huge amount of, of death around World War I, after the war. I think that there's also this sense that, okay, this is really not something that we can play around with. And there's, I'd say more concern also about kind of queer sex as well, that, that's before that I didn't see as much of a concern around that. But there's this kind of sense, okay, like, okay, like men having sex with other men is also a threat to the birth rate. We need everybody having heterosexual sex, reproductive sex to kind of bring us back and, and get us back on track. And so when these, these ads do continue to exist, but when they come back, they come back mostly into kind of, you know, lightly erotic titles. There's kind of a, it's more into magazines, weekly magazines that are kind of filled with sexual humor. And so it's a kind of ghettoization of, of this kind of sexual advertising that previously had been in the mass press, much more accessible to everybody that, that after the war, the kind of new big newspapers are very invested actually in being moral and in saying we have a moral advertising page and it creates this space. I think that it Ends up actually being quite good for business of saying, okay, our back pages are moral and are open to, you know, big time advertisers. So they're not, you know, and there is still classified advertising happening, but there's more of a concern and a concerted effort to control it and say, okay, the, the press is a moral space and you know, if not it's going to be in these magazines that really, that this is their bread and butter is being immoral. And there's been, you know, I, I found a lot of sources in, in the police archives that made it clear that these, the kind of the, the weekly sexual magazines actually wouldn't be able to survive without this revenue from, from largely sex workers. So it becomes this kind of like economic system in which the, the mass press no longer has a need of, because they found morality to be, to be a better selling point. And then only in the press where, where sex is indeed the selling point, that this becomes something that's helpful for their bottom line.
- [42:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is in many ways quite a big change from where we started. So in fact where you started in the archives, looking at sources that you didn't think would necessarily start off as that interesting. So I have to ask, this book is out in the world now. What archives might you be investigating next? What's currently on your desk?
- [42:36]
Dr. Hannah Friedman
Oh yeah. So I'm still trying kind of to figure it out. And I think part of what's hard is that I find the classified so endlessly fascinating that I keep finding them and finding other things, but I need to work on something else. And one of the things that I've become kind of additionally interested in is so I'm teaching in French studies and so I teach a lot of literature and I teach a kind of queer literature class from the 19th through the 21st centuries. And I've become especially interested in the ways that queer or just kind of literature in general that can be read as queer in some way. Both can kind of shore up queer identity and can call it into question. Both kind of like this idea that maybe, maybe we should be destroying identity and that literature is a good place to do this. And so I've been working on a number of kind of different case studies that, that look at because I'm especially interested in the ways that it deconstructs it. There's lots of interesting things to be said about the way it constructs it. I think going back to this kind of the case of the Claudine novels and allowing for a certain kind of queer communication that we see in the classifieds, but especially in the 20th century, from the kind of early 20th century, you start to see queer authors in particular, that are taking some of these kind of links to older novels and putting them together in ways that shows that, okay, actually, what kind of harm is identity doing? And how can literature help us imagine ways out of it?
- [44:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, well, that certainly sounds like that's going to keep you interested for a while.
- [44:25]
Dr. Hannah Friedman
Best of luck with the project. Thanks so much, Miranda.
- [44:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled between the Sexuality Classified Advertising and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Hannah, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [44:44]
Dr. Hannah Friedman
Thanks so much. This has been a.