Discipline ecclésiastique – discipline sociale -La prostitution au XVIIIe siècle à Bucarest
Ecclesiastical Discipline and Social Control: Prostitution in 18th Century Bucharest

Summary/Abstract: The author offers an important perspective of a topic that is regularly identi­fied with social history, seeking to diagnose the discourses and policies of sev­eral institutions - including the Church, the police, and society in general - in what concerns yet another facet of daily life in the 18th century. Scrutinizing an inedited judicial archive - the records of the Bucharest Metropolitan See - the author describes how the phenomenon of prostitution is organized and how it becomes manifest in the 18th century capital. Policies of prostitution control begin to take shape towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century, as the European "regulationalist" period contaminated the Romanians as well. Interventions by the laical and ecclesiastical power are moti­vated by a series of calamities, including the plague, syphilis, wars and dis­ order. These become visible especially in Bucharest, the city with the highest number of prostitutes, due to its economic and political prominence, both as the capital and as the largest urban center in Walachia. Nevertheless, the asso­ciated punitive practices are incoherent and usually inefficient.

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