![]() ![]() A few years after Restif, the eminent architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux developed two projects for building “museums of vice” and “institutions of public love.” 3 In the first volume of his treatise L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la legislation (Architecture considered in relation to art, morals, and legislation), Ledoux presented, in “Fragments of a Greek Monument,” the project for Oïkema at the Saline of Chaux. This small (and today extravagant) essay had an immense influence during the eighteenth century. Restif de la Bretonne argued in Le Pornographe for the seclusion and the regulation of the “street women” of Paris in a network of state-administered whorehouses, thereby developing the first architectural proposition to reform prostitution practices in European cities. ![]() Monsieur d’Alzan, finally about to marry Ursule, the sister of Monsieur des Tianges’s wife, sends his friend a project for the regulation of prostitution in order to guarantee “the virtuous exercise of love” within the city of Paris. 2 The pamphlet consists of a series of fictional Gentleman’s letters between two “pornographers,” a neologism Restif coined from the Greek pornê, “prostitute,” and graphein, “writing,” talking about love and the preservation of virtue. 1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project for the Regulation of Prostitutes, Suited to the Prevention of the Misfortunes Caused by the Public Circulation of Women. In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe. ![]()
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