Informal Urban Economy: a Historical Approach of Paris Street-level Prostitution - 1870-1914 - VERY PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE

Sep 5, 2026

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The paper explains how Paris districts became embedded in an informal economy despite harsh state regulation, focusing on the Belle Epoque rise in “clandestine” street prostitution. Using qualitative and quantitative data from La Goutte d’Or, it analyzes street prostitution’s economics and clustering dynamics: street workers were young, unskilled, relatively well paid, and often operated with local pimps in neighborhoods that competed with regulated brothels. The study shows how profits generated across multiple actors can shift the local economy away from formal sectors.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryGeneral

FormatPDF

Pages26

Reading Time9 min

AccessFree to download

I- Introduction

Prostitution as a market and neighborhood clustering

Regulatory policy and the “clandestine” vs “registered” distinction

Conceptual definitions of prostitution and market participation

Informal Urban Economy: a Historical Approach of Paris Street-level Prostitution (1870-1914)1 ***VERY PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE*** Alexandre Frondizi2 Simon Porcher3 Abstract: How can districts become totally embedded in informal economy despite harsh state regulation? In this paper, we use qualitative and quantitative data to explain the increasing number of “clandestine” street prostitutes in Paris during The Belle Epoque. We first describe the economics of street prostitution at the time: street prostitutes were young, unskilled and well-paid; they tended to work with pimps that were from the same area and clustered in neighborhoods where they could compete with regulated brothels. Street prostitutes not only generated profits for themselves but also for a whole bunch of actors, thereby switching the whole local economy to this industry, at the expense of the formal economy. 1 This work is mainly derived from Alexandre Frondizi’s master dissertation in History: Histoires de trottoirs. Prostitution, espace public et identitéspopulaires à la Goutte-d’Or, 1870-1914 (2007) . 2 Ph.D. Candidate in History- Sciences Po – Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po – 56 rue Jacob - 75006 Paris. 3 Ph.D. Candidate in Management – IAE Sorbonne Business School – GREGOR – 21 rue Broca – 75005 Paris. I- Introduction Like other underground economic activities, prostitution is based on markets. Sex workers cluster in some districts to be visible to their buyers and generally align their tariffs but can compete on their specific characteristics or the services they are willing to provide. This concentration of sex workers can generate negative externalities for the neighborhood, positive externalities for some shopkeepers and the development of informal economy. Despite these characteristics, there are very few economic studies of the contemporary market of prostitution and even less economic analyses of this market from an historical perspective (see Posner, 1992; Edlund & Korn, 2002 and Levitt and Venkatesh, 2007; for a complete literature review) . Moreover, there are no real studies about the potential inverse impact of an implemented policy to struggle against prostitution. In this paper, we investigate the market of prostitution in the district of La Goutte d’Or in Paris during the Belle Epoque. At the time, France was considered as the fatherland of regulation and Paris as the “city of sin”. In the heads of French regulators, prostitution must be tolerated because it was “necessary for the social body’s survival”(Corbin, 1986) but it had to be counterbalanced by a strong regulation. As a result, prostitutes had all to be registered and undergo sanitary examinations twice a month. Because of that tough regulation based on records of information about prostitutes, sex workers who did not want to be registered were called the insoumises, literally “rebellious girls” and were considered“clandestine” workers, contrary to the registered prostitutes, the soumises. Because of a harsh regulation that could lead to detention or notices to cease work, a lot of prostitutes decided to become outdoor prostitutes or to drop their status of registered prostitutes to avoid constraints imposed by the regulatory status, thus giving birth to distrust against the State capacity to regulate prostitution. The terminology of regulators was somehow a paradox: most of“clandestine” prostitutes became visible in the public space as they were outdoor prostitutes, while tolerated prostitutes working in houses of prostitution became “clandestine” as they were indoor and hidden prostitutes. Despite being one of the “oldest jobs in the world”, prostitution is not easy to define. We consider prostitution as a valid informal contract between a supplier – the prostitute – and a buyer – the customer – to exchange sex for money. One of the problems raised with this definition is that some married women satisfy to a certain extent this definition: exchan

FAQs

How does the paper define prostitution for its market analysis?

It treats prostitution as an informal contract between a sex worker and a customer to exchange sex for money, while noting that marriage-related exchanges share features but can be differentiated by duration, rights, and payment expectations.

Sep 5, 2026

Upload by Jake