In order to maintain sexual difference, authorities resorted to the use of regulations. Under the Ancien Régime, the death penalty was prescribed for cases of cross dressing deemed damaging to public order and moral decency. This sentence was relaxed with the Revolution. Such an endeavour recalls the 1800 police ordinance, prohibiting women from cross dressing. Men were also subject to the ban on dressing as the opposite sex, but for different reasons.

The 1800 ordinance found new prevalence in 1895 due to the success of culottes” worn by cyclists that share little in common with the male trousers, being puffy and of oriental inspiration. The topic was fodder for ridicule: the illustrator Adolphe Willette played on the lexical ambiguity between “culottes” and women’s under garments (the same word for both) to make a sexual allusion.

Louis Lépine, the prefect of the Paris police, casually jibed in this illustration, oversaw enforcing the law and threatened in 1895, to prevent female cyclists clad in pants from circulating. If he was opposed to a revision of the ban, it was in order to preserve, as he puts it, women’s “sexual attractiveness”.

The ban was mentioned once again in 1930 during the trial of the sportswoman Violette Morris. At the end of a debate at the municipal counsel of Paris in 1969, the Police Prefecture decided to maintain the prohibition. Although not enforced during the latter half of the twentieth century, 2013 was the year the ordinance was overturned, meaning women could finally legally wear pants…

The archives of the Paris Police Prefecture hold a file on cross-dressing (DB58), containing the ordinance prohibiting women from dressing as the opposite sex. (1)

      “The Police Prefect,

Informed that many women have been cross-dressing, and convinced that none of them have been abandoning the clothes required of their sex for health reasons,

Considering that cross-dressing women are exposed to an infinite number of inconveniences, and even to misunderstandings by police officers, if they are not provided with a special authorisation that they can present, when necessary,

Considering that this authorisation must be uniform, and that, until now, different permissions have been granted by different authorities,

Considering, finally, that any woman who, after the publication of the present ordinance, dresses as a man, without having fulfilled the prescribed formalities, would give reason to believe that she would have the guilty intention of abusing her possibility to cross-dress,

The orders are as follows:

1 - All cross-dressing permissions granted to date by the sub-prefects or mayors of the Seine department, and the mayors of the communes of Saint-Cloud, Sèvres and Meudon, and even those granted to the Prefecture of Police, are and remain void.

2 - Any woman wishing to dress as a man must go to the Police Prefecture to obtain authorisation.

3 - This authorisation will only be granted on receipt of a certificate from a health officer, whose signature will be duly legalised, and in addition, on the attestation of the mayors or police commissioners, bearing the surname and first names, profession and residence of the applicant.

4 - Any woman found in male attire who fails to comply with the provisions of the preceding articles will be arrested and taken to the Police Prefecture.

5 - The present ordinance will be printed, displayed throughout the Seine regions and in the communes of Saint-Cloude, Sèvres et Meudon, and sent to the commanding general of the 15^th and 17^th miliary divisions, to the commanding general of arms of the place de Paris, to the captains of the gendarmerie of the Seine and the Seine and Oise regions, to the mayors and police superintendents and the peace enforcers, so that each, insofar as they are concerned, can ensure its execution. The Police Prefect Dubois”

Cross-dressing men and public order

Male cross-dressing, if we are to properly differentiate from effeminacy, was without a doubt still unthinkable at the beginning of the 20^th century. Through cross-dressing, women gained the freedoms that society refused them: but what about men? In the 20^th century, it was male cross-dressing, in a climate of homophobia and unofficial regulation of male prostitution, that attracted the attention of the authorities.

After the Second World War, a circular issued by the Home Secretary, Jules Moch, generalised the Police Prefect’s decision which “forbade [ids] men wearing women’s clothes in Paris at public balls, attractions or cabarets shows known as “transvestite”. Under the same decision, men are forbidden to dance with each other in all public spaces”. In 1963, Paris Presse announced that “Papon (French politician) wanted [s] to ban the transvestite”. The Paris Police Prefect asked the Home Secretary to propose a bill to the national assembly which would ban cross-dressers. According to the municipal councillor of Paris, “it is becoming difficult for a man to go the little stretch on his own from place Clichy to place Blanche as there are so many homosexuals touting for business. They’re all dressed in extravagant outfits; it’s even difficult to know who we’re talking to as certain have very elegant feminine hair styles, while others are blatantly transvestites”.

This request was made in an oppressive climate. The act of the 30^th of July 1960 enabled the government to “fight against homosexuality”, now considered a “social scourge”. In 1966, the French literary, liberal and socialist newspaper, L’Aurore, published an article under the title of “Transvestites. The mentally ill”, quoting a Danish psychiatrist at the World Congress of Psychiatry, who declared that a woman dressing as a man (or inversely) was “symptomatic of mental illness”. Two years later, France would adopt the World Health Organisation’s classification identifying homosexuality a “mental illness”. This marked the culmination of an evolution that began in the last third of the 19^th century that would pathologise cross-dressing, often linked to “sexual inversion” rather than a crime.

The champion Violette Morris loses her case in 1930

Violette Morris (1893-1944) came into this world disappointing her father who wanted a boy. He already had a daughter and would have no more children. Given little love, the young girl, archetype of a “tomboy”, invested all her energy into sport. She excelled in many disciplines: swimming, weightlifting, football, motorcycling, cycling, the shot put and javelin. She enjoyed mixed events, possible in cyclocross, water polo and even boxing. Her talents would bring her to the highest ranking given that she beat national and international records, notably in 1921 at the first female Olympics.

She was the perfect embodiment of the modern masculinised woman in her choice of clothes, her smoking habits, but also the full mastectomy she underwent in 1927 in order to feel more comfortable in the tight space inside a racing car. She was also very promiscuous and openly bisexual.

Violette Morris’ popularity as an Omnisport champion was at its peak when the Female Sporting Federation of France stripped her of her licence in 1927, reproaching her on account of her numerous violent lapses and being a “deplorable example” for the young girls she was supervising as a trainer with the Federation. The champion pressed charges and the case took place in 1930. The Federation chose to make the pants worn by the sportswoman the symbol of her “deviancies”.

The right to wear pants before the 3^rd chamber of the Paris civil court

“A pair of navy-blue cloth pants, topped with a matching jacket, the collar and sleeves revealing the most elegantly virile of silk shirts. Pocket handkerchief, bright green pen, a trace of tobacco on her ringed fingers, a nice smile on her flat-haired face. Such was Mrs. Violette Morris yesterday, champion of all sports and a well-known amazon who not so long ago had a breast cut off, not to shoot from a bow, but to better drive her automobile”, wrote one journalist.

One of the two lawyers working for the Female Sports Federation of France, Yvonne Netter, brought forward the argument that women were not allowed to “wear culottes in the street”. (Le Journal, 25^th February 1930). A stupefying remark coming from a feminist as progressive as Yvonne Netter. Feminists seemed to side with order while public opinion tolerated the eccentricity, welcomed with a mix of irony and sympathy. One journalist wrote that the Police Prefect himself didn’t dare “pull this text out of its sweet slumber”! But for the Federation, it was the image of women’s sport, rapidly growing but still contested, that was at stake. As with other issues such as the right to vote, the aim was to demonstrate that sport was not a threat to gender differentiation.

The tribunal couldn’t rule on the refusal to issue a licence which depended on the federation’s rules and concluded:

“We are not in the capacity to deal with the way Mrs. Violette Morris dresses as a civilian or in other contexts, yet we believe that wearing trousers, not being an accepted custom for women, the FSF was perfectly entitled to forbid it. As a consequence, the tribunal dismisses Mrs. Morris’ case and orders her to pay the costs”.

The sportswoman’s lawyer, Henri Lot, who proclaimed that trousers were the future of women, was stunned. In an interview given just after the case and censured, “la Morris” defended herself in the very language that was reproached for: uncouth, cowardly, obscene, revealing the antics of the Federation’s “sluts” and other “tarts”.

“And then they come along and say, poutingly: oh how she dresses as a man, oh how she boxes the asshole official who is refereeing erratically like a man, oh how she walks around the dressing room naked as if it weren’t precisely reserved for that. Oh how she debauches our girls! All that because one day, I snogged a young girl who was all over me on a train! She said she was in love with me, these things happen, believe it or not. But I have never debauched anyone by force”.

Social contempt and nazi logic

“We are living in a country corrupted by money and scandals”, she continues, “governed by phrasemongers, schemers, and cowards. This country of little people is not worthy of its ancestors, not worthy of survival. One day, its decadence will lead it to slave status, but if I'm still here, I won't be one of the slaves. Believe me, this is not in my temperament”.

So logically, Violette Morris took Germany’s side. A transition that we can assimilate to another famous “female transvestite” from across the English Channel, who organised the boxing training for British fascists: Colonel Parker. The latter, herself, also went through a trial at the end of the 1920s for marrying a woman. A trip to Germany in 1934 allowed Violette Morris to get involved with Nazis. Ideologically speaking, she was a Nazi and claimed to be willing to “crush the Judeo-Masonic plutocracy”. She joined the SS security service, the SD, and became a valued spy, using her connections in the sporting world.

Violette Morris continued her activities in occupied France, carrying out numerous missions for the Gestapo, interrogating — and torturing women and men involved in Resistance activities. The Freikorps in Normandy received the order to eliminate her from London. On April 26, 1944, men from the « Surcouf » maquis (French guerilla resistance fighters) ambushed and killed her with a burst from a machine gun.

1969: beware of the “unpredictable fashion transformations” …

In 1969, the debate surrounding the 1800 ordinance resurfaced in the public arena. Doctor Bernard Lefay, a Paris councillor, addressed a written question to the police prefect on the topic of the “modernisation” of this regulation.

Doctor Bernard Lefay:

“It would be regrettable if prosecutions were brought against individuals of the female sex in compliance with the police ordinance issued on the 19^th of Brumaire in the year IX […] The requirement to apply for authorisation no longer applies, but it is settled case law that obsolescence cannot replace a formal text to repeal a legislative or regulatory measure. A threat will therefore continue to hang over many women who cannot invoke the demands of fashion to exonerate themselves before the authorities, as the wrath of the adage “no one should ignore the law" would certainly silence the canons of aesthetic dress”.

In his answer, the Police Prefect, Maurice Grimaud, deemed it “wise to leave unchanged the texts which foreseeable and unseeable transformations of fashion may at any time, render them obsolete”. (Official municipal bulletin of the city of Paris, 20^th June 1969).

What does this refusal conceal? Forty years later, he confessed that he found “skirts and dresses, as revisited by Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, infinitely more becoming than men’s trousers, most often taking the form of inelegant jeans” [1]

2013: The ordinance becomes an "archive-relic"

For the next forty years, there would be no requests to repeal this arguably forgotten measure. Historical research on the topic was what brought its existence back into memory. Members of parliament took up the issue but much later, and without knowing anything about the case. In 2004, Jean-Yves Hugon, UMP deputy for Indre, in 2007, Alain Joyandet, UMP deputy for Haute-Saône, in 2009 Pierre Morange, UMP deputy for Yvelines, called for the repeal of what they believed to be a law, without success. In 2010, for April 1^st, comedians from the radical left and those attentive to “priority” projects, made it an April fool’s joke. The “picturesqueness” of the subject seemed to be a powerful motivator. In 2011, the socialist and ecologist left, on the initiative of Maryvonne Blondin, socialist senator for Finistère, wanted to “remove anachronistic and obsolete references to women's rights” and proposed repealing the “law” of “26^th Brumaire of the year IX”. The Côte-d'Or senator Alain Houpert, took up the fight again on July 12, 2012.

In truth, the most logical course of action would consist in asking the Paris Prefecture to repeal this ordinance, which is what the city’s council did in 2010 in a pledge adopted at the request of the Ecologists and Communists. Yet the Police Prefect replied that he had better things to do than “legislative archaeology”, and that he was preoccupied with serious issues such as violence against women.

In 2004, Nicole Ameline, Minister Delegate for Parity and Professional Equality, replied to Jean-Yves Hugon that “it did not seem appropriate to her to take initiative for such a measure [the repeal], whose impact would be purely symbolic, as “obsolescence” seemed “more effective than intervention” in her opinion. Of course, no policeman, or policewoman wearing pants probably, would risk arresting a “travestie”; a word that had also fallen into disuse in French. But back in 1930, Violette Morris already believed in its obsolescence, a vague and sometimes misleading notion.

The media coverage of Une histoire politique du pantalon (A political history of pants) from 2010 onwards and the request to repeal the “law on pants”, formulated by the Ni Putes Ni Soumises movement (Neither Whores nor Submissive) and forwarded to the candidates of the presidential election in 2012, helped to bring the subject back into the political arena. After the election of François Hollande, the Minister for Women’s Rights, the City, Youth and Sports, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, a socialist, declared that the ordinance was “implicitly repealed”. This political act finally took the ban seriously in its legal, symbolic, historic and memorial dimensions and considered that the ordinance was nothing more than a “archive relic”. (Press release 31^st January 2013).

“The law of 7^th of November 1800 referred to in the question is Police Prefect Dubois’ ordinance no. 22 of the 16^th of Brumaire from the year IX, entitled “Ordinance concerning female cross-dressing”. For the record, this ordinance was primarily intended to restrict women’s access to certain functions or professions by preventing them from dressing like men. This ordinance is incompatible with the principles of equality between women and men enshrined in France's Constitution and European commitments, notably the Preamble to the 1946 Constitution, Article 1 of the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. This incompatibility entails the implicit repeal of the ordinance of the 7^th of November, which is therefore devoid of any legal effect and constitutes no more than an archive document kept as such by the Paris Police Prefecture” (Official Senate records, 31^st January 2013, p. 339).

Presentation - Masculine women

Prohibiting

Differrentiating