Introduction

Summary

Around the 1880s, the issue of “white slavery” – the ostensibly coerced prostitution of young women – first emerged as a moral problem of international concern. Social reformers, journalists, politicians, and the public debated whether migrant women involved in prostitution had been trafficked, or if they willingly left their homelands for work in the sex trade. I show that trafficking discourse, framed in terms of coercion, passivity, and gendered moral reform, conceals the migration story at the heart of these journeys: most importantly, the search for better paying work, but also the quest for adventure and self-discovery. However, agency and exploitation are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Migrants’ lives unfolded on the spectrum between coercion and choice, and in the interstices of illicit and licit economies. This book seeks to explain why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of global prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. It offers a provocative account of France’s role in modern world history: as an exporter of the theory and practice of state-regulated prostitution; of purportedly French sexual practices; and desirable or undesirable French women migrants, depending on point of view.