

The Detectives who Watched the Elite Prostitutes of 18th Century Paris - scarmig
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/04/elite_prostitutes_in_18th_century_paris_and_the_detectives_who_watched_their.single.html

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scarmig
Full title: "The Elite Prostitutes of 18th Century Paris, and the Detectives
who Watched their Every Move"

Although there's a salacious aspect here, it's fundamentally about the
relation between State and society, and how a government uses surveillance as
a way to make the world legible and as an instrument of social control.

Example:

 _Eighteenth-century Parisians overstated the extent of surveillance, perhaps
because they did not really understand its purpose. By the late 1740s, the
police were no longer collecting information in order to investigate criminals
or even to anticipate problems. As French police scholar Vincent Milliot
argues, by spying on Parisians, the police were literally incorporating them,
putting those outside the hierarchy into a special group—the spied upon—for
which the police provided oversight. More generally, however, the police were
gathering information just to gather information, endeavoring to make the city
visible to its government. Intelligence gathering had it own momentum.

So what of kept women? If they were hurling epithets against the king,
plotting sedition, consorting with enemies of the state, and secretly
converting to Protestantism, the police never indicated. They were not a
threat to men who hired them, even socially. Rather, like the_ gens sans aveu
_, the police kept track of them as part of the effort to provide oversight to
a group that naturally had none._

