Dangerous Intersections: Streetwalkers and the Circulation of Wealth in Mercier's Tableau de Paris

Abstract: This article explores the connections between prostitution and the circulation of wealth in Louis Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris (1781-1788), tracing the ways in which notions of prostitution shift from a corrupt appendage of the luxury and pleasure industry to a vital and necessary engine of the national economy. According to Mercier, prostitution not only ensured the healthy circulation of currency and consumer spending, but it also maintained social divisions that safeguarded the private marriage market. Historians of prostitution have drawn extensively on the police reports and legislation regarding prostitutes; scholars of literature meanwhile have focused mainly on the "whore's story" in libertine and sentimental novels. This essay offers instead an examination of Mercier's economic views, approaches, and arguments regarding prostitution in the late eighteenth century to illuminate how competing social, moral, and economic imperatives intersect and coalesce around the issue and practice of prostitution. With special attention to Mercier's various metaphors of circulation, contagion, and motion, the essay argues that prostitution made visible the mechanisms, as well as the contradictions, of wealth and its circulation in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution.