ATTITUDES TO SEX WITH WILLING PUBESCENTS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE
by Edmund Marlowe
March 2024
The purpose of this essay is to suggest as a fair generalisation from primary sources that in eighteenth century Europe pubescents were not considered too young to have sex with men[1], and that consequently the only objection to sex between men and boys was that it was sodomitical. Hence the reasons for hostility to pederasty had nothing in common with those adduced for the even greater hostility to it in the twenty-first century (by when, in diametrical contrast, it was denunciation of sodomy that was no longer tolerated).
Before proceeding further, I must issue a caveat without which this generalisation will rightly be condemned as over-sweeping. By “attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe”, I mean something slightly narrower, namely attitudes in Christian Europe between 1701 and 1791[2]. I am not including the bits of south-easternmost Europe that had different mores because they were Moslem, or the last decade of the century after the French Revolution, when, at least as far as the law was concerned, Enlightenment ideas about sex triumphed unequivocally, first in France and then in some other countries. Moreover, I have added “willing” to the title to make it absolutely clear that I am not trying to answer the question of whether the rape of pubescents was regarded differently to the rape of adults (though I understand it was). In comparing my conclusions with those of historians writing in current Newspeak, one should be aware that the latter are unable to address the same question as me because they cannot express the concept of sex with pubescents that is not rape. The eighteenth century was certainly not guilty of this absurdity.
Attitudes towards sex in Europe in the eighteenth century were quite distinct from those that prevailed in the preceding and following centuries. On the one hand, Europe was still Christian, not just in terms of what most people believed, but in that Christianity was everywhere upheld as the state religion. On the other hand, it was also the Age of Enlightenment when many Christian doctrines were, for the first time, openly challenged in the name of “reason” (however unreasonable “reason” may in practice sometimes have been![3]). These new ideas began to triumph after 1791, so that nineteenth-century thinking was very different and the new puritanism that steadily arose over its course did not rely on Christian doctrine.
Sex with girls
Showing how very little objection there was to sex with girls on account of their youth (until such objection became a cause célèbre over the course of the later nineteenth century) should help make it clear that the youth of boys was not a reason why men having sex with them was considered so wrong.
First of all one may consider the law, while remembering that it could be meaningless if there was no will to enforce it. The Christian view was that all sex outside marriage was wrong, fairly wrong in the case of fornication (sex between men and unmarried or widowed females) and very wrong in the case of adultery (sex between men and married women who were violating their marriage vows and thus casting doubt on the legitimacy of their offspring)[4].
Those who held to this view would naturally regard habitual fornicators as debauched and terrible sinners. They still had the theoretical backing of the law in regarding all fornication as criminal, while in practice they had lost it in countries where the ideas of the Enlightenment had a strong influence.[5] In addition to that, some countries had introduced secular laws that prohibited sex with girls under a certain age, usually twelve, which had been the Roman minimum age of marriage for girls and canon law ever since. For example, in England this was done in 1275[6], though the law in question had been a dead letter since 1576 when another statute proscribed consensual sex with girls under ten.
However, to understand the thinking behind the age of consent, it must be seen in the context of other sexual prohibitions. The strongest, for which the penalty was often death, were bestiality and sodomy. What these had in common with sex with pre-pubescent girls were that they were all non-procreative sex, so that in Venice, for example, all three were termed sodomy. There was a widespread presumption that girls under twelve were sexually incapable (in just the same way that in England boys under fourteen could not be charged with any sexual offence for the same reason). Nevertheless, with regard to girls, canonists showed awareness that this was only a presumption and was thus rebuttable, arguing that a marriage contracted even with a girl under twelve could be valid if she were ”viri potens, capable of sex with a man.[7]
Probably the single most important memoir in shedding light on social attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe was the very long History of My Life of the Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova.[8] For more than forty years, he travelled over an area extending from Madrid to Moscow and Constantinople, so that his memoir is a record of local customs and reactions to his own behaviour over a vast swathe of Europe. As he was renowned most of all for his amours, and many of these were with pubescent girls, he is the richest source there is for the subject of present enquiry. It was not that he indicated a preference for such young girls. Most of his liaisons were with older beauties, sometimes far into their twenties. He often remarked on the ages of the youngest girls only incidentally or well into his narrative or not at all.
Casanova did not blindly ignore the old morality; he vigorously, consistently and sincerely opposed it on grounds central to the Enlightenment viewpoint, that it was a false virtue that stopped people from following their natural instinct. However, it was not only such unapologetic children of the Enlightenment who were no longer cowed by strict old Christian moralising. There was also a large body of opinion that still fully accepted Christianity, but took comfort in a humane New Testament interpretation of its strictures. For example, at Chambéry in 1761, Casanova’s friend M. M., who was a nun in a convent there, confessed to him her erotic interest in an eleven-year-old boarder and said it did not trouble her conscience even though she knew it was a sin. “If I had not known M. M. at Aix her religion would have surprised me; but such was her character. She loved God, and she did not believe that he would fail in mercy because she had not the strength to overcome nature” (VII, p. 293).
One of Casanova’s longest-lasting liaisons was with a twelve- to thirteen-year-old girl in Russia, “who was the cause of my leading a more or less regular life in Petersburg.” Since he could not speak Russian, a new friend who was an eminent diplomat negotiated the purchase of her from her serf father. The latter “thanks St. Nicholas for the good fortune he has sent him, he talks to his daughter, I see her looking at me, and I understand that she says yes.” The father asked for a significantly higher sum due to her still being a virgin. “Her breasts were not yet developed, she was in her thirteenth year; nowhere did she show the indubitable imprint of puberty.” He took her to highest-society dinners and parties in St. Petersburg and Moscow and was proud to see her act so well as hostess to those he received in his carriage during the great social occasion of the annual military parade at Krasnoye Selo. It appears that none of the many distinguished people she met looked askance; rather they were charmed. She told him that he had increased her value by teaching her Venetian, and he seemed proud of how he had moved her up socially. When he had to leave and sadly returned her to her father (knowing a great architect was about to take her on), he observed that she “looked very much out of place in the hovel, for what they called a bed was only a big straw mattress on which the whole family slept together.”[9]
Other girls loved by Casanova were even younger. As a youth of eighteen, he fell in love with an apparent castrato whom he rightly suspected of being really a girl. While wooing her, he fell in with her family, including her apparent younger sisters, who were only twelve and eleven. But, “despite their extreme youth the sign of their precocious puberty was visible on their white bosoms.” He soon slept with the obviously keen twelve-year-old, without comment on her age, but when the eleven-year-old offered herself the next day, Casanova said, “You are too young.” To this she replied, “Age has nothing to do with it. I am better developed than my sister,” and, despite her affirming to another question that she was still a virgin, that settled the matter as far as Casanova’s doubts were concerned. The scene which ensues, in which Casanova finds her indeed “more well developed […] and in fact she proved herself superior to her sister in every way” (II pp. 9-14), is a living justification of the canonists’ argument that a girl under twelve was fine if she were viri potens. In effect, becoming this was the real distinction between child and woman, as Casanova’s mistress Marcolina later affirmed in the way she concluded her story of how, at the age of eleven, she and her twelve-year-old friend were deflowered by their confessor: “in an hour he made us women” (IX p. 95).
Casanova bedded many other girls younger than fourteen and in not one of them is the slightest note of disapproval or uneasiness shown by any of the many people who knew of these liaisons.[10] To get this in more accurate perspective, it should be remembered that the age of menarche was high in the eighteenth century, a few years higher than today. Besides what Casanova said about his Russian girl above, he said of fourteen-year-old Barberina, with whom he had an affair in Venice after deflowering her with her mother’s encouragement in 1755: “She was not yet a grown girl; the roses of her burgeoning breasts had not yet budded; her attainment of puberty existed only in her young mind.”[11]
Fortunately, we are not dependent on Casanova for how men of the Enlightenment saw this. The most famous of its philosophers to leave a memoir was surely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions, finished in 1769, is remarkably similar to Casanova’s in sexual outlook. Just like Casanova in St. Petersburg, but ironically in Casanova’s Venice, Rousseau too guiltlessly bought a girl of eleven or twelve for his future pleasure. He then abandoned her on leaving Venice and, in contrast to Casanova, showed not the slightest curiosity in what became of her. The Confessions is full of remorse for the author’s misdeeds, but this was not counted among them.[12]
Sex with boys
It is a little harder to demonstrate the truth that sex with boys was regarded as at least no worse than sex between men because both were almost invariably spoken of with the severest opprobrium. Sodomy (the definition of which varied but always included pedication, which was generally assumed to be the longed-for means of male homosexual consummation) was a crime for which the punishment inflicted was often death, though how severely it was repressed varied considerably.[13]
Before launching into the evidence, it is important to issue another caveat. Because sodomy was considered such a dreadful crime against God and nature, and because the eighteenth century was as conscious as any other that boys could easily be influenced by their elders, special concern was often shown that they should not be corrupted into acquiring a taste for something so pernicious. The recent dogma that everyone has an innate fixed sexual orientation had not been born and the eighteenth century was aware that if boys found they liked something they had previously been unaware of, they might find it hard to forgo thereafter. However, this worry about boys’ corruption hinged on the notion that sodomy was always nefarious. There are no grounds for supposing that, if it had not been so regarded, boys would have been considered too young for it any more than girls were for coitus.
The strongest evidence that the eighteenth century did not consider boys too young to make decisions to have sex is that, if it had done so, one might reasonably expect mercy for boys when the sex they took part in was sodomitical, but of that there was none. If a boy was considered old enough to have sexual desires, then he was punished for letting a man pedicate him and just as severely as the man.
Pre-pubescent boys in England were lucky in that there was there “an irrebuttable presumption that a boy under the age of fourteen years is incapable of having carnal knowledge”. The law specified that “a person who consents to the commission or the attempted commission of the offence upon him is guilty as a principal, unless he be under the age of fourteen”[14] If a fourteen-year-old were caught, it was thus a matter of life or death for him to try to convince a judge or jury that the man had forced him. If there was a witness to his having been willing or if there was other evidence of his willingness, such as his seeking out the man after their first sexual encounter, he could expect to hang.
Such was the sorry fate of, for example, fourteen-year-old Thomas Finley, who confessed to having been pedicated several times, apparently not realising the seriousness of the consequences, and who then fell on his knees and begged in vain for mercy when he did: he was hanged with his lover in 1761. This was widely reported in the press with the detail that he had “been quite of his mind” in the five days since the death warrant was read to him.[15] No one suggested he was too young to die for what he had let be done, so how can they have thought he was too young to give a fully meaningful consent to it?
Boys younger than fourteen were not so lucky in other countries where there was no presumption that boys below a certain age were incapable of lust. In Venice after 1424, boys aged ten to thirteen involved in sodomy received three months in prison and between twelve and twenty lashes.[16] In Calvinist Geneva, where the age at which a boy became sexually culpable was not defined, in 1564 a court ordered the parents of two eight-year-old boys implicated in mere sexual play to beat them in front of a fire (symbol of their future fate if they did not mend their ways). In 1662 thirteen-year-old Jean Chabaud was condemned there for having been willingly pedicated to being beaten on the still-smouldering ashes of his burnt lover.[17] In Spain and Portugal, no minimum age was set below which boys could not be tortured to confess[18] and punished, though boys were not burnt and, by the eighteenth century, punishment had become much less cruel.
As with fornication, Enlightenment ideas about sodomy were gentler than Christian ones, though nothing like as indulgent as with the former. Feeling against it was so strong that merely publishing a defence of it seems to have been practically impossible. At any rate, Thomas Cannon, who wrote the only such defence known to have been published in eighteenth-century England, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d (1749), had to go into exile for three years, while his printer was sentenced to the pillory and a month in prison.
Fortunately, one of the great philosophers of the age wrote frankly on pederasty, offering insight into the Enlightenment view of the subject. Jeremy Bentham’s Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty (1785) was a defence on utilitarian grounds too outspoken to be published in his lifetime. The legal prohibition of pederasty he argued against was that against sodomy, which could be with a boy, man or female. However, his essay’s contents, as well as its title (which could otherwise have been made “sodomy” rather than “paederasty”), make it clear that homosex with boys was what he had in mind. In describing those with a propensity for their own sex, he gave no indication of being even aware of men who had sex with other men. Rather, he insisted that “it is only for a very few years of his life that a male continues an object of desire even to those in whom the infection of this taste is at the strongest”, advancing as one of his arguments that the Greeks used a word for this taste that meant “the love of boys”. He raised each of the arguments he had heard raised against pederasty in order to refute them in turn. None of these concerned the youth of the boy. On the contrary, the impermanence of the desire consequent upon the beloved being still a boy is central to his argument for toleration of it, and makes nonsense of any notion that he saw sex with boys as worse than sex with men.
To this opinion of a philosopher who seems to have had no personal sexual interest in boys can be added Casanova as the most famous man to put into practice the Enlightenment’s ideas about sex. Given the dominant view of the age, he was unsurprisingly reticent about his personal experience of sex with boys but, given what has already been said about his attitude to sex with pubescent girls, he can hardly have regarded the age of a pubescent boy as a matter for moral objection. At any rate, in keeping with his strongly expressed hostility to old notions of sexual virtue, he wrote of the only boy he did admit to sex with, a seventeen-year-old Russian with earlier experience and still “pretty as a girl”: “he had been loved by the Secretary of the Cabinet Teplov, and, like an intelligent youth, he not only defied prejudice, he deliberately set about winning the affection and esteem of all men of position, in whose company he was always to be found, by his caresses.” In other words, being a pretty boy was something it was intelligent to take advantage of. Casanova also wrote of an abate in love with a boy of fifteen: “he sighed to conquer him in the Greek fashion when he encountered the obstacles which arise from education, prejudice, and what are called ‘manners’.”
My purpose here has been to show what the hostility to Greek love in eighteenth century Europe was not. The reasons for what it was, a violent antipathy to sodomy of any kind, require explanation elsewhere.
[1] I imagine they were seen as old enough for sex with women too, but this I have not studied enough to assert.
[2] These are the dates of the first year of the century and of the promulgation of the first French penal code which first did away with a “host of imaginary crimes” that came from the Bible, such as fornication and sodomy.
[3] For a good example of this, comparable to 21st century attitudes to sex with pubescents, consider the hysterical denunciation of masturbation initiated by the fake medical findings of the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728-1797), whose book L’Onanisme. Dissertation sur la maladies produites par la masturbation (Onanism. Dissertation on the Illnesses Caused by Masturbation), Lausanne, 1760 claimed that masturbation caused a wide range of severely debilitating illnesses. Its conclusions were swallowed without challenge by European society, including such great representatives of the Enlightenment as Voltaire and Kant. The eminent English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in his essay of about 1785, Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty, criticised the contemporary condemnation of pederasty on the grounds that it was harmless, in contrast to masturbation, which he called “the most incontestably pernicious […] of all irregularities of the venereal appetite.” Casanova himself, while expressing relatively moderate views, later in his memoirs explained to a sceptical Turk that “We Christians […] claim that young men who indulge in the practise impair their constitutions and shorten their lives. In many communities they are closely watched, left absolutely no time to commit this crime on themselves” (II p. 85). Widespread acceptance of Tissot’s views led to often extremely cruel measures to prevent boys from masturbating and punish those who did until well into the 20th century. The panic Tissot caused about masturbating has remarkable and unique similarities to the post-1980 mass hysteria about Greek love, in that in both cases uncritical swallowing of false pseudo-scientific claims of inevitable harm led to very long-lasting moral blindness and cruelty with a devastating impact on millions of lives.
[4] The idea that married men could commit adultery with unmarried females is a late 19th century innovation that is irrelevant here. It is irrational to compare it to the infidelity of married women because it could not result in misattributed offspring and thus undermine the family.
[5] Fornication was against canon law, which meant that it had been illegal throughout Europe until the Reformation and remained at least theoretically so in countries where Catholicism was the state religion. Some Protestant countries, such as England, also upheld a version of canon law, whilst others brought in new secular laws against fornication. In practice, the situation varied considerably. Casanova’s memoir mentioned strict enforcement in Spain (by the Inquisition), Turin and Vienna. In other countries, enforcement of such theoretically enduring laws had fallen into desuetude. In 1751, Casanova was arrested in France for impregnating his landlady’s daughter of 15 or 16 and refusing to marry or support her, but he was let go and the landlady arrested instead when the police (rightly) believed his claim that she had sent her daughter to his room guessing what would ensue (My Life III pp. 173-6). In England, the prohibition against fornication depended on ecclesiastical courts whose authority, since the upheavals of 1642-60, seem to have become too weak for punitive action in a country where Enlightenment ideas were taking hold. In Scotland, the pardoning by a court in 1709 of three hundred men and women charged with fornication and adultery brought about the de facto decriminalisation of these offences (Brian P. Levack “The Prosecution of Sexual Crimes in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland” in The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 228, Part 2 (October 2010), pp. 172-193).
[6] 1st Statute of Westminster, 3 Edw. 1, Chapter XIII.
[7] A. Esmein, Le marriage en droit canonique, vol. I (Paris, 1929), p. 236.
[8] All references to Casanova’s My Life in this essay are to the first full translation into English by Willard R. Trask, published by Harcourt, Brace & World in New York in 1966-71.
[9] See Casanova in Russia, 1764-5, where his whole account of their liaison is given, taken from My Life, X.
[10] For the reader interested in reading everything Casanova wrote about his liaisons with his youngest girls, here is a catalogue of all those begun with girls of thirteen or younger (references being to Trask’s translation), all fully consummated unless otherwise stated:
i. With Marina, 11, and her sister Cecilia, 12, both “with budding breasts”, in the Papal States in 1744, when Casanova himself was only 18.
ii. With Marie-Louise O’Murphy, 13, in Paris, not fully consummated; she just afterwards became the mistress of King Louis XV (III pp. 198-203).
iii. With Sara de Muralt-Favre, 13, in 1760 (VI pp. 194-6).
iv. With La Corticelli, 13, in Florence in 1761 (VII pp. 171-3, 257-262).
v. With an unnamed boarder, 11, at a convent in Chambéry in 1761 (also loved by an adult nun there): the sex was limited to her fondling his cock until he ejaculated one day, and then fellating him the next.
vi. With “Zaïre”, 12-13, in Russia in 1765 (X).
vii. With his niece Guglielmina, 13, who gave herself to him in Italy in 1771: he deflowered her before the eyes of his nine-year-old daughter Giacomina, who was in bed with them watching with keen interest (XII pp. 100-102).
Excluded from the above list are the several affairs with “little girls” of unspecified age who may have been just as young, for example Adèle Moreau, whom he deflowered when she was “on the verge of adolescence” (IX p. 127).
Concerning the sex of other men with girls under fourteen, Casanova also recounted:
i. At Chambéry in 1761, Mlle. Desarmoises told him how “her father had loved her madly from the time she was eleven years old,” and had tried in vain to “make off with the fruit” when she was thirteen (VII pp. 286-7).
ii. In Provence in 1763, his Venetian mistress Marcolina, 17, told him how in Venice she, aged 11, and her friend, 12, already “sweethearts”, were both deflowered by their confessor (IX pp. 94-5).
[11] My Life IV p. 180
[12] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, Œuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Raymond et al., Paris: Gallimard, 1959, Volume 1, p. 323.
[13] Talking of a boy prostitute he knew in the Papal States, Casanova said, “This is not unusual in outlandish Italy, where intolerance in this matter is not unreasonable, as it is in England, nor ferocious, as it is in Spain” (My Life II, p. 6), a fair summary. The Netherlands was a third country enthusiastic about putting sodomites to death. By contrast, in Italy indeed and in the Ottoman Empire, sodomy seems to have been largely tolerated, though still in theory a capital crime. Only in Russia was its status as a crime doubtful, being, like fornication, dependent on the much dwindled and nebulous authority of the Church.
[14] Halsbury’s Laws of England, Vol. II (1908) sections 510 and 1092, which shows this was still the case in 1908. The idea that boys reached spermarche at fourteen and its influence on the law extended far beyond England. It goes back to Aristotle’s statement in History of Animals 581a. It was the basis of Roman law that boys could only marry at 14 (versus girls at 12), whence it was incorporated into canon law, in which it remained unchanged until 1917. As such, it was also the law of most European countries: in France until 1792 and in England until 1929.
[15] See, for example, the Ipswich Journal and the Oxford Journal, both of 1 August 1761, and the Chester Courant of 4 August.
[16] P. H. Labalme, “Sodomy and Venetian Justice in the Renaissance”, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 52 (1984): 217–54.
[17] William G. Naphy, “’Under-Age’ Sexual Activity in Reformation Geneva” in George Rousseau (editor), Children and Sexuality: From the Greeks to the Great War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 118-9.
[18] Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and Civilization, Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 313 quotes the Portuguese Inquisition’s description of its torture of a boy of ten.