"The Abbé Theru Confronts Queer Paris, 1688-1736: An Early Modern Institutional History of Ideas" with Benjamin Bernard

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | How did the moral police in 1720s Paris learn about the hidden queer subcultures it sought to regulate? What intellectual tools did they use to judge what constituted moral behavior? The strange career of Nicolas Theru (c.1661-1737), a professor at the University of Paris, suggests that police relied on institutions of higher education. Through scholarship and teaching, Theru honed authoritative knowledge about sexuality and observed the tumultuous changes in the growing city around him. His work as a kind of "sodomy consultant" resulted in the surveillance, arrest, detention, banishment, or imprisonment of hundreds of men in Paris over nearly half a century. Bringing together manuscript archives from the police and from the university, this presentation suggests that the histories of sexuality and of the university are closely intertwined.

Benjamin Bernard is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Princeton Department of History. His dissertation is titled "Administering Morals in the French Enlightenment: Education, Authority, and Sexuality, 1645-1763." He is currently a Mellon Dissertation Fellow at the Council for European Studies and teaches at Princeton and the Institut d'études politiques (Sciences Po) in France.

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