A Brothel, Repurposed and Restored, Reveals Another Paris
Vivid greens, blues and browns on a long painted ceramic frieze mingle with one another,
but above all with flesh: flesh depicted in pinks, creams, and off-whites; flesh uncovered or uncovering; flesh flayed or fanned; flesh bestriding more flesh; flesh swaying, sagging or swooning.
"There’s this historic past that I’m fighting for." Of the 200-odd Paris brothels — licensed and inspected, luxurious and low down — flourishing by the mid-1930s, Aux Belles Poules is all
that is left from an era when a prosperous sex business was well integrated into the life of Paris.
The frieze at Aux Belles Poules — The Beautiful Hens — as the brothel at 32 Rue Blondel was called, is a unique survivor, protected by indifference, crude wooden boards, a Chinese emporium, a busy wholesale clothing business,
and finally, in 1997, grudging admission to the adjunct historic monuments list.
The effect, as one art historian has noted, "is like one of the Bacchic scenes from a villa at Pompeii." Aux
Belles Poules opened in 1921, in the burst of loosening morals that followed the dark years of World War I.
So, maybe it will give people another image." The tussle among the officials charged with historic preservation, in the late 1990s, and the protests
that followed Aux Belles Poules’ official designation, speak to the uneasiness this buried past provokes, long after all the brothels were closed after World War II.
Laure Adler wrote that Without money, without autonomy, deprived of close relationships, deprived of the
use of their own bodies, the bordello girls lived a state of moral and psychological deprivation,