This chapter attends to the uniquely French stakes of this global moral panic. Early twentieth-century anecdotes attested to the prevalence of French women in brothels overseas, along with the idea that they were the most desirable and best paid in the business. In addition, state-regulated prostitution began in Paris in 1802 and then proliferated across the world. Because most anti-trafficking activists believed that regulationism caused the traffic in women, they considered France a false ally in their crusade. French representatives at international anti-trafficking conventions, and later at the League of Nations, ardently defended state-sponsored prostitution and women’s freedom to migrate for opportunities in the sex industry abroad. They also acknowledged the legitimacy of male demand for prostitution, in stark contrast to Anglo-American anti-vice crusaders. Moreover, by recognizing women’s individual liberty to sell sex, they injected the thorny question of consent into an already contentious discussion. Both proponents and opponents of regulated prostitution battled to determine the terms of the trafficking debate. Respective notions of national character and sexual morality, as well as migration policy, followed along these lines.

Around the 1880s, the issue of “white slavery” – the ostensibly coerced prostitution of young women – first emerged as a moral problem of international concern. Social reformers, journalists, politicians, and the public debated whether migrant women involved in prostitution had been trafficked, or if they willingly left their homelands for work in the sex trade. I show that trafficking discourse, framed in terms of coercion, passivity, and gendered moral reform, conceals the migration story at the heart of these journeys: most importantly, the search for better paying work, but also the quest for adventure and self-discovery. However, agency and exploitation are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Migrants’ lives unfolded on the spectrum between coercion and choice, and in the interstices of illicit and licit economies. This book seeks to explain why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of global prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice. It offers a provocative account of France’s role in modern world history: as an exporter of the theory and practice of state-regulated prostitution; of purportedly French sexual practices; and desirable or undesirable French women migrants, depending on point of view.