is indeed true that, in general, the police and the courts, during the Belle Epoque, gave every evidence of acting with tact and discretion, still we are faced with the fact that in 1909 in the notorious "affair of the rue de la Pépinière" a servant named Renaud was sentenced to forced labor on the mere "presumption of a crime,” and the presumption in turn was based solely on the fact that he was a homosexual and consequently presumed to be immoral To be sure this scandalous sentence un leashed a veritable storm of protest in the press and among the public, but much nearer to our time a crowd in Limoges tried to lynch a man by the name of Baratoud as much because of his homosexuality as for his crime. Prejudice, hypocrisy and stupidity are to be found in any and every period.

CONCLUSION

SO

The advance in the social acceptance of homosexuality which markedly characterized the beginning of the century was obviously condi tioned and in no small measure initiated by the extraordinary development of scientific understanding which came to the fore at this very time. If public opinion and literature had since the Middle Ages been slow to recover any measure of good sense in sexual matters, the fault lay in the fact that science had, from the days of Antiquity, forgotten the most elementary truths of sexuality It was for the 19th century to bring about a renaissance in this field.

The studies of Casper, Tardieu, Magnan, to cite only Frenchmen, were undertaken about the middle of the century, and their researches were to culminate around 1890 in the first basic syntheses those of Chevalier, Westphal, Tarnowsky, Raf falovitch, Havelock Ellis, and finally Krafft-Ebing. The science of sexual

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psychopathology dates from this period, and the idea that homosexuality is not a crime but a simple constitutional anomaly begins to be generally accepted. Magnus Hirschfeld further stated, brilliantly and successfully, that it was, in itself, a harmless anomaly, neither a neurosis nor a predisposition to a neurosis, but an anomaly perfectly compatible with a normal and fruitful life.

It is on these scientific statements, today universally accepted, that the daily existence of our contemporary homosexuals is based. Once these truths had been stated, it was impossible not to attempt to come to grips with one's own conscience. It was during the Belle Epoque that, in Germany, the first tentative ef forts were made to form a homosexual organization. In 1910 one was to find in Binet-Valmer's Lucien the following significant passage

After all, I belong to myself I am not an invalid! I don't want to be an invalid. I don't intend to ruin my whole life with vain complaints and worries. I have a right to life, and I intend to live.

The fact that the character who makes this declaration of faith is the son of a great psychiatrist is not without significance. It proves the close relationship between scientific discovery and the awakening of the homosexual conscience. This relationship, first engendered about 1900, would come into its own between 1920 and 1925, it continues today as demonstrated by the existence of an organization like Arcadie which has continued to grow and to flourish for ten years.

I do not presume, in these few pages, to have studied, or even named, every manifestation of sexual noncomformity in those years at the turn of the century I have not discussed "inversion, as they called it then, in its relationship to exoticism, for such a study would have taken

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