In France in the thirteenth century the Church was so impressed by the prevalence of homosexuality that it reasserted the death penalty for sodomy at the Councils of Paris (1212) and Rouen (1214), while we are told that even by rejecting a woman’s advances (as illustrated in Marie de France’s Lai de Lanval) a man fell under suspicion as a sodomist, which was also held to involve heresy.[68] At the end of this century (about 1294) Alain de Lille was impelled to write a book, De Planctu Naturae, in order to call attention to the prevalence of homosexual feeling; he also associated the neglect of women with sodomy.  “Man is made woman,” he writes; “he blackens the honor of his sex, the craft of magic Venus makes him of double gender”; nobly beautiful youths have “turned their hammers of love to the office of anvils,” and “many kisses lie untouched on maiden lips.”  The result is that “the natural anvils,” that is to say the neglected maidens, “bewail the absence of their hammers and are seen sadly to demand them.”  Alain de Lille makes himself the voice of this demand.[69]

A few years later, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, sodomy was still regarded as very prevalent.  At that time it was especially associated with the Templars who, it has been supposed, brought it from the East.  Such a supposition, however, is not required to account for the existence of homosexuality in France.  Nor is it necessary, at a somewhat later period, to invoke, as is frequently done, the Italian origin of Catherine de Medici, in order to explain the prevalence of homosexual practices at her court.

Notwithstanding its prevalence, sodomy was still severely punished from time to time.  Thus in 1586, Dadon, who had formerly been Rector of the University of Paris, was hanged and then burned for injuring a child through sodomy.[70] In the seventeenth century, homosexuality continued, however, to flourish, and it is said that nearly all the numerous omissions made in the published editions of Tallement des Reaux’s Historiettes refer to sodomy.[71]

How prominent homosexuality was, in the early eighteenth century in France, we learn from the frequent references to it in the letters of Madame, the mother of the Regent, whose husband was himself effeminate and probably inverted.[72] For the later years of the century the evidence abounds on every hand.  At this time the Bastille was performing a useful function, until recently overlooked by historians, as an asile de surete for abnormal persons whom it was considered unsafe to leave at large.  Inverts whose conduct became too offensive to be tolerated were frequently placed in the Bastille which, indeed “abounded in homosexual subjects,” to a greater extent than any other class of sexual perverts.  Some of the affairs which led to the Bastille have a modern air.  One such case on a large scale occurred in 1702, and reveals an organized system of homosexual