It is a truism that the personal lives of French politicians are regarded as private matters as opposed to the real stuff of politics. However, this has not always been the case. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, sex scandals sparked significant political mobilization and indeed contributed to the downfall of both the Old Regime and the July Monarchy. This presentation examines three case studies from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century to explore the declining relevance of sex scandals in modern France and shows how democratization and new notions about desire changed the boundaries between public and private.
