The French Abolitionist Movement in the Period after WWII

Though under-studied, the years 1946-1960 are important in the history of the French movement for the abolition of the regulation of prostitution. The period has not only witnessed a struggle, after the ban on brothels, for the suppression of the compulsory medical and social registration of prostitutes. It is mainly the period of a weakening of the main historical abolitionist currents, that were linked to the Protestant bourgeoisie and whose rhetoric associated regulation with white slave traffic, for the benefit of a new movement coming from social Catholicism and promoting a more social approach of prostitution. The main expression of this movement is le Nid (the Nest); it was given the means to prosper after the complete conversion of France to abolitionism in 1960.