Thank you!!

Thanks for sharing those screenshots — a classic volume, and what a cool passage there. Sounds like a dream course to teach!!

Awesome!! Thanks, Liesbeth!

Terrific! I hope it might be useful.

Thank you! 🙏

I'd be interested in the reference/citation too!

Thank you Julie!! It was really helpful to think with your Lyon book for this one on the relationship between state actors, bureaucracy, & everyday practices of sexuality...

9️⃣ Thanks to the journal editors and Duke UP, the article is free to read on an exceptional basis through Dec 31, 2025: read.dukeupress.edu/french-histo... 🎁📅

8️⃣ (p.s. I’m on the job market this year as my postdoc at Yale ends this spring—open to new opportunities! 🙏📬)

7️⃣ What became of Théru's school? The Collège Mazarin once shaped French morals through education. Today, the same building houses the Académie française, which does so through language. (Continuity vs. change...)

6️⃣ FWIW, I think we see the social history of sexuality differently when attending to elite institutions. When Foucault wrote, “The sex of the schoolboy became... a public problem” over the 18th century, there are strong reasons to think he had such stories—and this particular school—in mind.

5️⃣ Above all, I show how Théru's twin endeavors fit together: that vice policing fit the school's moral charter. Such police work was an indirect consequence of absolutist wars of conquest, state building, and a particular intellectual understanding of the nature of gender and sexual difference.

4️⃣ In the article, I read those police archives alongside:
✍️ drafts & reports from Sorbonne & Parlement overseers
📒 account books
📕 printed textbooks
🏛️ architectural plans
…in French & Latin, to reconstruct neighborhood life in the growing city.

3️⃣ It's a strange side hustle for a humanist, no? Because of his police work, I’ve uncovered more correspondence from Théru than pretty much any of his colleagues. 📂 These letters—in police archives, not university ones—offer a rare glimpse into how higher education operated under absolutism.

2️⃣ Our man Théru dutifully taught Latin & Christian morality to his teenage students. But he also... maintained a vast clandestine urban information network and worked covertly with vice police to track, arrest, imprison, or banish alleged “sodomites” across Paris—for nearly 50 years. 🌈🕵️‍♂️⚖️

1️⃣ The article traces the strange career of Nicolas Théru, a professor (or regent) at the Collège Mazarin, a school which opened in 1688 to instill French mores in elite youth from provinces newly annexed by Louis XIV's wars of conquest. 🇫🇷📚

Academic gossip!