City of Pleasure

Book excerpt: After the austerity, horror, and bloodshed of World War I, France longed for joy, light-heartedness, and sexual freedom. Men and newly emancipated women alike rejected pre-war values and moral restraints. They embraced new lifestyles, and discovered a lust for extravagance, partying, and erotic experimentation that had the inter-war era known as the Roaring Twenties, or the "mad years," and Paris as the City of Pleasure. In this uncensored and fascinating photographic record of the period, historian Alexandre Dupouy pulls backs the bedcovers on Paris's eye-opening erotic life, revealing the delights of its fetish scene, its licensed brothels and gay nightclubs, the first sex shop chains, erotic photography, pornography, and much more. This is an uncensored, titillating, and utterly fascinating look at the sexual excesses of the inter-war period in what was the world's most decadent city.