Paris (Modern) — Pigalle Past and Present, the 2016 Abolitionist Law

It is 11:15 on a Wednesday night in late October, and the Route de la Muette cuts through the western flank of the Bois de Boulogne in near-total darkness. The joggers are gone. The cycling families have been gone since dusk. What remains, strung along the treeline in clusters of two and three, are the women — trans women, most of them, from Brazil and Peru and Ecuador — standing in the headlights of passing cars, negotiating in rapid-fire French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

A white Renault Kangoo has been parked for three hours at the Carrefour des Cascades. Its rear windows are covered with curtains fashioned from black bin bags. Inside, a mattress occupies the cargo area. Incense burns. This is not a parking spot — it is a cabinet de travail, a mobile office, one of perhaps a hundred such vehicles arranged across the Bois's sixteen-kilometre road network on any given weeknight. The women call them camionettes.

A kilometre north, on the Rue Blondel in the 2nd arrondissement, a different kind of commerce proceeds with the theatrical nonchalance that only a century of practice can produce. The street is barely 200 metres long, hemmed between the Boulevard de Sébastopol and a covered passage.

At number 32, behind a sandblasted facade that has held a preservation order since 1997, stands the former Aux Belles Poules — To the Beautiful Hens — a maison close that operated from 1870 until the night of April 13, 1946, when French law ordered every brothel in the country shuttered forever. The building is now a heritage venue offering guided tours at €14 per person.

On the pavement outside, the work continues.

These two scenes — the camionette in the western woods, the pavement in front of the preserved brothel — are seventy-eight years apart in one register and entirely continuous in another.

Modern France is a country that has outlawed the trade of bodies twice in a single lifetime: once in 1946, when it abolished the regulated brothel system, and again in 2016, when it criminalised the buyers. Both times, it was certain that the law would end the market. Both times, the market rearranged itself and continued.