Jean Bosc
Paris: Albin Michel, No date.

A French maritime novel centred on homosexual desire aboard ship, and a notable document in the literary history of same-sex desire. The first part of the story explicitly confronts the “marine vice” of pederasty. The book attracted controversy, prompting later issues to appear under the more discreet title ‘Les Isoles, moeurs maritimes’. In a preface to the retitled edition, dated 15 March 1905, Bosc complained that Le Vice Marin had “frightened the bourgeoisie” and that newspaper editors refused even to advertise it, forcing his publisher to disguise a commercially successful book beneath a less provocative title. The episode provides a revealing glimpse of the constraints surrounding the public discussion of homosexuality in Belle Epoque France. The novel prefigures later maritime treatments of adolescent sexuality, including the controversy surrounding James Hanley’s Boy (1931). Its place in the period’s homosexual self-understanding is seen in Georges Portal’s 1936 Un Protestant, whose narrator discovers the book in a shop window and recognises in it a reflection of his own experience. After numerous printings of the first edition by Pierre Douville, this second edition issued in Albin Michel’s Le Roman-Succes series (c. 1920s/1930s) and illustrated throughout by Marcel Bloch. The restoration of the original title suggests a markedly different publishing climate from that which had prompted its disguise a generation earlier.

Jean Bosc
Paris: Pierre Douville, [1905].

A French maritime novel centred on homosexual desire aboard ship, and a notable document in the literary history of same-sex desire. The first part of the story explicitly confronts the “marine vice” of pederasty. The book attracted controversy, prompting later issues to appear under the more discreet title ‘Les Isoles: Moeurs Maritimes’. In a preface to the retitled edition, dated 15 March 1905, Bosc complained that Le Vice Marin had “frightened the bourgeoisie” and that newspaper editors refused even to advertise it, forcing his publisher to disguise a commercially successful book beneath a less provocative title. The episode provides a revealing glimpse of the constraints surrounding the public discussion of homosexuality in Belle Epoque France. The novel prefigures later maritime treatments of adolescent sexuality, including the controversy surrounding James Hanley’s Boy (1931). Its place in the period’s homosexual self-understanding is seen in Georges Portal’s 1936 Un Protestant, whose narrator discovers the book in a shop window and recognises in it a reflection of his own experience. With two illustrations.