Bring back brothels! It’s not your typical political slogan, but Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has launched a campaign to reopen and regulate France’s brothels for the benefit of sex workers. In an interview last week Jean-Philippe Tanguy, one of Le Pen’s senior MPs, said his party would table a bill to reopen the brothels – known as maisons closes in France – which were closed in 1946.

‘The prostitutes would be empresses in their own kingdom,’ explained Tanguy. Le Pen’s party believes that regulated brothels would better protect sex workers from violence. But some on the left are outraged at the proposition. In an op-ed in the left-wing L’Humanité newspaper, 12 lawyers dismissed the idea as a ‘fascist project’. Let us remember, they added, ‘that 80 per cent of women and girls in prostitution are foreign women in precarious situations. The client is deeply sexist, racist, and paedophilic’.

Half a century ago the left wasn’t so prudish. ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ was the rallying cry of the students who took to the streets in the cultural revolution of 1968. This libertinism came to define France in the late 20th century: a country so much more laid-back than the strait-laced Anglophone world. This was particularly true of sex. There........

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