On Sep. 12, Swarthmore College Associate Professor of History Megan Brown gave a lecture titled “The Ballets Roses Affair: Scandalous Encounters and Shifting Morals, 1944-1967.” The lecture examined how the affair fit into the broader context of France’s post-World War II recovery and its impact on evolving sexual and political morals during that period.
Brown is a historian of modern Europe, specializing in the history of France and the Francophone world. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and completed her Ph.D in History at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She joined Swarthmore College immediately after earning her doctorate in 2017 and was promoted to associate professor in 2023.
Timothy Burke, chair of the history department, introduced Brown as a highly active scholar, noting her numerous published articles, her wide range of conference presentations, and her crucial contributions to both the history department and Swarthmore as a whole. “Her courses have become one of the shining lights of our departmental curriculum, and I trust so much in her steady conviction and presence in institutional work.”
Brown began the lecture by expressing gratitude to her summer research assistant, Julia Stern ’26, for her valuable contributions and noting that this was only the second time she had presented this project locally.
Brown then delved into the Ballets Roses scandal. On Dec. 18, 1958, police arrested a 33-year-old pianist on charges of inciting minors to debauchery. Shortly after, newspapers alluded to a party held in a villa “in a suburb west of Paris, at the disposal of a high-ranking figure of state.” That figure was André Le Troquer, a decorated World War I veteran, French Resistance member, and socialist politician who, until recently, had served as president of the National Assembly.
By March 1959, 23 adults, three of whom were women, had been charged and sent to trial for “debauching a minor,” with crimes involving five girls aged fourteen to around eighteen.
“The scandal offers not just a lens for making sense of sexual morals, or even the sexual revolution, but also a broader vantage of the markedly fluid, shifting, and often ambiguous moral landscape of post-World War II France,” Brown explained. “The actors caught up in the Ballets Roses Affair may not be household names today, but their actions and experiences have much to tell us about 20th-century France.”
Brown started by sharing how, in 1958, a police questioning of one of the girls resulted in the naming of three perpetrators who would eventually be arrested and tried, including a man named Pierre Sorlut, and a larger investigation being started. She noted that it was surprisingly difficult to determine the girls’ exact ages from the archives because court records did not list birthdays.
“The law is also confusing because, at that time, fifteen was the age of sexual majority for heterosexual contact, but those under 21 were still not considered to have a full legal majority,” Brown said.“So, the idea of being an adult was fluid and complex, particularly in the sense of sexuality.”
In providing more context to the story, Brown shared that Sorlut, who had briefly worked as a police officer in the 1940s, initially dated four girls and brought them into his social circle.
Brown noted that she uses neutral language because terms like “rape,” “statutory rape,” or “assault” carry specific legal and historical meanings that might not be applicable in this context She highlighted that recent research by historians of sexuality, influenced by new scholarship on queer experiences in the U.S. and Europe, challenges the use of terms like pedophilia in historical contexts.
“The historians aren’t acting as apologists for child sexual abuse,” she said. “Rather, they interpret their sources without applying anachronistic judgments in terms of changing legal and cultural understandings of age and sex.”
In discussing attitudes toward age and sex, Brown referenced Ira von Furstenberg, the former sister-in-law of fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. Ira received international attention in 1955, three years before the Ballets Roses Affair, when she married a 31-year-old prince at the age of fifteen. By the time the investigation began, she had already given birth to two children.
“Considering the age and sexuality of girls within this particular [historical] context is crucial for understanding the scandal and its interpretations,” Brown said. She noted that Princess Ira was not seen as a victim, with the idea of a schoolgirl bride inspiring “romance, not despair.”
Brown also mentioned that she is still trying to understand the specific charges brought against the 23 adults.
“The charge against all 23 was ‘debauching,’ or corrupting youth, and [this] juridical language had its roots in punishing habitual procurers of underage sex workers,” she explained. “Although, at the same time, French police and lawmakers permitted underage sex work under certain conditions, which created a conflict with the practice of the law.”
At this point in the lecture, Brown emphasized that in her view, consent was never the central issue, as three of the girls were at least sixteen during the events in question. Instead, the problem seemed to be that they witnessed sexual acts.
“For example, two girls were in the same room, each having sex with a different man. One girl was demolished by watching the other, and vice versa,” she explained.
“This language about debauchery in the Criminal Code, in the 20th-century French context, seems to have been used almost exclusively to punish homosexual acts,” she said. “So, I’m interested in figuring out why it was applied to charge twenty men for heterosexual contact with girls and young women.”
She highlighted that of the 23 accused, seventeen had sex with the youngest girl, who was either thirteen or fourteen years old at the start of the sexual encounters. The girl with the fewest encounters still had relations with six of the accused, while the girl with the most sexual encounters was involved with 21 out of the 23 adults.
“It’s crude, but I calculated the average number of women each accused man had sexual contact with, and it came to 3.04,” she explained. “Only one of the accused had sex with just one girl, and only two, Sorlut included, had encounters with all five.”
Brown also observed that Le Troquer, by far the most famous and the most powerful figure in this network, had no greater involvement than the average man on trial. Unsurprisingly, however, the press focused most of its attention on him.
According to Brown, much of the court record portrayed the girls as willing participants in the encounters, sometimes even instigating them using alcohol and marijuana. However, there is also evidence of fear or revulsion.
“One [example] is a brief mention of a police officer pressuring one of the girls to have sex with another unnamed officer, which the court dismissed as a nervous breakdown. Another instance occurred when Sorlut introduced a girl to Le Troquer, who, according to the court documents, ‘tried to kiss her on the mouth.’ And it was, essentially, a very rare moment where the court reported an attempt rather than an act, which made me wonder if it speaks to the girl’s particular shock at being the target of a man at least five decades older than her,” she explained.
Most of the defendants, including Le Troquer, received fines and suspended sentences. Sorlut was sentenced to five years in prison but successfully appealed the following year, reducing his sentence by one year. A few others were acquitted, and three who initially received short prison terms had them converted to suspended sentences. Additionally, the court reduced the damages awarded to the parents of the girls, stating that the parents had shown “blindness and a lack of supervision over their children.”
Brown shared that her work on this project began during the pandemic, as she could conduct digitized newspaper research remotely. Now, she’s transforming it into a book that covers the period “from the end of the German occupation of France to the burgeoning sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
One question Brown often asks herself is why the French state chose to prosecute this particular case. She suggested political motives might have been at play.
In February 1958, one of the journalists reported that “the government was believed to have ordered quick legal action to demonstrate to a shocked public that the new French [Fifth Republic] regime under President Charles de Gaulle would not tolerate moral laxity.” Although Le Troquer — at that time, a significant political figure who served during the Third and Fourth Republics — had been known to the Paris police for his proclivities, he was only arrested in November 1958, just weeks after stepping down during the elections.
“Le Troquer insisted that his arrest had been a political ploy, and I think he was on to something,” Brown remarked.
She explained that her book will use the Ballets Roses Affair as a critical moment in postwar France to explore the broader ambiguities and rapidly shifting discourse surrounding morality during this historical period.
“Scandals around it today might be explained by the seemingly mundane reality of powerful men accessing illicit sex, be it in France or the United States,” she said. “Nevertheless, when we situate this affair in its own historical context and expand outward to consider the experiences of its actors and the people involved in the years and decades before the scandal, we gain a richer understanding of the moral landscape of postwar France and a more ambiguous reading of French sexual norms and beliefs.”