A French Reaction to the Wilde Affair and Increasing Homophobia in Late-Nineteenth-Century France: Pierre Loti’s Judith Renaudin

Oscar Wilde’s condemnation for homosexual acts in 1895 in England, where such acts were illegal, caused a great stir in France as well, even though such acts had not been illegal there since the beginning of the nineteenth century with the creation of the Napoleonic Code. Both Wilde’s trial and, when he was released two years later, his arrival in France were covered extensively in the French press, with much commentary. It was just at this time that Pierre Loti, by then a very well known figure in France, began work on his play Judith Renaudin. Loti himself had been the subject of public speculation about his sexuality since the publication of his novel My Brother Yves in 1883. In Judith Renaudin, he makes use of an event that happened to his own ancestors during the persecution of Huguenots during the seventeenth century to speculate on what could happen to modern Frenchmen suspected of homosexuality should France follow in the path of England in the wake of the Wilde Affair.