Pigalle Faces Clean-up After a Century of Sleaze

Brel, Brassens and Piaf immortalised it in song; Lautrec caught it on canvas. Now Paris has finally decided to clean up Pigalle, the city's fabled sleaze centre for more than a century, and not all the locals are happy about it.

"It's a crying shame," said Mamie Irène, 82, who has lived on or near the seedy Boulevard de Clichy since she was 20. "Pigalle is an institution. It was always a friendly neighbourhood; the girls made sure there was always a crowd. Now the place is being slowly strangled."

Most of the red light district's prostitutes have been driven away by a tough law pushed through parliament this year that made "passive soliciting" (which can be interpreted simply as standing on a street corner in a very short skirt) an offence punishable by a fine of up to £2,500 and two months in jail.

Last week vice squad officers began raiding the 50 or so erotic cabarets, go-go bars and neon-lit strip joints that surround the Place Pigalle. Up to a dozen have been served with temporary closure notices from which their owners say they are unlikely to recover.

"Pigalle has always drawn tourists in their thousands," said a vice squad officer, Daniel Rigourd. "But nowadays the neon signs are more like distress signals. Visitors here are far more likely to get ripped off or even roughed up than titillated; we had to do something."

The technique employed by the bars is invariably the same, police say: clients are enticed inside with promises of women on stage and maybe more in the darkened auditorium. Once past the door the victims are plied with beer, wine or champagne and, when they realises that neither the show nor the women will be forthcoming, presented with a bill that can run up to €1,500 (£1,070).

"It's a classic scam, of course, but they're so desperate that they use the threat of violence to extort the money," Mr Rigourd said. "We've had French and foreign tourists robbed of all their cash and forced to sign huge credit card bills. And we know that many are far too embarrassed to come to us afterwards."

Pigalle started to acquire its frills-and-froufrou reputation at the end of the 18th century, when French aristocrats began installing their courtesans in the area. By the end of the 19th century, the Moulin Rouge, home of the frilly-knickered cancan dancers, was pulling in gawping crowds and contemporary writers estimated streetwalkers could be found "every six feet from La Chapelle to the Place de Clichy".

In the 1970s the first porn cinemas made their appearance, followed by the sex shops, video cabins and "hostess bars" bearing unambiguous names like Le Nooky, Le Star Dust, Le Nombril, l'Ex-o and Les Taxi-Girls. For more than 100 years an increasingly tacky Pigalle helped to cement Paris's name as the capital of forbidden pleasures.

Now, the mayor of the ninth arrondissement, Jacques Bravo, told Le Parisien newpaper, the area is "changing, and for the better. The streetwalkers have more or less evaporated, a lot of the more dubious establishments have been closed or are being closed, and I applaud the latest police campaign. We have drawn up new security guidelines that should enable us to improve things even further."

One Pigalle bar owner, Pierre Ruffini, said the police campaign amounted to "illegal harassment and an infringement of our right to trade". He has threatened to install video cameras in his establishment, the Bleu One, to prove that his customers are not being ripped off.

"Clients know any complaint will be listened to, so they're trying it on," he said. "If we were really charging €600 for a beer, we'd all be in the Bahamas by now."

And despite their years of campaigning to rid the area of the worst of its excesses, some residents also say the authorities may be taking things too far.

"Pigalle isn't what it used to be," said Father Jacques Gonnin, one of a team of Catholic priests who ran the Bistrot du Curé restaurant, which until its closure a couple of months ago served generations of students, strippers, streetwalkers and their clients with cheap meals and, if they wanted it, spiritual sustenance too.

"The place is being thoroughly sanitised and almost all of the girls have moved on elsewhere.

"Our most reliable customers, the whole reason the bistro opened in the first place, are slowly but surely disappearing. It's progress in a sense, of course, but there's no doubt a lot of people miss the old ambience."