This study, based on the archives of the Admission Office of Sainte-Anne asylum, points out the major role played by the material and institutional conditions of psychiatric clinic in the shaping of French sexual psychopathology during the last three decades of the 19th century. It leads to three conclusions: a major gap between the cultural dissemination of discourses about sexual perversions
... [Show full abstract] and the social and clinical reality; the specific style of French sexual psychopathology that could not consider sexuality as an autonomous object; the contradiction between psychiatric theories and the day-to-day management of patients—French public psychiatry cannot be considered unequivocally as an instrument of social control of sexual deviant behaviours. The material conditions of psychiatric clinic eventually appear as one of the factors explaining why a sexual research field similar to the Germanic sexology could not emerge in France at the beginning on the 20th century.
