Critiques of sapphism are often related to contemporary fears of population decline, especially after France’s defeat in 1870 by Germany. Nevertheless, demographic worries alone cannot explain the overwhelming presence of lesbians in turn-of-the-century literature, as well as in newspapers with an overtly anti-feminist stance. For “femmes damnées,” giving up their virginity was a sacrilege, bearing children was a heresy, and men were the designated enemy since they wanted to turn women into breeders, a simple “reproductive device.” Male authors mocked this hatred of motherhood.

By refusing to perpetuate the species, the lesbian is attempting to defy the Creator. As a decadent monster without offspring, she “achieves her own end.” In fiction, her transgressions can only end in punishment, such as madness, apathy or idiocy. The lesbian body, in opposing the human race and man himself, tries to escape from the writer-analyst. What role can he play in a sexuality that is based on his negation, since it rejects the male principle and the law of quantifiable ecstasy? Decadence, itself a literary movement without a future or offspring, was gazing at its own destruction when it contemplated sapphism, the cult of sterility and the unnatural.