Étranger Things: Why I Started This Little Corner of the Internet

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Étranger Things: When Paris Tried to Police Pants — The “Women Can’t Wear Trousers” Rule (and the 2013 Plot Twist)

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A Paris police “no trousers for women” order from 1800 lingered for centuries. Why it existed, how it faded, and what 2013 really meant.

I thought France had two national religions: bread and style.

Then I fell down a rabbit hole that begins, improbably, with a sentence that sounds like a prank your classmate invents to see if you’ll repeat it out loud:

“Women couldn’t wear trousers in France until 2013.”

My first reaction (very foreigner, very confident, very wrong-ish): Non, impossible. This is the country that gave us Coco Chanel, a thousand kinds of black blazers, and the ability to look casually magnificent while carrying a baguette like it’s a fashion accessory.

And yet… there really was an official text in Paris that required a woman who wanted to “dress as a man” to go ask the police for permission. Not a national law, not exactly enforced in modern times—but real enough to keep resurfacing like a zombie ordinance every few years. (actu.dalloz-etudiant.fr)

The revelation for me wasn’t just “wow, old laws were sexist” (history does history things). It was realizing how legal leftovers can linger quietly in the background—until someone points and goes, “Wait… is that still there?”—and suddenly everyone’s arguing in cafés about bicycles, horses, and whether holding a handlebar counts as “modesty.”

So: why did this exist, why did it hang around so long, and what happened in 2013?

Let’s put on our metaphorical trousers and walk into it.

The origin story: Paris, 1800, and the fear of “travestissement”

The famous text is an order from the Paris police prefecture, dated 16 brumaire an IX, which corresponds to 7 November 1800 (welcome to Revolutionary calendar chaos). (laviedesidees.fr)

It required that:

  • any woman who wanted to “dress as a man” had to present herself at the Préfecture de police to obtain authorization,

  • and that authorization would only be granted with a certificate from a health officer (yes, really). (laviedesidees.fr)

That word you’ll see in discussions is travestissement—cross-dressing—framed not as personal expression, but as a public-order problem: identity confusion, deception, women accessing spaces/jobs reserved for men, and the broader Napoleonic-era obsession with policing categories (gender included). (laviedesidees.fr)

And here’s an important detail that gets lost in the viral version:

This wasn’t “France” in the national sense

It was a Paris/Seine police decree, not a nationwide law passed by parliament. The Local lays out the caveats clearly: decree, not law; limited geographic scope; no clear penalty stated. (The Local France)

So the headline “France banned women from trousers until 2013” is… the kind of sentence that is emotionally true, historically interesting, but legally sloppy. (I say this lovingly, as someone who once confused la mairie with Marie and wondered why everyone kept asking me to bring a woman to my appointment.)

The “exceptions” that sound like satire: bicycles and horses

Over time, the strictness of the order was “softened” in popular memory by two later circulars often cited as allowing trousers if a woman was holding:

  • the handlebars of a bicycle (1892)

  • the reins of a horse (1909) (Sénat)

This is the part that makes modern brains short-circuit, because it reads like a Monty Python sketch:

“Madame, you may wear pants only if you are actively gripping… a handlebar.”

Like—what if you stop at a red light? What if you’re just near the bicycle? What if you’re holding a baguette in one hand and the handlebar in the other—do you become legally pants-certified?

Even historians point out that some of these “exceptions” function like an urban legend that keeps getting repeated with confident dates attached. (laviedesidees.fr)

But regardless of the folklore texture, the deeper truth is that the order became increasingly out of step with lived reality. Women wore trousers for work, for sport, for convenience, for fashion, for identity, for everything. Paris did not descend into chaos.

(If anything, Paris descends into chaos when it rains for eight minutes and everyone forgets how umbrellas work.)

So why did it “last” until 2013?

Because the legal system is a bit like that drawer in your kitchen where batteries, rubber bands, mysterious keys, and one single expired painkiller go to live forever.

This order wasn’t actively enforced for ages, but it also wasn’t always formally removed from the books. It lingered in what some commentators call “legal archaeology,” resurfacing periodically as a symbol: look how absurd this is; shouldn’t we clean it up? (timebase.com.au)

The 2013 moment: a political question triggers an official statement

In 2012, a French senator asked about abrogating the text. The Senate page captures the question and the framing around those old “bicycle/horse” references. (Sénat)

Then in January 2013, the Ministry associated with women’s rights issued a statement saying the 1800 order was “implicitly abrogated”—meaning: it can’t be applied because it conflicts with later constitutional principles and equality norms. (laviedesidees.fr)

This is why you’ll see two versions of the story in the wild:

  • “It was repealed in 2013!” (clean, satisfying, headline-friendly) (Sky News)

  • “Actually it wasn’t a national law, and 2013 was more a formal acknowledgement that it’s unenforceable.” (messier, more accurate) (The Local France)

Both are pointing at the same weird cultural fact: a sexist relic still had enough presence to require a public “yes yes, obviously women can wear pants” clarification in the 21st century. That alone is… telling.

The part that hits me as a foreigner in Aix

Living here, you start to feel how France holds two impulses at once:

  1. Revolutionary modernity (liberté! rights! universalism!)

  2. Administrative permanence (a form from 1974 that must be stamped in triplicate by a person who is at lunch)

So it makes sense that an unenforced Paris police order could become a kind of symbolic ghost—something everyone knows is ridiculous, but no one has bothered to exorcise properly, until it pops up again in a news cycle and everyone collectively goes: Pardon?

And then—this is my small personal click—suddenly I had a sentence in French I genuinely couldn’t have produced before:

“Ce texte est obsolète, mais il a une portée symbolique.”
(That text is obsolete, but it has symbolic weight.)

I felt extremely proud for seven seconds, until I remembered I still sometimes panic-order “une baguette… euh… normale” like the baguette has unusual settings.

A tiny curated trail of sources if you want to go deeper

  • Background on the 1800 order and its framing as authorization for women “dressed as men.” (actu.dalloz-etudiant.fr)

  • A historian’s deep dive on the 2013 “implicit abrogation” statement and the recurring media story. (laviedesidees.fr)

  • The Senate question that helped trigger the 2013 clarification. (Sénat)

  • The “myth vs reality” explainer (Paris-only decree, not national law, and what 2013 did/didn’t do). (The Local France)

  • One of the widely shared English-language retellings of the “illegal until 2013” version. (The Connexion)

Language corner: talk about it in French (A1 → Advanced)

A1 (super simple):

  • Je porte un pantalon. (I’m wearing trousers.)

  • J’aime les pantalons. (I like trousers.)

A2 (tell the story):

  • J’ai appris qu’à Paris, il y avait une vieille ordonnance sur le pantalon.

  • Aujourd’hui, ce n’est plus appliqué.

B1 (add nuance):

  • Ce n’était pas une loi nationale, mais une ordonnance de police à Paris. (The Local France)

  • Elle est devenue surtout symbolique.

B2 (discussion mode):

  • Même si elle n’était plus appliquée, le fait qu’elle existe encore posait un problème.

  • On voit comment le droit et les mœurs évoluent à des rythmes différents.

Advanced (flex gently, not obnoxiously):

  • Il s’agit d’une ordonnance de la Préfecture de police (16 brumaire an IX), déclarée “implicitement abrogée” en 2013. (laviedesidees.fr)

  • La persistance du texte relève presque de l’archéologie juridique. (timebase.com.au)

Your turn (comments, s’il vous plaît 💬)

Have you ever stumbled on a “wait… that was a rule?!” moment in France—fashion, paperwork, language, anything?

Drop a comment with one of these prompts:

  • A1/A2: What’s one clothing word you learned recently (pantalon, jupe, manteau, baskets…) and where did you learn it?

  • B1: Share a surprising French “rule” you heard—true or not—and how you verified it.

  • B2: Do symbolic laws matter even when unenforced? Why?

  • Advanced: What other bits of French “legal archaeology” have you encountered (or want to investigate)?

And if you’re reading this from Aix: next time you see someone effortlessly chic in wide-leg trousers on Cours Mirabeau, just remember—somewhere in the dusty attic of bureaucracy, an 1800s paper is whispering, “Oui, but are you holding a bicycle?”

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