This ceased after the Liberation. However, "obscene" literary material continued to be subject to a level of official repression which remained severe for some thirty years. This abated in and after the 1970s; however, laws allowing the proscription of literary works remained in place and were reinforced by new anti-pornography measures introduced in 1994.
A law which pertained to the control of publications intended for the young, and which extended restrictions placed upon books deemed to contravene morality by the 1939 Family Protection Decree, was passed on 16 July 1949, serving as a pretext for proscription. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed a series of literary prohibitions, the objects of which were works of erotic literature. Texts affected included the French translations of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Sexus; I Spit on Your Grave (J'irai cracker sur vos tombes) by "Vernon Sullivan" (alias Boris Vian); Pauline Réage's Story of O (Histoire d'O); and some of the works by the Marquis de Sade, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.
A further landmark in the battle to restrict the publication of erotico-literary material waged by the French legislature was an administrative edict-an ordonnance, which did not require the sanction of the National Assembly-of 21 December 1958. The ambit of this document, which was modified by the law of 4 January 1967 and was intended, ostensibly, to protect French youth, covered books and periodicals destined not only for children and adolescents but also for adults. It made it illegal to make available to minors any publication that was licentious, pornographic or violent in nature. Between 1958 and 1967, a hundred or so books were banned and, in 1966, both Le Figaro and Le Nouvel Observateur ran into legal difficulties after running advertisements for books subject to proscription. The sociosexual upheavals generated by May 1968 did not, at least not initially, militate against the restrictions to which erotico-literary material had become subject.
In the closing years of the 1960s, erotic texts by authors such as Sade, Henry Miller, Guyotat, Réage and Emmanuelle Arsan were banned. In 1973, a publisher of erotica, Régine Deforges, was fined 10,000 francs for bringing out works constituting an "apologia for perversion". Deforges's trial provoked a storm of protest, which may have contributed to the diminution in literary repression that took place in France during and after the mid- 1970s. This period is generally considered to be one in which, as far as matters pertaining to book publishing were concerned, the legislative status quo bowed to the pressure of social evolution, and to changes in popular conceptions of what did and did not constitute "obscenity". This is not to say that the French legal system has become openly tolerant of erotica. In 1994, the new French penal code included a section detailing the sanctions attendant upon the dissemination (to minors) of pornographic material.
