Coins of Desire: The Erotic Currency of Parisian Brothels

A satirical brothel token, early 20th century, kept inside a Napoleon III box at Messy Nessy’s Cabinet

Not all antiques clink with noble history. Some carry a more risqué past, whispering of velvet curtains, candlelit parlors, and the secret economies of Paris by night. Among them are the curious “jetons de maison close” (brothel tokens) — currency that look at first like ordinary coins, stamped with imperial profiles or decorative motifs, but flip it over, and the story begins to shift. Instead of the expected imperial wreath or eagle, one finds highly explicit erotic engravings — marks that translate less to fiscal value than to carnal exchange.

Brothel tokens were the chips of Paris’s hidden casinos of flesh, functioning as pre-paid tickets for the luxurious bordellos of the Belle Époque and earlier, slipped to sex workers in exchange for services. Beyond currency however, they served multiple purposes. Firstly, discretion – gentlemen could purchase tokens at the entrance, which often varied in design to indicate exactly what they purchased from the house’s “menu” of delights, saving the client any potential embarrassment by eliminating the need to articulate which sexual act they desired at the moment of transaction. The tokens also allowed the madam to keep her ledgers tidy, ensuring each girl was fairly (or not so fairly) paid according to the tokens returned at the end of the evening.

To hold one today is to feel the tactile residue of a shadow economy—proof that even in an era of rigid moral codes and empire-building, the business of pleasure required its own infrastructure. But the French didn’t invent this clever trick. Like so many “scandals” of modern Europe, brothel tokens were really a revival of ancient Roman habits. The Romans had a whole system of spintriae—small bronze or brass tokens, engraved on one side with a number (I–XVI) and on the other with what can only be described as explicit illustrations of the act on offer. Historians debate whether they might have doubled as gaming counters or locker tokens for bathhouses, but their erotic imagery leaves little doubt about their primary purpose.

The practicality was the same then as in 19th-century Paris: discretion, standardization and control. The idea survived in whispers through the centuries, resurfacing when Napoleon III’s Paris reintroduced tokens for its own booming sex industry. The resemblance is uncanny: the profile of an emperor on one side, and the silent promise of what lay beyond a curtained doorway on the other.

How did the Emperor’s face end up pressed onto tokens exchanged in Parisian pleasure houses? In truth, many were re-struck from outdated or decommissioned coins, their legitimacy long expired in official circulation. In the dim light of a brothel lobby, what mattered was not the Emperor’s reputation but the metallic promise in a client’s palm. One wonders what Napoleon III—himself no stranger to scandal—might have thought of his likeness serving as the patron saint of Parisian vice.

Today, these tokens are prized by a peculiar breed of collectors: numismatists with a taste for the bawdy, historians of the hidden city, or simply the curious magpies of the flea market. Auction houses occasionally list them, though many survive in drawers and shoeboxes, souvenirs from Paris long gone. They hover in the liminal space between coinage and erotica, offering a rare chance to hold the material culture of desire in your hand, with roots stretching all the way back to the frescoed lupanars of Pompeii.

After all, money talks — but sometimes it whispers.