The New Flesh Trade.(prostitution i)

Prostitutes have always been a part of French life, from the caravans haunting the Bois de Boulogne to the Chanel-suited call girls of the Place Vendome. In the 1967 film "Belle de Jour," no less than Catherine Deneuve played the bourgeois blonde who daylights at a brothel--and nobody arched an eyebrow.

So it's no wonder that "Marianne," talking on her mobile phone from her holiday on the Riviera, is a trifle upset. By nights, she entertains clientele in the Avenue Foch, an elegant quartier of doctors' and lawyers' offices in Metz. By day, she's mustering opposition to Metz's mayor, who recently passed a bylaw banning anyone involved in prostitution from certain city streets. Feeling "flouted" and "humiliated," she says the measure criminalizes her profession, which, unlike pimping or soliciting, isn't illegal in France. In his haste to clean up an unseemly new boom in street prostitutes, many of whom are illegal migrants working for criminal syndicates, the mayor is conflating "traditional forms of prostitution" with new networks of foreigners. "We know when they're around," Marianne says of the Eastern European sex workers. "Our profits go down." Strike another blow against globalization. Not long ago, Europe's prostitutes tended to be native-born. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the advent of a borderless European Union, they're increasingly from elsewhere. In Rome, as in most major European cities, most prostitutes are foreign-born. In some cities, such as Vienna, the figure approaches 90 percent. Like any industry reeling from the effects of the global economy, the influx of immigrants has shaken up the European sex business. Competition has grown tougher, prices lower and solicitation bolder. "At the end of 1999, Western Europeans began witnessing a new, very visible form of prostitution," says French feminist author Elisabeth Badinter. Traditionally, she explains, European prostitutes more or less chose their trade, even if for unsavory reasons. Today, prostitution is vastly more coercive, dominated by mafia syndicates trafficking in younger and younger women imported often against their will from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.

The crisis--for that is how many experts describe it--has provoked wildly divergent responses from European governments. At one extreme is Germany and the Netherlands, both of which recently legalized prostitution and allow properly registered sex workers to receive pensions and health care. Sweden, by contrast, banned prostitution in 1999, slamming clients--instead of the sex workers themselves--with heavy fines and jail sentences. France, where prostitution recently has been caught up in the controversy over immigration, may opt for a no less draconian middle ground. When Nicolas Sarkozy became Interior minister this spring, he announced that he wanted to deport migrant sex workers, who comprise about 60 percent of the country's estimated 15,000 prostitutes.

That's prompted a predictable outcry. Many French accused the move as pandering to the anti-immigrant sentiment of the far right, which across Europe has won startling electoral victories over the past year. "Sarkozy is flying the foreigner flag with this policy," says Martine Schutz-Samson, director of a sex workers' outreach program in Lyon. "It's completely racist." If so, the Interior minister's clean-up-the- streets rhetoric has ...