France: Bad News at The Sex Shop

More than 200 guests trooped up the flight of unmarked stairs in a bland Paris office building last week to view a show billed as an "Exhibition of Horrors." The photographs lining the stucco walls were a lurid selection from sex magazines available in France, ranging from the French edition of Penthouse to bondage magazines like Crime and Punishment to publications featuring lesbianism, bestiality and pedophilia.

The impresario? None other than Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who staged the display as part of a campaign against pornography. Dubbed "Pasqua's Sex Shop" by the press, the antiporn program quickly backfired. An uncooperative President Franois Mitterrand declared that he opposed "all forms of censorship," and former Culture Minister Jack Lang pointedly sent along an erotic engraving by Picasso to be included in the show.