About ten years ago bans were imposed by two French municipalities on local funfairs where, for a few francs, revellers had been permitted to shoot a dwarf from a cannon. The official reason was the maintenance of public order, but the regional courts which initially overturned the bans pointed out that the shows were entirely orderly. The real issue was human dignity; but the people whose dignity was being compromised were the dwarfs who made their living from the spectacle and were among the chief opponents of the ban. The Conseil d'Etat, the final appeal court, restored the prohibitions, deciding that public order included public morals and that these were violated by assaults on human dignity even in cases where the victim was willing.

Once, before the onset of middle-class morality, the English courts had taken a similar line to the French regional courts. Chief Justice Holt, the first great judge of the Bill of Rights era, throwing out the indictment against a bookseller named Read for publishing a dirty book called The 15 Plagues of a Maidenhead, said: ‘This is for printing bawdy stuff that reflects on no person … If there is no remedy in the spiritual court, it does not follow there must be a remedy here […]’