“We all miss those days, when we could go from one street to another covered by the voluptuous darkness of the night to find the new ‘house of pleasure’… Now ! there is nowhere to hide now, If you go down the street of Zarkoun, you are going to the brothel and everyone would know it. There is one unique space and a unique shame. Those French bastards, they have left us with only two choices: Marriage or public disgrace.” Ali Douagi, 1938. This paper starts with the following premise: a brothel is a space that is exclusively dedicated to female prostitution. The latter is defined as a sexual practice involving a female worker, a client and a specific amount of money given in exchange of a sexual intercourse, taking place in a public space exclusively affected to that role. When applied to the Tunisian context, this premise can lead to the following primary conclusion: the first brothel ever implemented in the city of Tunis is the Karti, and this happened in 1936. However, this date does not announce the birth of organized and illicit sexual practices in the city. Proscribed extramarital relations have always existed and different references to sexual workers in Tunis indicate the presence of several ‘spaces of sexuality’ since the 12th century. What happened in 1936 is, in reality, the replacement of ‘immoral’ and fluid sexual practices by ‘prostitution’ per se and its spatialization through the creation of the well defined and heavily regulated space of the brothel. This paper will try to analyze this institutional and spatial transition. It will look at the ways in which this ‘function’ was created and how it has been translated into space within the urban fabric. It will examine the relationship of this brothel to the city and to the process of colonization in general. It is finally an attempt to unravel the colonial strategies of micro-spatial control and to oppose it to the idea of a colonial ‘domination totale’ proposed by thinkers such as Ali Mahjoubi and Hachemi Karoui.