Watch for the White Square

"I am happy to have achieved my aim in life--to be a prostitute," said the girl on the TV screen. "I shall retire someday, very rich, and become a saleslady." Said another girl: "We have four or five clients a night, sometimes more. But Bastille Day--ah, that is something!"

The two Paris prostitutes were appearing, for $40, on Faire Face (Let's Face It), a documentary on the government-owned Radiodiffusion-Television Franc,aise (RTF), long known for the sexy shock value of its programing. Along with the interviews, the program--using cameras concealed in cruising trucks--showed dozens of girls plying their trade. Audience response was everything RTF had hoped for: 6,000 letters in one week, some demanding police cleanups or the re-establishment of government-controlled brothels, others requesting names and addresses. Most startling reaction: five girls who had been secretly photographed charged before a Paris tribunal that they had been "morally damaged." Some, their lawyer explained, were innocent shoppers. One girl admitted to being a prostitute but told the court: "I'm ruined. All my son's classmates saw his mother at work, and now they won't speak to him."

In the past, RTF always has managed to answer its critics. Last year, when a hero had daydreamed about his maid and the camera subsequently showed every stitch of clothing falling away from her body, an RTF spokesman explained that the maid really wore flesh-colored, form-fitting underwear. When, in another film called L'Execution, a nude woman ambled across the screen, RTF's defenders pointed out that she had kept her back to the camera. Some months ago, an irate citizen claimed his marriage had been broken up because an RTF cameraman had panned past him at a prize fight, catching him snuggling with his mistress at ringside. When he returned home at midnight, his wife struck him with a lamp. But while all Paris sympathized with him, the aggrieved husband failed to collect damages.

In the case of the prostitutes, the Paris court ruled, RTF had gone too far in invading the citizens' privacy, barred the program from further showing and named an arbiter to decide damages. Already Frenchmen sensed a new television era. Announced RTF: "Controversial." for-adults-only shows will henceforth be identifiable by a small white square in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

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