This article relies on multi-site archival research to explore the way in which 1970s France racialized the regulation of commercial sex and its relation to the preservation of gendered, racialized, and class-dependent sexual order. Through its examination, this article further contextualizes and historicizes an analysis of French legislative and law enforcement construction of race and colour blindness. First, it focuses on the period during and after the Algerian War, when colonialist worries about sexual threats posed by North African male labour migrants in the French metropole contributed to politicians, journalists, and policymakers’ decision to adopt selective tolerance of commercial sex. It then demonstrates that such unfocused legislation surrounding commercial sex allowed police to hold discretionary power to protect the existing sexual order using justifications of colourblindness. In doing so, law enforcement implemented and enforced a racially particularistic and universalist legislation for regulating commercial sex throughout France’s urban metropole.