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Title: French morality, under the regulation system
Author: Julie Daubié
Contributor: Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler
Release date: June 15, 2025 [eBook #76302]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Trübner & Co, 1870
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRENCH MORALITY, UNDER THE REGULATION SYSTEM ***
FRENCH MORALITY,
UNDER
THE REGULATION SYSTEM.
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF MAD’LLE. J. DAUBIÉ.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., 8, AND 60, PATERNOSTER ROW.
LIVERPOOL:
THOMAS BRAKELL, 7, COOK STREET.
1870.
PREFACE.
Mademoiselle Julie Daubié has published a book in three volumes,
entitled _La Femme pauvre au dix-neuvième Siècle_.[1] This work is the
result of many years of careful research, accompanied by self-denying
labours among the poor, and the outcasts of society.
The following pages are a translation of those chapters of her book
which bear upon the state of the most unhappy of her countrywomen. In
granting permission for the publication of these chapters, Mad’lle
Daubié writes as follows:—
“PARIS, January 18th, 1870.
“Our new Parliament has made an emphatic declaration that it has in
view a great moral reform, which fills us with hope. Our eyes are
turned towards your Parliament, the wisdom of which is boasted
everywhere. It is assuredly not the English Parliament which will make
a law to tolerate (that is to say to encourage) prostitution; for such
an infamy as this is not yet inscribed in any Code of any civilised or
Christian nation. Even in France, prostitution is regulated by an
article of the _Penal Code_, which refers this question to the police.
Our Civil Code has not yet had the impudence to proclaim the
immunities of profligate men to be a civil right; and the expenses of
this department are municipal.
“But if it be true that provocations in the public thoroughfares are
so frequent in the towns of England, and that places of ill fame are
not watched, &c., your Parliament has left much undone, and has much
to do for the repression of vice.
“The principal means for this appear to me to be good laws for the
punishment of seduction, measures for making women independent through
a sufficiency of wages, the severest prohibition of all provocations
in the public way, and the right of the police to enter infamous
houses, and to exercise the same powers against the men as against the
women who frequent them; (an impartiality exercised in France in
gambling houses.)
“But we must abhor and reject all those odious measures which treat
woman as an impure being for debauchery to profit by. Scorn all the
advice which may be given you, on this subject, by timid or corrupt
men, who can see nothing beyond that which actually exists! The
progress of prostitution in France is frightful, and the number of
public women is said to be doubled even since the Great Exhibition.
Every day new houses of infamy are opened, authorised by the _Chef_,
who replies to any one who remonstrates, ‘_It is because they are
necessary, &c., &c._’
“We shall do well, I think, in our International League, to give
ourselves especially to questions of justice and of human dignity in
connexion with the relations of the sexes, and to endeavour to bring
all the nations of Europe to the adoption of uniformly just laws on
this subject—a subject on which it is not permitted to cherish with
impunity false sentiments or unjust laws.”
Who shall dare to prophesy for the future of England, if, at such a
crisis as the present, when the eyes of France—of Europe, it may be
said—are upon us, the Parliament whose wisdom is vaunted on the
Continent, should endorse, and not repudiate, the policy of a clique who
have succeeded in gaining a footing in our country for a system which
elsewhere has been tried and condemned?
JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER,
Hon. Secretary to the Ladies’ National Association for the
Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts.
FRENCH MORALITY,
UNDER
THE REGULATION SYSTEM.
I.
INFAMY AS KNOWN TO THE LAW AND SECRET INFAMY; PANDERS AND COURTESANS.
“There are so many drawbacks attached to the loss of virtue in women;
this principal point being taken away is the cause of so many others
falling with it, that public unchastity may be looked upon as the
greatest of misfortunes.”—_Montesquieu._
“Woman is the embodiment of evil when evil exists about her: she is
the impersonation of evil when society must be ruined through
evil.”—_Pierre Leroux._
Public immorality has pushed its excesses so far as to cause the poor
woman to become a nuisance which has neither a name nor a right in our
code. I have undertaken the painful duty of considering with attention
the profligate portion of the community, which is controlled by the
police authorities; I shall not flinch from my sorrowful task—one that
will not, in any way, afford the lovers of scandal cause for
laughter....
Is it my fault, indeed, if, after having gone back to Eden itself for
woman as created in God’s image, I must pick the infected vase out of
the gutter and look into it for woman as made in man’s image?
Social injustice causes the greater part of the young women of the lower
orders both to fall into and to remain enslaved in the sink of
prostitution: the writers of their history agree in calling them the
victims of destitution, ignorance and seduction. The insufficiency of
the city-workwoman’s earnings sometimes forces her, even in a season of
industrial prosperity, to supplement her means by the sale of her
person; that is termed the fifth quarter of the working day. When
employment fails, this species of right to labour makes up the entire
day’s earnings. In different towns, according to the evidence of the
inspectors of the department of morals, women who have not totally lost
every sentiment of modesty are driven to ignominy by the want of the
means of support.
In our manufacturing towns, even children serve as food for profligacy.
Generally, the destitution of these women is such, that out of 6000
registered in Paris, only two had any other resource. One woman might be
instanced who struggled for three days with the pangs of hunger before
yielding. Two young girls, through having recoiled from this horrid
expedient, dropped down, in an hospital, half dead from want of
nourishment. Ignorance is another so fruitful cause of ruin for these
women, that, of 4000 natives of Paris, hardly a hundred were able to
sign their name. In other towns facts as sad are borne witness to. The
privileges enjoyed by seducers are often their original cause, for these
privileges are the cause of women without resources being borne down by
the burden of maternity, and of illegitimate daughters being left in
destitution. These, moreover, constitute the fourth part of the total
number of the inmates of the recognised brothels, completed partly by
the victims of seduction.[2] These latter have followed men, who, after
having promised them marriage, have cruelly deserted them in the towns
where they were without the means of support. Others, incurring the
disgrace and curse of a first fall, find no refuge but in profligacy.
Girl-mothers are also to be met with, who are forced to become
prostitutes to bring up their children. Often, says one of their
historians, cases very embarrassing to the Administration are brought
under notice; young girls not wholly corrupted evince penitence, can be
reclaimed, and wish to return to their homes, but their parents disown
them, _and they are obliged to be registered_. Others, forsaken from
their very birth, have been brought up by themselves; they know neither
their father nor mother, their age nor name. What is to be done? They
are forced to be admitted. No path opens before them; the Administration
offers a passport gratuitously, and, _sometimes_, a pair of shoes, to
the young female under age, without profession, shelter, clothes, or
food, and sends her back to her native place. One of our depraved men,
in whom genius kept alive some ray of feeling, sometimes experienced a
profound pity for these victims whom destitution gives over to
debauchery; he confesses that they often conjured him, with tears, not
to withdraw his unhappy protection from them. One of these suppliants
assured him that if he abandoned her he would be the cause of herself
and mother dying of hunger.[3] By the side of the liberty which girls of
15 have to become prostitutes, is placed that of parent-procurers. The
weakening of family ties among us often causes these monstrous
transactions to occur, on account of which women have been known to
commit suicide. The moral sense is, moreover, perverted to such a
degree, in our rural districts, that you there hear of mothers
congratulating themselves on living by the proceeds of their daughters’
dishonour. Apart from the cynicism of the concubine-keepers who sell
their unacknowledged daughters, workmen are met with who marry with the
object of enslaving their wives; one such person assaulted his to make
her go on the streets, saying to her: “Don’t think you deserve to eat,
if you do not perform the only work you can make lucrative for me—I want
money.”[4]
The foregoing facts belong to _legal_ prostitution, which is always
conjoined with that carried on clandestinely; it is certain that the
_toleration-certificate_ of procuresses is nothing but a permit for all
sorts of infamy. Agents for intercourse with certain women of fashion,
they likewise carry on, almost without impediment, negotiations
respecting girls under age.
An author of the 15th century, estimating the number of “girls of the
town” in Paris at 5000, attributes this enormous figure, unknown before,
to the war which had affected the earnings of women, and to the culpable
indifference of the provost, Ambroise de Loré. Statistics do not supply
us, nevertheless, with reliable indications of the progress of the evil
earlier than from the close of the year A.D. 1812. In Paris, less than a
third of the fallen girls belong to prostitution as known to the law;
the rest haunt the permitted houses, drive a profitable trade at the
singing-saloons, public-houses, lodging-houses, and taverns. More than
25,000 of them are supported by a number of immoral men who, in their
turn, are the support of a great many places of public resort, where
both soul and body are lost through drunkenness and profligacy. In our
different towns,[5] secret prostitution works the same kind of ravages.
It is generally noticed that the destitution of women gives a great
increase to it during industrial “crises.” Our soldiers and colonists
have likewise carried into Algeria morals previously unknown to the Arab
polygamy. So great was the horror the Mussulmans had for prostitution,
that at Algiers, as recently as the 17th century, prostitutes were
thrown into the sea. In the present day, women who go to get employment
in our colony ordinarily find their livelihood only in debauchery and
concubinage; “unfortunates” subjected to the brutalities of our
soldiery, are bartered, like beasts of burden, at every change of
garrison, and our army may be followed by the track of the infection it
leaves in even the smallest villages. After the conquest (of Algeria)
the daughters of the original possessors of the soil had not even the
means of living except by shame.[6] This sketch suffices to show how
unfitted we are to colonise a people which, on the evidence of every
high and competent authority, has adopted our vices without acquiring
any of our good qualities.[7] In fact, the Mussulman code, the Jewish
religion and morals, permit, upon the African soil, polygamy, divorce,
and repudiation, with the obligation, on the father’s part, of
supporting all his children, and the prohibition of repudiating a woman
without providing for her; these duties rendered manifold marriages a
privilege of wealth. The “senatus-consultum” which governs, on the model
of our code, the Arabs who are naturalised French, changes nothing of
the influence exerted on them by climate, religion, education, and
manners. Thus, by abjuring every duty to wives with whom, otherwise,
they are free to maintain relations, uncurbed and uncontrolled, under
the title of concubines; by leaving their unacknowledged children to die
of destitution, they obtain the title of French citizen, which should be
to them the reward of virtue and honour.
In that frightful famine when the brutality of the strong to the weak
was so monstrous, in which Religion and Charity had not arms wide enough
to enfold the legions of repudiated women, and of children without
fathers, the conviction might force itself that our code is more deadly
for Algeria than are its noxious animals.[8] Our legislation for morals
is an active cause of our want of success in colonizing; for our moral
responsibility being able to bring nothing but intermixture to the races
in our colonies, degenerated by polygamy or slavery, the young
negresses, seduced and abandoned, knowing none of the duties of the
family and of maternity, are living in the most deplorable degradation.
In France, the police authorities entrust the lucrative estate (_fermé_)
of profligacy (which private persons are not authorised to farm out) to
brothel-keepers who represent a considerable capital. At Paris, where
their business connexion is sometimes transferred at prices as high as
those of solicitors’ and notaries’ practices, the moveable effects of
one of them have been appraised as high as 100,000 francs (£4,000). The
sums invested compel the brothel-proprietresses to hunt up buyers
incessantly, and God knows how they perform their task. It would be
difficult to form an idea of the corruption they sow in our boroughs, in
our villages even, by sending to them detachments of girls whom
authority tolerates as soon as they place themselves under the
government regulations. France is no longer anything but a vast field of
prostitution, since railways have brought this traffic within reach of
our rural districts. The brothel-keeper, whose receipts are enormous,
has agents who accustom the workman and the female domestic servant to
look upon her house as an institution for the deserving.
The procuress, having full authority for mixed education, takes further
upon herself the social education of the young men living away from home
in our towns: she puts herself on the track of students, collects from
the _Botin Almanac_ the address of certain known men, sends them
ambiguous letters by gold-laced lacqueys, whose business it is to
supplement the intimations. For the negotiations about girls under age,
the brothel-keeper goes out herself from apartments fitted up in
princely style, steps into her carriage, has herself announced by her
footman, introduces herself into aristocratic drawing rooms, has a
perfumed note delivered on a silver salver, announcing to such and such
an important personage the purpose which brings her there. It is
asserted that the inefficiency of our laws is so great as not to admit
of the guilty being reached once in a thousand times, and never
effectually represses them, as we shall see from the sequel of this
investigation.[9]
Apart from this traffic, the brothel-keepers are found to be protected
by the police authorities, who leave the registered girl dependent upon
them: they send clothes to the half-naked workwoman and domestic servant
on their leaving the hospital or the prison, to get them into their
power through debt, and trade on the ignorance and poverty of
unfortunate creatures, wretched to the extent of being obliged to hire
from them clothing in which to present themselves for sanitary
inspection. In the event of subterfuge, the brothel-keeper brings a
charge of taking away with intent to defraud, and our law courts place
her victims in her power. If we did not know the debasement of the girls
of the lower orders, we should, perhaps, be astonished that hunger
should give over to these procuresses, women who, getting none of the
money for which they are sold, will finish by rotting in the street into
which they are thrust like refuse, when they can no longer bring profit.
Their destitution and degradation then become extreme. They live in
filthy lodgings, or take shelter under doorways and under carriages.
Those women whom our troops bring in from all parts are crowded in
narrow and dark caverns, take refuge in plaster-kilns, in partially
built houses, in cells as narrow as graves, in which they pass the night
upon horrible truckle-beds full of filth and vermin, receiving as their
only food some ration-bread which the soldiers throw in the mud to them;
they have thus come to look upon prison as a retreat, and often to beg
in vain the favour of admission to institutions for beggars.[10] Does
the brothel-keeper who has worked their youth for her profit at least
share their disgrace? No! from the moment that she makes choice of the
evil—that she makes a gain by it, _she_ is no more dishonoured by it
than the man who pays the price of it. The unjust assumption of the most
respectable titles—the names alone of _lady_, _mistress of the house_,
or of _matron_, attest the progress of this woman in general
consideration. A burgess in the fullest sense of the term, she dowers
and marries her daughters honourably, sometimes to legionaries, and _to
agents of the police for morals_. Then as a woman of independent means,
_retired from business_, she lives in the country, attracts notice there
for her wealth, her devoutness, and her prayer book at the parish mass
every Sunday. I do not know if such an ending would appear moral in
romance, or whether it would not, on the stage, startle, however little,
the indulgent conservators who look upon the tolerated house as a
necessary evil, without reflecting that if men guilty of the trade in
Blacks are punished with death, the trade in Whites ought not to be made
an institution protected by the public power.
By the side of this in importance in society is placed that of the
_avowed kept women_ (_femmes lancées_), who are sought after like a
race-horse or dog of high breed—a numerous family which daily reckons
new varieties. Here still the original cause of the evil lies in the
want of independence for the woman, who, after having been supported by
a father or a brother, is reduced, in the absence of such props, to have
recourse to a lover. When this fragile reed comes to be broken, she
remains at the mercy of the first comer who gives her the means of
livelihood. The impossibility of getting a competence and distinction in
the liberal professions plunges into this gulf even women like the
exhibitioners of St. Denis; in the same way certain young women of the
working classes have connected themselves with manufacturers, famous
bankers, wealthy public officials, who, living on family property or
pension, give up to them the ten, twenty, or thirty thousand francs
lopped from our budget; these goddesses in the hey-day of their
spring-time are floating on the surface of perdition. The short-lived
favours of their prostituters have stifled their natural qualities; they
show themselves very proud of mortgagee lovers, while rejecting
mortgager ones; but all despicable as they seem, they are far from being
so much so as their supporters, who, possessing a competency, wealth,
social appointments, and honours, sacrifice the most sacred duties to
their passion for degrading gratifications. The woman trampled on by
these attachments of a day is often she who knows how to cherish and
preserve constancy in love, she, in short, who might possibly have
become a faithful spouse and tender mother; while the harlot at the
zenith of her avocation is she who can stoop to the degree of the
corruption of her purchasers.
The luxuriousness, the sensation, the independence, the very borrowed
honour which, in the present day, encircles the name of a certain
mistress of an exalted personage, the remembrancers which the public
compete for at the sale of her effects, are the saddest indications of
our decay. Formerly, prostitution, which had no name in respectable
language, was confined to particular streets with a stigma of infamy
which forbade its breathing the common air; in our time it gives the
tinge of hope to its peculiar type admitted into good society; if there
still exist accursed abodes where human beings are shut up like lepers,
they belong to the hives of the working classes which are tasked to the
utmost to create wonders. Who does not recall the economist Blanqui’s
heartrending stories of the streets of Lille, those catacombs of people
having no property? Who does not remember those of the “_Bassesse_” and
of the “_Cloaque_” at Rouen, where families of working-men, deprived of
air and space, seemed buried alive in their underground dwellings?
Everywhere, however, in our most luxurious districts, splendid mansions,
palaces indeed, are built for high-class and fastidious prostitution,
where it is loaded with gems and perfumes, and receives the respectful
attentions of tradespeople, ambitious people and hangers-on. Without
speaking of the monuments erected to it by art; without pointing to the
stairs of marble and porphyry which it walks on in the temples of its
glory, it may be asserted that, in general, our women of doubtful
position are lodged in rooms which the respectable woman could not pay
for with the fruits of her industry nor of her talent, however
exceptional that might be. My personal inquiries have shewn me in Paris
a number of kept women, whose rent rises from 800 to 4,000, 5,000, and
10,000 francs yearly.
The moral reaction which took place in 1848 caused the scale on which
these women’s pay for what they do is based, to be lowered temporarily;
but they very quickly regained their professional connection and their
accustomed following when the pyramid was resettled on its base. There
are houses where the porters even prefer the kept-woman to every other
lodger, for her proverbial donations and prodigality, and whose virtues
they vie in extolling.[11]
The courtesan preserves in society the importance which attaches to her
in her private apartments. Photographs of her decorate our streets; her
memoirs enrich our literature; her showy personality sets off our public
platforms (_trétaux_); she often displays it, moreover, at the theatres
and the public baths; she cuts a figure on the fashionable promenades,
in the most gorgeous equipages of the higher classes. When she finds
herself at her own disposal, instead of beating the air and space, with
the illustrious lover who glories in being as infatuated as herself, on
returning from the races, the concubine remains in her chariot, where a
long row of carriages with their contents are for hire in this novel
market for prostitution. Amateurs of all classes pass in review this
living corruption; they address these women in a loud tone, with their
hats on, their riding whip in hand, and debate the conditions of
purchase and sale which are made for them, as for horses, to the highest
applicant and richest outbidder.
In the presence of this corruption, which has never had a precedent
except on the eve of the downfall of kingdoms and empires, certain
short-sighted moralists are exclaiming: “It is the passions of
concubines that are dragging us into a bottomless abyss.” I could point
out that the passions of rich women have not the social consequences of
the necessities of poor ones, and that there is a deplorable legislative
fault wherever man pays woman to corrupt her, while she must pay the man
for trying to reform him by marriage; but I shall say, “Misfortune, a
thousand times misfortune upon civilizations which fear the passions
because they do not know how to direct them.” Suppress this source of
devotedness and progress, and there will no longer be either vices or
virtues, and the facility, the satiety of profligacy, will hurry society
on to an irremediable fall.
II.—PENITENT GIRLS.
“The harlots enter into the kingdom of heaven before you.”
—_Gospel according to St. Matthew._
If we recall the causes which force women into the sewer of
prostitution,—if we remember the humiliations of registered and
non-registered girls,—we shall not be at all astonished that common
prostitutes often feel all the horror of their lot, and we shall
understand the talent of observation presented by certain types rendered
familiar by literature.
Apart from romance and the drama, the authors who have, at Paris,
studied this subject with such scrupulous accuracy, declare to us in
like manner, that a great number of these “unfortunates” are conscious
of their degradation, and hasten to quit their infamous means of living
when they find normal means of livelihood. Unhappily this recovery is
but an exceptional fact; the brothel-keeper, who collects the proceeds
of their sale, makes them giddy by intoxication to dissemble from them
the horror of their degradation. Their mirthfulness is often but a mere
external display, provoked by the impure jokes of those who support
them. Among those confined in the St. Lazare, too, are found instincts
of shame, united to the sentiments of motherly love. Most of them impose
heavy sacrifices upon themselves to bring up their child, the only
creature, say they, who will _not at all despise them_.
A few words of sympathy astonish them. A young female foundling, whom
want had caused to take to bad ways, was admitted into the “Bon Pasteur”
institution: the fulness of her joy made her shed tears abundantly,
because it was the first time, she said, that any one had spoken kindly
to her. The horror of this condition has many a time been the cause of
mental aberration and suicide.[12] The consciousness of their degraded
condition has been apparent even in the queens of fashion who have
become famous in backstairs society. Théroigne de Méricourt one day
recognised, in Paris, the gentleman who had deceived her; she darted so
vindictive a look at him that he perceived how dangerous his position
was becoming, at a time when the lower orders were exercising such an
implacable justice against crimes unpunished till then, and he dared to
ask forgiveness of her. “My forgiveness!” she replied, “and with what
price could you pay for it? My innocence betrayed, my honour lost, that
of my family sullied, my brothers and sisters pursued in their native
place by the sarcasms of their neighbours; my father’s curse; my exile
from my native land; my enrolment in the infamous caste of courtesans;
the blood with which I stain and shall stain my hands; my memory
execrated among men; that immortality of virtue which you have taught me
to doubt—this is what you wish to redeem! Let us see: do you know a
price on earth able to pay me for all that?”[13] Théroigne not believing
that the guilty man’s blood was too precious or too pure to wipe out her
shame, allowed, or caused, him to perish in the September massacres.[14]
At periods of religious revival especially, the courtesan has a
consciousness of her debasement. Under the influence of gospel
enlightenment the most abandoned women were reformed to the length of
hastening to martyrdom, in order to wipe out the stains of their life
in this baptism of blood. When the age of persecution was past, the
church tried to reinstate fallen women; councils granted a
dispensation from canonical penance to those who gave up their evil
ways, and granted forgiveness of their sins to the men who should
marry them.[15] Different societies were formed with the design of
raising a dower for them. The middle age opened numerous asylums to
them: St. Louis had a large refuge built for them, and gave them the
name of “Filles-Dieu.”—“And caused,” says Joinville, “a great number
of women to be put in a refuge, who from poverty were made to sin by
the luxurious, and gave them 400 livres annually to live upon.” This
dotation (endowment), enormous for the age, was higher than that of
the “Quinze-Vingts,” which received only 300 livres.[16][17] Louis IX.
also helped them with his advice, or founded with his money several
similar institutions, as places affiliated to the “Filles-Dieu.” “The
King,” says Joinville further, “caused houses of nuns to be instituted
in several places of his kingdom, and gave them incomes to live upon,
and recommended that they should be admitted into them who were
willing to resolve (_fere contenance_) to live in chastity.”
The Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII., collected in a part of his
“hotel” two hundred penitent girls, whom destitution and licentiousness
had perverted during war; but France was then so ruined, and existence
was so rough for modest women, that several of them became prostitutes
with the design of getting admission. The Corporation of Paris also
supplied penitent women with money-aids, which are found entered thus in
a bill of the 16th century:—“To poor penitent girls, six _livres
parisis_ for charity and alms, to get bread, of which they stand in
great need.”
Louis XIV. founded the Madeleine asylum; he granted his patronage to
that of the Bon Pasteur, which a widow founded, and to Sainte Pélagie,
the work of Madame de Miramion. Paris built, in the 18th century, four
more establishments of this kind, under the titles of the Saviour, St.
Valerius, St. Theodore, and St. Michael. These refuges, so richly
endowed by royal or private munificence, had numerous subsidiary
institutions in the provinces; the letters-patent of our Kings, even the
bulls of the Popes, gave authority for making them permanent.
Other societies reinstated fallen women by affiancing them to Christ.
After the revolution had destroyed these rich and numerous places of
refuge, the Consulate re-established the house of St. Michael; the City
of Paris and the Ministry for charitable institutions also founded that
of the Bon Pasteur in 1821; but the inadequacy of the sums placed at
their disposal did not admit of these institutions fulfilling their
original purpose. There was the same poverty of resources in all France.
This state of things seemed deplorable, whether it be regarded in
reference to the wealth of the spoliated refuges, or be compared with
the stability and the opulence of those other social institutions that
are called toleration-houses, and to the sums absorbed in the interest
of profligacy upon the pretext of public health and security. An effect
of our moral impoverishment, and of certain economical doctrines which
have gone to the extent of making the refuges guilty of the progress of
prostitution, may be seen in that. Without doubt, there is immorality in
the efforts made to _take away from vice the consequences which nature
has attached to it_; but this consideration can only be applied to
individuals who choose it voluntarily. In going back to the causes of
the downfall of the greater number of women, we can but bless the hand
which tries to raise them up, though tardily. Every measure which
relates to them is, however, but a powerless palliative of an evil which
must be attacked in its causes, by putting down the profligacy of the
man.
III.—LAWS FOR REPRESSION.
“He was convinced that good could only flow, in a State, through the
channel of the laws; that the way to make a benefit lasting was by
practising the virtue of following them; that the way to make an
evil lasting was by practising the vice of hindering their effect;
that the duties of princes did not less consist in defending the
laws against the passions of others than against their own personal
ones.”—_Montesquieu, Arsace et Isménie._
“The liberty which shows favour to the passions and licentiousness is
a fatal license, a fresh yoke, a shameful slavery; and the rule of
good morals is the leading principle of the happiness of
empires.”—_Massillon._
If woman too frequently acquiesces in depravity, man makes choice of it;
it is against this active agent of corruption, therefore, that societies
for the maintenance of the integrity of their original laws should
fortify themselves beforehand; we moreover see ancient and purer
civilisations ward off decay by prosecuting those who pay for
prostitution, and by involving the accomplices of a common sin in a
common punishment.
The best ages of Greece and Rome exhibit to us an extreme severity
against breaches of good morals. So long as the body of laws framed by
Lycurgus remained in force at Sparta, prostitution was unknown there.
The laws of Solon followed up immoral men with an inexorable rigour, by
requiring a public examination into the morals of those who were looking
forward to public appointments; they degraded public officials of every
rank discovered in a brothel, and declared the citizen who had been seen
there a single time unworthy to serve his country. Independently of the
archon commissioned to try these matters, every Athenian had the right
and the obligation of prosecuting for the prostitution of a woman or of
a child; in certain cases the criminals were put to death. Prostitutes,
banished from society, wore a peculiar uniform. We observe similar
regulations existing in the Roman republic, where the censor of morals
degraded dissolute functionaries, and branded the citizen with disgrace
who made prostitutes of his slaves or freed women-servants. Panders
could not make over their property, nor sue in law, nor be sworn, nor
retain legal authority over their children. Every harbourer and
accomplice of a prostitute was condemned to the same punishment as
herself. This wise legislation did not survive the ruin of liberty, and
profligacy was the fruit of the system of governing which substituted
the informer for the censor.
When the world-wide Roman empire had perished through excess of sensual
gratification, Christianity caused the old laws to be resuscitated; and
Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian put them in practice in Gaul; the
last-mentioned ruler put panders to death. These measures corresponded
in other things, for Gaul, to the mind of the Germans who, after
dragging through a horse-pond _men_ convicted of prostitution, threw a
hurdle on their bodies and sunk them to the bottom of the slough.[18]
With the same penalties, Charlemagne subsequently punished prostitutes,
their accomplices and harbourers, who were all whipped together. Our
parliaments condemned those who paid for prostitution to a whipping, to
temporary transportation, to the galleys, to fine, to confiscation of
their property, and to the iron collar. St. Louis, who had shielded the
_destitution_ of women against profligacy, had incorrigible girls and
_the gentlemen, their accomplices_, publicly flogged _with the same
whip_. Philip the Bold, following up his father’s work, assigned to
prostitution specific districts within which it was to be strictly
confined. Charles V. likewise contributed to the moral amelioration of
the nation; but, in the following reign, the precarious position of
women, the effect of the war, and the excesses of the troops, again
plunged France into serious profligacy.
The totality of our old legislation exhibits everywhere a considerable
degree of severity against procurers and libertines; the decrees of our
parliaments, and the proclamations of the provosts of Paris, often
branded the former with disgrace, and condemned them to death; they had
them even buried alive when they had cajoled women by flatteries or
presents. A bill of the 15th century gives the cost of a dozen _new
brooms_ used at the execution of some procuresses, who had their ears
cropt, were put in the pillory, whipped, and afterwards burnt.
At other times the brothel-keeper was led through the town, mounted on
an ass, with her face to the animal’s tail; afterwards the executioner
branded her with a hot-iron and expelled her from the locality. In the
18th century several examples of this kind of punishment occur, and it
was inflicted in Paris as recently as A.D. 1756.
Every one conspired to punish the mother infamous enough to procure her
daughter’s prostitution; the spectators beat her with rods, and the
executioner cut off her nose.
The agents of profligacy were, in like manner, punished if they lent
clothes or money to a woman of ill fame, with the design of encouraging
her profligacy; the things supplied could not be legally re-demanded,
and if an attempt were made to regain them by force from the woman to
whom they had been lent, or to take others in way of compensation, they
were prosecuted as thieves.
How far were our ancestors from this modern progress, which gives us, in
the case of procuresses of infamy, _ladies of the house_ sufficiently
respected and sufficiently respectable to find husbands, and legionaries
for sons-in-law! Oh, honour! Oh, my country!
These vile creatures, the objects of the just severity of laws, were
marked out for public contempt by infamous designations; we may judge of
that by the vehement indignation of old authors against this disgusting
traffic, which was formerly looked upon, in France, and with so much
reason, as the most horrible of crimes.
“What else do the procurers, if not restore, in their entirety, all the
detestable slaveries abolished by law—to effect better than before the
sale of men?”
“As for panders and procuresses,” exclaims another writer, “they are
quite insufferable as enemies to respectability, betrayers of matronly
and maidenly modesty, assassins of holy human society, traitors to the
lawful succession of true heirs, firebrands of hell, and faithful
interpreters of the filthy mind.”
This severity did not extend to the _victim_ of loose morals, to whom
the path of re-instatement was ever open.[19] If we did not know how
much unreasonableness and cruelty there are in a corrupt nation, we
might learn it in the fact that France began to treat the common
prostitute with severity at the close of the 15th century, when the
Hundred Years’ War had ruined the country, and when the excesses of the
troops and the profligacy of the Court were beginning to extinguish the
national morality; then, the birth of a free class developing personal
responsibility, called for the means of livelihood for the friendless
woman, who was getting them by the sale of her person; for the writers
of that age attribute the progress of public corruption to the
difficulty which women found in living by respectable means.
The _Journal du Bourgeois de Paris_, 1445, thus expresses itself:—“At
that time, when everyone learned how to earn, wages were so bad that
respectable women, who had learned how to earn five or six _blancs_ a
day, were willingly letting themselves out for two, and living on them.”
This sad picture sufficiently resembles that of the _fifth quarter of
the working day_, which disgraces our time. Let it be observed, however,
that instead of trying to ameliorate woman’s position by work, she was
punished for not finding any at all. The edicts of the time overwhelm
her by extending indulgence to her purchasers, who, beginning from that
period, acquired new prerogatives daily. A writer on morals is, with
reason, astonished at the cruelty of the 16th century in this respect.
“It is,” he says, “truly remarkable, that never were royal and municipal
enactments against public women more frequent or severe than during this
period of disorder. No pity was shown to public prostitutes at a period
when decency and shame seemed banished from morals.”[20]
This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. When
the French people, wallowing at a later period in the unchastity of
royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of love to be enthroned on
its altars, it offered, on the revolutionary scaffold, the innocence,
beauty, and attractions of women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then
the guillotine gathered its harvest from the young girls of Verdun, as
the scythe cuts off a basket of lilies.
Nevertheless, in its moral debasement hitherto, France had made
profligacy a privilege and not _a right_. If the nobles had freed
themselves from the curb, if the middle class was irritated by it, the
lower orders still endured it, and, up to the Revolution, the prison of
St. Lazare tried to reform immoral men, over whom the Government
reserved a discretionary power. Young people of dissolute morals, under
25, picked up by the police, were confined at La Salpétrière, and at
Bicêtre; severe penalties were also attached to the prostituting of
modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our decline since that
period, let us recall the enactment of 6th November, 1778, which
prohibits provoking to debauchery in the public street,[21] and enjoins
upon tavern and lodging-house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine
of 200 to 500 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons
they admit. The police, who made a strict inspection of these houses,
brought into court the tavern and the lodging-house keepers guilty of
harbouring women of doubtful character, and, in the event of their
transgressing a second time, had their houses closed. When the
Revolution abolished the old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose
of establishing fresh ones, the lower orders, in their _saturnalia_,
again became violators of women—a crime which, after having destroyed
the aristocracy, was ruining the middle class. The Convention, alarmed
at excesses which were threatening the very foundations of social order,
thought to nip the evil in the bud, by enacting the distant deportation
of abandoned women; but the instability of its short-lived powers did
not admit the application of this measure.
Notwithstanding that, the feverish activity of the nation, its
sacrifices during the wars of the Republic and the Empire, greatly
restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitution, which
Napoleon I. regarded with horror.[22] M. M. Pasquier and D’Anglés
subsequently made a demand, but vainly, for effectual measures for
extirpating this social canker; in presence of its rapid progress,
honest magistrates and upright counsellors felt the necessity of having
the old enactments put again in force. Tavern-keepers, harbourers of
prostitutes were, at the instance of the public ministry, often brought
before the Court of Correctional Police, and condemned to a fine, by the
application to them of the enactment of 6th November, 1778. The Court of
Cassation had quashed these verdicts but three times up to the year
1866, when the before-mentioned enactment received its last application
from the Correctional Court of the Seine, which expressed the wish to
see the laws of former times again put in force in modern legislation.
Since that period, our judges, alleging their limited powers, declare
that the fact of the tavern-keepers admitting prostitutes is only a
breach of police-regulations, satisfied by a fine fixed at five francs,
by the application of the article 471, No. 15, of the Penal Code.[23] It
is useless to say that this fresh moral weakness, by rendering the most
cynical impunity in these immoralities certain, permits young men freely
to indulge in illicit intercourse. Our Code referring all the means for
repression to the _police_, it remains to be seen how this discretionary
power acts with respect to the pander who procures the debauchery, to
the man who pays for it, and to the woman who is the subject of it.
The brothel-keeper, as we know, acquires a right, even a monopoly, by
becoming the mistress of a licensed brothel; her privileges are sacred
to the degree that no one may meddle with them as regards that matter. I
have no longer to touch upon the respect we owe to the _ladies of the
house_, and I pass over that infamy. As for the individual sufficiently
degraded to seek for the gratification of his brutal appetite in
debauchery, he is under the very special protection of the public power,
which keeps watch, night and day, to sanction his rights. The police by
the Vagrants’ Act, it is true, strike down in the lower classes a few
debauchees among respectable people, but for every man who has a home
there is no curb; the “magistrate for morals” goes so far even as to
object to the tears and supplications of a mother who implores him to
take pity on the soul of her son, losing his health, money, and honour
in brothels.
Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the sin by a threefold
fear, our society even tries to take that fear away from him by using
the utmost solicitude to set him free from every duty in contriving, if
possible, to rid him of those selfish subjects of prior interest for
him, which might have proved his safeguard upon the brink of ruin. The
sanitary visits and the imprisonment of women guilty of not having kept
the debauchee unharmed, cost nearly half a million in Paris. Let an
approximate calculation be made for our other towns, and it will be
apparent how valuable a citizen, in the interests of public order, is
the frequenter of permitted brothels. His cynicism will have victims,
above all among those women who have no material independence, and no
moral development. We know the fate of the common prostitutes who,
formerly kept down by laws applied equally to their accomplices, are now
accounted for nothing in the eye of the law, for the profit of these
same accomplices.[24] The girl of the town is no longer a person, she is
a _thing_ in the eye of a species of roving commission, which gives its
stamp of security to the bargain; prostitution is no longer an
unspeakable infamy, it is a social want, as necessary as, more imperious
even, than nutriment in the opinion of the legislator, since he does not
permit a theft which might even be the sole means of appeasing a
devouring hunger, whilst he is destroying human dignity and social
justice in the interest of debauchery. The lower-class girl becomes as
the sweepings of the streets, will be imprisoned therefore, not for her
immoral way of getting a living, but for not complying with the law
after the markets are closed, or for want of customers; because, from
the moment she accepts an offer, she escapes from the control of the
police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of debauchery are termed
service of morals; they are usually made by old soldiers—models,
doubtlessly of chastity—in a military spirit, who have the right to
treat, without ceremony, every woman _guilty of walking about_, and who
will be looked upon as prostituted if she has no relatives to claim her.
An absolute judge gives his sentence, without any appeal, for condemning
this one to be registered, that to be imprisoned; if, week by week, they
do not present themselves for detestable investigations, they will be
imprisoned as persons guilty of _intended_ prostitution. Twelve verdicts
of guilty of this kind are, on an average, pronounced daily at Paris, to
the gain of profligacy. In our seaports, the police, established for the
security of evil, intrude even upon domestic privacy to oblige female
servants to be enrolled.
The intense nausea this system has lately caused France may make
apparent to what kind of despotism it gives up self-dependent women.
Moreover, if a head official is continued in power after the mistakes
which are the necessary consequence of his orders, it is a crying
injustice; if he is deprived, it is as great an injustice, since this
victim is sacrificed for having done what he considered his duty. Our
machinery for morals will remain for ever an evidence of the degree of
barbarity which depraved communities may attain to; let us not expect
anything more humane from them, and if we have forgotten the history of
prostitution in ancient France, let us recall that when slavery had
developed in the Roman Empire those excesses which are consistent with
the right of citizenship among ourselves, Tiberius was compelled to put
down the incontinence of women, and Domitian issued sumptuary edicts
against women of loose morals. _The protection accorded to the
immoralities of the man is the cause of the incessant persecution of the
girl of the town_; she alone is followed up in furnished rooms and
hotels, which are likewise the refuge of the workwoman, the
female-servant, and the art-worker without employment, who, when there,
find themselves the subjects of the harsh misconstructions of the
police, who are invested with the right of intruding upon, and of
arresting them at any minute. Immorality has, from this motive, gone to
the length of driving women from our boarding-houses who were trying to
get a respectable living. In 1845, the Prefect of the Seine, acting on
the express order of the Minister of Public Instruction, issued a
regulation prohibiting mistresses of boarding-houses and _secular_
institutions from receiving women-lodgers as boarders, and ordered them,
under the penalty of a prompt closing of their establishments, to turn
out of doors, without delay or exception, those then residing with them.
As a consequence of this severe measure, the modest woman, often not
knowing where to rest her head, sees herself obliged to submit to the
discretionary discipline of public girls. The convents, it is true, not
being included in the regulation cited above, admit women very far
advanced in pregnancy, who are presented to them by an ecclesiastic.
The young woman endowed with youth and beauty cannot show her face alone
in our streets without being exposed to insulting looks and words; if
she accept a situation behind a counter, in a spirit dealer’s
establishment, she will, by the laws of 1861, fall under the action of
the police, as _guilty of corrupting young people_.
To finish on the subject of this despotic law, it must be added, that a
large number of places of public resort, of promenades, cannot be
frequented by unaccompanied women, and that a quite recent regulation
forbids every _unaccompanied woman_ to enter any of our cafés on the
boulevards. Formerly, public places of resort were forbidden to
prostitution; at present, having obtained the wall-side there, it drives
respectable people away from them.
The anxiety of the Administration for the debauchee might, however,
leave him some monetary miscalculations; but legislative enactment and
legal exposition are on the watch, in their turn, like anxious mothers,
that mistresses should not be too expensive. Every day our courts of law
sanction the rights of prostitution by annulling his presents and debts,
and issuing orders like this: “_It exists as a principle in
jurisprudence_, that the _individual who has excited to debauchery to
gratify his own passions is by no means looked upon as guilty by our
legislation_.”[25]
This solemn charter is confirmed in all the specific applications.
Formerly our law courts, refusing their countenance to men whom they
looked upon, and with justice, as the greatest disturbers of social
order, refused to entertain any of their suits whatever, upon the ground
of this old maxim of law; “_Nemo auditur turpitudinem suam
allegans._”[26] Practically, those who support courtesans never appear
before the judges except as complainants to claim protection, if these
women owe or get money from them unfairly, or continue to use the name
which they themselves had inscribed upon their crests.
Let us judge of the complicity of the courts of law by some facts
recorded in our judicial annals, which constantly corroborate the same
principles in similar occurrences. A clerk, convicted of having stolen
45,000 francs, which he had sent to his mistress, was sentenced to two
years’ imprisonment, while the woman had to undergo five years of the
same kind of punishment.[27]
Justice sometimes goes so far as to punish the woman for the theft
committed by him who keeps her. A young man of 20, after having freely
prostituted himself with a courtesan, robbed his mother. The judge, by
an inquisitorial examination, tried to make the thief acknowledge
complicity on the part of the woman he was cohabiting with. He affirmed,
on the contrary, that he left her in the belief that the money expended
with her was part of the salary attached to his appointment. The court,
however, let this precocious debauchee off, and sentenced the courtesan
to 8 months’ imprisonment.[28]
The young man who has not attained his majority thus meets with a
special protection in corrupting himself; for, while our law courts,
upon the pretence that it is swindling, annul the pecuniary engagements
made with courtesans by men of all ages, they keep the young man under
21 especially safe. When robbery occurs, the fact of prostitution brings
the two principles of family and property face to face, but the former
is, in this matter, always sacrificed to the latter.
Military men, even officers, bring before the law courts the robbery of
their epaulettes, which has been effected in a brothel; and, without any
blame, without any penalty against these family destroyers, the
Government or Magistrate, after imprisoning the woman inculpated,
replaces the symbol of official honour on the shoulders of her
accomplice in profligacy.
Has not the student, too, the privilege of declaring to our judges that
he claims the repayment of 30, 40 francs, &c., pilfered by women with
whom _he was cohabiting_; not only does the court not pronounce him
guilty, it by no means seeks to know if this youth, the hope of his
country, has been the cause of a wrong, irreparable, perchance, to
society, by allying himself with abandoned women and outlawed youths,
whom his irresponsibility in wickedness has urged on to commit larceny.
It neither condemns this rebel against society to a fine nor to disgrace
as a citizen, and, by imprisoning the woman, it proclaims the man’s
right to be dissolute.
A well-known courtesan who lived in a splendid town-house in one of our
wealthiest districts, was there receiving, every year, from her
admirers, an income of about 100,000 francs. Carriages, liveries well
known in the official world, were shamelessly standing at her door. In
those orgies, which are only to be compared to the Babylonian nights,
she boasted of having _the particular charge of training young people_.
The police, forcing an entrance into her house, accused her of illegal
gambling. It is unnecessary to say that the court did not sentence—did
not even name, any of her high-placed accomplices; certain organs of the
periodical press gave an account of this affair, and spoke of the
courtesan under the appellation of _amiable hostess, well-known in the
fashionable world of Paris for the choice suppers she gave_. Our
jurisprudence is still the zealous protectress of these men who manifest
an equal shamelessness in tricking out the courtesan with their heraldic
name, and taking it from her when they are in search of the marriage
portion necessary to restore their fortune impaired by profligacy. With
an unfeeling barbarity they then set to work to drag their discarded
mistress before the courts of law, to take her ducal coronet from her,
to efface the coats-of-arms they had themselves engraven upon her
carriage, and, at length, to have her sentenced for usurping the titles
of the aristocracy.
The seducer unpunished, (what do I say,) protected, encouraged! is not
even prosecuted for the purchase of girls under age; for our code only
recognises guilt where this traffic is made a _regular calling_. As to
the seller bungling enough to fulfil all the required conditions, he
renders himself liable to an imprisonment of from one month to five
years, and to a fine of from 50 to 500 francs; but the full extent of
the punishment being never imposed, the risk is small, the advantage
certain from the time that the sale of a young girl can fetch, from
1,500 to 10,000 francs. No search for, no mention even is made in any
case of these monsters with a human face, who have a constant right to
the produce of this horrible traffic; no indemnification is granted to
the wretched parents from whom the victims have been carried off by
stratagem. I have already cited the solemn right which the spirit of our
laws acknowledges for those who procure debauchery on their own account.
Different decrees declare that Article 334 of the Penal Code, relating
to the exciting to debauchery, is not applicable to this kind of crime.
Even when there has been systematic persuasion, cleverly exercised by a
man of ripe years upon a girl under age hurried away from a respectable
way of life, our courts acknowledge that they have no means of bringing
the guilty person to justice.
To the privileges I have just enumerated, prostitution on the part of
the man adds that of honour intact. Every time a punishment loses
anything in its degree of publicity, or is no longer available for an
act that is blameable and hurtful to society, the cry of public opinion
is stifled; its isolated manifestations remain powerless, especially
when they are looked upon as a crime. Then indignation, no longer
finding a free course, a tacit acquiescence, which may be thought a
voluntary one, gives daily, new force to the reign of vice, and a great
confusion of principle exists between good and evil. It must be
confessed, with sorrow, never did civilization in this matter protect
evil with more effrontery than ours does. Respect for the man of
dissolute morals is, among ourselves, imposed by a system of vicious
laws which furnish him with an impenetrable breast-plate; he is able to
brave, and he does brave, honour and duty, beneath the shield of the
interdiction of investigation to discover the father of illegitimate
children, and by the law which refuses to admit proof in cases of libel,
and forbids the making known any act of private life. If he is in the
service of the State or of his country, his irresponsibility will be
still greater; his freedom from annoyance will follow him even in death,
for society has further provided that his vices may sleep in the grave
with him. Sullied by baseness, he will even receive distinctions that
will enrol him in the list of those chosen for official rewards. Do not
let us be any longer surprised, then, at the discredit into which these
rewards are falling; for, if the cross of honour is given to a man who
has deserved well of his country, it will lose its value if a man who
has done nothing remarkable obtains it also; it will fall into contempt
if a despicable man can get it. Hence result the indifference and
disdain which, in depraved societies, certain men profess for official
honours, whose symbols which might serve as a safeguard against infamy,
they sometimes refuse to wear.
The study of our present subject has shown us a thorough absence of
discretionary measures and of penal laws against prostitution in men—a
fact unheard of, I think, in the history of civilizations _based on the
principle of the family_.
Is this culpable toleration the effect of a general relaxation of
morals? Is it possible to reform our laws? This is what every serious
mind must ask itself in view of such a rapid downward course.
This consideration is so much the more important that, in its economical
aspect, it is connected with the European balance of power. The relative
strength of the powers especially consists, it will not be denied, in
the manner, more or less effectual, which they adopt in order to
maintain, together with the dignity of the man and the woman, the vigour
of the child and the honour of the family. We see, in fact, that those
nations only which sanction the principle of moral responsibility, have
been able to preserve themselves from the decay which prostitution
brings in its train. England,[29] Sweden, Switzerland, Prussia, Saxony,
the United States, &c., permit, as France in former times did, the
private initiative in the closing of the places for debauchery; they
refuse to allow the accomplices of prostitutes to bring any action for
debt, and impose penalties for the immoralities which we both condone
and surround with outward signs of splendour.[30] On the contrary, we
see the greatest slavery—that of the passions—among peoples which,
having the likeness of liberty, are governed according to the French
code. Thus Belgium, suffering from the like social wounds with
ourselves, gives the title _conversational drawing-room_ (salons de
conversation), to places where young girls are to be bought, and where
important personages go to be supplied.
Without pausing here upon all the economic consequences of debauchery, I
shall draw attention to the fact that it enervates, enfeebles, and
diminishes population, accumulating and scattering, besides, riches got
without labour; and devoting to orgies food obtained by pinching the
poor, it creates a pauperised community in the midst of one of
sybarites.[31]
The European nation which shall most imperfectly put down this vice will
therefore be the weakest, the most unstable, and, consequently, the
ripest for downfall. Experience teaches that this truth applies alike to
ancient and modern civilizations.
Moral responsibility, interpreted in Egypt, by the duty which the
lawgiver imposed upon fathers and mothers of providing for their
illegitimate children, and by their custom of passing judgment on the
dead, had fashioned that granite people which will continue to be the
wonder and admiration of all ages. So long as Greece and Rome preserved
this Egyptian policy, whose light had been introduced among them by
severe lawgivers, they were in a position to defy, in like manner, all
external enemies; but, from the time that the absolutism of profligacy
_towards their slaves_ had hurried them along the downward path to ruin,
they refused to submit to those wise laws, which had constituted their
strength, and ensured a hopeful future. What vigour, what energy, did
this unceasing control bestow upon the administrator! Despite the
depravity which found its way into Greece, in the age of Pericles, still
what a noble spectacle there is in the struggles of Æschines and of
Demosthenes—in that immortal discourse upon the crown in which we
perceive the heart of a free people throb in the reciprocal
responsibility of the public man and his accusers!
It is, on the other hand, sad to consider the work of absolutism, not so
much in the pyramids formed out of human carcases by the Genghis Khans
and the Tamerlanes, as in the civilized systems, polished like the Roman
Empire, that of the Low Countries and of France, in which are observed
the highest development of material and intellectual progress side by
side with moral decline.
Certes, reformers, moralists and satirists, were not wanting in the
Roman empire. Honest men, saddened and indignant at the depravity of
their age, tried to stem the muddy torrent which was hurrying it in the
direction of degrading gratifications. What noble efforts we see,
whether among the Catos, the Tacituses, and the Juvenals; or among the
Origens, the Tertullians, and the Justins! What moral energy among the
Stoics, who took for their maxim _endurance_ and _self-denial_! What
grandeur of soul among those obscure Christians, whose performance of
the moral obligations which are based upon respect for the dignity of
humanity, caused spiritual development to be carried to such a high
degree! Did not this reformation, seated upon the throne itself, produce
the admirable epoch of the Antonines![32]
Individual virtues were unable, notwithstanding, to save the empire,
ruined as it was from the day when the rule of morals no longer found a
place in either _law_ or _authority_; from the moment when there were no
longer either tribunes to denounce abuses, or censors to repress them.
Yes, the Roman empire received its death-warrant at the inconsistent
epoch in which Cæsar erected his vices into laws; in which Augustus
destroyed, by his example, the morality he preached by his precepts; in
which that _censor of morals_, who issued severe edicts against an
unmarried seducer, who caused the consecrated fire to be maintained by
the virgins on the altar of Vesta, being personally affected by the
contagion of the period, secretly introduced the courtesan at home, by
paying public and hypocritical honours to Livia. It is all over with
that power which shall have for its moral law nothing more than the
individual temperament of those who wield it, and Juvenal shall very
soon utter his prophetic warning:—
“Saevior armis
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.”[33]
Rome shall drink the poisoned cup by copious draughts; when the queen of
the world shall have emptied the fatal beverage, God shall make a sign
to the barbarians, and the Northern hordes shall arise. A thousand times
unhappy should we be, similarly, if, by scandalous privileges, we
continued to attract the dregs of the entire world which will sacrifice
France’s future by corrupting her youth and her women. Before pointing
out the remedies which the evil calls for, let us, however, see to what
degree of horror its too great freedoms have brought the prostitution of
the man.
IV.—MALE PROSTITUTION, AND PARTICULARLY THAT OF THE STUDENT, THE
OFFICIAL, AND THE SOLDIER.
“May the unworthy man perish who makes a market of the heart, and
renders love mercenary! He it is who covers the earth with the
crimes that debauchery causes to be committed in it. How should she
not be always for sale who has allowed herself to be bought once?
And, in the ignominy into which she soon falls, who is the author of
her wretchedness—the brute who ill-treats her in a place of bad
repute, or the seducer who drags her there, by being the first to
put a price on her favours.”—_J. J. Rousseau._
“By refusing virtue the right of being the matter of primary
importance, you have granted to vice the right of being so.”—_M.
Alex. Dumas, fils._
“There are bad examples worse than crimes; and more States
have perished from violated morals than from infringed
laws.”—_Montesquieu._
The legislative impunity, the administrative and judicial protection
granted to the excesses of the man, must take away from them the stigma
of infamy, and, by making them universal, cause them to be lost sight of
even to the very odiousness of their name. Every vice which forms part
of a nation’s life is disguised under an honourable term. Thus
prostitution is called _gallantry_, and to live in those bonds which
degrade woman, suppress the child before or after its birth, and hurry
society to ruin, is to _divert one’s self, to be a man of pleasure, an
agreeable companion, a captivating knight_, &c. The facility with which
young men can procure instruments of vice, wherever they go, the
guardian-hand of the administration which goes with them for protection
into the very haunts of profligacy have caused them to lose their moral
sense to such a degree that their passions, nursed by habitual
gratification, no longer acknowledge any check. Who has not heard those
Societies spoken of which give their candidates formal banquets, to
which every member, married or not, repairs, accompanied by one of his
mistresses? Our towns are honoured by a crowd of illustrious “gaudins,”
who call themselves _followers-up of workwomen_; of celebrated
foreigners, earls and viscounts, &c.; hunting-dogs more or less clever
at following up the track of hunger and destitution. Upon our
boulevards, in our coffee-houses, at races, clubs, theatres, they riot
and box for these women, whose champions they glory in being. Fathers,
eldest sons, generals, literary men, bankers, &c., even dare to set
themselves up as supporters of registered girls. They sign, without any
shame, the letters they address to them, and have the assurance to go to
the office of the commissioner of police to give themselves out as their
lovers, and there to claim them.
Elsewhere such and such a man acknowledges that he is looking for a
fortune by marriage to repair the inroads made on his heritage, by more
than a _hundred_ women he has kept. Young masters of establishments,
where many workpeople are employed, are seen, moreover, reserving to
themselves the right of choosing their mistresses in the workroom, and
exacting that the mother of the work-girl, who is the sport of their
whims, should keep a constant watch over her, and give her up to them
herself. Certain fashionable foreigners look out in the “Petites
Affiches” the addresses of women out of work, whom they engage under the
title of servants, governesses, needlewomen, &c., and afterwards hand
over to the public streets those who, having neither means of their own,
nor savings, have been put in their power by hunger.[34]
In all classes we meet these men, whose polygamy, simultaneous or
successive, has no other limits than the caprices of unbridled passion.
This process of making licentiousness common, imparts to it, in the
present day, an instability unknown even to the corruption of the 18th
century, in which the courtesan was, so far as the aristocracy and the
rich among the middle classes were concerned, a woman of inferior rank,
with an assured _status_, like that of the legitimate wife; in practice,
our dissipated men, rich and poor, allow their _mistresses of a day_ to
pass through every successive step in degradation. Such and such a youth
writes down among the records of his life, the possession of a girl whom
he was able to pay for three months or three days when he left college.
Thus the debauchee, not rich enough to keep a mistress, obtains unlawful
gratification on a species of five-percent. principle; it is the fact of
the existence of these morals that gave occasion to the writing of
this:—
“Impuissants a porter un vice tout entier
Ils sont amants, joueurs, libertins par quartier.”[35]
But, in order to appreciate better an evil which is sapping society in
its very foundations, let us especially consider those who symbolize
truth, justice, law and national defence; that is to say, the student,
the public official, and the soldier—the soldier who, previously
enlisted to defend his country, seems to be no longer kept in pay but in
order to corrupt her.
The young man’s course of depravity begins at college; the pestiferous
atmosphere in which we are living causes bad books to find their way
into our schools, where children are often detected reading the memoirs
of our dancing and singing celebrities, to get acquainted with the
details of their lives and that of their illustrious lovers; the greater
part of them conceive the hope of following their elders in backstairs
society, and their young imagination places its beau-ideal in the wealth
acquired by corruption and for corruption.
The sayings of young men have been collected, of whom one claimed that
the unlimited use of the horse, the cigar, and the mistress, should
follow upon a course of philosophy; whilst another affirmed that it
might be substituted for it with advantage. In fact, we have
rhetoricians who fight duels on account of harlots. It is this type of
libertine which affects a supreme contempt for modest women, rejects the
advice of his elder sisters, the wise counsel of his mother, and would
fear to be ridiculed among his fellow-students for his respectful
conduct towards her. The manners of some of them are such that they
glory in smoking in a carriage, in the presence of women, who seem to
them too timid to remind them of the bye-laws.
Religion and the family oppose but a feeble obstacle to the profligacy
of youths during the period of secondary instruction; but in that of the
higher grade, the young man shaking off this uncomfortable check,
inaugurates his life as a citizen by procuring a degraded mistress, who
initiates him into every sort of wickedness.[36]
The student away from home often lives in those social circles which are
the most corrupting. It is incredible to what extent the guests at these
social gatherings dread the company of respectable people. They give
themselves out as ‘_bored_’ if they have to make their appearance at a
_family_ dinner, try to escape from a ball in good society, shun a
drawing-room where they must observe some proprieties of behaviour, and
curse every atmosphere which keeps them away from their cigar, their
beer, the racket of the billiard-table, the public-house and the orgie
where their nights are spent. Far from being ashamed of this kind of
life, they have, as we can testify, the impudence to appear in our law
courts as complainants, if the women with whom they are cohabiting rob
them of a few francs. Students of law, medicine, &c., often picked up
drunk in the streets, at two and three o’clock in the morning, are
brought up for creating a disturbance at night. “You have,” the judge
tells them, “ill-used women with whom you are cohabiting; but the fact
of notorious profligacy is not an object of legal repression or even of
censure.” A law student twice attempted to stab with a poinard one of
his rivals who was seated at a table of the _Eldorado café_. The
prosecution proved that this assassin had for four years been living
with prostitutes in the most unrestrained debauchery.[37] By an odd
coincidence, the newspapers were giving a report of this degradation of
a young man entrusted to our society, by an honourable family, for the
sake of his education, viz., for the elevation of his mind and heart, on
the very day that the Senate, after having approved of the
irresponsibility of public officials, was adding a peroration to an
address, to celebrate the principles of _loyalty and morality_ in which
we are bringing up the young. Let us look a little more closely at the
language of facts, and we shall understand the unhappiness of parents
compelled to have their sons brought up amidst circumstances in which
the principles of _loyalty and morality_ may be trampled under foot with
a cynicism of this character. There is no longer such a thing as youth,
some one exclaims with sadness, in taking notice of morals of this
description. There is no longer a fatherland, one might rejoin. Are the
domestic virtues, then, no longer the school for civil ones? If any
guardianship, or disciplinary regimen, is exercised over students, apart
from acts which do not fall within the penal law, is it logical to make
them out to be so rigorous in discourses read to foreigners while
shutting our eyes to the crimes I am enumerating? Should not tutors that
have charge of the heart, from the time they stand in place of the
absent family, take care of and be anxious about the morality and higher
nature of these youths, who are the advance-guard of the future, and
have been confided by France to their care? And yet this corruption, all
odious though it be, is not to be placed by the side of the fierce
selfishness of those students who, with a calculating heartlessness,
seduce workwomen, artless girls who become attached to them. In order to
show the connection between seduction and prostitution, I instance the
following among those which abound on this melancholy subject:—
A rich foreign student, whose parents used to send him 600 to 700 francs
monthly for his personal expenses, became acquainted with a young
shopwoman living away from home in Paris. After keeping her for some
time, he deserted her when she had told him she expected to become a
mother. This woman in the most frightful poverty, reduced to bring forth
her child in the street, was conveyed to the hospital. Despite the
student’s unfeeling conduct to herself, she was hoping he would provide
for the daughter she had given birth to; but he proceeded to take away
from her her last hope, and informed her, when sending her 30 francs,
that if she had the audacity to annoy him, French police and French law
would very soon set all that to rights. Stunned by this last blow, the
young girl never again arose from her bed of sorrow. Let us say, for the
honour of human nature, that there was a general feeling of indignation
among those who knew about this odious action; they did not know how to
brand this selfish debauchee who imagined he could, with 30 francs,
atone for the murder of a woman and the sacrifice of a child. I,
however, consider he was generous, this student. The laws of his own
country, sentencing him to allow the deserted child and agonised mother
a means of support in proportion to his fortune, might, it is true, have
imposed upon him a sufficient fine; but, as he was living under the
personal advantage of a code of laws he had been wise enough to call in
to his aid, as a protection for his profligacy, and as he was the sole
judge of the reparation, he gave 30 francs too much. Perhaps he denied
himself an orgie; he showed himself superior to a code which, to
preserve the prerogatives of debauchery inviolable, does not condescend
to grant the consideration to the human soul which it bestows upon
broken glass. The French legislator has said to us, in effect: “_I
forbid_ you to interfere with this man; he is my chosen one, my
anointed, the apple of my eye; I pronounce him inviolable. Let him cause
ruin, let him make victims, I applaud; it is his right, it is my
principle of the education of youth.”[38]
These poor girls are also seen to commit suicide from despair. One of
them threw herself out of her window on hearing of the marriage of a law
student who had just deserted her. Another was seized with asphyxia in
the room of the medical student who was leaving her. Have we not reason
to shudder, then, in reflecting that these assassins, seated one day on
the bench, will be the interpreters of the fundamental law which
regulates the relations of the sexes?
In directing special attention to such monsters, let us consider youth
away from home, entering life with the most generous aspirations—with
the healthiest impulses with respect to individual rights and social
obligations. Well, these students, not being more than about 25 to 30
years old—not having the social position which will admit of their
marrying—meet with numerous obstacles in the path of honour. In their
minority for lawful wedlock or for reparation, they are in their
majority for error and crime. Their conscience speaks in vain; society,
fashion, speak louder still, and stifle this voice. Minority, the issue
at the termination of their student career, the demands of their future
profession, are insuperable obstacles. Custom and prejudice superadding
their barriers, give the names of heedlessness, and senseless marriage,
to the fulfilment of a duty from the non-fulfilment of which an honest
man would recoil. In proportion as the student lives in this deadly
atmosphere, the depravity of his heart vitiating his judgment, impels
him, without remorse, to sacrifice mothers and children as a holocaust
to profligacy. The lower-class girl is no longer anything but the sport
of his passions. It is all over with him. He proceeds from seduction to
prostitution; provides himself with victims without name, by the
intervention of the agents of human merchandise, the hucksters of shame;
and France has lost a man. This is the history of numbers of young men
fixed in our towns for years, between their duty, the abstract idea of
good, and the social current of example, and the allurement of the
senses. They had promised marriage to a woman they had seduced; their
promise was a sincere one; they even attempted to get rid of the
material obstacles which were opposing either their lawful union or the
legitimation of their children. But as their promise did not receive the
sanction of the law, they made themselves familiar with perjury. Time,
absence, satiety made them forget their former engagements. They then,
no longer as novices, but with deliberate design, made false oaths to
other women, and constancy foresworn in regard to one will be so in
reference to a thousand.
A celebrated novel has made the names of _Tholomyés_ and of _Marius_
familiar to many. The former personifies the student with base passions,
the hero of the day, whose morals I have sketched—who becomes an
important personage, a member of parliament, all the while he is
continuing to be, without control, the cause of ruin to women and
children. The second pictures the young student, true to a first love,
which keeps alive in him noble and elevated feelings, and confers
happiness on him through marriage. Men affecting to be serious, have, in
this matter, accused the author of exaggeration and falsehood. It may,
nevertheless, be asserted that our higher course of instruction reckons,
among those who are its objects, many more of the _Tholomyés_ than the
_Marius_ type, and that it is even organised in a way to nourish these
profligate men. Who does not know that on the appearance of the
_Misérables_ our _Tholomyés_ of the _quartier latin_ were making sport
of their mistresses by styling them _Fautine_?
If we wish to leave the domain of fiction, let a careful inquiry be made
into the number of young men away from home in our towns without
becoming depraved in them; let this investigation be made among the
fifteen and twenty thousand students living in Paris, far from their
families, and let us be informed how many _Tholomyés_ seduce _Fautines_,
and how many _Mariuses_ marry, or can marry, their sweethearts. For
myself, I am endeavouring to base my assertions upon conscientious
investigation: I have questioned many families having relations with
students who are recommended to them from the provincial towns. All have
assured me, sadly, that they have not been able to save _one_ of them
from vice. A respectable woman, among others, after keeping in view
twenty young men, had seen some who had remained one year, others two or
three years, without contracting vicious habits; but all of them, before
their departure from Paris, had finished by, more or less, losing their
innocence in the fumes of excess, and were giving themselves up to those
debasing pleasures, which, by corrupting the individual, destroy all
social-ties. It is young men like these who, baptised in luxuriousness,
make, as it were, a distinctive livery of it; for the rest, it is not a
question of knowing if good or evil is the exception here, but of
demonstrating all the odiousness there is in the impunity of a possible
vice while the student is being initiated into the duties of the
citizen.
In the face of the actual state of things, let us no longer ask why our
system of advanced training produces so few superior men, and let us
deplore the mistake of the instructors of youth, who do not pay
sufficient attention to moral culture—to the elevation and dignity of
the feelings of man—to the enquiry whether the youth entrusted to their
care has not been guilty of any of these stolen-marches upon justice
which confuse the harmonious relations indispensable to the maintenance
of all social order. For ourselves, conscious of the worth of a human
soul, we weep over the unhappiness of France, which, year by year, is
losing its vigour. I shall have to speak of the antagonism in society
which results from male irresponsibleness. Let us follow, for a moment,
those young men prepared for filling the part of public officials by
acts of violence against the institution of the family, and which would
deprive them of the rights of citizenship in a state of society
sufficiently logical to regulate its morals by its principles.
It is among these that we meet with those selfish and avaricious men
who, having a host of ruinous wants, contract mercenary marriages. It is
in their ranks that we include those intending husbands, dragged into
marriage by their families, and by certain conveniences of position,
which impose it upon them as a means of purgation; they have had pointed
out to them a young lady disposed to place in their power a large
fortune, attractions of person and heart by relatives who must decide
about them. The marriage is, nevertheless, arranged without their being
consulted; everything around them is going forward for the nuptials;
nothing is wanting but their affection. Eventually the marriage takes
place; they make as few and short calls as possible; in the midst of the
heartiness of their family connexions, they alone remain abstracted,
bored, awkward and unpolite, absorbed as they are in regrets for the
seduction of the lower-class girl for which they had not to answer, and
for the courtesan’s drawing-room. Restrained for a very short time by
the life of the domestic circle, they are ill at ease while kept at a
distance from their ideal, all the while looking forward to be released
on the very first opportunity.[39]
To get at the origin of these immoralities, so widely spread in the
present day, we must put royalty itself upon the culprit’s stool, and
exhibit it on the scaffold where it expiated the guilty inconsistency
which made it defy those moral laws, the observance of which was its
most sacred title to the veneration of subjects. When the dynasty of the
Mérovingians was implanted in our soil, a conquest to Rome,
civilization, and Christianity, the Gallican bishops, it is true, made
the haughty Sicambrians bow their heads to regenerate them in the water
of baptism. But these men of the sword and blood did not leave all their
pollutions there, because their moral sense was not sufficiently
developed to understand the purity of practice, the holiness of the
Christian teaching. The Church tolerated in these barbarous kings and
their enervated sons, the Roman system of concubinage which, be it
observed, by determining the lot of the woman and the child, guarded
against the crimes resulting from irresponsible profligacy.
Nevertheless, absolute power would have brought its customary abuses in
its train if, in the Church, it had not found a moderator invested with
the noble mission of giving a sanction to justice by making the
principle of marriage triumph for the protection of the weak against the
brutal caprices of the strong; history ought to bless those pontifical
fulminations which hovered constantly over the head of royal culprits
from the moment they had taken their passions as their rule of
conduct.[40]
But restraint irritated these kings, these princes and great ones,
senseless enough not to understand that they were ruining themselves,
together with respect for authority, by teaching the people contempt for
the moral law. The age of the “Renaissance” was, from this point of
view, perhaps the most fatal era of our old monarchy. Paganism, when it
left Constantinople, proceeded to take possession of the papacy, and,
being infiltrated into all the pores of our society, dominated in
literature, art and morals. In the “saturnalia” of debauchery, Rome lost
her empire over the souls of men; the Reformation carrying with it the
principle of vitality, substituted the authority of conscience for that
of divine right; but France, corrupted to the extent of having abbots
like Brantôme, had not recuperative force sufficient to regenerate her
morals, and, pagan in her customs, she was yet illogical enough to
believe she was Christian and profess herself Catholic. Her kings,
putting themselves out of the page—that is, ceasing to be guided by
common sense or reason, wallowed with impunity in the most monstrous
debauchery. Sending to execution those who reproved them,[41] they paid
honour to their _morganatic queens_ (queen-mistresses). From this
period, moreover, every principle of respect was destroyed by these
great violators of the social compact, henceforward in no fear from
judges; it is in this way that France experienced the humiliation of
sullying her history by the disgraces of the court during the dynasty of
the Valois, and by the scandals and infamies of that of the Bourbons.
The example afforded by royalty having roused the courtiers and nobles
to emulate it, they vied with each other in deserting their duty of
making their estates productive and enlightening their vassals. Wholly
taken up in the gratification of their selfish passions, they gradually
lost their long kept honour in the ostentatious idleness of Versailles,
and communicated their corruption, more and more closely, to the rich of
the middle class. Still, however, the law, which was no longer anything
but a dead-letter for royalty and the aristocracy, continuing to
exercise authority over the masses, the condition of morals at the close
of the 18th century may be thus summed up: the nobles paraded their
mistresses, the middle class concealed them, the lower orders coveted
them. But peace to these _Manes_, since rivers of blood have cleansed
these _Augean_ stables.[42]
It is not useless to compare this period of decline with our present
morals. _Then the debauchee infringed the laws—he keeps them now_; the
corruption which was at the head of the nation has affected its heart;
_the privilege of the few has become the right of all_.
“Obscur, on l’eût flétri d’une mort légitime,
Il est puissant, les lois out ignoré son crime:”[43]
was then the poet’s indignant protest. In the present day, the highest
functionary prostitutes himself with prerogatives as princely as those
of the Duke of Orleans. There is even no longer any magisterial
authority for exercising a wholesome restraint, in this direction, upon
_the governing class_.
Every debauchee is an absolute sovereign, not after the manner of our
former monarchs who robbed God through his representatives, but like the
Tiberiuses and the Neros, whose only law was their own passions.
The scandals of the uncontrolled conduct of certain officials set at
defiance all sense of rectitude and indignant feeling. The blows they
deal at the rights of the family are so public, so deplorable, and so
numerous, that the State might be thought partial to debauchees if we
did not know in what an atmosphere the greater part of the men entrusted
with high-office for the purpose of directing us are prepared for their
work, if we did not especially note their emulation in, and boasting of,
the lax morals which obtain among the upper classes.
If I specified a few of these offences, our law for libel would consider
me guilty—to such a degree does it pay respect to immorality. Let us
merely say that no government whose aim might be the destruction of the
institution of the family could find either better servants or a better
state of affairs by which to accomplish its ends than that of France.
Let us speak at least of one of these men whose morals are no longer
under the protection of the law.—Reynaud who, in 1861, came up before
the Isire Assize Court[44] under the law for the prevention of
assassination, was a former public official, that is to say, _a guardian
of religion, the family, and propriety_; he had even been foreman of the
jury in this court some years previously. As the proceedings at the
trial proved, the successive registry-receivers in that district were
causing scandal and demoralising it by their illicit intimacies.
Reynaud, the murderer of his daughter in a fit of jealous anger against
the Registrar, whose mistress she was, was convicted of having committed
every kind of outrage upon the family institution. A husband and father,
he incessantly solicited his female domestics, day labourers, and the
farmers’ daughters &c., on his estates, never letting them alone; he
forced them by threats of killing those who were proof against his
terrifying intimidations, to the extent that several women lost their
health through fear. A farmer gave evidence at the trial that, in one
year, three poor servants had been obliged to submit to the monstrous
desires of Reynaud, and that others, in a more independent position, had
saved themselves from it by flight. A friend of his daughter, overcome
by him, was also obliged to yield to solicitations which, in the
defence, were toned down into partial violence. Reynaud had, moreover,
seduced an idiot, and cruelly left her in great destitution while she
was pregnant; he drove her away with blows with a stick when she came
with her mother to ask him for some assistance for the child. This
ex-official, who understood the law as applicable to his own case, even
boasted at the trial of having bought as many women of the labouring
classes as he wished for, by throwing them a five-franc piece as an
inducement. “_That is how those things are done_,” he added
sardonically, with a consciousness of his right. So far it was well, and
the cup would never have been full if he had confined himself to this
species of crimes, for none of the facts I have just recounted
constituted the smallest delinquency, nor even the slightest
responsibility in the eye of our legislation, which, at the same time,
discountenances divorce as _an outrage on the family institution_. After
the recital of these horrors, the President could say to the accused,
“_You have been an honourable man to the verge of the criminal code._”
At this trial, the judges, without respect for public decency, put upon
the stool of repentence all the women whom the respectable citizen and
upright functionary Reynaud had bought for five sous or five francs. Let
these female domestics and day labourers, whose honour is worth a few
francs, pass in review, and let girls belonging to the wages-earning
class be fastened to the pillory! The court did not blush to compromise
even a wife and mother who had had dealings with Reynaud: it violated
the sanctity of the domestic circle in summoning this woman to give her
evidence. The unhappy creature seeking, as in a barbarous age, an asylum
at the foot of the altar, knelt down for a whole day in a church, in the
hope of escaping the shame of this trial, at which she was questioned,
in inquisitorial language, in presence of the public, about the most
minute details of her illicit connection with the accused man. After in
this way sacrificing the weak, the judges manifested particular leniency
to the officials, the lovers of the daughters assassinated by Reynaud,
as necessary to the proceedings as the women who figured at them;
inviolability, the protectress of their profligacy, prevented justice
from summoning them, and even uttering their names; their
“_honorabilité_,” kept safe by the letter “h,” suffers them to continue
preaching social morality in our departments, and leading the people
back to healthy notions of law and duty!
To understand the immense mischief which a single profligate man can do,
we must refer to our multitudes of Reynauds who have neither killed nor
stolen, but who, submitting like himself to the yoke of unbridled
passions, sow death wherever they go without being punished for it.[45]
In the face of an irresponsibility of such a nature, instead of
lamenting lest morality should no longer exist, we should rather wonder
that there is any to be found.
I am aware that with our dissolute officials we might place in contrast
noble types of moral qualities in other public functionaries, who are
honourable and devoted to the public welfare; but this contrast would be
a fresh condemnation of the society which despises the family to the
extent of not making any distinction between these and those whose
morals I have sketched. Did not this confusion of principles already
exist in the Roman Empire at the period in which Corneille depicts it in
his “_Polyeucte_”?
To the profligacy of the student and the public official, let us add
that of the soldier:—
We should look into history in vain for a method of defending our native
country, more opposed to its true interests than is our peace-army.
Conformably to a memorandum of the Council of State (December 21st,
1808) declaring that it is for the good order of the army and the
interest of society _that military men should not be able to contract
inconvenient marriages, susceptible of altering the consideration due to
their character_, the generals and colonels on active service and liable
to be called out, half-pay officers, and reserve-conscripts, must obtain
a special authorisation to marry, under penalty of being left unprovided
for, of being reduced in rank, and of the loss of all rights and titles.
We know that the marriages _of convenience_ consist in the settling the
minimum of the marriage portion; but, in spite of these conditions, the
official permission being only given to the heads, marriage is very
exceptional in the army, and still more so in the imperial guard. Hence
follow prostitution in towns, seduction and concubinage in the rural
districts, and female degradation and the sacrifice of infant life
everywhere. The government had, in this matter, even lost the sense of
economy to the extent of almost requiring, after a five years’ active
service, three years in the reserves _without marrying_. If the “Corps
législatif” has, by its energetic opposition, procured three years
reserve _with power to marry_, we must not congratulate ourselves too
much upon this victory, for the relative advantage the man finds in
irregularity of life, and the prospect of being again called out for
active service, will keep him in those injurious bonds which banish
family duties in the interests of the rights of profligacy.
As to the military man on active service, he must, on that account,
reject a poor girl who would gain an honourable livelihood by working;
if a marriage contract with her is signed, the minister of war
intervenes to punish the delinquent and the notary guilty of this
(so-considered) discreditable transaction.[46] The same prohibition is
enforced by the commanders of the army against making reparation for a
wrong to a seduced woman who might not have any marriage portion
whatever; consequently, according to the reports of the societies of St.
Vincent de Paul and François Régis, the formal opposition of superiors
to the legitimation of soldiers’ natural children.
It is impossible to estimate the lax morality which results from this.
Independently of the scandals caused by particular leading military men,
it has been noticed that illegitimate births increase, in towns, in
direct proportion to the presence and increase of garrisons, which have
also carried prostitution into out-townships till then preserved from
this pest.
Of this, an opinion may be formed from the fact that our soldiers defile
themselves to the extent of maintaining a third of the common
prostitutes; that uniform which should only be met with on the field of
honour, even serves to enable soldiers to obtain a reduction of one half
the payment in brothels. It is incredible how far the license of knights
who wear the colours of the famous women of our streets extends; their
_military honour_ is the negation of the virtues which make the good
citizen.
Idleness, provocations, contests with non-military power, drunken and
degrading brawls, in which the name of _father of a family_ is thrown in
the teeth of the moral soldier by way of insult,—such is the life of a
great number of troopers who have never been in action. Base
gratifications have so perverted their moral sense, that brothers carry
off from sisters who have not enough to live upon, the fruit of their
earnings; insensible even to the distress of indigent parents, they
frequently spend their pay in a few days’ orgie. These are the veterans
who, adopting the manners of courtesans, spend their time, as _they_ do,
in tightening their waists, arranging their hair, and loading themselves
with perfumes. An automaton-like precision and instincts of _slaughter_,
will be powerful enough, nevertheless, to make them deserve the
distinctions to which the terms _country_ and _honour_ are attached.
The license and brutality of the soldiery in reference to women, the
distorted gallant attentions, the unhappy complicity of the commanders
in breaches of morals, become incomprehensible if they are contrasted
with the rigid discipline which sometimes punishes with death the least
rebellion against a superior, and condemns to loss of rank, to long
years of confinement, the theft of a pair of officer’s gloves. Just
minds are expressing the opinion that France will only escape ruin by a
more healthy recognition of social obligations, which may cause her, at
length, to understand that the honour of the woman of the masses, the
future of her children, the personal dignity of the man, should have
more value in the eye of the military code than a pair of officer’s
gloves, or than the demands of shop-keepers.
In the face of promises violated, of prospects blighted, the garrison
nevertheless goes away, insulting occasionally with a cruel irony, the
tears of mothers, and the lamentations of families. The commanders,
faithful to the laws of French honour, have caused the tobacco and drink
supplied by too confiding hands to be respected. This kind of integrity
satisfied, the bugle sounds, the trumpets re-echo, the drum beats, the
ensign is unfurled, France marches to glory, advancing in her onward
path over the bodies of children and women sacrificed by our soldiers.
These profligate habits, hawked from town to town by our garrisons,
appear especially lamentable in small localities. Uproarious orgies
which, from morning to evening, sadden the passer by, issue from
public-houses termed officers’ “cafés.”
There, men who wish for nothing in life beyond sensual gratifications,
spend their entire day, glass or billiard cue in hand, cigar in mouth,
and make themselves conspicuous by the brutality of their manners. One
understands that, with these notions of morals, our courts-martial
sometimes treat rape as a pastime, hardly within the jurisdiction of the
police-court, if they do not give it triumphant acquittal, and that
their verdicts often condemn to a few days’ imprisonment, public
outrages on modesty. To give an idea of the spirit of this legislation,
I shall make reference to the case of Léandri.[47] That officer was
brought before a military tribunal, under the law for preventing rape. A
large body of soldiers escorted him with a defiant and threatening
attitude that had the air of setting justice and morality at nought.
Léandri’s counsel went so far as to make his frequenting the “quartier
Bréda” meritorious in him: “_He has mistresses_,” said he, “_is not that
the common practice?_”
The imperial commissioner interfered, in his turn, to reproach the
accused for having dressed himself in the character of a Joseph. Why was
he ashamed to acknowledge that he was a jovial pleasure-seeker? He could
not be blamed for that. The acquittal of this valiant defender of France
permitted him to protect us by his good morals, until the theft of a
cash-box caused him to be sentenced. His wrong was not having been rich
enough to pay for his mistresses with his small coin, otherwise he would
be still a brave fellow, resembling many others, for the army reckons
thousands of men of honour of this description, whose particular talent
is the theft of women and not of cash-boxes. Certain courts-martial
have, through it, even come to look upon rape as an extenuating
circumstance in a case of assassination. A Vincennes artillery-man was
convicted, on the inferences of doctor Tardieu, of having violated a
child of seven years with the most revolting atrocity, and then of
assassinating her with seventeen stabs of his poinard. Out of seven
judges of this monstrous occurrence, three voted for the acquittal of
the culprit, who escaped through having a minority favourable to
him.[48]
These rakes, returning again to their native district, after being
liberated, spread corruption even to our smallest villages, where they
constitute themselves instructors in vice for the young of both sexes.
Let not these plain-spoken truths, however, cause it to be thought that
I confound the real men of honour of our army with these numerous
supporters of taverns and brothels. Besides, I am not so much attacking
the persons as the institutions which are the causes of the evil, like
our peace-army, hateful in all its bearings; the negation of the moral
law, and, consequently, of civil order, which is order in the intellect
and not in the street. In order to raise a revolt against this state of
things, it should suffice to point out that it keeps no account of the
soldier’s respectability of morals, and even degrades from official
honour the courageous man who sets himself determinedly to practise
natural morality in despite of social.[49] For the rest, if this evil
should spread generally, it is the downfall of society; if it check
itself, the reaction will beat back the leaders who endure or exact it.
This investigation has shown us that prostitution does not bring
dishonour, among us, upon the man who is defiled by it, and does not
shut against him the road to any public appointment. We may be convinced
that, in France, these prerogatives have caused the principle of the
family to fall into the contempt in which that of property is in the
East.
Theft does not there disgrace public officials, because its immediate
advantages often triumph over a dilatory repression, uncertain, and
always ineffectual. If our criminals, our robbers, were sheltered from
the public vengeance, we should, in the same way, have to be resigned to
the evil of an unchecked brigandage.
Our social arrangements, therefore, by going against nature, in the
physical, intellectual, and moral consequences she attaches to crime,
offers to the vicious man the advantages of a robber who, sure of
impunity, should see patrols watching over his safe-keeping, and racking
their brains to perfect the instruments he wants for his midnight
burglaries. Moreover, they have taken away every security from the
victims of the wrong, in order to extend them to its promoters. Hence
results the extent of the canker which is gnawing us; we have to endure
even vanity of vices become fashionable, against which nothing can
defend us, whilst we ought to be armed against the unpunished evil-doer.
Prostitution, apart from marriage, has brought contagion to marriage
itself. Take away from it the mercenary character of the contract, and
none of these men will clog themselves with a permanent tie. Meanwhile,
as they have one foot in respectable and the other in doubtful society,
they have established the link of connection between the two
hemispheres, and exact that their wives should adopt the courtesan’s
manners, or make the courtesan adopt them by the imitation of theirs.
But still the progress is not fully realised; for, if the so-called
respectable man must obtain his civilian education in the haunts of
profligacy, these haunts cannot be any longer closed to our modest
girls, and we ought to think it as moral to admit into respectable
society the daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, who go to the public
thoroughfare to get lovers, as the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers
who go there to get fresh mistresses. If we shudder at these logical
consequences, they may, at least, teach us where we are in respect to
them from the stand-point of law, natural morality and justice, for
conjugal union is only possible where there exists, in those united,
conformity of education and morals.
Society, like the family, finds itself afflicted by this profligacy,
which, in relation to marriage, further destroys the proportionate
balance of the births of each sex. It takes for granted a hundred, and
even a thousand times, more male than female debauchees, and corresponds
to an equal number of modest girls who are living in discomfort or
poverty, since wherever a hundred men can run after one woman for the
purpose of prostitution, it follows that a hundred women ought to run
after one man for the purpose of marrying him.
When the evil has reached these proportions, the fall of the arts and
literature follows the corruption of morals. This is the cause of those
debased talents, those obscenities which bring discredit upon art, and
which, instead of the severely chaste creations of the Poussins and the
Lesueurs, present for our contemplation the orgies of artistes falling,
when overcome by drunkenness, into the courtesan’s arms; the impurities
displayed in our monuments, in our public squares, is the result of a
like cause.
In literature, the corruption of particular authors inspiring their
writings, keeps them floating by the motive power of their unchaste
wishes; and we should not, I imagine, look for noble creations from
these young authorlings who, not blushing to sell themselves to old
mistresses, by whom they are paid, desert them as soon as they meet with
the favours of another who pays them better. Their code of morals must
be that of the contemporaries of Plautus, claiming that rich women
should choose their lovers, but that poor ones must love the man rich
enough to buy them. This absence of true and deep seated feelings, this
mercenary species of love, gives birth to a mass of scribblers without
principles—of would-be poets of the affections, who, being neither poets
nor in love, prostitute their pen to every subject, as they do their
person to every harlot.
What shall we expect, moreover, from the art of observation? Why should
our numerous “Messieurs aux camélias” after what they call their term of
youthful folly, and when they have become faithful husbands, tender
fathers, upholders by conviction of the family institution, become
indignant at seeing an abandoned woman attain to their own nobleness of
sentiment? Why should not the stage have the right to exhibit for us
these fellows, just liberated from college restraint, who get up
_women’s parties_? Why should it spare those far-seeing fathers, who
take as much pains to procure modest mistresses for their sons as to buy
them pure-bred horses? Art and literature, let it not be forgotten, are
the reflections of the state of society; let not sweet-smelling odours
be looked for from an atmosphere loaded with infection.
Let us no longer behave as insensates, who, after breaking a mirror that
shows them uglier than they are, credit themselves with as many more
attractions as they see fewer. The theatre, which is the mirror of our
manners, ought even to go so far as to produce, on the stage, the
courtesan in person, and to have her applauded in those “tableaux
vivants” of which she is the heroine.
V.
“In short, the truth must be spoken. Woe to those who speak it not,
and woe to you if you are not worthy of hearing it.”
_Letter from Fènèlon to Louis XIV._
The investigation of this melancholy subject has placed before us the
progress of the evil, through the destitution and dependence of the
young women of the lower classes; and the impunity, and even the
protection, of the agents and accomplices of profligacy. This too clear
and a thousand times attested degradation of the woman by discomfort and
poverty, this glut in the supply of prostitution on the market in
seasons of dearth of employment, enables us to understand the error of
certain anti-economical doctrines representing that the man, who is the
bread-winner for _four_, is ever his wife’s and mother’s and child’s
protector at his fireside.[50]
The sad eloquence of facts too often shews us the possessors of income,
fortune and wealth corrupting those suffering from destitution and
hunger. We must in a measure base the regeneration of France upon
material independence, the source of woman’s dignity; and, consequently,
we call for a widely extended system of professional instruction, of
liberty of action which may, if possible, introduce into the laws of
wages the equality which obtains in those of real estate.
With reference to the impunity and protection of the immoral man, they
are condemned by sound reason bearing testimony that every society
disloyal to the laws that maintain its vitality, must perish by
continually-increasing degeneracy. The purpose of human existence is
moral perfection, not happiness, much less those vulgar, coarse, and
fatal pleasures which, by lowering man to the level of the brute,
destroy the institution of marriage, together with the domestic virtues
and the rights of the weak. Let us then reject the sophisms of erring
and depraved intellects, which represent that paths must be opened to
profligacy if we would have the sanctuary of the family institution
respected. In the slough of the Roman empire, the rights and necessities
of _passions not to be resisted_ were already being talked of, when
Christianity replied by raising man and woman to the same moral
perfection.
Let us further remind our self-satisfied people of the prosperity of the
family principle among nations which put down prostitution, and of its
decline among those who permitted it: perhaps they will, at length,
understand the value of the argument from facts.
Be it, in the first place, remarked that the irresponsibility of the
father of children born out of wedlock, which gives him every advantage
in going after prostitutes, is the most fruitful cause of profligacy. I
would, then, make other repressive measures subordinate to the effort to
make the father responsible. After placing this corner-stone of social
law in such a position as to act with rigour against prostitution, we
shall scarcely need to inquire if that evil can be restrained.
Human dignity and civil equality are opposed to penal measures against
the common prostitute as such. This is the point from which to start on
the effort to discover a just measure for checking prostitution. Ancient
France was ignorant alike of registration and the frightful
“surveillance” it necessitates. We know that modern nations governed by
the laws of true honour have maintained justice enough to be horrified
at this utter destruction of the human soul for the benefit of
debauchery. The nations that are seized with the desire of emulating our
system for the regulation of morals have, on the contrary, fallen to an
unspeakable degree of degradation.[51]
What deep seated corruption does the unrestricted haunting of places of
ill-repute by beings endowed with that threefold bridle of the
passions—reason, intelligence, and liberty—take for granted!
Prostitution is an irreparable ill for young men who, by it, lose the
pure source of the moral affections. We must therefore, at any cost,
snatch them from this infamy, make them feel its horror, and, above all,
not make use of the threefold complicity of government, legislation, and
jurisprudence, to promise the safe-keeping of their health, their money,
and their secret in their profligate courses.
I have, previously, made apparent the immorality which this organization
indicates; for physical, intellectual, and moral penalties are, let us
repeat, society’s only safeguard against vicious persons. It is
everywhere attested, by experience, that the certainty, the hope merely,
of escaping punishment, multiplies vicious habits; thus, when the
Government does not watch over the debauchee with so paternal a
solicitude, a first step in vice is frequently—on account of the misery,
disgrace, maladies and mental incapacity it entails—a living lesson for
the young, who imbibe the feeling of discretion by making a comparison
between the gratification and its consequences. It is a stringent duty
of morality and logic, then, to take away from human merchandise the
official impress, in order that the buyer, acting at his own risk and
peril, may become more circumspect; so that, trained to imbibe a horror
of profligacy, individuals should not persist in feeding on the poison,
and should catch some sense of self-respect by at least the feeling of
responsibility, added to the interposition of other subjects of
interest. Certain men would perhaps be ashamed to haunt places which, if
left unprotected in their infamy, would no longer be looked upon as
necessary institutions. Let us then deplore the infatuation of those
communities which talk of the teaching of morality while they protect
the debauchee; as if a part of the teaching of morality did not consist
in causing the good and bad consequences of human action to be apparent;
as if moralists could have authority in circumstances where vice is
compulsorily invested with rights, while virtue is clogged by penalties.
I go on to add, that our immorality is _cruel_. If it be a folly to
preserve certain men from the natural contagion consequent on their
vices, it is a crime to multiply opportunities for vice, so as to decoy
the individuals who, after disgracing themselves on the faith of what
society holds out to them as safe, bequeath to us a heritage of curses
when they are on the brink of the grave prematurely dug by their own
profligacy. It is a crime of treason against the nation to send
carcases, whether dead or living, back to families needing citizens and
regulators of social education. Let us, then, get rid of all the
frightful tolerations which set prostitution free from the rebuking and
regenerating influences of a personal initiative. At all events, as the
dens of infamy would not exist if there were not proprietresses to keep
them, and men to frequent them, measures of repression brought to bear
on girls only must be ineffective, since they do not reach the source of
the evil. The same action should be brought to bear by the police on
these houses as on gambling houses. This practicable and greatly-needed
reform would inevitably be followed by the making every excitement to
debauchery in the public street illegal, and by the right of complaint
for every man accosted by a woman to whom he is not known, as for every
woman addressed by a man with whom she was not previously acquainted.
What a shame it is that, owing to debauchery, a civilization should
tolerate, at particular hours, in these human flesh-markets, the
suspension of God’s laws, which is the cause of ruin for thousands of
young men who would never have become acquainted with profligacy if it
had not been offered to them daily with such persistency, and who are
unable to take a step, in our towns, without meeting with it.[52]
We have been enabled to see what a mistake it is to pretend that our
Government toleration is _necessary for the protection of modest women_.
If that were the case, we may be sure they would reject this
annihilation of their sisters for their benefit; but it is proved, on
the contrary, that _the insecurity of every woman_ results from the
prerogatives granted to vice in France. Are we not aware, that nations
which have not our monstrous measures of preservation, permit the girl
to go out, to travel, and live by herself, for the purpose of either the
secondary or the higher course of instruction; whilst in Paris more than
100,000 regulars and soldiers of the national guard, and a numerous body
of police, fail to inspire the young woman of the middle class with
sufficient confidence to allow her to venture a single step without a
protector, or the lower-class young woman with a security sufficient to
keep her from being made a merchantable article? Without even leaving
our territory, any one may be convinced, by comparison, that the
unprotected woman is so much the more respected in proportion as
profligacy has less of license. Charts of France have been made,
coloured more or less black according to the degree of instruction in
each of our “departments.” It would be easy to make such an one for
morality. It would demonstrate that the departments in which _the
machinery for morals_ is the most active, the most inquisitorial towards
the registered girl, are those in which a young girl who should have
committed the offence of walking out “unprotected” is no longer
marriageable.
Debauchery, driven from the street, would also be driven from cafés,
hotels, &c., otherwise than by laughter-moving and arbitrary regulations
against the “unprotected” woman. In this matter, then, we must further
substitute, for police rule, a general law to reach the real doers of
the evil, in the persons of those lodging-house keepers, tavern-keepers,
coffee-house proprietors, &c., who, by the greediest complicity, make
vice a matter of trade. But, alas! the law promulgated in 1778 alone
remained to us for dealing a blow at this abuse, and, after applying it
during the former half of the century, we declare it to be inapplicable
in the latter, without finding a substitute for it. Shall we profess
ourselves too much depraved to go back in this matter even to the
measures adopted by a reforming Government at the period of the greatest
decay of morals in our former monarchy?
The offence of treating for girls under age also demands a more severe
law. The uncertainty of the penalty, the feeble attempts to put down the
evil, as they appear when viewed with reference to the certainty of
immediate advantages to be gained by it, do not stop the agents of
procuration. The impunity assured to the person for whom the sale is
effected also gives to this kind of offences a deplorable frequency and
daring, in a country that punishes for a triple complicity, and by civic
degradation, the printer, author, and editor of writings whose offence
has sometimes been disseminating useful truths.
Profligacy driven from the public thoroughfares in this way, and from
establishments frequented by men without a home, the honour of the girl
under age being efficiently cared for, inexperienced youth will no
longer fall into the inextricable pitfalls of prostitution; no one but
the depraved man will, with the utmost caution, go into these sties of
infamy, to gratify a vicious propensity which would be left to its
natural consequences.
A community which sanctions the family principle should, further, spare
us the scandal of actions for debt and theft brought by the prostituter
against the prostituted. When our courts of law intervene to annul the
engagements which those above or those under age have contracted with
courtesans, it follows that these corrupters or these corrupted ones
have procured for themselves, by false pretences, on credit or for a
specific period, a gratification which the judge, as they have reason
for knowing, will take upon himself to make a gratuitous one, and that
their disgrace, which ought to close the ear of justice to their suits,
finds such privileges as to permit them to do a wrong to the tradesmen
who supply them with goods. Sound views will recognise the validity of
these debts, or, in annulling them, punish the complainant for the fact
of having prostituted himself; it is, above all, for cases such as these
that article 60 of our Criminal Code should be declared applicable,
thereby punishing _every individual who incites to profligacy by
presents_. Very much to the contrary, the application of the law becomes
deplorable in this matter; Lovelaces aged from 15 to 20, precocious Don
Juans, become villains with impunity by the assistance of the law’s
protection—spend some hundreds of thousands of francs in orgies, with
the certainty of committing robbery; they promise, give their
signatures, subscribe documents, and the court declares them white as
snow, provided they do not pay anything; and this is the education by
which we prepare young people for their life as citizens! What! is it to
be supposed that these young men, who to-morrow will be electors,
citizens, public officials, judges, magistrates perhaps, are not
capable, at the age of 19 and 20 years, of a greater moral
responsibility than the infant in long-clothes? Cancel their debts, if
you like; but at least brand them for their cynical attacks on the
fundamental laws of public propriety.
We must get rid of our confusion of principles with respect to those
young people who, separated from their family by their profession, are
entrusted to society. In the first place, in what has reference to the
soldier, patriotism and a feeling of true honour, would not give him up
to be corrupted by long years of inaction in garrison, and would not
permit any man to lead the life of a pig under cover of the flag of
France. Now that we are threatened with the corporal-instructor, we
ought, I think, to be permitted to know that his certificate of good
conduct has not compelled him to disavow his illegitimate children, nor
to denounce and imprison the victim guilty of having aimed a blow
against his security in debauchery.
As for that numerous body of civilian youths fighting on the
battle-field of life in schools, in public offices, workshops, commerce
and so forth, shall we leave them without a guide, to succumb to the
degradation of the companions of Ulysses? No; they must henceforward do
themselves honour by putting a curb on their passions and mastering
their excesses. It is the duty of us all to shew them, from the
commencement of their course, marked distinctions between the road to
honour and that to infamy by imposing obligatory limits to stop them in
bad courses. It is the right of moral families to know that the member
they wish to unite to them by marriage is a man, and not a living
carcase, sullied with all sorts of profligacy.
Let us then establish courts of honour to separate goodness from
evil—great associations which will confer distinction on themselves by
the morality they exact from their candidates and those whom they
employ, putting us thus upon the road of reformation.
Each of us has, in this matter, his work to accomplish, and we shall
succeed if we know how to be united in a common feeling. The law for
outrage on public morals would authorize us in a rebellion against our
administrative toleration of vice; all men of courage, claiming the
emancipation of destitution sold to profligacy, must likewise denounce
the shamelessness of those men who would, with one hand, punish the
freedom of the press while protecting the obscenity of the streets with
the other; who ill-use free-thinkers while they grant charters to free
livers. In what has reference to legislative repression Art. 334 of our
Criminal Law, joined to Art. 60, of which I have spoken, would be
sufficient for putting down the evil, if applied to direct profligacy,
especially in actions for debt and theft which debauchees bring against
their accomplices.
It is, nevertheless, to Art. 340 of our Civil Code that the guilty
complaisance of our interpretation of the law for profligate morals must
be attributed. The license into which the irresponsibility there laid
down hurries a great number of law students, greatly contributes to warp
their judgment in these suits, and to take from vice its last restraint.
Alas! shall we have the energy necessary for a real reform? We have
astonishingly perfected the physical sciences, and developed material
civilization; but we have so little advanced in the science of the law
and the duty which govern our connexions in society, our ambition is so
little excited for the development of human dignity, that we put our
frightful complaisance for debauchery under the patronage of St.
Augustine and St. Louis. Should we be willing to retrograde to such an
extent in the arts and mechanical processes—we who, in morals, dare to
take our ideal in pagan and barbarian society? When our Senate, some
years ago, discussed this grave question, it did not put the inquiry to
itself, whether seduction and irresponsible debauchery are the great
highways of public infamy; still less did it examine if despotic
centralization, which arbitrarily deprives the young girl of
professional instruction, and the woman of an honourable income, does
not at all contribute to her ruin. This Senate, _the guardian of
morals_, refrained from looking round within its own precincts, to see
if it were not, in any way, harbouring members whose example might
weaken the authority of its precepts; it did not seem to suspect that a
courtesan is the effect of a debauchee who pays for her, and it did not
at all wish to know if its sons were contributing to the evil: laying it
wholly upon the _luxuriousness of women_, it contented itself with some
pleasantries, and, far from opposing strong means of resistance to
profligacy, declared that Art. 484 of our Criminal Code sufficed for
putting down vice.[53] Almost immediately after this discussion, the
Asiatic pest, raging around us, threatened our physical existence. Oh!
then we became the champions of progress; we knew how to attack the evil
in its very source; our civilizing efforts were proposing to purify the
Ganges itself—the home of the epidemic: ordering inquiries, putting
sixteen questions to the meeting of the international conference at
Constantinople, we made an appeal to the enlightened intelligence of the
whole world. Why then does our energy fail in view of the plague of
public profligacy, more fatal to the moral life of a nation than is the
cholera-epidemic to its material life? Since we know the causes of the
evil, we deserve to be execrated if we do not look for wholesome means
of reaction—if authorities established to put it down continue to
protect it. The measures I am proposing, if they are examined by the
prismatic glass of history, reason, national and personal rights, are
the conditions of liberty and public decency. They will confine the evil
to the dregs of society.
When we are governed by a moral Code, the Family institution grounded on
morality and labour, will be able, without aid, to tread down the hydra
of debauchery, wallowing in the mire of idleness and licentiousness.
But, if justice and honour do not come out victorious from the present
struggle, woe, a thousand times woe, to the vanquished!
T. BRAKELL, PRINTER, LIVERPOOL.
-----
Footnote 1:
Published by Ernest Thorin, 7, Rue de Médicis, Paris, 1869.
Footnote 2:
One of our salaried seducers learned that destitution was reducing one
of his illegitimate daughters to have herself registered at the office
of the department of morals. A friend of his urged him to claim her,
so as to save her from this disgrace:—“If,” said he, “I were obliged
to help all my daughters, my income would not be sufficient to do it.”
Footnote 3:
Alfred de Musset—“Confessions d’un enfant du siècle.”
Footnote 4:
To turn, for a moment, from these horrors, let us say they horrify the
moral working-men who have undertaken the responsibilities of the
family without selfish ideas conceived previously. These men generally
give proof of a sentiment of honour, too often extinguished in the
upper classes; but what is their state of mind when they are not able
to guard their wives and daughters against a disgrace which is the
daily bread of an insufficient labour-market? Their faces are then
stern, their eyes vindictive; their heads droop, but they cherish in
their hearts, against the peace of society, a profound hatred and
projects of vengeance which are only too inveterate. Ah! let us dread
the storms we are collecting over our heads, in a gloomy future; if we
have not the energy to put down profligacy from a love of virtue, let
us, at least, do it from considerations of its cost.
Footnote 5:
Clandestine prostitution invariably increases wherever the system of
registration and police regulation exist.
Footnote 6:
E. A. Duchesne—“De la prostitution dans la ville d’Alger, depuis la
conquête, 1853.”
Footnote 7:
Letter from the Bishop of Algiers to the Governor-General of Algeria,
May 1868.
Footnote 8:
I shall better still define the respective condition of the Mussulman
and French morals and laws by recalling to recollection that Emir who
went about Paris displaying, in a triumphal manner, two girls under
age purchased under the title of wives. If we take the oneness and the
sacred nature of our indissoluble marriage-institution as the measure
of this outrage on the dignity of humanity, we see in it a defiance to
our civilisation. It is, nevertheless, a fact that Abdel Kader could
have been supplied with human flesh on the Parisian market on much
easier terms; if he repudiates his Circassians, he must provide for
them, while he would have been free, on his departure, to turn
Parisians out into the street. In the investigation of our scandalous
morals, we shall meet, among our officials, with types of degradation
which would make the Grand Chief Mussulman blush. If, therefore, from
our lawful monogamy to the Arab polygamy, the distance from heaven to
earth be measured, there is between our irresponsible profligacy and
that polygamy all the interval from earth to hell. Before our time the
children born in the harem belonged to the father; in our time, those
born out of it belong to the mother. The economical results of this
state of things, in a country where woman has no means of support, can
be calculated.
Footnote 9:
Some years since, a wealthy foreigner offered a brothel-proprietress
10,000 francs (£400) for a young girl. She bought her from a greedy
mother, who was to receive half the price of the sale, but the
procuress disappeared after delivery of the girl, and receiving
payment for her. The mother, disappointed of the part she agreed for,
went to a lawyer with her case, but he declined to have anything to do
with this unsavoury affair.
Footnote 10:
At the July Revolution, the gates of St. Lazare were opened for them,
but they declined to go out from it.
Footnote 11:
A Parisian tenant was complaining that the house which he thought was
well-tenanted should lodge women of doubtful reputation and be the
theatre for riotous and scandalous orgies. The porter replied: “These
women, who pay for their occupancy as you do, are more generous than
yourself; if you are not satisfied with the neighbourhood you can look
for a better—in any event, _their money is worth as much as yours_.”
Footnote 12:
Brière de Boismont has made out a list of seventeen suicides, in ten
years among the girls registered in Paris.
Footnote 13:
Lamartine—History of the Girondins.
Footnote 14:
According to Lairtullier, she stabbed him herself with a dagger.
Footnote 15:
“He who takes a prostitute for his wife,” says Innocent III.,
“performs an act of piety, for he rescues her from the road to ruin,
and obtains forgiveness of his sins.”
Footnote 16:
The livre was worth about 10½d.
Footnote 17:
A basis of comparison may be formed by remembering that Joinville, one
of the richest noblemen of that age, who went to the crusade with
troops equipped at his own charges, had an income of 1,500 livres.
Footnote 18:
Tacitus: Manners of the Germans—XII.
Footnote 19:
A decree of February 13th, 1424, is made the protector of public girls
against the dissolute men who beat them.
Footnote 20:
P. Dufour: History of Prostitution—Vol. IV.
Footnote 21:
Art. 1st—Women and girl prostitutes are forbidden to do fancy work (to
crochet) on the quays, in the squares, public walks, boulevards, &c.
Footnote 22:
One of the noblest and most constant subjects of interest to the
Emperor at St. Helena was the discovery of effectual means for
guarding against profligacy in towns.
Footnote 23:
Law of November 19th, 1866.
Footnote 24:
For the tendency of similar legislation in England, see _Saturday
Review_, January 8th, 1870:—“The law accepts the fact of a contagious
disease which happens to exist in a human subject only as the law
accepts the fact of a bad drain or an unhealthy factory, and deals
with it accordingly. In neither case is either the woman or the
nuisance _treated as a moral agent, but as a physical
fact_.”—[EDITOR.]
Footnote 25:
Correctional Court of Niort, _re_ Plassiart—Sitting of Dec. 7, 1861.
Footnote 26:
No one is permitted to come into court who must avow his own shame.
Footnote 27:
Assize Court of the Seine—Sitting of May 12, 1868.
Footnote 28:
Law of October 25, 1864.
Footnote 29:
The authoress, when she wrote these pages, had not heard the fact that
the _Contagious Diseases Acts_ had become law in England.—[EDITOR.]
Footnote 30:
In the United States the Constitution thus establishes the principle
of responsibility:—“The president, vice-president, and all civil
functionaries, shall be liable to be turned out of their places if,
after being accused, they are convicted of treason, the waste of
public money, or other offences, and _of libertinism_.” In the same
way, every elector, before voting, must give proof of his morality.
The Prussian laws sentence the pander who allures women, even those
above age, by artifice, to ten years’ hard labour, and have him
flogged when he is sent to, and when discharged from, prison. They
deprive fathers, mothers, masters, patrons, tutors, &c., of their
rights, if they abuse, merely by licentious words, those placed in
their care. Russia whips debauchees with the knout. Spain has partly
kept up her old laws, which were severe only on the purveyors of
profligacy and the frequenters of places of infamy, by declaring that
“_The shame proceeds from him who pays for debauchery, and not from
her who sells it and receives its price._” Public prostitutes there,
who engage maid-servants under 40, are sentenced to one year’s
transportation, and a fine of 2000 marvedi, &c.
Footnote 31:
In one of our towns of 100,000 inhabitants, the brothels receive about
1,200,000 francs yearly.
Footnote 32:
Marcus Aurelius, who understood all the importance of moral
perfection, thanks the gods for having had a youth of chastity. How
few sovereigns can say with him: “Men want a head as flocks do a
leader. This head is not above the laws, his life separated from the
body of society would be a factious one.... A sovereign cannot do his
duty if he does not find advisers to point it out to him,” &c.
Footnote 33:
Luxuriousness, more ruthless than war, overmastered us, and avenges
the world (we have) conquered.
Footnote 34:
A young debauchee used to get women into a house for base purposes.
After debauching his victims he deserted them in the darkness of night
in the middle of winter, among the intricacies of a house unknown to
them. When, half dead from cold, they dragged themselves in the
morning to the doorstep to complain of this barbarity, the young man,
questioned by the porter, feigned surprise. At other times, he made
sport, impudently, of recriminations he knew to be unable to reach
him, and commonly boasted of the privileges of irresponsibility which
convert marriage into a profession of trickery. This guardian of our
social morality was decorated, in 1848, for having, in the June days,
fought _in defence of public tranquillity_.
Footnote 35:
The purport of this couplet may be thus freely rendered:—
“Denied of one fat vice to take their fill,
Morsels of several serve them for a meal.”
Footnote 36:
The protection of the student is insufficient, even in the special
schools which have pupil-boarders. They are, it is true, supposed to
have guardians, but, in reality, left to themselves twice a week, and
on some days, as extra holidays, when they come back, they proceed to
get a certificate of good behaviour signed by a guardian, who, busied
with his own affairs, cannot have known how they spend their time.
Footnote 37:
Assize Court of the Seine, sitting of February 4, 1866.
Footnote 38:
When we reflect that foreign youths learn such manners in France, we
are no longer surprised that the profligate, and, too often, the
governing portion of Europe, should consider the investigation to
discover the father of disowned children inconvenient.
Footnote 39:
One of our well-known courtesans, in her memoirs, brings to mind one
of her former supporters, who was then a public official in a
provincial town, and who is sending her stolen expressions of regret,
and looking upon his appointment as a post of insupportable
banishment, far from the social circle in which he lived with her.
Footnote 40:
Bishops asserted the Church’s right of deposing adulterous princes,
fornicators, &c., and of absolving their subjects from every oath of
fidelity to them. (See M. Guizot, “History of Civilization in
Europe.”)
Footnote 41:
Then (under Henri II) Anne du Bourg thus expresses herself:—“But what!
crimes worthy of death, blasphemies, adulteries, horrible debauches,
perjuries are committed, with impunity, in the face of heaven, and
every day new punishments are invented against men whose only crime is
having made, owing to the teachings of Holy Scripture, the discovery
of the Roman baseness, and having called for its wholesome reform.”
The Councillor du Four, in his turn, exclaims: “We must understand
well who they are that trouble the Church, lest that should happen
that Elijah told king Ahab, ‘It is you who trouble Israel.’”
Footnote 42:
Saint Simon, endeavouring to have an illicit intimacy of the Duke of
Orleans broken off, showed him the opinion existing against him.
“There is,” said he, “a general estrangement, which has the complexion
of rage, because _no one_ can endure in a grandson of France, at the
age of 35, an outrage upon good morals which the magistrate and the
police would long ago have punished in any one who might not have been
high enough in rank to be shielded from censure.” He puts before him
the distinction and honours that attach to the moral men from amongst
whom Louis XIV has chosen his generals and advisers, whilst noblemen
of high birth are deprived of the distinctions of their class, debased
in their profligate habits, unknown or despised at court, left to
their own shame and to wretchedness, expelled from the meanest
societies, objects of the public blame and contempt, and reduced to
find themselves too despicable for the blows people disdain to inflict
upon them. Elsewhere, St. Simon further caused the reception of
Villars by the parliament to be looked upon as an enormity, because,
he said, “_against the most common practice_, no peer was taken as a
witness of his life and manners, which will afford cause for public
dissertation; had he so acted from respect or from shame, or from a
fear of being rejected? I was pained,” he adds, “to find myself at so
humiliating a ceremonial.”
Footnote 43:
Freely rendered thus:—
“The crime that rightly costs the hind his blood,
For peers condoned, by _partial_ justice viewed,”
Footnote 44:
Sittings of March 22, 23, and 24.
Footnote 45:
Madlle. Daubié, in a private letter elsewhere, points out the terrible
social results which attend the absence of laws against seducers in
England, which, if joined with a system of regulated prostitution,
must bring us as low as France.
Footnote 46:
Moniteur de l’armée, November, 1862.
Footnote 47:
Criminal Justice, First Court-Martial of Paris, Sittings of the 15th
to the 20th April, 1857.
Footnote 48:
Second Court-Martial of Paris, October 1865.
Footnote 49:
The applications of the law which forbids the marrying a victim of
seduction are sometimes grevious. Thus, an officer lost his post for
making the offer of reparation to a young girl, whom moral tortures
and the pangs of child-birth were putting in danger. This noble
deserter from an infamous military honour, hastened to tell her of the
military disgrace which would attend his marrying, and led her to the
nuptial altar, where she died heart-broken with emotion.
Footnote 50:
Man, the sole support of his family, assuming an average of but two
children by marriage, should always earn enough for four and spend for
one: which assumes that there would be no one counting for nothing—no
bachelor among men: moreover the logic of this system would be either
marriage or death—fidelity in marriage or death; the certainty for the
husband and the father of never having any sickness, and of assuredly
surviving his wife and his children under age, &c. O logicians of the
absurd!
Footnote 51:
The United States, Sweden, Prussia, England, Switzerland, &c., reject
this organization: Austria, Belgium, and Italy imitate it. Let us see
in which direction the path of the future lies.
Footnote 52:
Among a group of college students who were treating for a girl in the
public thoroughfare, one of twelve years old at most was noticed.
Footnote 53:
The sole measure of a serious character proposed by the Senate was the
prohibition of provocation in a public thoroughfare; the Government,
it appears, has not even condescended to take notice of this vote. As
to Article 484 of the Code, it declares, we know, that it did not
regulate this matter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
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