“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.