Tenth Study — Love and Marriage — parallel English

TENTH STUDY

ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY. — N° 10.

OF JUSTICE

IN THE REVOLUTION

AND IN THE CHURCH.

———

TENTH STUDY.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE.

I address a question that the vow of continence has always made dear to people involved in the orders, and which will attract for me, I am afraid, many readers among the devout world, male and female. I will talk of love in all its forms; of conjugal society at its most intimate, and I shall have to make strange revelations.

May the Seraphim who purified the lips of the prophet deign to touch mine also, so that on this erotic subject, on which my studies have not accustomed me to discourse, nothing escapes me that, by warming the senses, scandalizes souls, and may my words remain chaste as the gaze of the doctor, as the scalpel of the anatomist.

Monsignor,

I address a question that the vow of continence has always made dear to people involved in the orders, and which will attract for me, I am afraid, many readers among the devout world, male and female. I will talk of love in all its forms; of conjugal society at its most intimate, and I shall have to make strange revelations.

May the Seraphim who purified the lips of the prophet deign to touch mine also, so that on this erotic subject, on which my studies have not accustomed me to discourse, nothing escapes me that, by warming the senses, scandalizes souls, and may my words remain chaste as the gaze of the doctor, as the scalpel of the anatomist.

I. — Let us begin with what concerns me.

The stain that my biographer tried to cast on my life, the respect that I owe to my people, the very nature of the reproach, on which the public is entitled to demand that I explain myself doctrinally: everything here justifies this personal response.

After a ridiculous story of potatoes and cabbage soup, imagined for the sole purpose of representing me as a glutton whose temperance is all poverty, M. de Mirecourt continues the story of my sensualities in these terms:

“To this remarkable sobriety, Proudhon joined or _seemed_ to join a cenobitic continence. Neither solicitations nor teasing persuaded him to take a step with the scoffers on the side of debauchery. This strange man wrote lines on chastity that one might think had fallen from the pen of a Father of the Church. (Quotes follow.)

“Seeing Pierre-Joseph profess such pure virtue, one wonders if virtue was his advisor.

“The heads of sects, the proud, the muddled geniuses, who from century to century claim the title of reformers, always seek to pass for chaste. They know how much we admire those who seem above the passions and weaknesses of our poor humanity. We see here system and calculation, but no shadow of virtue.

“It suffices to remind M. Proudhon in what circumstances a certain marriage took place at Sainte-Pélagie, to convince him that the angel of legitimate love has not always watched over the bedside of the warmest apostles of continence. Do you believe, lying sectarians, that we are going to leave this usurped halo intact around your forehead?”

As a final brushstroke, he adds that I had my marriage blessed by the priest, and presented the children who came from it to the baptismal font.

Everything is permitted to those who fight for a holy cause. I would like to believe, however, that when M. de Mirecourt wrote these lines, carried away by his zeal for the Church, he forgot that the suspicion he was echoing did not fall on me alone, that it reached a person who does not seek fame, and whose philosophy certainly never went so far as to put the sacrifices of the lover before the dignity of the wife. Why didn’t he go back further, into my life as a boy? He would have found his business there, and he would have escaped the indignity of insulting a woman.

Suffice it then for me to say, for the one who was never to figure in this shameful debate, that my incarceration took place on June 4, 1849, my first release on December 25 of the same year, for an assembly of Le Peuple; my second outing eight days later, for the celebration of my marriage, and that my first child was born on October 18, 1850, as can be verified from the registers of the town hall of the 12th arrondissement.

As for ecclesiastical blessing and baptism, I would not have been reluctant to do so, perhaps, before 1848, at a time when the spirit of tolerance that animated all the citizens and imposed itself on the clergy made this ceremony the most insignificant thing for a philosopher. After the reaction of 1848, 1849, 1850 and 1851, I believed that it was forbidden for me to compromise with those who proscribed me, and I put as much religion into abstaining as I would have put condescension, ten years before, into executing it.

My marriage, Monsignor, although it was not contracted before the Church, and precisely because it was not contracted before it, was the freest, most thoughtful act of my life, the most disinterested, the most free from any motive of ambition, caprice, passion or constraint, the purest, from whatever side I consider it, and I dare say for this reason the most worthy and the more meritorious. That satire denounces the gallantries of an individual is already an invasion of privacy that nothing excuses; as soon as it touches on marriage it becomes sacrilege, and gives rise to the most energetic repression. As it is a matter of another reputation than mine, and as, despite great examples, it is part of my principles that a man of sense does not anticipate his wedding day, I had to, I owed to the cause that I defend and to the respect of the people, to make this declaration.

I. — Let us begin with what concerns me.

The stain that my biographer tried to cast on my life, the respect that I owe to my people, the very nature of the reproach, on which the public is entitled to demand that I explain myself doctrinally: everything here justifies this personal response.

After a ridiculous story of potatoes and cabbage soup, imagined for the sole purpose of representing me as a glutton whose temperance is all poverty, M. de Mirecourt continues the story of my sensualities in these terms:

“To this remarkable sobriety, Proudhon joined or _seemed_ to join a cenobitic continence. Neither solicitations nor teasing persuaded him to take a step with the scoffers on the side of debauchery. This strange man wrote lines on chastity that one might think had fallen from the pen of a Father of the Church. (Quotes follow.)

“Seeing Pierre-Joseph profess such pure virtue, one wonders if virtue was his advisor.

“The heads of sects, the proud, the muddled geniuses, who from century to century claim the title of reformers, always seek to pass for chaste. They know how much we admire those who seem above the passions and weaknesses of our poor humanity. We see here system and calculation, but no shadow of virtue.

“It suffices to remind M. Proudhon in what circumstances a certain marriage took place at Sainte-Pélagie, to convince him that the angel of legitimate love has not always watched over the bedside of the warmest apostles of continence. Do you believe, lying sectarians, that we are going to leave this usurped halo intact around your forehead?”

As a final brushstroke, he adds that I had my marriage blessed by the priest, and presented to the baptismal font the children who came from it.

Everything is permitted to those who fight for a holy cause. I would like to believe, however, that when M. de Mirecourt wrote these lines, carried away by his zeal for the Church, he forgot that the suspicion he was echoing did not fall on me alone, that it reached a person who does not seek fame, and whose philosophy certainly never went so far as to put the sacrifices of the lover before the dignity of the wife. Why didn’t he go back further, into my life as a boy? He would have found his business there, and he would have escaped the indignity of insulting a woman.

Suffice it then for me to say, for the one who was never to figure in this shameful debate, that my incarceration took place on June 4, 1849, my first release on December 25 of the same year, for an assembly of Le Peuple; my second outing eight days later, for the celebration of my marriage, and that my first child was born on October 18, 1850, as can be verified from the registers of the town hall of the 12th arrondissement.

As for ecclesiastical blessing and baptism, I would not have been reluctant to do so, perhaps, before 1848, at a time when the spirit of tolerance that animated all the citizens and imposed itself on the clergy made this ceremony the most insignificant thing for a philosopher. After the reaction of 1848, 1849, 1850 and 1851, I believed that it was forbidden for me to compromise with those who proscribed me, and I put as much religion into abstaining as I would have put condescension, ten years before, into executing it.

My marriage, Monsignor, although it was not contracted before the Church, and precisely because it was not contracted before it, was the freest, most thoughtful act of my life, the most disinterested, the most free from any motive of ambition, caprice, passion or constraint, the purest, from whatever side I consider it, and I dare say for this reason the most worthy and the more meritorious. That satire denounces the gallantries of an individual is already an invasion of privacy that nothing excuses; as soon as it touches on marriage it becomes sacrilege, and gives rise to the most energetic repression. As it is a matter of another reputation than mine, and as, despite great examples, it is part of my principles that a man of sense does not anticipate his wedding day, I had to, I owed to the cause that I defend and to the respect of the people, to make this declaration.

II. — To the two of us now, Monsignor.

I know your favorite thesis, seized with so much aptness by my biographer: Empty of faith, abandoned of grace, the heart of the impious becomes an abyss of corruption, and this corruption breaks out above all through immodesty. Those who lack religion are handed over to Asmodeus, the demon of the flesh, who strangled Sara’s first seven husbands.

The flesh and its works! It is a subject that your priests, who are nevertheless dedicated to celibacy, like to explore, for the defamation of free thinkers and their own glory. Let’s dig into it, then, and if it turns out that the Church, with her air of a virgin, has on this point, as on all the others, made morality skip, I will have the right to say to her: Do not accuse, if you don’t want to be accused.

Yes, Monsignor, I am chaste; I am so naturally, by inclination, by incompatibility of temper, if I may so say; I am so above all out of respect for women. As I do not care in the least to pass for a hero of chastity, I will enumerate for you all the reasons that can diminish in me the merit of my virtue.

This, however, does not mean that I was always perfectly continent. There is, as you know, a great difference between these two things, one of which does not always imply the other, chastity and continence. I would even dare to say that continence is the virtue of those who are not chaste, because the more chaste the man, the less continence is painful to him, the less his love needs carnal realization. Epicurus, following this datum, went so far as to claim that voluptuousness and chastity are synonymous.

Eh bien ! ne voilà-t-il pas un beau texte de déclamation, qu’en un siècle de libres amours, malgré ma chasteté naturelle il me soit arrivé, sans doute plus d’une fois, de pécher contre la vertu de continence ? Où donc aurais-je appris à soutenir une pareille lutte ? Où sont les principes qui régissent la matière ? Où les exemples ? Et quand l’incertitude est dans toutes les âmes, quand l’incontinence règne partout, depuis la caserne jusqu’à l’Église, est-il judicieux, est-il décent de venir remuer cette vilenie ? Qu’est-ce que la virginité plus ou moins authentique d’un écrivain peut faire à la république sociale ? Que font à l’Église les fornications de ses moines et moinesses, de ses prêtres, de ses cardinaux et de ses papes ? Vous me reprochez d’avoir connu ma femme avant la cérémonie : c’est la mode en Suisse et dans d’autres pays. Je répète que, quant à moi, l’imputation est calomnieuse ; mais quand cela serait, quand il serait vrai qu’avant de me marier au 5^e arrondissement je l’ai été, comme tant d’autres, au treizième, que pouvez-vous en conclure, en ce temps de fornication universelle, je ne dis pas contre mes principes, mais contre mes mœurs ? Je connais tels et tels qui se font un point d’honneur de se passer, pour leurs unions, et de l’acte civil et de la bénédiction ecclésiastique : tant le contrat matrimonial, déshonoré par l’intérêt, leur paraît contraire à la dignité de l’amour et leur inspire d’horreur. Je ne partage pas, du moins pour ce qui regarde l’acte civil, cette manière de voir, mais je n’en tire aucune conclusion contre l’honorabilité des personnes. Ces gens-là se trompent, à mon avis, par l’excès même de leur délicatesse : voilà tout. Pourquoi, aujourd’hui que vous avez tant besoin d’indulgence, prêtres et évêques, n’agissez-vous pas de même ? Vais-je m’enquérir si vous avez ou non des concubines et des bâtards ? Entre honnêtes gens, on se tait sur ces misères, qui ne touchent pas au fond des choses et n’accusent que l’ignorance où la société est encore, sur cette question des sexes, du droit et du devoir. Rappelez-vous ce que répondait Marc-Antoine à Octave, son collègue, qui lui reprochait ses farces avec Cléopâtre : Quid te mutavit ? quod reginam ineo ? Uxor mea est. Nunc cœpi, an ab hinc annos novem ? Tu deinde solam Drusillam inis ? Ita valeas, uti tu hanc epistolam cùm leges, non inieris Tertullam, aut Terentillam, aut Ruffillam, aut Salviam Citisceniam, aut omnes ? Anne refert ubi et in quam arrigas ?… Voilà, Monseigneur, si j’étais tel qu’on a voulu le faire entendre, ce que j’aurais le droit de dire à bon nombre d’entre vous, et que je ne me permettrai pas même de vous traduire.

So let us stick to the question: I had no other goal, in executing myself with good grace, than to get there faster.

Now, the question, since you claim to draw an induction against the philosophy of incontinence into which philosophers can fall, although they do not all fall into it, although those who fall are generally the most reserved of men; the question, I say, is to know if this incontinence, such as it is, which is reproached to them and which is common to them and to so many priests, comes from the philosophical spirit or from the spirit of religion; if consequently Christianity, although it preaches marriage, and outside of marriage continence, is beyond reproach; if its official maxims correspond to the dignity of civilization; if, compared to paganism which had opened the way to it, it advanced or demoted; if it can be taken with complete confidence as the rule of amorous relations; if, in this part of morality, there does not remain some progress to be made, which paganism indicated, but which Christianity has not understood, which it denies on the contrary, at the risk of dooming, through the dissolution of which it is the cause, family and society?

The Church has always prided itself on possessing on love and marriage, as on education and so many other things, an exceptional morality. The multitude believed it, without going to see, even if it meant encountering the most appalling miscalculations in practice. As for me, surprised to see, under a so-called perfect law, immodesty in progress, I wanted to put the law itself through a cheesecloth; and I affirm that Christianity, when it undertook to reform loves and to regulate marriage, only succeeded in distorting the institution, defrauding hearts and inflaming lust. Christianity has nothing of the conjugal sacrament, nothing of the principle and object of the family; it did not even retain what was bequeathed to it by its authors. Ah! Christian hypocrites, who accuse philosophers of incontinence, do you believe that we were going to leave intact around your forehead this usurped halo?

This, then, will be the course of this controversy:

With regard to the family and the relations of the sexes, in what state has Christianity found civilization?

What was to be its mission, and in this respect what has it added to the moral heritage of humanity?

What does it leave to the Revolution?

If we are justified in raising these questions today, and I defy anyone to disagree, I no longer know what will remain presently, in this matter so little known of marriage, of the purity of Christianity and the roses of the Church.

II. — To the two of us now, Monsignor.

I know your favorite thesis, seized with so much aptness by my biographer: Empty of faith, abandoned of grace, the heart of the impious becomes an abyss of corruption, and this corruption breaks out above all through immodesty. Those who lack religion are handed over to Asmodeus, the demon of the flesh, who strangled Sara’s first seven husbands.

The flesh and its works! It is a subject that your priests, who are nevertheless dedicated to celibacy, like to explore, for the defamation of free thinkers and their own glory. Let’s dig into it, then, and if it turns out that the Church, with her air of a virgin, has on this point, as on all the others, made morality skip, I will have the right to say to her: Do not accuse, if you don’t want to be accused.

Yes, Monsignor, I am chaste; I am so naturally, by inclination, by incompatibility of temper, if I may so say; I am so above all out of respect for women. As I do not care in the least to pass for a hero of chastity, I will enumerate for you all the reasons that can diminish in me the merit of my virtue.

This, however, does not mean that I was always perfectly continent. There is, as you know, a great difference between these two things, one of which does not always imply the other, chastity and continence. I would even dare to say that continence is the virtue of those who are not chaste, because the more chaste the man, the less continence is painful to him, the less his love needs carnal realization. Epicurus, following this datum, went so far as to claim that voluptuousness and chastity are synonymous.

Well, isn’t it a beautiful text of declamation, that in a century of free love, despite my natural chastity, it happened to me, no doubt more than once, to sin against the virtue of continence? Where could I have learned to sustain such a struggle? Where are the principles that govern the matter? Where are the examples? And when uncertainty is in all souls, when incontinence reigns everywhere, from the barracks to the Church, is it judicious, is it decent to come stir up this villainy? What can the more or less authentic virginity of a writer do to the social republic? What do the fornications of her monks and monks, her priests, her cardinals and her popes do to the Church? You reproach me for having known my wife before the ceremony: it is the fashion in Switzerland and in other countries. I repeat that, as for me, the imputation is calumnious; but, were that to be, were it to be true that before getting married in the 5th arrondissement I have been, like so many others, in the thirteenth, what can you conclude from that, in this time of universal fornication, I don’t say against my principles, but against my morals? I know some who make it a point of honor to do without, for their unions, both the civil act and the ecclesiastical benediction: so much does the matrimonial contract, dishonored by interest, seem to them contrary to the dignity of love and inspires them with horror. I do not share, at least as regards the civil act, this way of seeing things, but I draw no conclusion from this against the respectability of persons. These people are mistaken, in my opinion, by the very excess of their delicacy: that is all. Why, today, when you need indulgence so much, priests and bishops, don’t you act in the same way? Shall I inquire whether or not you have concubines and bastards? Among honest people, we are silent on these miseries, which do not touch the bottom of things and show only the ignorance in which society still remains, on this question of the sexes, of right and of duty. Remember what Marc-Antoine replied to Octave, his colleague, who reproached him for his pranks with Cleopatra: Quid te mutavit ? quod reginam ineo ? Uxor mea est. Nunc cœpi, an ab hinc annos novem ? Tu deinde solam Drusillam inis ? Ita valeas, uti tu hanc epistolam cùm leges, non inieris Tertullam, aut Terentillam, aut Ruffillam, aut Salviam Citisceniam, aut omnes ? Anne refert ubi et in quam arrigas ?… Here, Monsignor, if I were as some wish to be told that I am, is what I would have the right to say to many of you, and which I would not even allow myself to translate for you.

So let us stick to the question: I had no other goal, in executing myself with good grace, than to get there faster. Now, the question, since you claim to draw an induction against the philosophy of incontinence into which philosophers can fall, although they do not all fall into it, although those who fall are generally the most reserved of men; the question, I say, is to know if this incontinence, such as it is, which is reproached to them and which is common to them and to so many priests, comes from the philosophical spirit or from the spirit of religion; if consequently Christianity, although it preaches marriage, and outside of marriage continence, is beyond reproach; if its official maxims correspond to the dignity of civilization; if, compared to paganism which had opened the way to it, it advanced or demoted; if it can be taken with complete confidence as the rule of amorous relations; if, in this part of morality, there does not remain some progress to be made, which paganism indicated, but which Christianity has not understood, which it denies on the contrary, at the risk of dooming, through the dissolution of which it is the cause, family and society?

The Church has always prided itself on possessing on love and marriage, as on education and so many other things, an exceptional morality. The multitude believed it, without going to see, even if it meant encountering the most appalling miscalculations in practice. As for me, surprised to see, under a so-called perfect law, immodesty in progress, I wanted to put the law itself through a cheesecloth; and I affirm that Christianity, when it undertook to reform loves and to regulate marriage, only succeeded in distorting the institution, defrauding hearts and inflaming lust. Christianity has nothing of the conjugal sacrament, nothing of the principle and object of the family; it did not even retain what was bequeathed to it by its authors. Ah! Christian hypocrites, who accuse philosophers of incontinence, do you believe that we were going to leave intact around your forehead this usurped halo?

This, then, will be the course of this controversy:

With regard to the family and the relations of the sexes, in what state has Christianity found civilization?

What was to be its mission, and in this respect what has it added to the moral heritage of humanity?

What does it leave to the Revolution?

If we are justified in raising these questions today, and I defy anyone to disagree, I no longer know what will remain presently, in this matter so little known of marriage, of the purity of Christianity and the roses of the Church.

FIRST CHAPTER.

Complex problem of marriage: preparatory analysis.

III. — The problem of marriage is so vast, so complicated, so scabrous; it has given rise to so many rantings, treatises, novels, poems, customs and laws, that after having read as much of it as I could, I found that the only means of to see clearly was to close the books, and to summarize the substance in a series of questions on which it will be easy to concentrate the debate and prepare a judgment.

1. The human species, like all living races, is preserved by generation.

Physiology gives a first reason for this law. As soon as he has seen the light of day, the individual begins to wear out and grow old; food and rest do not fully repair it; it is deteriorates through life itself, and soon demands to be replaced. This replacement takes place by generation: this is what a first look at the movement of existences seems to reveal.

But is this reason, entirely a matter of physiology, the only one? I say more, is it the primary one? Apart from the vital evolution, there is society, the supreme goal of creation. I therefore ask whether the renewal of subjects by generation is quite simply a condition imposed on humanity by the inevitable dissolution of the organism, which would subordinate the kingdom of the mind to the kingdom of matter and disgust our ideas of liberty and progress; or if it were not rather that, since society itself needs, for its own development, to constantly rejuvenate itself in its members, as the animal renews itself through food, generation is thus more than a necessity of the organism, it is of social constitution?

And since, in the whirlwind of this universe, the principle, the means and the end of all things are identical, the question would ultimately amount to asking whether death, which we see hovering over all life, has not itself even its reason in the happiness of man, of all beings the only one who knows death and who can, according to circumstances, rejoice or grieve at dying?

If this hypothesis were true, we immediately see the great importance of marriage, that we could define in advance an Institution for life and death.

2. Nature made man bi-sexual, masculum et feminam creavit eos; that is to say, for the generative function, the concurrence of two persons of different sexes is necessary. Why didn’t nature make man a hermaphrodite instead? Why this division of the generative apparatus between two individuals complementary to each other, the male and the female? Is it still a necessity that physiology imposes on society, or a condition that society imposes on physiology? More simply: does the distinction between the sexes have its reason both in society and in the organism? What is this reason? In the animal series, the lower species unite the two sexes; as one rises in the scale, the division becomes more and more marked.

3. The cooperation of the sexes in view of generation takes place under the influence of a particular feeling, which is love. It is this powerful attraction that, in all species where the sexes are separate, drives the male and female to unite and pass on their life in a deadly orgasm. Hence the well-known, profound saying: Love is stronger than death; which means that the being who has tasted love no longer has anything to fear from death, because love is death itself, death in joy, euthanasia.

Here the secret of death begins to reveal itself; at the same time, the dignity of marriage makes itself felt, which makes it so sweet. But we do not know for that reason how, from the point of view of the moral order, death is a condition of progress and happiness: in this respect, what we have said of it in another Study awaits a complement.

The ancients made from this irresistible inclination of both sexes to reproduce their life by sacrificing it, Love, the firstborn and most powerful of their gods. It is Love that unravels chaos and animates nature… Christ the Redeemer, giving his life for the salvation of men, is still, from another point of view, a symbol of universal generation; and it is not without reason that Dupuis, in his Origine des culte, saw in the legend of Christ a reproduction of that of Adonis.

L’amour est donc l’apogée et la consommation de la vie, l’acte suprême de l’être organisé ; à tous ces titres on peut le définir : la matière du mariage. Mais si le rôle de l’amour dans la génération est très-apparent, on ne voit pas à quelle fin il est donné dans la société, dont le principe propre est la Justice. Encore une question sur laquelle il faut que la théorie s’explique.

Here we leave the general facts of animality to enter the category of exclusively human facts.

FIRST CHAPTER.

Complex problem of marriage: preparatory analysis.

III. — The problem of marriage is so vast, so complicated, so scabrous; it has given rise to so many rantings, treatises, novels, poems, customs and laws, that after having read as much of it as I could, I found that the only means of to see clearly was to close the books, and to summarize the substance in a series of questions on which it will be easy to concentrate the debate and prepare a judgment.

1. The human species, like all living races, is preserved by generation. Physiology gives a first reason for this law. As soon as he has seen the light of day, the individual begins to wear out and grow old; food and rest do not fully repair it; it is deteriorates through life itself, and soon demands to be replaced. This replacement takes place by generation: this is what a first look at the movement of existences seems to reveal.

But is this reason, entirely a matter of physiology, the only one? I say more, is it the primary one? Apart from the vital evolution, there is society, the supreme goal of creation. I therefore ask whether the renewal of subjects by generation is quite simply a condition imposed on humanity by the inevitable dissolution of the organism, which would subordinate the kingdom of the mind to the kingdom of matter and disgust our ideas of liberty and progress; or if it were not rather that, since society itself needs, for its own development, to constantly rejuvenate itself in its members, as the animal renews itself through food, generation is thus more than a necessity of the organism, it is of social constitution?

And since, in the whirlwind of this universe, the principle, the means and the end of all things are identical, the question would ultimately amount to asking whether death, which we see hovering over all life, has not itself even, like generation, its reason in the happiness of man, of all beings the only one who knows death and who can, according to circumstances, rejoice or grieve at dying?

If this hypothesis were true, we immediately see the great importance of marriage, that we could define an Institution for life and death.

2. Nature made man bi-sexual, masculum et feminam creavit eos; that is to say, for the generative function, the concurrence of two persons of different sexes is necessary. Why didn’t nature make man a hermaphrodite instead? Why this division of the generative apparatus between two individuals complementary to each other, the male and the female? Is it still a necessity that physiology imposes on society, or a condition that society imposes on physiology? More simply: does the distinction between the sexes have its reason both in society and in the organism? What is this reason? In the animal series, certain lower species unite the two sexes; as one rises in the scale, the division becomes more and more marked.

3. The cooperation of the sexes in view of generation takes place under the influence of a particular feeling, which is love. It is this powerful attraction that, in all species where the sexes are separate, drives the male and female to unite and pass on their life in a deadly orgasm. Hence the well-known, profound saying: Love is stronger than death; which means that the being who has tasted love no longer has anything to fear from death, because love is death itself, death in joy, euthanasia.

Here the secret of death begins to reveal itself; at the same time, the dignity of marriage makes itself felt, which makes it so sweet. But we do not know for that reason how, from the point of view of the moral order, death is a condition of progress and happiness: in this respect, what we have said of it in another Study awaits a complement.

The ancients made from this irresistible inclination of both sexes to reproduce their life by sacrificing it, Love, the firstborn and most powerful of their gods. It is Love that unravels chaos and animates nature… Christ the Redeemer, giving his life for the salvation of men, is still, from another point of view, a symbol of universal generation; and it is not without reason that Dupuis, in his Origine des culte, saw in the legend of Christ a reproduction of that of Adonis.

Love is therefore the apogee and consummation of life, the supreme act of organized being; by all these titles it can be defined: the matter of marriage. But if the role of love in generation is very apparent, we do not see to what end it is given in society, whose proper principle is Justice. For we do not admit that anything that interests the individual is unrelated to the social order: more than the philosopher, society has the right to say: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Another question on which the theory must be explained.

Here we leave the general facts of animality to enter the category of exclusively human facts.

IV. — 4. Love, of which we have just spoken, has its basis in the organism.

In the inferior species, it does not appear, despite all the amorous demonstrations of the couples, that genetic rapture is mixed with any attraction superior to sexuality itself. Love is pure in the beasts, if I may so express myself; I mean that it is purely physiological, free from all moral or intellectual feeling.

With man, intelligent and free, things do not happen in the same way. We know, from the theory of liberty, that man tends to free himself from all fatalism, notably from organic fatalism, against which his dignity rebels, and that this tendency is proportional to the development of his reason. This repugnance of the spirit for the flesh manifests itself here in an unequivocal and already very noticeable way, first in modesty, that is to say in the shame that the servitude of the flesh makes felt in the mind; then in chastity or voluntary abstention, with which is mingled an intimate voluptuousness, the result of shame avoided and liberty satisfied.

The progress of liberty and human dignity being therefore contrary to the ends of generation, there would be reason to fear that man, by the very excellence of his nature, would completely lose the care for his generation, if he were not called back to love by an entirely psychic power, Beauty, that is to say the Ideal, the possession of which promises him a happiness superior to that of chastity itself.

Idealism thus joins the pruritus of the senses, more or more exalted by aesthetic contemplation, to appeal to the generation of man and woman, and make this couple the most amorous in the universe.

Through the ideal, man preserves his dignity in love: he triumphs over the fatalism of the senses and bestiality of the flesh even as he fulfills the vow; he can, without derogating, attend to generation and accept marriage.

The ideal also reveals a primary reason for the distinction between the sexes. The faculty that man possesses of idealizing objects is not exercised on himself; he cannot become an idol for himself. Since the influence of the ideal was necessary for the generations of humanity, a sexual division was necessary; in two words, for the man, viro, there must be the woman.

5. Here we run into another difficulty.

In overcoming the repugnances of the spirit through beauty, we are exposed to the seductions of idealism, a hundred times more terrible than those of the flesh. The conservation of the species and the felicity of the sexes would be again and more sadly compromised, if a third element did not intervene, the role of which this study and the following one will above all aim to determine: this element is Justice.

We have already seen, by the theory of progress and of the origin of sin, how the ideal tends to be corrupted, dragging liberty and society into its ruin, if it is not incessantly supported, uplifted, purified, purified, with the condiment of right.

Love, even idealized, like property and power, like ideas and philosophy, must have a law of balance, without which it inevitably degenerates into debauchery, and, instead of perpetuating social life, lead civilization to its ruin.

What will be this new application of Justice, which redeems man and woman from lust?

But this is only part of the question. Since, according to all that precedes, generation, the distinction of the sexes and love must have their supreme end in society, and since society is Justice, it is obvious that Justice does not intervene only in marriage as a reaction to the ideal, it must appear as the ultimate reason, as the goal for which marriage was preordained and foreseen. The question therefore becomes this: What is the use, for the production, guarantee and progress of Justice, of the conjugal institution? In a word, what is _Marriage_?

IV. — 4. Love, of which we have just spoken, has its basis in the organism.

In the inferior species, it does not appear, despite all the amorous demonstrations of the couples, that genetic rapture is mixed with any attraction superior to sexuality itself. Love is pure in the beasts, if I may so express myself; I mean that it is purely physiological, free from all moral or intellectual feeling. (A)

With man, intelligent and free, things do not happen in the same way. We know, from the theory of liberty, that man tends to free himself from all fatalism, notably from organic fatalism, against which his dignity rebels, and that this tendency is proportional to the development of his reason. This repugnance of the spirit for the flesh manifests itself here in an unequivocal and already very noticeable way, first in modesty, that is to say in the shame that the servitude of the flesh makes felt in the mind; then in chastity or voluntary abstention, with which is mingled an intimate voluptuousness, the result of shame avoided and liberty satisfied.

The progress of liberty and human dignity being therefore contrary to the ends of generation, there would be reason to fear that man, by the very excellence of his nature, would completely lose the care for his generation, if he were not called back to love by an entirely psychic power, Beauty, that is to say the Ideal, the possession of which promises him a happiness superior to that of chastity itself.

Idealism thus joins the pruritus of the senses, more or more exalted by aesthetic contemplation, to appeal to the generation of man and woman, and make this couple the most amorous in the universe.

Through the ideal, man preserves his dignity in love: he triumphs over the fatalism of the senses and bestiality of the flesh even as he fulfills the vow; he can, without derogating, attend to generation and accept marriage.

The ideal also reveals a primary reason for the distinction between the sexes. The faculty that man possesses of idealizing objects is not exercised on himself; he cannot become an idol for himself. Since the influence of the ideal was necessary for the generations of humanity, a sexual division was necessary; in two words, for the man, viro, there must be the woman.

Here we run into another difficulty.

5. In overcoming the repugnances of the spirit through beauty, we are exposed to the seductions of idealism, a hundred times more terrible than those of the flesh. The conservation of the species and the felicity of the sexes would be again and more sadly compromised, if a third element did not intervene, the role of which this study and the following one will above all aim to determine: this element is Justice.

We have already seen, by the theory of progress and of the origin of sin, how the ideal tends to be corrupted, dragging liberty and society into its ruin, if it is not incessantly supported, uplifted, purified, purified, with the condiment of right.

Love, even idealized, like property and power, like ideas and philosophy, must have a law of balance, without which it inevitably degenerates into debauchery, and, instead of perpetuating social life, lead civilization to its ruin.

What will be this new application of Justice, which redeems man and woman from lust?

But this is only part of the question. Since, according to all that precedes, generation, the distinction of the sexes and love must have their supreme end in society, and since society is Justice, it is obvious that Justice does not intervene only in marriage as a reaction to the ideal, it must appear as the ultimate reason, as the goal for which marriage was preordained and foreseen. The question therefore becomes this: What is the use, for the production, guarantee and progress of Justice, of the conjugal institution? In a word, what is Marriage?

V. — 6. The sentiment, more or less vague, of a modification to be given to love with a view to Justice exists in all men. There is no faculty, instinct or affection in the human soul, not excepting love, that has given rise to a greater number of manifestations. Matrimonial mores embrace all the parts of the legislation relating to civil status, domicile, paternal authority, the rights of women, guardianship, emancipation, divorce, successions and wills: it is the most considerable portion of civil right. Looking at it more closely, one is not even far from thinking that, with marriage abolished, respect for man and citizen losing noticeably of its intensity, the social system is nothing more, such had been the conclusion of Plato, than a matter of police and discipline, where Justice is reduced to almost zero.

Hardly named, marriage and the family therefore appear to us as the hearth of Justice, the root of society, and, if it is up to me to say so, the true religion of the human race.

Religion, sought with so much ardor and for such a long succession of centuries, finding itself in marriage at the exact hour when humanity repudiates it everywhere else: what a discovery!

The grounds on which this conjecture is based are:

7. The solemnities of marriage, or nuptials, instituted all over the world, with an apparent aim of rejoicing and as an excitement to pleasure, but whose real object is to confer on the spouses I know not what juridical and religious dignity, juris humani et divini communicatio, and in which the families of the spouses and society as a whole intervene;

8. The prerogatives assured to the wife, and the duties, sometimes of an excessive rigor, that are imposed on her: duties and prerogatives whose constant meaning, in spite of all the diversity and the arbitrariness of the formulas, is that the wife, notwithstanding the relative inferiority of her sex, is declared a member of the social body;

9. The distinction of persons, conditions and races, in the choice of husbands and wives and in the formation of conjugal couples;

10. Finally, the principle of indissoluble monogamy that emerges more and more, as civilization develops, and is posed as a sacramental condition of marriage.

Now, unless our axioms are false and our definitions erroneous, we must admit a priori that all these institutions, whose rights vary infinitely, are the forms by which man and society tend spontaneously to observe the secret relationship of generation and love with Justice. The task of the philosopher is therefore reduced to penetrating the meaning of these manifestations, deducing their hidden motives and formulating their theory.

I pass over the nuptial ceremonies, as well as the civil and domestic condition that the legislation of different peoples has made for women. This research, a matter of pure erudition, would add nothing to what I have just said about it, and which translates its general idea.

A few words only on the last two questions, the most serious of all, of the distinction of persons relative to the union of the sexes, and of indissoluble monogamy.

V. — 6. The sentiment, more or less vague, of a modification to be given to love with a view to Justice exists in all men. There is no faculty, instinct or affection in the human soul, not excepting love, that has given rise to a greater number of manifestations. Matrimonial mores embrace all the parts of the legislation relating to civil status, domicile, paternal authority, the rights of women, guardianship, emancipation, divorce, successions and wills: it is the most considerable portion of civil right. Looking at it more closely, one is not even far from thinking that, with marriage abolished, respect for man and citizen losing noticeably of its intensity, the social system is nothing more, such had been the conclusion of Plato, than a matter of police and discipline, where Justice is reduced to almost zero.

Hardly named, marriage and the family therefore appear to us as the hearth of Justice, the root of society, and, if it is up to me to say so, the true religion of the human race.

Religion, sought with so much ardor and for such a long succession of centuries, finding itself in marriage at the exact hour when humanity repudiates it everywhere else: what a discovery!

The grounds on which this conjecture is based are:

7. The solemnities of marriage, or nuptials, instituted all over the world, with an apparent aim of rejoicing and as an excitement to pleasure, but whose real object is to confer on the spouses I know not what juridical and religious dignity, juris humani et divini communicatio, and in which the families of the spouses and society as a whole intervene;

8. The prerogatives assured to the wife, and the duties, sometimes of an excessive rigor, that are imposed on her: duties and prerogatives whose constant meaning, in spite of all the diversity and the arbitrariness of the formulas, is that the wife, notwithstanding the relative inferiority of her sex, is declared a member of the social body;

9. The distinction of persons, conditions and races, in the choice of husbands and wives and in the formation of conjugal couples;

10. Finally, the principle of indissoluble monogamy that emerges more and more, as civilization develops, and is posed as a sacramental condition of marriage.

Now, unless our axioms are false and our definitions erroneous, we must admit a priori that all these institutions, whose rights vary infinitely, are the forms by which man and society tend spontaneously to observe the secret relationship of generation and love with Justice. The task of the philosopher is therefore reduced to penetrating the meaning of these manifestations, deducing their hidden motives and formulating their theory.

I pass over the nuptial ceremonies, as well as the civil and domestic condition that the legislation of different peoples has made for women. This research, a matter of pure erudition, would add nothing to what I have just said about it, and which translates its general idea.

A few words only on the last two questions, the most serious of all, of the distinction of persons relative to the union of the sexes, and of indissoluble monogamy.

VI. — From time immemorial, prior to any historical memory, there has spontaneously taken place, with a view to love and marriage, a first selection:

From father to daughter, from son to mother, from brother to sister, union is forbidden; love is repugnant: it is regarded as monstrous. Why this exclusion?

In more advanced societies, the distinction has gone much further: it embraces whole classes, nations and races. Marriage was everywhere forbidden from noble to plebeian, from free man to slave, and misalliance noted with infamy. The law of Moses prohibited the Israelites from taking wives from the reprobate races of Canaan. More powerful than the law of Moses, the pride of blood and color nowadays prevents crossing, through marriage, between whites and blacks. The mulattoes, bleached by several generations, hardly dare to claim it. Doubtless such reprobation is exorbitant; but it has its cause, it rests on a motive more or less understood, more or less judiciously applied: what is this motive?

It has been said, with regard to the degrees of kinship, that the conservation of the species and the peace of society are equally concerned; that the crossing of families is a principle of order as much as a law of hygiene.

I accept these considerations of public and health utility. But I will point out that there is in the sentiment of primitive societies, whose modesty condemned incest from the outset, something more, which relates to conscience: it is this reason that I am looking for, asking myself whether it is founded in morality, or whether it should be seen only as a whim of instinct.

Formerly the kings of Egypt could, by special privilege, marry their sisters. The derogation made in favor of royalty, for reasons which are no longer of our century, proves that in general the union of brother and sister was regarded as contrary to good morals. It belonged only to the beasts and the gods, whom religion has always freed from the duties of humanity. With all the more reason the commerce of the father with the daughter, of the son with the mother, was considered abominable; they were not far from seeing it as a public calamity. What is the reason, once again, for this abhorrence?

The prohibition of marriage on the grounds of kinship seems all the more surprising since, in the opinion of the ancients, the work of the flesh, coitus, was regarded, in the state of nature, as an indifferent thing, involving in itself nor felony or misdemeanor. They considered as living in a state of nature, relative to a given society, all that was outside of this society, barbarians or foreigners, prisoners of war and slaves. For these categories, rejected outside the law, outside the public conscience, there was neither incest, nor adultery, nor debauchery, nor rape; promiscuity was, so to speak, their right. The prohibition, that is to say the crime, existed only for persons of free status, who alone were bound to respect, with respect to each other, the legal barriers.

How, then, in passing from the so-called state of nature to the state of civilization, has the practical reason of peoples created, from the point of view of love, these distinctions of persons, which one would almost take for a variant of the distinction of meats? How did that which the state of nature would have authorized become, by the definition of the legislator, illicit, culpable?

The text of this prohibition has been taken, without apparent reason, to treat civilized morality as prejudice; we have asserted the inalienable rights of nature, which leaves all liberty to love: all the sophisms accumulated against marriage, the family and modesty, start from there.

But the most mediocre attention is enough to convince oneself that, if there is prejudice somewhere, it is on the side of the partisans of the so-called state of nature, not on the side of civilization. It is, in fact, with love as with work, with property, with exchange, with society as a whole. It is by leaving the state of nature that the human multitude passes to the juridical state and becomes the city, which just proves that the state of nature is for humanity a state against nature: all Jean-Jacques’ declamations in this regard are absurd. Similarly, it is by leaving the state of nature and by taking on a social character that property is distinguished from theft, that exchange is regularized and freed from speculation, that work is organized by division and the group: these are perfectly intelligible facts, founded in reason, in utility, in morality, and against which no quibble can prevail.

Reasoning by analogy, I say that it must be the same with love, that it cannot be, in the state of civilization, the same as in the state of nature: I consequently ask what distinguishes it in the two states, and the reason for this distinction.

For, far from marriage having to lose its consideration because it is a correction of nature, it is this quality of corrective that, according to all civilized analogies, gives its legitimacy, consequently its nobility. Like property and labor, love must obey Justice: this is no doubt what the first people who attempted this difficult regulation were pursuing in idea. Before rejecting such a general tendency, it would be necessary to prove that conscience is nothing, Justice nothing, personal dignity nothing; that right, which governs everything, has nothing to do with love and generation: which entails the negation of society in its embryo, the family.

That Justice seizes man in his loves as in all the manifestations of his activity, far from surprising us, we must expect it: it only remains for us to discover the law and to submit to it.

I therefore return to the question posed: First of all, what does this distinction of persons mean? Why prohibit marriage between subjects whom consanguinity should, it seems, make all the more dear to one another because it was already a beginning of justice? This is what the followers of Zoroaster used to answer, whom foreigners reproached for marrying their sisters, their daughters and their mothers.

VI. — From time immemorial, prior to any historical memory, there has spontaneously taken place, with a view to love and marriage, a first selection:

From father to daughter, from son to mother, from brother to sister, union is forbidden; love is repugnant: it is regarded as monstrous. Why this exclusion?

In more advanced societies, the distinction has gone much further: it embraces whole classes, nations and races. Marriage was everywhere forbidden from noble to plebeian, from free man to slave, and misalliance noted with infamy. The law of Moses prohibited the Israelites from taking wives from the reprobate races of Canaan. More powerful than the law of Moses, the pride of blood and color nowadays prevents crossing, through marriage, between whites and blacks. The mulattoes, bleached by several generations, hardly dare to claim it. Doubtless such reprobation is exorbitant; but it has its cause, it rests on a motive more or less understood, more or less judiciously applied: what is this motive?

It has been said, with regard to the degrees of kinship, that the conservation of the species and the peace of society are equally concerned; that the crossing of families is a principle of order as much as a law of hygiene.

I accept these considerations of public and health utility. But I will point out that there is in the sentiment of primitive societies, whose modesty condemned incest from the outset, something more, which relates to conscience: it is this reason that I am looking for, asking myself whether it is founded in morality, or whether it should be seen only as a whim of instinct.

Formerly the kings of Egypt could, by special privilege, marry their sisters. The derogation made in favor of royalty, for reasons which are no longer of our century, proves that in general the union of brother and sister was regarded as contrary to good morals. It belonged only to the beasts and the gods, whom religion has always freed from the duties of humanity. With all the more reason the commerce of the father with the daughter, of the son with the mother, was considered abominable; they were not far from seeing it as a public calamity. What is the reason, once again, for this abhorrence?

The prohibition of marriage on the grounds of kinship seems all the more surprising since, in the opinion of the ancients, the work of the flesh, coitus, was regarded, in the state of nature, as an indifferent thing, involving in itself nor felony or misdemeanor. They considered as living in a state of nature, relative to a given society, all that was outside of this society, barbarians or foreigners, prisoners of war and slaves. For these categories, rejected outside the law, outside the public conscience, there was neither incest, nor adultery, nor debauchery, nor rape; promiscuity was, so to speak, their right. The prohibition, that is to say the crime, existed only for persons of free status, who alone were bound to respect, with respect to each other, the legal barriers.

How, then, in passing from the so-called state of nature to the state of civilization, has the practical reason of peoples created, from the point of view of love, these distinctions of persons, which one would almost take for a variant of the distinction of meats? How did that which the state of nature would have authorized become, by the definition of the legislator, illicit, culpable?

The text of this prohibition has been taken, without apparent reason, to treat civilized morality as prejudice; we have asserted the inalienable rights of nature, which leaves all liberty to love: all the sophisms accumulated against marriage, the family and modesty, start from there.

But the most mediocre attention is enough to convince oneself that, if there is prejudice somewhere, it is on the side of the partisans of the so-called state of nature, not on the side of civilization. It is, in fact, with love as with work, with property, with exchange, with society as a whole. It is by leaving the state of nature that the human multitude passes to the juridical state and becomes the city, which just proves that the state of nature is for humanity a state against nature: all Jean-Jacques’ declamations in this regard are absurd. Similarly, it is by leaving the state of nature and by taking on a social character that property is distinguished from theft, that exchange is regularized and freed from speculation, that work is organized by division and the group: these are perfectly intelligible facts, founded in reason, in utility, in morality, and against which no quibble can prevail.

Reasoning by analogy, I say that it must be the same with love, that it cannot be, in the state of civilization, the same as in the state of nature: I consequently ask what distinguishes it in the two states, and the reason for this distinction.

For, far from marriage having to lose its consideration because it is a correction of nature, it is this quality of corrective that, according to all civilized analogies, gives its legitimacy, consequently its nobility. Like property and labor, love must obey Justice: this is no doubt what the first people who attempted this difficult regulation were pursuing in idea. Before rejecting such a general tendency, it would be necessary to prove that conscience is nothing, Justice nothing, personal dignity nothing; that right, which governs everything, has nothing to do with love and generation: which entails the negation of society in its embryo, the family.

That Justice seizes man in his loves as in all the manifestations of his activity, far from surprising us, we must expect it: it only remains for us to discover the law and to submit to it.

I therefore return to the question posed: First of all, what does this distinction of persons mean? Why prohibit marriage between subjects whom consanguinity should, it seems, make all the more dear to one another because it was already a beginning of justice? This is what the followers of Zoroaster used to answer, whom foreigners reproached for marrying their sisters, their daughters and their mothers.

VII. — This is no less worthy of attention.

Let men, united by a pact of protective reciprocity, agree among themselves to place women, as well as property, outside the common right; let them thus make the mutual abstention from their concubines a civic convention; let them even assure them and their children, in the event of separation, of maintenance, an indemnity, in reward for their deflowered youth and their care, I do not see in all this anything that goes beyond the limits of ordinary conventions: a matter of convenience, of foresight, which fetters the liberty of couples only as long as it suits them to stay together; that is not marriage.

I speak of this constitution, much more serious, toward which all matrimonial customs tend and in which they are resolved, a constitution that is defined in three terms: Unity, inviolability, indissolubility.

What drives humanity, by the very reason of its civilization, to this rigorous monogamy? How does liberty, which we have seen unceasingly breaking every kind of yoke, come to meet this one? Is it certain that this tendency, so generally, so strongly marked, conforms to the reason of persons and things? Illustrious philosophers, such as Plato, deny it, and their denial happens right in history at the time of the greatest civilization, as if, in the name of civilization, they were protesting against a prejudice of barbarism and a remnant of servitude. Nowadays, as in the time of Plato and the emperors, many protest against marriage, for which they substitute free love, calling for ever greater liberty, guaranteed by the community of children and women. What about these opinions to the contrary? Did it depend on the ancient legislator, would it depend on the modern legislator, to tighten or loosen, at will, the marital bond? What finally prevents the union of man and woman from remaining, like domesticity and hired labor, a revocable contract, susceptible to all possible restrictions and extensions?…

The objections against the unity, inviolability and indissolubility of marriage linger everywhere; they figure among the main motives of the communists, both Saint-Simonian and Phalansterian systems: I have no need to reproduce them. Transitory love, freed from all the restraints that public opinion once imposed on it; concubinage, which multiplies everywhere, testifies to the uncertainty that reigns over this whole matter in people’s minds. I have reported elsewhere (Study VII, ch. II) the doubts of the theologians on the essence of marriage; the civil law appears scarcely less fluctuating. After the Revolution, divorce is introduced into the laws; then we erase it: is it a good thing, is it a bad thing? As for matrimonial stipulations, the Code recognizes at once two systems, the community regime and the dotal regime. Which best responds to the essence of marriage, if marriage is anything at all? Answer, please.

One word would give us the key to all these enigmas, which obviously depend on each other. But this word, we do not have it; it must be sought in the depths of the conscience, no human mouth having yet known how to say it.

Flee with me to the mountain, beautiful Shulamite! And I’ll tell you what you dream of in your fiancé, what your fiancé dreams of in you, which neither the impure old woman who appeals to your senses nor the effeminate who flatters your pride ever knew.

VII. — This is no less worthy of attention. Let men, united by a pact of protective reciprocity, agree among themselves to place women, as well as property, outside the common right; let them thus make the mutual abstention from their concubines a civic convention; let them even assure them and their children, in the event of separation, of maintenance, an indemnity, in reward for their deflowered youth and their care, I do not see in all this anything that goes beyond the limits of ordinary conventions: a matter of convenience, of foresight, which fetters the liberty of couples only as long as it suits them to stay together; that is not marriage.

I speak of this constitution, much more serious, toward which all matrimonial customs tend and in which they are resolved, a constitution that is defined in three terms: Unity, inviolability, indissolubility.

We will indeed see that outside of this there is no marriage.

What drives humanity, by the very reason of its civilization, to this rigorous monogamy? How does liberty, which we have seen unceasingly breaking every kind of yoke, come to meet this one? Is it certain that this tendency, so generally, so strongly marked, conforms to the reason of persons and things? Illustrious philosophers, such as Plato, deny it, and their denial happens right in history at the time of the greatest civilization, as if, in the name of civilization, they were protesting against a prejudice of barbarism and a remnant of servitude. Nowadays, as in the time of Plato and the emperors, many protest against marriage, for which they substitute free love, calling for ever greater liberty, guaranteed by the community of children and women. What about these opinions to the contrary? Did it depend on the ancient legislator, would it depend on the modern legislator, to tighten or loosen, at will, the marital bond? What finally prevents the union of man and woman from remaining, like domesticity and hired labor, a revocable contract, susceptible to all possible restrictions and extensions?…

The objections against the unity, inviolability and indissolubility of marriage linger everywhere; they figure among the main motives of the communists, both Saint-Simonian and Phalansterian systems: I have no need to reproduce them. Transitory love, freed from all the restraints that public opinion once imposed on it; concubinage, which multiplies everywhere, testifies to the uncertainty that reigns over this whole matter in people’s minds. I have reported elsewhere (Study VII, ch. II) the doubts of the theologians on the essence of marriage; the civil law appears scarcely less fluctuating. After the Revolution, divorce is introduced into the laws; then we erase it: is it a good thing, is it a bad thing? As for matrimonial stipulations, the Code recognizes at once two systems, the community regime and the dotal regime. Which best responds to the essence of marriage, if marriage is anything at all? Answer, please.

One word would give us the key to all these enigmas, which obviously depend on each other. But this word, we do not have it; it must be sought in the depths of the conscience, no human mouth having yet known how to say it.

Flee with me to the mountain, beautiful Shulamite! And I’ll tell you what you dream of in your fiancé, what your fiancé dreams of in you.

CHAPTER II.

First manifestations of Matrimonial Justice.

VIII. — Of all the parts of ethics, the one that has made authors ramble the most is unquestionably marriage.

The variety of uses, always so instructive, their oppositions even, so well calculated to awaken the mind, everything that should facilitate the solution of the problem is precisely what has confused the learned; and one remains stupefied to see the pains taken by minds distinguished elsewhere to show their lack of intelligence on this subject. This is the reflection I made about MM. Ernest Legouvé and Emile de Girardin: the first, author of a rather immoral Histoire morale des femmes, to which he nevertheless owed his entry into the Academy; the second, father of an absurd idea, disguised under this title, La Liberté dans le Mariage, ou l’Égalité des enfants devant la mère, with 400 pages of evidence borrowed from what antiquity and the modern world, civilization and barbarism, have to offer that is most divergent and most eccentric.

Can we conceive of philosophers who, having to extract the law of a whole order of phenomena, begin by declaring the phenomena devoid of meaning, erase them with the stroke of a pen, and substitute for the content, for the reason of things, the vain imaginations of their philology? This, however, is what MM. Legouvé and Girardin have done, to the glory, they are convinced of it, and for the greatest advantage of the fair sex. I would like each of my readers to have before their eyes these two compilations, the whole merit of which is to be able to serve as a dossier for a theory of marriage: it would be the best commentary on the conclusions that we will have to reach.

Seeing at what unreason, on such a serious question, writers had arrived for whom gallantry takes the place of method, I thought it appropriate to recall in a few words the principles that guide us.

From the moment that we have resolved to demand the laws of morality, no longer from arbitrary speculations or from still more blind sentimentalities, but from the comparative manifestations of universal spontaneity, we had to suppose and we suppose a priori that these manifestations are the product of the very laws that we seek, laws which thus have for expression the series of phenomena.

This is what we have explicitly declared, from the beginning of these Studies, by laying down these axioms:

Nothing necessary is nothing;

Nothing can be drawn from nothing nor be reduced to nothing;

Nothing happens by virtue of nothing;

Nothing tends to nothing;

Nothing can be balanced or stabilized by nothing, etc.

Operating on these principles, we have noted that humanity is moving, by long and painful gropings, towards a general constitution of which we have tried to determine the principal parts.

Now, just as we have supposed, then demonstrated, by this method of observation, that there existed in society a constitution of property, a constitution of labor, a constitution of the State, a constitution of public reason , etc., we again assume and we will demonstrate that there exists a constitution of marriage and of the family, a constitution that naturally did not reveal itself immediately in its depth, but which first reveals itself in the first datum of sexuality, then emerges little by little in the forms of love and marriage, practiced, consecrated or tolerated among all peoples.

Why are we talking here about prejudice? One is surprised that having denied, in a rather energetic way, property, government, religion, I have always preserved a certain respect for marriage, of all the prejudices, one thinks, the least respectable and, let us add , the least defended by the modern democracy.

But everything is prejudice in human institutions, that is to say provisional judgment, præ-judicatum, until the day when science, verifying the laws and purging ideas, converts prejudice into positive truth or rejects it definitively. Is it then a question of following, without examination, the established prejudice? Certainly not, and no one will reproach me for having ever given such an example. But to reject prejudice without understanding it is the most absurd of all prejudices, since, supposing effects without cause, phenomena without reality, tendencies without aim, an existence without reason, it is the very negation of the laws of intelligence.

The prejudice for family and marriage exists; it is universal, and it seems indestructible; it is given a priori by generation, the distinction of the sexes, love and all the analogies of Justice; it forms a solidary whole with society. There is therefore something under this prejudice, and all our philosophy can only go to determine, with the greatest possible exactness, this something.

Let us therefore pass without further delay to the examination of the facts, more or less exact but authentic testimonies of the universal thought on the constitution of marriage. A first glimpse of the human being, of its renewal by generation, of its sexuality, of its training in love, of the need for a new intervention of Justice, has enabled us to pose the problem: let us see how the practice of nations has grasped it. There will be a lot of misfortune if we do not end up discovering a grain of truth.

CHAPTER II.

First manifestations of Matrimonial Justice.

VIII. — Of all the parts of ethics, the one that has made authors ramble the most is unquestionably marriage. The variety of uses, always so instructive, their oppositions even, so well calculated to awaken the mind, everything that should facilitate the solution of the problem is precisely what has confused the learned; and one remains stupefied to see the pains taken by minds distinguished elsewhere to show their lack of intelligence on this subject. This is the reflection I made about MM. Ernest Legouvé and Emile de Girardin: the first, author of a rather immoral Histoire morale des femmes, to which he nevertheless owed his entry into the Academy; the second, father of an absurd idea, disguised under this title, La Liberté dans le Mariage, ou l’Égalité des enfants devant la mère, with 400 pages of evidence borrowed from what antiquity and the modern world, civilization and barbarism, have to offer that is most divergent and most eccentric.

Can we conceive of philosophers who, having to extract the law of a whole order of phenomena, begin by declaring the phenomena devoid of meaning, erase them with the stroke of a pen, and substitute for the content, for the reason of things, the vain imaginations of their philology? This, however, is what MM. Legouvé and Girardin have done, to the glory, they are convinced of it, and for the greatest advantage of the fair sex. I would like each of my readers to have before their eyes these two compilations, the whole merit of which is to be able to serve as a dossier for a theory of marriage: it would be the best commentary on the conclusions that we will have to reach.

Seeing at what unreason, on such a serious question, writers had arrived for whom gallantry takes the place of method, I thought it appropriate to recall in a few words the principles that guide us.

From the moment that we have resolved to demand the laws of morality, no longer from arbitrary speculations or from still more blind sentimentalities, but from the comparative manifestations of universal spontaneity, we had to suppose and we suppose a priori that these manifestations are the product of the very laws that we seek, laws which thus have for expression the series of phenomena.

This is what we have explicitly declared, from the beginning of these Studies, by laying down these axioms:

Nothing necessary is nothing;

Nothing can be drawn from nothing nor be reduced to nothing;

Nothing happens by virtue of nothing;

Nothing tends to nothing;

Nothing can be balanced or stabilized by nothing, etc.

Operating on these principles, we have noted that humanity is moving, by long and painful gropings, towards a general constitution of which we have tried to determine the principal parts.

Now, just as we have supposed, then demonstrated, by this method of observation, that there existed in society a constitution of property, a constitution of labor, a constitution of the State, a constitution of public reason , etc., we again assume and we will demonstrate that there exists a constitution of marriage and of the family, a constitution that naturally did not reveal itself immediately in its depth, but which first reveals itself in the first datum of sexuality, then emerges little by little in the forms of love and marriage, practiced, consecrated or tolerated among all peoples.

Why are we talking here about prejudice? One is surprised that having denied, in a rather energetic way, property, government, religion, I have always preserved a certain respect for marriage, of all the prejudices, one thinks, the least respectable and, let us add , the least defended by the modern democracy.

But everything is prejudice in human institutions, that is to say provisional judgment, præ-judicatum, until the day when science, verifying the laws and purging ideas, converts prejudice into positive truth or rejects it definitively. Is it then a question of following, without examination, the established prejudice? Certainly not, and no one will reproach me for having ever given such an example. But to reject prejudice without understanding it is the most absurd of all prejudices, since, supposing effects without cause, phenomena without reality, tendencies without aim, an existence without reason, it is the very negation of the laws of intelligence.

The prejudice for family and marriage exists; it is universal, and it seems indestructible; it is given a priori by generation, the distinction of the sexes, love and all the analogies of Justice; it forms a solidary whole with society. There is therefore something under this prejudice, and all our philosophy can only go to determine, with the greatest possible exactness, this something.

Let us therefore pass without further delay to the examination of the facts, more or less exact but authentic testimonies of the universal thought on the constitution of marriage. A first glimpse of the human being, of its renewal by generation, of its sexuality, of its training in love, of the need for a new intervention of Justice, has enabled us to pose the problem: let us see how the practice of nations has grasped it. There will be a lot of misfortune if we do not end up discovering a grain of truth.

IX. — First of all, what is the goal, at least the apparent goal, of marriage?

According to everyone and considering it only from the outside, the purpose of marriage is to provide for these three great interests: love, wife, offspring. This is the unanimous opinion of the authors; it results from all the laws and all the customs, and it does not appear that the first instituters of marriage had any other idea in mind. Let us follow this thread.

Love. — I do not pretend to teach my readers much about it: there is not a teenager leaving secondary school who does not believe himself to be an initiate in the matter, a maiden who does not flatter herself that she could teach her grandpa a thing or two on the subject. Let us therefore content ourselves, for the understanding of the discussion, with representing it first as it is and as we have experienced it; we will advise afterwards what it can become.

Love is a movement of the senses and of the soul, which has its origin in the rut, an organic and repugnant fatality, but one which, immediately transfigured by the idealism of the spirit, imposes itself on the imagination and the heart as the greatest, the only good in life, a good without which life appears only as a long death.

Under one or the other aspect, whether we consider it as the effect of the generative power, or whether we relate it to the ideal, love is entirely withdrawn from the will of him who experiences it: it is born spontaneously, unintentionally, fatally. It happens without our knowledge, in spite of us; everything serves it as a means or, as the old poets said, as an arrow: youth, beauty, talent, the voice, the gait, and I don’t know what certain secret affinities, which moreover occupy much less place in reality than in the novel. I set aside virtue, the admiration of which has the effect of producing between man and woman a feeling of another kind, and consequently of transfiguring love a second time.

Love thus given by nature and the ideal, and until Justice assigns it a new destination, has only one goal, reproduction. It is a drama that, by its nature, is played only once and whose evolution is divided into two opposite periods, one of ascent or desire, the other of satisfaction or decline.

During the first period, the soul, given over to the hallucination of an ineffable voluptuousness, hungry for what it calls its sovereign good, panting, becomes absorbed, merges in the person of the loved object; it is ready to sacrifice itself for it, it makes itself its slave, its calls it its divinity. Every lover is idolatrous and has lost possession of themself: it is then that they dream of an intimate, continuous, inviolable, eternal union, lost in solitude, far from men and things. This is love such as the young man, the young girl experiences it, unless precocious experience or sordid calculations have depraved them; as poets and novelists like to paint it, for the intoxication, the disappointment and sooner or later the depravity of this youth.

But we will not stay long in this seventh heaven. The lovers possess each other: the heart has enjoyed, the flesh is satisfied, the ideal flies away. A reverse movement of the first, just as fatal, is declared; the period of decline has begun. In vain the imagination makes an effort to retain the soul in ecstasy: reason awakens and blushes; liberty, in the depths of consciousness, lets its ironic laughter be heard; the heart detaches; reality and its consequences, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, make the ideal pale: happy then is he whose need to pull himself together does not drive him to hatred and disgust!

Inevitable effect of possession, which distresses the woman who is slower to sober up, makes her cry out for infidelity, treason, and delivers her body and soul to her lover; which at the same time begins for man a period of libertinism by rendering him incredulous, and makes both sexes slander love, which is no longer capable. It is the eternal subject of the elegies, héroïdes and amorous lamentations, to which all literature grants such a large place, and of which it would be time to abandon the overly beaten theme: for really, since the Ariadne abandoned by the mythologists, absolutely nothing new was said.

It is true that, since man has the privilege of surviving his own generation, love in him is capable of a series of revivals, as if the happy lover, on coming back to life, resuscitated at the same time love. But these resumptions never equal in quality and power the first explosion; they gradually diminish in passional and ideal energy. To the primitive enthusiasm succeeds an experience of voluptuousness and an itching of the senses that at first create illusion, but which soon degenerate into a tyrannical habit and turn to dissolution. Then, the ideal always declining, a vague uneasiness seizes the heart; it seems to the soul that after having loved so much it finds itself empty; and suddenly, without premeditation, without thinking of harm, the most virtuous of lovers catches himself in flagrante delicto of infidelity: he has discovered, in another creature, a new ideal.

Inconstancy in love is in the very order of things, and every man without exception experiences it. Only this inconstancy takes more or less time to declare itself, either because the superior quality of the loved object or the rarity of comparisons maintains ideality to its advantage; or because the power of idealization of the lover, his character, his occupations, make him more refractory to the temptation of a new subject. But, the first infidelity committed, acrobatics becomes for love an obligatory resource; and the more the ideal is renewed, the more intense the lust becomes.

One can judge from this the value of certain types, praised by the literature of the day as the heroes of love and of the ideal, Don Juan, for example, and Lovelace. Morality aside, such beings are heroes of imbecility. In terms of love and the ideal, the power is not in the acrobatics, it is in the persistence and the exclusion: I do not need to repeat the reasons.

Less active in love than the man and receiving more than she spends, the woman also shows herself to be more constant, not to mention that other consideration which makes the weaker being attach to the stronger, the mother to the author of her motherhood. Also cases of polyandry are infinitely rarer than those of polygamy, and the depravity that arises from inconstancy seems more rapid and more profound in women.

Voilà l’amour, tel qu’il se produit en nous par le développement de la faculté génératrice et l’exaltation idéaliste, dégagé du verbiage et des jeux de scène dont l’assaisonnent les romanciers et les poëtes : source de félicité, s’il faut en croire l’aspiration de nos cœurs et le témoignage douteux d’un petit nombre d’élus ; océan de misère, si nous devons avoir égard aussi à l’expérience de la multitude de ceux qui aiment ; dans tous les cas, la plus puissante fatalité au moyen de laquelle la nature ait trouvé le secret d’obscurcir en nous la raison, d’affliger la conscience et d’enchaîner le libre arbitre.

Je parlerai ailleurs plus au long de la Femme, dont le mariage a officiellement pour but, en second lieu, de régler la condition dans la famille et la société. Qu’il me suffise de dire, quant à présent, qu’en raison de sa faiblesse toutes les législations lui assignent un rang inférieur, et, de quelque part que lui vienne sa dot, de son père ou de son mari, la mettent à la charge de l’homme.

Quant aux enfants, troisième et dernier motif accusé par les légistes en faveur de l’institution, il n’y a, si j’ose le dire, qu’un cri contre ces petits malheureux. C’est plus qu’une charge ; c’est, avant, pendant et après l’enfantement, une gêne à l’amour, gêne que leurs innocentes caresses sont loin, hélas ! de racheter. Car à l’amour proprement dit la progéniture est odieuse : il n’est pas rare de voir les animaux et les hommes s’en défaire, lorsque leur lubricité ingénieuse n’a pas su l’empêcher.

IX. — First of all, what is the goal, at least the apparent goal, of marriage?

According to everyone and considering it only from the outside, the purpose of marriage is to provide for these three great interests: love, wife, offspring. This is the unanimous opinion of the authors; it results from all the laws and all the customs, and it does not appear that the first instituters of marriage had any other idea in mind. Let us follow this thread.

Love. — I do not pretend to teach my readers much about it: there is not a teenager leaving secondary school who does not believe himself to be an initiate in the matter, a maiden who does not flatter herself that she could teach her grandpa a thing or two on the subject. Let us therefore content ourselves, for the understanding of the discussion, with representing it first as it is and as we have experienced it; we will advise afterwards what it can become.

Love is a movement of the senses and of the soul, which has its origin in the rut, an organic and repugnant fatality, but one which, immediately transfigured by the idealism of the spirit, imposes itself on the imagination and the heart as the greatest, the only good in life, a good without which life appears only as a long death.

Under one or the other aspect, whether we consider it as the effect of the generative power, or whether we relate it to the ideal, love is entirely withdrawn from the will of him who experiences it: it is born spontaneously, unintentionally, fatally. It happens without our knowledge, in spite of us; everything serves it as a means or, as the old poets said, as an arrow: youth, beauty, talent, the voice, the gait, and I don’t know what secret affinities, which moreover occupy much less place in reality than in the novel. I set aside virtue, the admiration of which has the effect of producing between man and woman a feeling of another kind, and consequently of transfiguring love a second time.

Love thus given by nature and the ideal, and until Justice assigns it a new destination, has only one goal, reproduction. It is a drama that, by its nature, is played only once and whose evolution is divided into two opposite periods, one of ascent or desire, the other of satisfaction or decline.

During the first period, the soul, given over to the hallucination of an ineffable voluptuousness, hungry for what it calls its sovereign good, panting, becomes absorbed, merges in the person of the loved object; it is ready to sacrifice itself for it, it makes itself its slave, its calls it its divinity. Every lover is idolatrous and has lost possession of themself: it is then that they dream of an intimate, continuous, inviolable, eternal union, lost in solitude, far from men and things. This is love such as the young man, the young girl experiences it, unless precocious experience or sordid calculations have depraved them; as poets and novelists like to paint it, for the intoxication, the disappointment and sooner or later the depravity of this youth.

But we will not stay long in this seventh heaven. The lovers possess each other: the heart has enjoyed, the flesh is satisfied, the ideal flies away. A reverse movement of the first, just as fatal, is declared; the period of decline has begun. In vain the imagination makes an effort to retain the soul in ecstasy: reason awakens and blushes; liberty, in the depths of consciousness, lets its ironic laughter be heard; the heart detaches; reality and its consequences, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, make the ideal pale: happy then is he whose need to pull himself together does not drive him to hatred and disgust!

Inevitable effect of possession, which distresses the woman who is slower to sober up, makes her cry out for infidelity, treason, and delivers her body and soul to her lover; which at the same time begins for man a period of libertinism by rendering him incredulous, and makes both sexes slander love, which is no longer capable. It is the eternal subject of the elegies, héroïdes and amorous lamentations, to which all literature grants such a large place, and of which it would be time to abandon the overly beaten theme: for really, since the Ariadne abandoned by the mythologists, absolutely nothing new was said.

It is true that, since man has the privilege of surviving his own generation, love in him is capable of a series of revivals, as if the happy lover, on coming back to life, resuscitated at the same time love. But these resumptions never equal in quality and power the first explosion; they gradually diminish in passional and ideal energy. To the primitive enthusiasm succeeds an experience of voluptuousness and an itching of the senses that at first create illusion, but which soon degenerate into a tyrannical habit and turn to dissolution. Then, the ideal always declining, a vague uneasiness seizes the heart; it seems to the soul that after having loved so much it finds itself empty; and suddenly, without premeditation, without thinking of harm, the most virtuous of lovers catches himself in flagrante delicto of infidelity: he has discovered, in another creature, a new ideal.

Inconstancy in love is in the very order of things, and every man without exception experiences it. Only this inconstancy takes more or less time to declare itself, either because the superior quality of the loved object or the rarity of comparisons maintains ideality to its advantage; or because the power of idealization of the lover, his character, his occupations, make him more refractory to the temptation of a new subject. But, the first infidelity committed, acrobatics becomes for love an obligatory resource; and the more the ideal is renewed, the more intense the lust becomes.

One can judge from this the value of certain types, praised by the literature of the day as the heroes of love and of the ideal, Don Juan, for example, and Lovelace. Morality aside, such beings are heroes of imbecility. In terms of love and the ideal, the power is not in the acrobatics, it is in the persistence and the exclusion: I do not need to repeat the reasons.

Less active in love than the man and receiving more than she spends, the woman also shows herself to be more constant, not to mention that other consideration which makes the weaker being attach to the stronger, the mother to the author of her motherhood. Also cases of polyandry are infinitely rarer than those of polygamy, and the depravity that arises from inconstancy seems more rapid and more profound in women.

This is love, such as it is produced in us by the development of the generative faculty and the idealistic exaltation, freed from the verbiage and stage games with which novelists and poets season it: a source of happiness, if we must believe the aspiration of our hearts and the dubious testimony of a small number of chosen ones; an ocean of misery, if we must also pay attention to the experience of the multitude of those who love; in any case, the most powerful of the fatalities whose rise can obscure reason in us, afflict the conscience and chain the free will.

I will speak elsewhere more fully of the Wife, whose marriage officially aims, in the second place, to regulate her condition in the family and in society. Suffice it to say, for the present, that because of her weakness all the laws assign her an inferior rank, and that, wherever her dowry comes to her, from her father or her husband, they charge the man.

As for children, the third and last motive alleged by the legists in favor of the matrimonial institution, there is, if I may say so, only a cry against these little unfortunates. It is, for the spouses, more than a burden; it is, before, during and after childbirth, an embarrassment to love, an embarrassment that their innocent caresses are far away, alas! to redeem. For to love properly so called, offspring are odious: it is not uncommon to see animals and men get rid of them, when their ingenious lust has not been able to prevent them.

X. — Faced with this complication of embarrassment, arising either from the inevitable failure of love, or from the burdensome weakness of women and the fragility of her attractions, or finally from the even more burdensome feeding of children; in the presence of this inevitable lassitude, of this humiliating disappointment, of this imminent depravity, of this tyranny of the strongest that awaits the woman, of this danger that will strike an unfortunate offspring, one guesses what must have been, at all times, the secret wish of the human heart, which gave birth to the mystical institution of marriage.

Love: We would like it to be reciprocal, faithful, constant, always the same, always devoted, always ideal.

La femme : Quelle belle créature, si elle ne coûtait rien, si du moins elle pouvait se suffire et par son travail couvrir ses frais !

Children: We would be consoled if they did not spoil the mother, if love and its pleasures lost nothing, if later the children could repay the parents for their advances.

Now, marriage, in the spontaneity of its institution, has precisely in view to satisfy this triple vow: it is a _Sacrament_ by virtue of which 1) love, from being inconstant as nature has made it, would be made fixed, equal, lasting, indissoluble, its intermittences softened, its awakening more sustained; 2), the wife, of so little resource, would become a useful auxiliary; 3) paternity, so costly, would be the extension of the self, the pride of life and the consolation of old age.

Marriage, finally, as conceived by the universality of legislators, is a formula of union by which domination would be given to the spouses over love, that formidable fatality born of the flesh and of the ideal; the wife would acquire economic value, and the children would be offered as a blessing and wealth.

Is this serious?

La garantie que le mariage prétend offrir contre les défaillances de l’amour, en la supposant efficace, en serait la dénaturation : elle suppose, en effet, que l’amour n’aurait pas seulement pour objet de servir à la génération, quil aurait encore une autre fin, soit de volupté pure, soit au contraire de moralité : deux choses qui, ce semble, également lui répugnent.

As for the wife, the calculation based on her productive capacity is absolutely false, as we will see: a bad partner, who costs on average much more than she brings in, and whose existence rests only on the perpetual sacrifice of the man.

Let us not speak, please, of the fruits of love: by nature, which alone presides over their procreation, ingratitude is their lot, I almost said their right. Love, says the proverb very well, does not go back.

However, let us not prejudge anything, even against prejudice. The reason of humanity does not proceed, like that of the philosophers, by inductions and syllogisms; it asserts itself through its acts, overall and from the outset, without taking the trouble to write its motives on the sand of rivers or the bark of beeches, leaving it to the wise to understand and justify it . So let is follow it, and without being surprised by its enigmatic walk, let us collect its declarations as they occur.

X. — Faced with this complication of embarrassment, arising either from the inevitable failure of love, or from the burdensome weakness of women and the fragility of her attractions, or finally from the even more burdensome feeding of children; in the presence of this inevitable lassitude, of this humiliating disappointment, of this imminent depravity, of this tyranny of the strongest that awaits the woman, of this danger that will strike an unfortunate offspring, one guesses what must have been, at all times, the secret wish of the human heart, which gave birth to the mystical institution of marriage.

Love: We would like it to be reciprocal, faithful, constant, always the same, always devoted, always ideal.

The Wife: What a beautiful creature, if she cost nothing, if at least she could be self-sufficient, and by her work cover her expenses!

Children: We would be consoled if they did not spoil the mother, if love and its pleasures lost nothing, if later the children could repay the parents for their advances.

Now, marriage, in the spontaneity of its institution, has precisely in view to satisfy this triple vow: it is a Sacrament by virtue of which 1) love, from being inconstant as nature has made it, would be made fixed, equal, lasting, indissoluble, its intermittences softened, its awakening more sustained; 2), the wife, of so little resource, would become a useful auxiliary; 3) paternity, so costly, would be the extension of the self, the pride of life and the consolation of old age.

Marriage, finally, as conceived by the universality of legislators, is a formula of union by which domination would be given to the spouses over love, that formidable fatality born of the flesh and of the ideal; the wife would acquire economic value, and the children would be offered as a blessing and wealth.

Is this serious?

The guarantee that marriage claims to offer against the failings of love, assuming it to be effective, would be its distortion. It supposes, in fact, that the object of love would not only be to serve generation, but that it would also have another end, either of pure voluptuousness or of supreme morality: two things that are, it seems, equally repugnant to it.

As for the wife, the calculation based on her productive capacity is absolutely false, as we will see: a bad partner, who costs on average much more than she brings in, and whose existence rests only on the perpetual sacrifice of the man.

Let us not speak, please, of the fruits of love: by nature, which alone presides over their procreation, ingratitude is their lot, I almost said their right. Love, says the proverb very well, does not go back.

However, let us not prejudge anything, even against prejudice. The reason of humanity does not proceed, like that of the philosophers, by inductions and syllogisms; it asserts itself through its acts, overall and from the outset, without taking the trouble to write its motives on the sand of rivers or the bark of beeches, leaving it to the wise to understand and justify it . So let is follow it, and without being surprised by its enigmatic walk, let us collect its declarations as they occur.

XI. — In the name of what power does marriage claim to tame love, to save man from the troubles of possession, from the tribulations of the flesh and from the eclipse of the ideal; then, to protect the deflowered wife, and to ensure the existence of the children?

In the name of Justice. If love, as we have explained elsewhere, is stronger than death, Justice in its turn will be stronger than love: such is the datum of marriage.

This results first of all from the matrimonial conditions, formalities and ceremonies, such as we see them occurring or tending to occur among all peoples, the substance of which can be summarized in the following articles:

1. Marriage is not abandoned to amorous inclination which is not ruled out, but is considered to be only of the second order;

2. The consent of the families is requested at the same time as that of the spouses;

3. Society is taken as witness, first of promises, betrothal, then of engagement;

4. A solemn, religious ceremony brings about marriage, and makes it a _sacrament_;

5. By this sacramental act, incompatible by its nature with any idea of polygamy and divorce, the spouses mutually swear an inviolable and perpetual love;

6. The husband promises protection and devotion, the woman obedience;

7. Thus married under the auspices of the family and the city, the spouses form between themselves and with their future children a legal and solidary whole, embryo, image and integral part of the great society, whose destiny is thus linked to that of of the family.

Observations. Cohabitation follows marriage; but, like love, which makes it desirable and embellishes it, it is only an accessory which the spouses have the right to use or not to use, at their common convenience.

As for the stipulations of interest, what today is specifically called the marriage contract, although they have their principle in marriage and serve as its external expression; although marriage cannot exist without a certain community of fortunes and obligations, of pains and joys, consortium; even though finally it is according to the type of the family that the civil societies were formed thereafter, as such conventions, between men and women, can exist without marriage, they do not establish the marriage any more than love or cohabitation.

Marriage, in short, is a constitution sui generis, formed at the same time externally by the contract, internally by the sacrament, which perishes as soon as one or the other of these two elements disappears.

What is striking in this mysterious institution is above all, I cannot repeat it too often, the loudly avowed claim to subject love, to place it, according to the expression of Roman law, in manu, that is to say, in dependence and under the authority of the conjugal couple, and that by a sort of religious evocation, an exorcism that purges love of all lasciviousness and weakness, elevates it above itself, and actually a supernatural feeling.

I leave aside the detail of the rites that, in each country and each locality, precede, accompany and follow the solemnity of marriage: there are touching, bizarre, ridiculous, obscene ones. I also pass over in silence the various interpretations that have been given of the sacrament, either as regards marital authority, or as regards the prerogatives of the wife, the honor due to the mother of the family, etc. Across the infinite variety of usages, one thing constantly stands out, namely, the idea of mastering love by religion, and, by a necessary consequence, of making the husband, despite his proud prepotence, which we take care to recognize, always attentive to his wife; the wife, despite the disgraces that await her, always kind to her husband.

Is this, then, an idea that must be attributed to superstition, which deserves to occupy the philosopher no more than enchantments, love potions, talismans that make one invulnerable or invisible?

Once again, let us not be hasty to bring such a condemnation. Religion is essentially divinatory: it is a mythology of right. Now, marriage is above all a religious act, a sacrament; I will even say, except for interpretation, that it is nothing other than that. So why not suppose, as I have given to understand, that marriage is of all the manifestations of Justice the most ancient, the most authentic, the most intimate, the most holy? Our experience of life is already long; but we have reflected so little that our knowledge of ourselves is almost nonexistent. What did we know yesterday about social economy, the constitution of the state, the organization of labor, the education of intelligence, liberty, progress? What did we know of Justice itself? Our first glimmers on all these things date from the French Revolution: by what privilege could we have been better and earlier enlightened on marriage?

I therefore say, and this is my fundamental affirmation, that we have here a creation of consciousness of a new kind, a creation whose aim is not only to free human dignity from the double fatalism of the flesh and the ideal, but to make them serve jointly for the consolidation of Justice, both internally and externally.

Let us now continue, and without further digression, our research.

XI. — In the name of what power does marriage claim to tame love, to save man from the troubles of possession, from the tribulations of the flesh and from the eclipse of the ideal; then, to protect the deflowered wife, and to ensure the existence of the children?

In the name of Justice. If love, as we have explained elsewhere, is stronger than death, Justice in its turn will be stronger than love: such is the datum of marriage.

This results first of all from the matrimonial conditions, formalities and ceremonies, such as we see them occurring or tending to occur among all peoples, the substance of which can be summarized in the following articles:

1. Marriage is not abandoned to amorous inclination; this is not ruled out, but is considered to be only of the second order;

2. The consent of the families is requested at the same time as that of the spouses;

3. Society is taken as witness, first of promises, betrothal, then of engagement;

4. A solemn, religious ceremony brings about marriage, and makes it a sacrament;

5. By this sacramental act, incompatible by its nature with any idea of polygamy and divorce, the spouses mutually swear an inviolable and perpetual love;

6. The husband promises protection and devotion; the woman, obedience;

7. Thus married under the auspices of the family and the city, the spouses form between themselves and with their future children a legal and solidary whole, embryo, image and integral part of the great society, whose destiny is thus linked to that of of the family.

Observations. Cohabitation follows marriage; but, like love, which makes it desirable and embellishes it, it is only an accessory which the spouses have the right to use or not to use, at their common convenience.

As for the stipulations of interest, what today is specifically called the marriage contract, although they have their principle in marriage and serve as its external expression; although marriage cannot exist without a certain community of fortunes and obligations, of pains and joys, consortium; even though finally it is according to the type of the family that the civil societies were formed thereafter, as such conventions, between men and women, can exist without marriage, they do not establish the marriage any more than love or cohabitation.

Marriage, in short, is a constitution sui generis, formed at the same time externally by the contract, internally by the sacrament, which perishes as soon as one or the other of these two elements disappears.

What is striking in this mysterious institution is above all, I cannot repeat it too often, the loudly avowed claim to subject love, to place it, according to the expression of Roman law, in manu, that is to say, in dependence and under the authority of the conjugal couple, and that by a sort of religious evocation, an exorcism that purges love of all lasciviousness and weakness, elevates it above itself, and actually a supernatural feeling.

I leave aside the detail of the rites that, in each country and each locality, precede, accompany and follow the solemnity of marriage: there are touching, bizarre, ridiculous, obscene ones. I also pass over in silence the various interpretations that have been given of the sacrament, either as regards marital authority, or as regards the prerogatives of the wife, the honor due to the mother of the family, etc. Across the infinite variety of usages, one thing constantly stands out, namely, the idea of mastering love by religion, and, by a necessary consequence, of making the husband, despite his proud prepotence, which we take care to recognize, always attentive to his wife; the wife, despite the disgraces that await her, always kind to her husband.

Is this, then, an idea that must be attributed to superstition, which deserves to occupy the philosopher no more than enchantments, love potions, talismans that make one invulnerable or invisible?

Once again, let us not be hasty to bring such a condemnation. Religion is essentially divinatory: it is a mythology of right. Now, marriage is above all a religious act, a sacrament; I will even say, except for interpretation, that it is nothing other than that. Why not suppose, as I have given to understand, that marriage is of all the manifestations of Justice the most ancient, the most authentic, the most intimate, the most holy? Our experience of life is already long; but we have reflected so little that our knowledge of ourselves is almost nonexistent. What did we know yesterday about social economy, the constitution of the state, the organization of labor, the education of intelligence, liberty, progress? What did we know of Justice itself? Our first glimmers on all these things date from the French Revolution: by what privilege could we have been better and earlier enlightened on marriage?

I therefore say, and this is my fundamental affirmation, that we have here a creation of consciousness of a new kind, a creation whose aim is not only to free human dignity from the double fatalism of the flesh and the ideal, but to make them serve jointly for the consolidation of Justice, both internally and externally.

Let us now continue, and without further digression, our research.

XII. — In principle, it is above all the woman whom the teacher of marriage has in view. For her, the nuptial ceremony becomes a consecration that makes her holy, sanctissima conjux, says Virgil, inaccessible, on pain of sacrilege, to anyone other than her husband. The reciprocal does not exist, at least to the same degree, for the husband: we have seen this by the droit de seigneur granted by Moses to the master of the slave girl, a right recognized throughout antiquity. While the commerce of a woman of free status with a slave seemed monstrous and was punished with the last torture, the man enjoyed a kind of privilege with regard to the servant whom he deigned to honor with his favor, Quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suæ, says the Virgin Mother, favorite of the Most High, in the Gospel; as if marriage interested the woman in a completely different way than the man, and that moreover the right of property covered misalliance for the latter.

Thus the adultery of women and the seduction attempted in their regard have everywhere been the object of energetic repression.

“Let seduction beware of approaching the free woman. The dishonor imposed on the matron, on the virgin, on the son of a family, is not only a shame for the domestic roof; it is a shame and a pity for the state. If the domestic tribunal, of the husband or the father, takes too long to avenge this insult, the aedile will go before the people to accuse the guilty matron. The seducer will be degraded by the censor, if however he is not condemned by the judge. The fine, exile, even death will be the penalties of debauchery.” (_Franz de Champagny_, Les Césars, V. II, p. 301.)

Are not our laws, which admit the action in adultery only on the complaint of the husband, in this respect below those of the Romans?

Moreover, the reader understands that I do not intend to make a title to the libertinism for man of the kind of prerogative or tolerance that the laws have generally recognized in him, or, in the absence of laws, mores. I simply note this fact, the significance of which is higher than it appears at first sight, namely, that in the opinion of all peoples, marriage is instituted principally in view and in the interest of woman; that, under the double relation of economy and love, the man loses from this engagement more than he gains, in such signs as the restrictions with which the liberty of the wife is surrounded, the retirement that is imposed, the penalties, sometimes atrocious, with which her infidelity is punished, must be considered much less as an abuse of force than as compensation for marital sacrifice and revenge for the ingratitude of one’s other half.

Doubtless a better practice of conjugal life will reassure the household and bring balance to it; but let us not deny what first appears to all eyes, the enormous sacrifice that a man makes of his liberty, of his fortune, of his pleasures, of his work, the risk of his honor and his possession of a creature of which, before two years, perhaps six months, I reason from the point of view of love properly speaking, he will have had enough.

How, then, is man brought to this pact in which his prepotence becomes the servant of weakness; where, while he believes he possesses and enjoys, it is he in reality who is possessed, not to say exploited? How did this superb master become the legislator and guarantor of such a market? What does he hope for? What does he find there? This is what the partisans of the equality of the sexes should at least teach us before ranting against the one whose whole crime was to abdicate his strength, by inventing marriage for women.

XII. — In principle, it is above all the woman whom the teacher of marriage has in view. For her, the nuptial ceremony becomes a consecration that makes her holy, sanctissima conjux, says Virgil, inaccessible, on pain of sacrilege, to anyone other than her husband. The reciprocal does not exist, at least to the same degree, for the husband: we have seen this by the droit de seigneur granted by Moses to the master of the slave girl, a right recognized throughout antiquity. While the commerce of a woman of free status with a slave seemed monstrous and was punished with the last torture, the man enjoyed a kind of privilege with regard to the servant whom he deigned to honor with his favor, Quia respexit humilitatem ancillæ suæ, says the Virgin Mother, favorite of the Most High, in the Gospel; as if marriage interested the woman in a completely different way than the man, and that moreover the right of property covered misalliance for the latter.

Thus the adultery of women and the seduction attempted in their regard have everywhere been the object of energetic repression.

“Let seduction beware of approaching the free woman. The dishonor imposed on the matron, on the virgin, on the son of a family, is not only a shame for the domestic roof; it is a shame and a pity for the state. If the domestic tribunal, of the husband or the father, takes too long to avenge this insult, the aedile will go before the people to accuse the guilty matron. The seducer will be degraded by the censor, if however he is not condemned by the judge. The fine, exile, even death will be the penalties of debauchery.” (Franz de Champagny, Les Césars, V. II, p. 301.)

Are not our laws, which admit the action in adultery only on the complaint of the husband, in this respect below those of the Romans?

Moreover, the reader understands that I do not intend to make a title to the libertinism for man of the kind of prerogative or tolerance that the laws have generally recognized in him, or, in the absence of laws, mores. I simply note this fact, the significance of which is higher than it appears at first sight, namely, that in the opinion of all peoples, marriage is instituted principally in view and in the interest of woman; that, under the double relation of economy and love, the man loses from this engagement more than he gains, in such signs as the restrictions with which the liberty of the wife is surrounded, the retirement that is imposed, the penalties, sometimes atrocious, with which her infidelity is punished, must be considered much less as an abuse of force than as compensation for marital sacrifice and revenge for the ingratitude of one’s other half.

Doubtless a better practice of conjugal life will reassure the household and bring balance to it; but let us not deny what first appears to all eyes, the enormous sacrifice that a man makes of his liberty, of his fortune, of his pleasures, of his work, the risk of his honor and his possession of a creature of which, before two years, perhaps six months, I reason from the point of view of love properly speaking, he will have had enough.

How, then, is man brought to this pact in which his prepotence becomes the servant of weakness; where, while he believes he possesses and enjoys, it is he in reality who is possessed, not to say exploited? How did this superb master become the legislator and guarantor of such a market? What does he hope for? What does he find there? This is what the partisans of the equality of the sexes should at least teach us before ranting against the one whose whole crime was to abdicate his strength, by inventing marriage for women.

XIII. — In all acts, whether in his private life or in his public life, man tends to safeguard his dignity, consequently to realize, within and outside himself, Justice.

In amorous relations there will therefore always be, in as slight a degree as you like, a tendency to marriage, to the consecration of love by honor and right; and this tendency, proportional to the ideal inspired by the loved object, will acquire its maximum intensity at the moment that precedes the possession.

Here we begin to glimpse the secret motive that leads man to marriage, a motive that will already explain two things to us: the first, why marriage at its origin assumes an aristocratic character; the other, why among the ancients concubinage and vulgar love were deemed less unworthy, less shameful than today.

Marriage, by its institution, is aristocratic: it was not found among the islanders of Oceania, living, at the time of discovery, in an Edenic equality. Then, among peoples where marriage is already established, but where slavery and polygamy still exist, we must distinguish between the wife and the concubine, the first of free birth, that is to say noble, the another of servile or plebeian condition. Hence a radical difference in the prerogatives: for the wife alone, there is an engagement, a contract, a legitimate marriage, privileges, rights, above all respect for the city. As for the concubine, after having served for the pleasures of her owner, she becomes his servant again, she serves as chambermaid, baker, perfumer, says Deuteronomy about the royal statute with which it threatens the Israelites. In the Decalogue it is forbidden, by one and the same commandment, to covet either the wife or the servant (concubine) of one’s neighbor. But the consequences of the infraction are very different, depending on whether the woman is free or servant, wife or favorite. In the first case, the death penalty; in the second, penalty of the stick.

But nowhere does this aristocratic spirit show itself with greater force than in the ceremonies of Roman marriage, according to the class to which the spouses belonged.

First there was the confarreatio, or sacred banquet, the only mode of celebration known in early times, the use of which was then reserved for the patricians; then came the coemptio, or sale, established by Servius Tullius for the legitimation of plebeian unions; finally the usucapio, possession of year and day, when the woman was foreign, without relatives who could deliver her. Basically, these three formulas of marriage produced the same effects, as regards the external forum, for the wife and the children. But they were far from having the same value in public opinion with regard to what touches the most delicate part of the sacrament, namely, the dignity of love, the honorability of women, the sanctity of the marital bed; in other words, the inner forum. The proud matron hardly admitted that there was any honesty in the plebeian, married by a fictitious sale; all the more so in the foreigner, taken, so to speak, on trial, exposed to the risk of seeing the annal prescription, her only hope, interrupted by a whim of its possessor.

“Virginia, daughter of Aulus, had been driven out by the matrons of sacrifices to patrician Modesty, for having married a plebeian, the consul Volumnius. Irritated, she gathers the plebeians in a place where she has just placed an altar. After having recounted her insult: I, she adds, I consecrate this altar to plebeian modesty, so that the same emulation that exists in the Republic between men for valor also exists between matrons for purity. So let it be said in future that this altar is more revered than the other, and by those who are more chaste.” _Livy_), 1. x.)

It was not enough for the dignity of the matron to be married and to observe the duties of marriage, it was necessary to have been married according to the sacred, justifying rite, superior to the civil convention per œs et libram as much as the religion itself is elevated above interest. The idea was laudable, for it came from an exquisite feeling for the honor of woman and the dignity of marriage; the severe patricians were fundamentally right: they were only mistaken in form. This virtue of justification that was demanded of the confarreatio, accompanying it with supplications and sacrifices, this legitimization in the interior, did it therefore depend on a material ceremony, on a few formulas of prayer? Common sense rejects such a fetishism, and the Latin legislator, in agreement with public opinion, agreed on this point with the wife of Volumnius. The confarreatio, which no apparent positive reason protected, gradually fell into disuse: this is the fate of all unexplained symbolism; the coemptio disappeared in its turn from a similar cause; and the usucapio being raised by one degree, the public consent of the parties suffices in the end for the validity of the marriage.

It was in hatred of this aristocratic spirit that Plato, in his Republic, abolished marriage and made women common. In his opinion he did not debase them; only, as he did not discover in the distinction of the sexes any juridical or social thought, as he saw in woman only an instrument of reproduction and pleasure, he said to himself that she fell under the domain of the republic neither more nor less than industry and property, and, just as he had degraded the man from patrician dignity, he deprived the woman in her turn of the nobility that is proper to her, marriage. Such was the will of the reason of state of his communist republic, conceived in a spirit of repression of the ancient individuality, the exaggeration of which had become a danger for Greece.

Mais si la civilisation tend à l’égalité, elle se refuse à toute déchéance. La législation des empereurs, et plus tard le christianisme, conservèrent le mariage et en rendirent le rite uniforme : sous ce rapport du moins tout le monde devint noble, et chacun put se dire aristocrate.

XIII. — In all acts, whether in his private life or in his public life, man tends to safeguard his dignity, consequently to realize, within and outside himself, Justice.

In amorous relations there will therefore always be, in as slight a degree as you like, a tendency to marriage, to the consecration of love by honor and right; and this tendency, proportional to the ideal inspired by the loved object, will acquire its maximum intensity at the moment that precedes the possession.

Here we begin to glimpse the secret motive that leads man to marriage, a motive that will already explain two things to us: the first, why marriage at its origin assumes an aristocratic character; the other, why among the ancients concubinage and vulgar love were deemed less unworthy, less shameful than today.

Marriage, by its institution, is aristocratic: it was not found among the islanders of Oceania, living, at the time of discovery, in an Edenic equality. Then, among peoples where marriage is already established, but where slavery and polygamy still exist, we must distinguish between the wife and the concubine, the first of free birth, that is to say noble, the another of servile or plebeian condition. Hence a radical difference in the prerogatives: for the wife alone, there is an engagement, a contract, a legitimate marriage, privileges, rights, above all respect for the city. As for the concubine, after having served for the pleasures of her owner, she becomes his servant again, she serves as chambermaid, baker, perfumer, says Deuteronomy about the royal statute with which it threatens the Israelites. In the Decalogue it is forbidden, by one and the same commandment, to covet either the wife or the servant (concubine) of one’s neighbor. But the consequences of the infraction are very different, depending on whether the woman is free or servant, wife or favorite. In the first case, the death penalty; in the second, penalty of the stick.

But nowhere does this aristocratic spirit show itself with greater force than in the ceremonies of Roman marriage, according to the class to which the spouses belonged.

First there was the confarreatio, or sacred banquet, the only mode of celebration known in early times, the use of which was then reserved for the patricians; then came the coemptio, or sale, established by Servius Tullius for the legitimation of plebeian unions; finally the usucapio, possession of year and day, when the woman was foreign, without relatives who could deliver her. Basically, these three formulas of marriage produced the same effects, as regards the external forum, for the wife and the children. But they were far from having the same value in public opinion with regard to what touches the most delicate part of the sacrament, namely, the dignity of love, the honorability of women, the sanctity of the marital bed; in other words, the inner forum. The proud matron hardly admitted that there was any honesty in the plebeian, married by a fictitious sale; all the more so in the foreigner, taken, so to speak, on trial, exposed to the risk of seeing the annal prescription, her only hope, interrupted by a whim of its possessor.

“Virginia, daughter of Aulus, had been driven out by the matrons of sacrifices to patrician Modesty, for having married a plebeian, the consul Volumnius. Irritated, she gathers the plebeians in a place where she has just placed an altar. After having recounted her insult: I, she adds, I consecrate this altar to plebeian modesty, so that the same emulation that exists in the Republic between men for valor also exists between matrons for purity. So let it be said in future that this altar is more revered than the other, and by those who are more chaste.” Livy), 1. x.)

It was not enough for the dignity of the matron to be married and to observe the duties of marriage, it was necessary to have been married according to the sacred, justifying rite, superior to the civil convention per œs et libram as much as the religion itself is elevated above interest. The idea was laudable, for it came from an exquisite feeling for the honor of woman and the dignity of marriage; the severe patricians were fundamentally right: they were only mistaken in form. This virtue of justification that was demanded of the confarreatio, accompanying it with supplications and sacrifices, this legitimization in the interior, did it therefore depend on a material ceremony, on a few formulas of prayer? Common sense rejects such a fetishism, and the Latin legislator, in agreement with public opinion, agreed on this point with the wife of Volumnius. The confarreatio, which no apparent positive reason protected, gradually fell into disuse: this is the fate of all unexplained symbolism; the coemptio disappeared in its turn from a similar cause; and the usucapio being raised by one degree, the public consent of the parties suffices in the end for the validity of the marriage.

It was in hatred of this aristocratic spirit that Plato, in his Republic, abolished marriage and made women common. In his opinion he did not debase them; only, as he did not discover in the distinction of the sexes any juridical or social thought, as he saw in woman only an instrument of reproduction and pleasure, he said to himself that she fell under the domain of the republic neither more nor less than industry and property, and, just as he had degraded the man from patrician dignity, he deprived the woman in her turn of the nobility that is proper to her, marriage. Such was the will of the reason of state of his communist republic, conceived in a spirit of repression of the ancient individuality, the exaggeration of which had become a danger for Greece.

But if civilization tends towards legality, it refuses any decline. The legislation of the emperors, and later Christianity, preserved marriage and made its ritual uniform: in this respect at least every married woman became noble, and each could call herself an aristocrat.

XIV. — If the efficient cause of marriage, I mean, if the juridical element that tends to be introduced between man and woman to sanctify their love and transform, in a superior interest, their union, if, I say , this element resides essentially in the heart of humanity, in the common conscience of the husband and the wife, and if the nuptial, public, solemn rite, is for no other purpose than to give it, with authenticity, impulse and life, it is evident that something of this element, of its action, of its influence, must be found in every love not consecrated by law, in which man and woman, freely, temporarily, can indulge. A ray of Venus Urania will always shine in the darkness of marshy Venus: it is not given to man, whatever he does, to deny his soul.

More humane in this respect than Christianity has made us, antiquity had had a deep feeling for this fact, and, while raising high the matrimonial dignity, it had tried, by its tolerance, by its customs and its institutions, to redeem the unworthiness of free love.

Apart from aristocratic and solemn marriage, the Greeks admitted, in cases where marriage was deemed, for whatever reason, impracticable, a concubinage that was not in itself degrading, although the woman had no legal rights and her children could not take the place of the legitimate ones. The companion, hetaira, was not infamous; deprived of the honors of the wife, she often prevailed over her in fidelity, chastity and sacrifice.

The famous Briseis, innocent cause of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, was, like Chryseis, the daughter of the high priest, who had from a captive become a hetaira. What could be more touching, more decent, than the tears of this young girl, when she sees herself taken away from her Achilles, the master of her heart and her person? Compare her farewells with those of Andromache, Hector’s lawful wife, and you will find in the difference in the poet’s tones the difference in the condition of the two women, but nothing that betrays the slightest idea of debasement. — Alcibiades, a refugee in Asia, was living with a hetaira when he was assassinated: we know with what pious care she collected the body of her friend and gave him the last duties. — The Ten Thousand, of the famous retreat, each had their companion. These women followed them on the marches and on the battlefield, preparing their meals, dressing their wounds and rendering them all the services of devoted and faithful wives. Religion apart, do you believe, Monsignor, that these women are not equal, for heroism, to our Sisters of Charity, whose ministry, I know as you do, ceases when the patient recovers? Do you believe that the heart of the soldier did not feel stronger, sustained by this pious and gratuitous tenderness?… — Aspasia, whom we insultingly qualify as a courtesan, was the lady-in-waiting of Pericles. Aristotle, Plato, the philosophers in general, were involved in similar bonds: it never occurred to a Greek to find in this material for criticism and calumny.

XIV. — If the efficient cause of marriage, I mean, if the juridical element that tends to be introduced between man and woman to sanctify their love and transform, in a superior interest, their union, if, I say , this element resides essentially in the heart of humanity, in the common conscience of the husband and the wife, and if the nuptial, public, solemn rite, is for no other purpose than to give it, with authenticity, impulse and life, it is evident that something of this element, of its action, of its influence, must be found in every love not consecrated by law, in which man and woman, freely, temporarily, can indulge. A ray of Venus Urania will always shine in the darkness of marshy Venus: it is not given to man, whatever he does, to deny his soul.

More humane in this respect than Christianity has made us, antiquity had had a deep feeling for this fact, and, while raising high the matrimonial dignity, it had tried, by its tolerance, by its customs and its institutions, to redeem the unworthiness of free love.

Apart from aristocratic and solemn marriage, the Greeks admitted, in cases where marriage was deemed, for whatever reason, impracticable, a concubinage that was not in itself degrading, although the woman had no legal rights and her children could not take the place of the legitimate ones. The companion, hetaira, was not infamous; deprived of the honors of the wife, she often prevailed over her in fidelity, chastity and sacrifice.

The famous Briseis, innocent cause of the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, was, like Chryseis, the daughter of the high priest, who had from a captive become a hetaira. What could be more touching, more decent, than the tears of this young girl, when she sees herself taken away from her Achilles, the master of her heart and her person? Compare her farewells with those of Andromache, Hector’s lawful wife, and you will find in the difference in the poet’s tones the difference in the condition of the two women, but nothing that betrays the slightest idea of debasement. — Alcibiades, a refugee in Asia, was living with a hetaira when he was assassinated: we know with what pious care she collected the body of her friend and gave him the last duties. — The Ten Thousand, of the famous retreat, each had their companion. These women followed them on the marches and on the battlefield, preparing their meals, dressing their wounds and rendering them all the services of devoted and faithful wives. Religion apart, do you believe, Monsignor, that these women are not equal, for heroism, to our Sisters of Charity, whose ministry, I know as you do, ceases when the patient recovers? Do you believe that the heart of the soldier did not feel stronger, sustained by this pious and gratuitous tenderness?… — Aspasia, whom we insultingly qualify as a courtesan, was the lady-in-waiting of Pericles. Aristotle, Plato, the philosophers in general, were involved in similar bonds: it never occurred to a Greek to find in this material for criticism and calumny.

L’idée que la condition de l’hétaïre, illustrée par la poésie, la philosophie et l’histoire, n’était pas incompatible avec une certaine dignité, inspira l’empereur Auguste, lorsque, trouvant les Romains rebelles à l’antique conjugium, il donna un titre légal au concubinat, et éleva à la hauteur d’une institution publique ces unions libres, que la gravité des vieux patriciens avait toujours refoulées, et que multipliait la décadence des mœurs républicaines. M. Troplong (De l’influence du christianisme sur le droit civil des Romains, in-12), accusant cet empereur d’avoir précipité la dissolution des mœurs, a également méconnu l’histoire et le cœur humain.

Marriage, for reasons which it is easy to guess, and in spite of the facilities offered by divorce, so widely practiced in the last days of the republic, had become onerous from all points of view; the majority resorted to unions where liberty, love and economy found their account better. Augustus regularized these new mores by creating, so to speak, the civil status of concubinage, and in my opinion he did something moral. It was marriage reborn under another name: time had only to take its course.

« Ce qui différenciait le concubinatus du mariage légitime, appelé justa nuptiæ, c’est que par ce mariage l’homme ne prenait pas la femme avec laquelle il se mariait pour l’avoir à titre de légitime épouse (justa uxor), mais il la prenait pour l’avoir à titre de femme et de concubine. Les enfants qui naissaient de ce mariage n’avaient pas les droits de famille, ils n’étaient pas justi liberi ; ils n’étaient pas néanmoins bâtards. On les appelait liberi naturales. On appelait nothi et spuris les enfants qui étaient nés ex acorto et d’unions défendues. (Pothier, Contrat de mariage.)

« Sous l’empereur Justinien le concubinage n’était point encore aboli ; il était permis d’avoir une concubine. » (Merlin, Recueil de jurispr.)

(V. aussi Digeste, t. XXV, tit. vii, Des Concubines ; Aulu-Gelle, Nuits attiques, liv. IV, chap. iii.)

L’homme marié ne pouvait avoir de concubine : la femme avec laquelle il avait alors commerce était pellex.

Virgil, in his Dido, also seems to me to have alluded to the Homeric custom of the hetairate; and it is, in my opinion, to badly misunderstand this poet to compare the loves of the Queen of Carthage with those of a sinner of our time. More severe than Augustus, however, Virgil is careful not to ennoble concubinage, and if he made Dido so touching, it was to heighten the matronly modesty, represented by Lavinie. The Aeneid was the canto of Roman right, as the Iliad and the Odyssey had been the canto of Greek right, a work consequently of high public morality. Epic proprieties did not permit Virgil either to suggest that he placed concubinage on the level of marriage, or to indulge in an erotic description that would not have found its excuse in the public conscience itself.

Notice first that Juno, the chaste and severe goddess, presides over the clandestine union of Dido, a union that she proposes to change into a firm and legitimate marriage:

Connubio jungam stabili propriamque dicabo ;

que les cérémonies nuptiales sont accomplies sur la montagne par les nymphes ; que Mercure, envoyé auprès d’Énée pour lui faire rompre cet engagement, déjà le traite de Vir uxorius, mari benêt ; qu’Énée lui-même, avant ce message, n’eût pas demandé mieux que de se fixer auprès de Didon et de joindre la fortune de Troie à celle de Carthage. Didon, d’ailleurs, l’avait ainsi espéré ; elle avait vu et dû voir dans cette consommation si prompte un gage de la solennité à venir ; elle le dit formellement :

To all this what does Aeneas reply? He objects to the order of the gods, the destinies of his nation to whom Italy is promised; he denies that he ever spoke to Dido about marriage, and that he came with the intention of merging the two nations:

And this denial, which in our customs would be an act of disloyalty and for a woman the ultimate outrage, is in no way contrary to ancient modesty and probity. On the part of Aeneas there is no more offense than bad faith and ingratitude.

Where then is the fault? one will ask, because on this point Virgil is formal:

The fault lies entirely with Dido: it consists in the fact that, widow of a prince and queen, having so many titles to a legitimate union, she was not permitted to form a secret union, in the manner of a Berenice or a Madame de Maintenon, and to prelude marriage by the enjoyments of the hetaire. Her complaints, voiced with the violence of vexed passion, are those of a sacrificed companion, not of a deceived wife; in this regard, she is so far from considering her fault as we would today, that she regrets not having at least one child from her temporary union:

. . . . . . .Si quis mihi parvulus aulà
Luderet Æneas ;

an idea that will certainly never come to a libertine.

Moreover, I have made known elsewhere the political and social reason for this episode of the Aeneid. Virgil, by admitting, with Homer, Plato, Augustus himself, a certain honorability in concubinage, wanted above all to glorify Roman marriage, and to reprove consequently the degradation of the imperial majesty of which Antony had made himself guilty, by his concubinage with Cleopatra. Let us not forget that the triumvir, after having repudiated Octavia to take the queen of Egypt, replies to Augustus: “What harm am I doing? Cleopatra is my wife. Can you say as much of Tertulla, Terentilla, and so many others that you woo against all right and all modesty?…” About a hundred years after Virgil read his poem in the presence of Augustus and Octavie, Antoine’s abandoned wife, the tragedy of the foundress of Carthage and the Trojan hero was played out naturally between Titus and Berenice, whose concubinage, certainly not love, hurt the Roman soldier so deeply. At a time when solemn marriage was falling into disuse, the quality of concubine or hetaire was a step towards the dignity of wife: this transition, which our civilization rejects, seems to me to have been, after the fall of the Roman Republic, the main supporting morality in gender relations.

XV. — The idea that the condition of the hetaire, illustrated by poetry and history, was not incompatible with a certain dignity, inspired the Emperor Augustus, when, finding the Romans rebellious to the ancient conjugium, he gave a legal title to concubinage, and raised to the height of a public institution those free unions that the gravity of the old patricians had always repressed, and which the decadence of republican manners multiplied. M. Troplong (De l’influence du christianisme sur le droit civil des Romains), accusing this emperor of having hastened the dissolution of morals, has equally misunderstood history and the human heart.

Marriage, for reasons which it is easy to guess, and in spite of the facilities offered by divorce, so widely practiced in the last days of the republic, had become onerous from all points of view; the majority resorted to unions where liberty, love and economy found their account better. Augustus regularized these new mores by creating, so to speak, the civil status of concubinage, and in my opinion he did something moral. It was marriage reborn under another name: time had only to take its course.

“What differentiated concubinatus from legitimate marriage, called justæ nuptiæ, is that by this marriage the man did not take the woman he was marrying to have her as his legitimate wife (justa uxor), but he took her to have her as wife and concubine. The children born of this marriage did not have family rights, they were not justi liberi; they were not however bastards. They were called liberi naturales. Children who were born ex acorto and from forbidden unions were called nothi et spurii.” (PothierContrat de mariage.)

“Under the Emperor Justinian concubinage was not yet abolished; it was permissible to have a concubine.” (Merlin, Recueil de jurispr.)

(See also Digeste, Bk. XXV, tit vii, Des Concubines; Aulu-Gelle, Nuits attiques, Bk. IV, chap. 111.)

A married man could not have a concubine: the woman with whom he then had commerce was a pellex.

Virgil, in his Dido, also seems to me to have alluded to the Homeric custom of the hetairate; and it is, in my opinion, to badly misunderstand this poet to compare the loves of the Queen of Carthage with those of a sinner of our time. More severe than Augustus, however, Virgil is careful not to ennoble concubinage, and if he made Dido so touching, it was to heighten the matronly modesty, represented by Lavinie. The Aeneid was the canto of Roman right, as the Iliad and the Odyssey had been the canto of Greek right, a work consequently of high public morality. Epic proprieties did not permit Virgil either to suggest that he placed concubinage on the level of marriage, or to indulge in an erotic description that would not have found its excuse in the public conscience itself.

Notice first that Juno, the chaste and severe goddess, presides over the clandestine union of Dido, a union that she proposes to change into a firm and legitimate marriage:

Connubio jungam stabili propriamque dicabo;

that nuptial ceremonies are performed on the mountain by nymphs; that Mercury, sent to Aeneas to make him break this engagement, already treats him as Vir uxorius, husband subject to his wife; that Aeneas himself, before this message, would have asked nothing better than to settle with Dido and to join the fortune of Troy to that of Carthage. Dido, moreover, had hoped so; she had seen and should have seen in this prompt consumption a pledge of the solemnity to come; she says it formally:

. . . . . Nec te data dextera quondam…
Per connubia nostra, per incœptos hymenasos…
Hoc solum nomen (hospitis) quoniam de conjage restat.

To all this what does Aeneas reply? He objects to the order of the gods, the destinies of his nation to whom Italy is promised; he denies that he ever spoke to Dido about marriage, and that he came with the intention of merging the two nations:

. . . . . . . . . .Nec conjugis unquam
Prætendi tœdas, aut haoc in fœdera veni.

And this denial, which in our customs would be an act of disloyalty and for a woman the ultimate outrage, is in no way contrary to ancient modesty and probity. On the part of Aeneas there is no more offense than bad faith and ingratitude.

Where then is the fault? one will ask, because on this point Virgil is formal:

Conjugium vocat, hoc prætexit nomine culpam.

The fault lies entirely with Dido: it consists in the fact that, widow of a prince and queen, having so many titles to a legitimate union, she was not permitted to form a secret union, in the manner of a Berenice or a Madame de Maintenon, and to prelude marriage by the enjoyments of the hetaire. Her complaints, voiced with the violence of vexed passion, are those of a sacrificed companion, not of a deceived wife; in this regard, she is so far from considering her fault as we would today, that she regrets not having at least one child from her temporary union:

. . . . . . .Si quis mihi parvulus aulà
Luderet Æneas ;

an idea that will certainly never come to a libertine.

Moreover, I have made known elsewhere the political and social reason for this episode of the Aeneid. Virgil, by admitting, with Homer, Plato, Augustus himself, a certain honorability in concubinage, wanted above all to glorify Roman marriage, and to reprove consequently the degradation of the imperial majesty of which Antony had made himself guilty, by his concubinage with Cleopatra. Let us not forget that the triumvir, after having repudiated Octavia to take the queen of Egypt, replies to Augustus: “What harm am I doing? Cleopatra is my wife. Can you say as much of Tertulla, Terentilla, and so many others that you woo against all right and all modesty?…” About a hundred years after Virgil read his poem in the presence of Augustus and Octavie, Antoine’s abandoned wife, the tragedy of the foundress of Carthage and the Trojan hero was played out naturally between Titus and Berenice, whose concubinage, certainly not love, hurt the Roman soldier so deeply. At a time when solemn marriage was falling into disuse, the quality of concubine or hetaire was a step towards the dignity of wife: this transition, which our civilization rejects, seems to me to have been, after the fall of the Roman Republic, the main supporting morality in gender relations.

XV. — But if marriage was dreaded by many because of the decorum, the domestic responsibilities, the pretensions of the matron, etc., it was not easier, and for analogous reasons, for anyone who wanted to give themselves a concubine or hetaira. What to do then?… Paganism had dared to ask the question: we must see the answer.

L’homme a besoin de s’honorer jusque dans le péché. Je n’aime point, je l’avoue, ces accommodements avec la conscience ; mais je ne puis m’empêcher de reconnaître ici, une fois de plus, le sens moral de l’antiquité. Elle avait porté haut la dignité de l’épouse ; elle avait honoré la concubine : laisserait-elle périr la femme vouée à l’amour universel, qui, ne pouvant devenir la compagne d’aucun, est condamnée à servir de maîtresse à tous ?

There were therefore, apart from wives and concubines, for the service of passing love and at the lowest price, courtesans, such as there are among us despite the prescriptions of Christianity; but with this difference, that among the ancients religion intervened in favor of these women, delivered by our morals to the lowest of infamies. They were placed under the protection of Venus, they served in her temple; their dignity, if I dare use this word in speaking of prostituted women, was somehow saved by the priesthood. They were called, in the language of the East, whence they passed into Greece, consecrated daughters, in Hebrew gadischoth, literally saints.

There exists in Japan a similar and much more perfected custom.

“In Japan, as in Greece, as in ancient and modern India, gallant women by profession seem to have a poetic and religious mission that is linked to the ancient bases of social organization, and that allows them to preserve their rights to prerogatives of their sex and with respect to society. Their education is the object of the most assiduous care. They are taught everything that can help to enhance their natural advantages, to develop their intelligence. Once their commitment has expired, these women return to their families; a large number succeed in finding husbands, and no one thinks of reminding them of their past life. The number of tea houses (dwellings of these women) exceeds all our European forecasts. In Nangasaki, a city of 70,000 souls, there are more than 750.” (Univers pittoresque, Bk.. VIII, p. 45 and 46.)

Thus was conceived, by the Justice immanent in Humanity, the cult of the vulgar Venus; because, let us not forget it, any religion, however polluted it appears, is an expression of Justice. Certainly the Revolution does not intend, whatever has been said, to rehabilitate the prostitute; but, really, is not the way in which our Christian hypocrisy explains and judges the mores of the past stupid? Who, then, in Japan, India, Babylonia, Greece, ever placed Aphrodite’s protégée in the rank of wife, or only hetaira? What man of sense, able to give himself one or the other of these, preferred to them the common lover, the omnivorous woman, the one whom brutal Latin called a she-wolf, lupam?

What must be seen here is this feeling, naive and profound, of the dignity of woman, which changed into an act of religion what the least severe morality cannot help stigmatizing as the height of degradation.

Oh what! When Simonides, celebrating the patriotism of the courtesans of Corinth, dares to make for them, in the name of all the Greeks, this epigraph: These prayed to Venus, who, for their love, saved Greece, we do not would see in these words only a horrible profanation of the fatherland and an insult to conjugal love! Why not understand rather that this testimony of public recognition, which after all had its principle in the institutions, was intended to exalt the moral sense in these women, by making them understand that they too had a part in the destinies of the Greek homeland? Nowadays, official insult would have driven them back into the filth of their temple: who knows how many of them then passed from the status of courtesans to that of more honored companions? And certainly, when later, towards the first century of our era, everything was corrupted in polytheistic society; when the woman, wife as well as courtesan, seemed in every degree degraded, if there was a means of reforming morals, it was not on these proud and depraved matrons that one could try it; it was rather about those creatures of the third rank whose hearts, in a way purified by the very excess of debauchery, reopened to the inspirations of chaste love and virtue. Didn’t the Church have its Madeleine, its Thaïs, its Affre, who, with a single leap, rose from the mire of prostitution to the sublimities of penance and martyrdom? O priests, whom politics, not the modesty of your popes, had so much difficulty in snatching from concubinage, you know nothing of religion; for you know neither the human heart, nor the march of society, nor your history.

XVI. — But if marriage was dreaded by many because of the decorum, the domestic responsibilities, the pretensions of the matron, etc., it was not easier, and for analogous reasons, for anyone who wanted to give themselves a concubine or hetaira. What to do then?… Paganism had dared to ask the question: we must see the answer.

Man needs to honor himself even in sin. I do not like, I confess, these compromises with conscience; but I cannot help recognizing here, once more, the moral sense of antiquity. It had carried high the dignity of the wife; it had honored the concubine: would it let perish the woman dedicated to universal love, who, unable to become the companion of anyone, was condemned to serve as mistress to all?

There were therefore, apart from wives and concubines, for the service of passing love and at the lowest price, courtesans, such as there are among us despite the prescriptions of Christianity; but with this difference, that among the ancients religion intervened in favor of these women, delivered by our morals to the lowest of infamies. They were placed under the protection of Venus, they served in her temple; their dignity, if I dare use this word in speaking of prostituted women, was somehow saved by the priesthood. They were called, in the language of the East, whence they passed into Greece, consecrated daughters, in Hebrew gadischoth, literally saints.

There exists in Japan a similar and much more perfected custom.

“In Japan, as in Greece, as in ancient and modern India, gallant women by profession seem to have a poetic and religious mission that is linked to the ancient bases of social organization, and that allows them to preserve their rights to prerogatives of their sex and with respect to society. Their education is the object of the most assiduous care. They are taught everything that can help to enhance their natural advantages, to develop their intelligence. Once their commitment has expired, these women return to their families; a large number succeed in finding husbands, and no one thinks of reminding them of their past life. The number of tea houses (dwellings of these women) exceeds all our European forecasts. In Nangasaki, a city of 70,000 souls, there are more than 750.” (Univers pittoresque, Bk.. VIII, p. 45 and 46.)

Thus was conceived, by the Justice immanent in Humanity, the cult of the vulgar Venus; because, let us not forget it, any religion, however polluted it appears, is an expression of Justice. Certainly the Revolution does not intend, whatever has been said, to rehabilitate the prostitute; but, really, is not the way in which our Christian hypocrisy explains and judges the mores of the past stupid? Who, then, in Japan, India, Babylonia, Greece, ever placed Aphrodite’s protégée in the rank of wife, or only hetaira? What man of sense, able to give himself one or the other of these, preferred to them the common lover, the omnivorous woman, the one whom brutal Latin called a she-wolf, lupam?

What must be seen here is this feeling, naive and profound, of the dignity of woman, which changed into an act of religion what the least severe morality cannot help stigmatizing as the height of degradation.

Oh what! When Simonides, celebrating the patriotism of the courtesans of Corinth, dares to make for them, in the name of all the Greeks, this epigraph: These prayed to Venus, who, for their love, saved Greece, we do not would see in these words only a horrible profanation of the fatherland and an insult to conjugal love! Why not understand rather that this testimony of public recognition, which after all had its principle in the institutions, was intended to exalt the moral sense in these women, by making them understand that they too had a part in the destinies of the Greek homeland? Nowadays, official insult would have driven them back into the filth of their temple: who knows how many of them then passed from the status of courtesans to that of more honored companions? And certainly, when later, towards the first century of our era, everything was corrupted in polytheistic society; when the woman, wife as well as courtesan, seemed in every degree degraded, if there was a means of reforming morals, it was not on these proud and depraved matrons that one could try it; it was rather about those creatures of the third rank whose hearts, in a way purified by the very excess of debauchery, reopened to the inspirations of chaste love and virtue. Didn’t the Church have its Madeleine, its Thaïs, its Affre, who, with a single leap, rose from the mire of prostitution to the sublimities of penance and martyrdom? O priests, whom politics, not the modesty of your popes, had so much difficulty in snatching from concubinage, you know nothing of religion; for you know neither the human heart, nor the march of society, nor your history.

XVI. — Let us summarize these facts, and bring out their development and series.

The point of departure for the institution of marriage and the family is generation.

Exalted, transformed by idealism, this instinct becomes love, the most powerful movement of the soul after Justice, engendered by the combination of two fatalities, one organic, the other intellectual.

In this state, love is itself the most tyrannical of fatalisms, remarkable above all for its increasing and decreasing evolution, irresistible when it comes, impossible to retain when it goes away.

There, however, does not end for humanity the relationship created between the two sexes by generation and love.

Man feels his dignity in others: hence, in general, Justice.

From one sex to the other, this dignity is felt in a particular way, which adds to love a hitherto unknown character of serenity and tenderness, extinguishes passion, and creates an attachment that all those who have it experienced unanimously judge of nature to be able to last, in spite of the external degradation of the loved object, as long as life.

Thus man loves all at once by his senses, by his mind and by his conscience: he cannot not love thus, because he is a man.

According to the power of idealization and Justice of the lover, and the quality of the loved object, the union of man and woman will incline more or less towards one or the other of these terms: the senses, the ideal, the conscience. Hence three principal degrees of manifestation of love: fornication, concubinage, marriage, in other words, lust, voluptuousness, chastity.

It may be that as a result of a mistake or of circumstances beyond the control of the persons, there is a reversal of mode in legal situations; let some married people be abominable fornicators, some concubinaries true husbands, if not for the external forum at least for the conscience. These contradictions, which relate only to appearances, confirm the rule: it is that a more or less profound feeling of dignity is always present in the amorous manifestations of man, a feeling that is the principle of marriage.

How does this principle translate into a religious act?

All of our studies explain it. Justice has religion as its primary expression; Conjugal love, founded on mutual dignity, and, if I may say so, on community of conscience, therefore takes on a tinge of piety. All lovers are inclined to devotion; the family becomes, through love, the focus of worship: therein lies the secret of the duration of religions.

As for the particular position of the woman in the domestic site, her share of freedom and influence, remarkably enough, is everywhere the opposite of the respectability of the bond that unites her to the man.

The gallant woman enjoys all her independence: trafficking in her charms, except for a very short moment she is nothing for the man, who is nothing for her either. She can say: I know no master; but she is degraded.

Equality reigns in concubinage, at least so long as motherhood or other disgraces do not place the woman at the mercy of her lover. But the concubine has no rights, and all she can expect from public opinion is that people will pardon the irregularity of her position in favor of the virtues she displays there.

Honor and dependence are for the wife.

« Nulle part autant qu’à Rome la chose publique n’accepta et ne glorifia la vertu féminine ; nulle part la femme ne fut plus citoyenne, plus associée aux dangers, aux triomphes, aux intérêts, à la gloire commune… Elle tient le second rang dans la cité. Tout père est prêtre, guerrier (quiris), patron, maître (dominus) ; au dessous du père, la femme, matrona ; puis, les libres, liberi ; les esclaves, servi ; les clients, qui n’ont pas droit de parler, elingues, c’est-à-dire qui n’ont pas de droit politique. » (Franz de Champagny, les Césars.)

But, make no mistake about it, if the honor is great, the subordination to the father of the family is rigorous. The Roman woman was never anything but a housewife: Domi mansit, lanam fecit; she kept the house and spun the wool, it was said of her, and the most illustrious made a point of fulfilling this modest duty. Lucrèce, Clélie, Valérie, Virginie, Véturie, Cornélie, Aurélie, Caesar’s mother; Atia, mother of Augustus, Livia herself, Porcie, Arrie, Agrippina, wife of Germanicus, all these heroines, to whom we have nothing to compare, were above all workers, priestesses of the domestic sanctuary. The old Romans did not suffer from the interference of sex in the things of the State: we know that the parricide Nero was almost justified in the eyes of the plebs, as if, following the example of Brutus, executioner of his sons, in killing his mother he would have done no more than perform a necessary act of paternal authority.

This severity of Latin mores seems excessive to us: no intimate romance of the first seven centuries of Rome has come down to us, and we wonder, reading in the jurists the details of matrimonial ceremonies and the duties of the wife, whether the Romans truly loved their women.

Question de bas-bleus et de coquettes. Le mariage romain par confarreatio est le chef-d’œuvre de la conscience humaine : en faut-il davantage pour démontrer que les femmes romaines furent les plus aimées de toutes les femmes ? Pendant près de six siècles, pas une séparation, pas un divorce, ne vint scandaliser la cité ; encore le premier qui en donna l’exemple, Sp. Carvilius Ruga, cité par les historiens pour l’étrangeté du fait, ne fit-il, en se séparant d’une épouse adorée, mais stérile, qu’obéir à l’ordre des censeurs, qui lui avaient fait promettre de donner des enfants à la République. La constitution de l’État ne fut elle-même qu’une extension de celle de la famille : qui touchait à celle-ci, ébranlait aussitôt celle-là. Toutes les révolutions romaines ont pour cause un attentat à l’honneur domestique : la mort de Lucrèce amène l’expulsion des rois et l’établissement de la République ; celle de Virginie détermine la chute du décemvirat ; le crime de Papirius produit la liberté civile ; un peu plus tard, l’insulte faite à une autre Virginie amène la divulgation des formules : alors le mariage plébéien, coemptio, devient l’égal du mariage patricien, confarreatio. Mais de cette époque date aussi l’altération de la charte domestique ; la constitution de la famille entraînant celle de l’État, le droit public est changé, mutatum autem jus, selon l’observation de Tite-Live, et la République que soutient de moins en moins le respect des pères, patres conscripti, incline à sa perte. (Voir une excellente monographie du Mariage romain, par M. Picot, in-8^o, 1849.)

The question now is to know if the principle of conscience that in the union of man and woman is added to love to purify it, to reassure it, to convert it, to make of it a spiritual and foolproof love, as indicated by the mythological fraternity of Love and Hymen; if, I say, this principle really has the required efficacy; under what conditions it can acquire this efficiency; what the act or sacrament of marriage is worth for this purpose; what destiny it makes for woman, and of what importance it is for justice and society.

Let us follow the story.

XVII. — Let us summarize these facts, and bring out their development and series.

The point of departure for the institution of marriage and the family is generation.

Exalted, transformed by idealism, this instinct becomes love, the most powerful movement of the soul after Justice, engendered by the combination of two fatalities, one organic, the other intellectual.

In this state, love is itself the most tyrannical of fatalisms, remarkable above all for its increasing and decreasing evolution, irresistible when it comes, impossible to retain when it goes away.

There, however, does not end for humanity the relationship created between the two sexes by generation and love.

Man feels his dignity in others: hence, in general, Justice.

From one sex to the other, this dignity is felt in a particular way, which adds to love a hitherto unknown character of serenity and tenderness, extinguishes passion, and creates an attachment that all those who have it experienced unanimously judge of nature to be able to last, in spite of the external degradation of the loved object, as long as life.

Thus man loves all at once by his senses, by his mind and by his conscience: he cannot not love thus, because he is a man.

According to the power of idealization and Justice of the lover, and the quality of the loved object, the union of man and woman will incline more or less towards one or the other of these terms: the senses, the ideal, the conscience. Hence three principal degrees of manifestation of love: fornication, concubinage, marriage, in other words, lust, voluptuousness, chastity.

It may be that as a result of a mistake or of circumstances beyond the control of the persons, there is a reversal of mode in legal situations; let some married people be abominable fornicators, some concubinaries true husbands, if not for the external forum at least for the conscience. These contradictions, which relate only to appearances, confirm the rule: it is that a more or less profound feeling of dignity is always present in the amorous manifestations of man, a feeling that is the principle of marriage.

How does this principle translate into a religious act?

All of our studies explain it. Justice has religion as its primary expression; Conjugal love, founded on mutual dignity, and, if I may say so, on community of conscience, therefore takes on a tinge of piety. All lovers are inclined to devotion; the family becomes, through love, the focus of worship: therein lies the secret of the duration of religions.

As for the particular position of the woman in the domestic site, her share of freedom and influence, remarkably enough, is everywhere the opposite of the respectability of the bond that unites her to the man.

The gallant woman enjoys all her independence: trafficking in her charms, except for a very short moment she is nothing for the man, who is nothing for her either. She can say: I know no master; but she is degraded.

Equality reigns in concubinage, at least so long as motherhood or other disgraces do not place the woman at the mercy of her lover. But the concubine has no rights, and all she can expect from public opinion is that people will pardon the irregularity of her position in favor of the virtues she displays there.

Honor and dependence are for the wife.

“Nowhere so much as in Rome did public affairs accept and glorify feminine virtue; nowhere was woman more of a citizen, more associated with dangers, with triumphs, with interests, with common glory. She holds the second rank in the city. Every father is priest, warrior (quiris), patron, master (dominus); below the father, the woman, matrona; then, the free ones, liberi; the slaves, servi; clients, who have no right to speak, elingues, that is to say, who have no political right.” (Franz de Champagny, Les Césars.)

But, make no mistake about it, if the honor is great, the subordination to the father of the family is rigorous. The Roman woman was never anything but a housewife: Domi mansit, lanam fecit; she kept the house and spun the wool, it was said of her, and the most illustrious made a point of fulfilling this modest duty. Lucrèce, Clélie, Valérie, Virginie, Véturie, Cornélie, Aurélie, Caesar’s mother; Atia, mother of Augustus, Livia herself, Porcie, Arrie, Agrippina, wife of Germanicus, all these heroines, to whom we have nothing to compare, were above all workers, priestesses of the domestic sanctuary. The old Romans did not suffer from the interference of sex in the things of the State: we know that the parricide Nero was almost justified in the eyes of the plebs, as if, following the example of Brutus, executioner of his sons, in killing his mother he would have done no more than perform a necessary act of paternal authority.

This severity of Latin mores seems excessive to us: no intimate romance of the first seven centuries of Rome has come down to us, and we wonder, reading in the jurists the details of matrimonial ceremonies and the duties of the wife, whether the Romans truly loved their women.

Question of blue-stockings and coquettes. Roman marriage by confarreatio is the masterpiece of human conscience: is more needed to demonstrate that Roman women were the most loved of all women? During nearly six centuries, not a separation, not a divorce, came to scandalize the city; still the first who gave the example, Sp. Carvilius Ruga, quoted by historians for the strangeness of the fact, did he, in separating from an adored, but sterile wife, only obey the order of the censors, who had made him promise to give children to the Republic. The constitution of the state was itself only an extension of that of the family: whoever touched the latter, immediately shook the former. All Roman revolutions are caused by an attack on domestic honor; the death of Lucretius brings about the expulsion of the kings and the establishment of the Republic; that of Virginia determines the fall of the decemvirate; the crime of Papirius produces civil liberty; a little later, the insult made to another Virginia leads to the disclosure of the formulas: then the plebeian marriage, coemptio, becomes the equal of the patrician marriage, confarreatio. But from this period also dates the alteration of the domestic charter; the constitution of the family entailing that of the State, public law is changed, mutatum autem jus, according to the observation of Livy, and the Republic, which is less and less supported by the respect of the fathers, patres conscripti, inclines to his loss. (See an excellent monograph on Mariage romain, by M. _Picot_, in-8°, 1849.)

The question now is to know if the principle of conscience that in the union of man and woman is added to love to purify it, to reassure it, to convert it, to make of it a spiritual and foolproof love, as indicated by the mythological fraternity of Love and Hymen; if, I say, this principle really has the required efficacy; under what conditions it can acquire this efficiency; what the act or sacrament of marriage is worth for this purpose; what destiny it makes for woman, and of what importance it is for justice and society.

Let us follow the story.

CHAPTER III.

Corruption of marriage and love by idealism. Confusion of the sexes.

XVII. — We have seen in the preceding chapter how the experience of love, as given by the imagination and the senses, must have given rise to the idea of marriage.

This idea, there is no mistaking it, is nothing less than the project of taming love, of making it constant, faithful, indefectible, superior to itself, by penetrating it at a high dose with this feeling of dignity that accompanies man in all his actions, and by uniting man and woman in a community of conscience, of which the community of fortune is only the consequence and the pledge. Matrimonial consecration by the ministry of the priest, with sacrifice, auspices, invocation of the gods, Eucharistic banquet, secret words, blessing, exorcism, has no other meaning. For the vulgar, it was like a mysterious potion that was to confer on love the divine quality, incorruptibility. For the philosopher, it is the affirmation of conscience that repudiates love in its doubly fatal nature,

Now, Nothing is produced by virtue of nothing, Nothing tends to nothing, Nothing can be the expression of nothing. Marriage is therefore not a vain conception of conscience; it is a reality.

It is not nothing, in fact, that sublime aspiration that is is repugnant the flesh, which even beauty does not satisfy, and which under this ideal seeks a higher ideal, the ideal of the ideal. There is here a phenomenon of psychology that astonishes the mind by its loftiness, which seizes the will by its exquisite delicacy, and commands certainty by its universality. A hope from on high, which has not always lacked success, witness the six centuries of conjugal fidelity of ancient Rome.

But if we now consider marriage in its relation to the destiny of nations, we must recognize that between society and the family there exists an intimate solidarity; that as generation is a function of the organism, marriage is a function of humanity, outside of which love becomes a scourge, the distinction between the sexes no longer has any meaning, the perpetuation of the species constitutes for the living a real damage, Justice is against nature, and the plan of creation absurd.

Marriage, then, is not just an idea; nor is it just a reality: marriage is necessary, and necessarily social.

This is what we are going to demonstrate by examining what happens to love, and consequently to the family, to society, to the species, when the relations between man and woman are no longer governed by the conservative principle of marriage.

CHAPTER III.

Corruption of marriage and love by idealism. Confusion of the sexes.

XVIII. — We have seen in the preceding chapter how the experience of love, as given by the imagination and the senses, must have given rise to the idea of marriage.

This idea, there is no mistaking it, is nothing less than the project of taming love, of making it constant, faithful, indefectible, superior to itself, by penetrating it at a high dose with this feeling of dignity that accompanies man in all his actions, and by uniting man and woman in a community of conscience, of which the community of fortune is only the consequence and the pledge. Matrimonial consecration by the ministry of the priest, with sacrifice, auspices, invocation of the gods, Eucharistic banquet, secret words, blessing, exorcism, has no other meaning. For the vulgar, it was like a mysterious potion that was to confer on love the divine quality, incorruptibility. For the philosopher, it is the affirmation of conscience that repudiates love in its doubly fatal nature,

Now, Nothing is produced by virtue of nothing, Nothing tends to nothing, Nothing can be the expression of nothing. Marriage is therefore not a vain conception of conscience; it is a reality.

It is not nothing, in fact, that sublime aspiration that is is repugnant the flesh, which even beauty does not satisfy, and which under this ideal seeks a higher ideal, the ideal of the ideal. There is here a phenomenon of psychology that astonishes the mind by its loftiness, which seizes the will by its exquisite delicacy, and commands certainty by its universality. A hope from on high, which has not always lacked success, witness the six centuries of conjugal fidelity of ancient Rome.

But if we now consider marriage in its relation to the destiny of nations, we must recognize that between society and the family there exists an intimate solidarity; that as generation is a function of the organism, marriage is a function of humanity, outside of which love becomes a scourge, the distinction between the sexes no longer has any meaning, the perpetuation of the species constitutes for the living a real damage, Justice is against nature, and the plan of creation absurd.

Marriage, then, is not just an idea; nor is it just a reality: marriage is necessary, and necessarily social.

This is what we are going to demonstrate by examining what happens to love, and consequently to the family, to society, to the species, when the relations between man and woman are no longer governed by the conservative principle of marriage.

XVIII. — Everything is preserved and developed in Humanity by Justice, we have said; everything degenerates by the ideal.

It will be with the family as with the State, as with philosophy, letters and the arts. Founded on right and for right, it will perish through the idolatry of love. And as everything is linked in society, the decadence of domestic mores by erotic idealism will be all the more rapid as the corruption of public mores by political, metaphysical or aesthetic idealism goes faster, and vice versa.

Let us sketch in rapid lines the moments of this dissolution.

After having posited marriage, by an act of its religious spontaneity, the mind, obeying the law of intellectual development, studies this symbol and seeks its philosophical reason. A difficult problem, the solution of which requires a great deal of knowledge, and therefore cannot be immediately given to it. As it discovers only an entirely external ceremony, a superstitious rite, without apparent reality, the mind denies marriage; that is to say, it recognizes only the purely civil part of marriage, relating to the position of the parties with regard to third parties and to the rights of children: which equates marriage to a market in which the love has nothing to do, the conscience of the spouses nothing to see.

Thus in Rome the religious form of marriage, the confarreatio, by which the husband begat his wife spiritually before begetting children from her, fell into disuse. The coemptio, then the usucapio, producing, as regards the external forum, the same effects, we conclude with Ulpian that the contract was everything, the ceremony insignificant; that what made the marriage was the will to unite, consensus facit nuptias, plus certain stipulations concerning the contributions and acquisitions.

The family thus established on a dubious basis, since the religious side was not understood, and since for lack of understanding it was abandoned, the legitimacy of the children having become equivocal, one can conceive how it became impossible to distinguish marriage from concubinage, and how the Emperor Augustus, in the interest of the population and morals, was led to give legal title to concubinage. I am surprised that a writer such as M. Amédée Thierry (Histoire de la Gaule, t. 1) could see progress in this abandonment of the confarreatio: things spoke quite loudly, however.

Here is the case to apply the rule: The form wins over the substance. The sacrament despised, the religious sentiment of marriage is not long in dying out; the institution disappears from the home, it no longer exists except for the public square. From this moment the incompatibility of moods, ideas, feelings, takes flight; division, then scandal, entered the family; paternal authority, no longer tempered by affection, takes on a character of tyranny on which the legislator feels obliged to put a check; the woman, protected by her family, feeling her strength, exaggerating her rights, becomes insolent, aspires to equality; the children, barely adults, obtain emancipation; the family becomes a hotbed of discord, and the marital oath, sanctioned by divorce, a tacit promise of termination.

Alors, malgré les phrases pompeuses des juristes, qui continuaient à définir le mariage une participation du droit divin et humain, il devint clair pour tout le monde que cette prétendue participation se réduisait à une association de biens et de gains, communauté de profits et pertes, dont les enfants formaient le principal article. Dans un contrat de cette espèce, auquel suffisait le ministère du tabellion, les stipulations d’intérêt tenant toute la place, l’amour laissé à ses propres risques, le mot de mariage retenu par habitude et pour les convenances, l’union des époux, quant à la couche, ne se distinguait en rien de celle des concubinaires, que dis-je ? des simples fornicateurs ; de sorte qu’entre le mariage, le concubinage et la prostitution légale, il n’y avait pas de différence essentielle.

Nothing is as pitiless as logic. The nuptial veil, flammeum, torn; celestial love, promised to spouses, changed ipso facto into a lascivious caress, marital fidelity thrown to the winds, feminine modesty fallen into prudery, marriage had to be and was taken for what it was, a fool’s bargain.

XIX. — Everything is preserved and developed in Humanity by Justice, we have said; everything degenerates by the ideal.

It will be with the family as with the State, as with philosophy, letters and the arts. Founded on right and for right, it will perish through the idolatry of love. And as everything is linked in society, the decadence of domestic mores by erotic idealism will be all the more rapid as the corruption of public mores by political, metaphysical or aesthetic idealism goes faster, and vice versa.

Let us sketch in rapid lines the moments of this dissolution.

After having posited marriage, by an act of its religious spontaneity, the mind, obeying the law of intellectual development, studies this symbol and seeks its philosophical reason. A difficult problem, the solution of which requires a great deal of knowledge, and therefore cannot be immediately given to it. As it discovers only an entirely external ceremony, a superstitious rite, without apparent reality, the mind denies marriage; that is to say, it recognizes only the purely civil part of marriage, relating to the position of the parties with regard to third parties and to the rights of children: which equates marriage to a market in which the love has nothing to do, the conscience of the spouses nothing to see.

Thus in Rome the religious form of marriage, the confarreatio, by which the husband begat his wife spiritually before begetting children from her, fell into disuse. The coemptio, then the usucapio, producing, as regards the external forum, the same effects, we conclude with Ulpian that the contract was everything, the ceremony insignificant; that what made the marriage was the will to unite, consensus facit nuptias, plus certain stipulations concerning the contributions and acquisitions.

The family thus established on a dubious basis, since the religious side was not understood, and since for lack of understanding it was abandoned, the legitimacy of the children having become equivocal, one can conceive how it became impossible to distinguish marriage from concubinage, and how the Emperor Augustus, in the interest of the population and morals, was led to give legal title to concubinage. I am surprised that a writer such as M. Amédée Thierry (Histoire de la Gaule, t. 1) could see progress in this abandonment of the confarreatio: things spoke quite loudly, however.

Here is the case to apply the rule: The form wins over the substance. The sacrament despised, the religious sentiment of marriage is not long in dying out; the institution disappears from the home, it no longer exists except for the public square. From this moment the incompatibility of moods, ideas, feelings, takes flight; division, then scandal, entered the family; paternal authority, no longer tempered by affection, takes on a character of tyranny on which the legislator feels obliged to put a check; the woman, protected by her family, feeling her strength, exaggerating her rights, becomes insolent, aspires to equality; the children, barely adults, obtain emancipation; the family becomes a hotbed of discord, and the marital oath, sanctioned by divorce, a tacit promise of termination.

Then, despite the pompous phrases of the jurists, who continued to define marriage as a participation of divine and human right, it became clear to everyone that this pretended participation was reduced to a pure association of goods and gains, to a community of profits and losses, of which the children formed the principal article. In a contract of this kind, for which the ministry of the notary sufficed, the stipulations of interest occupying all the place, love left at its own risk, the word marriage retained out of habit and for convenience, the union of the spouses, as for the bed, was in no way different from that of the concubinaries, what am I saying? mere fornicators; so that between marriage, concubinage and legal prostitution, there was no longer any essential difference.

Nothing is as pitiless as logic. The nuptial veil, flammeum, torn; celestial love, promised to spouses, changed ipso facto into a lascivious caress, marital fidelity thrown to the winds, feminine modesty fallen into prudery, marriage had to be and was taken for what it was, a fool’s bargain.

XIX. — How many reasons for both sexes to abstain from it!

Old Rome had presented this miracle of five hundred and twenty years passed without a divorce: we can boldly conclude that adulteries, carefully dissimulated, were rare. What marvelous love, what respect, what charity, what force of continence this single fact recounted by all historians as being of public, official notoriety, supposed among the Quirites and their matrons!.… Such a race was made to conquer the world.

But now, with the nuptial religion, modesty has flown away; and the same men, the same women, who have astonished the world with their chastity, will astonish it with their lust.

At a time of general dissolution, in an environment fevered by luxury and pleasures, devoid of public life, without social communion, everything created endless antipathies in the spouses, everything became grounds for divorce, everything therefore militated against marriage. .

Avarice, first, the weak side of the Roman soul: household expenses are too heavy; the maintenance of the children and their education are so much taken away from personal well-being. Above the maxim Everyone by himself, everyone for himself, whose triumph led to the desertion of the forum and ensured Caesar’s fortune, reigns the fierce Primo mihi. All for me! Faced with this indomitable selfishness, what becomes of love? A consumer item, such as bread, wine, bathtubs, entertainment, which must be obtained at the fairest price. So no marriage.

Disgust with labor: the noble and the knight unload it on the plebs, who send it back to the slaves. Without labor, even that of oversight and administration, no fortune can be maintained; besides, no Justice. If the rich man, indolent and unoccupied, finds himself poor, how will it be for the citizen without patrimony, for whom no vast possessions produce rent? To marry is to condemn oneself to labor: therefore, no marriage.

The horror of offspring: the woman no longer wants them, in the interest of her beauty; the man, who puts his life to waste, for whom the Republic is reduced to the person of the prince, cares even less about it. Paternity, fatherland, patriciate, so many fables: therefore, no marriage.

The over-excitement of idealism, which under all forms, philosophy, literature, arts, invades society; the empire and its pomps; superstition and its research. A single thought governs the world, appears at the bottom of all doctrines, emerges in all works of the mind, serves as the motive force for all actions, _Pleasure_. Concubinage is already no longer sufficient for this: no doubt it is preferable to marriage, more economical, more convenient. To the man it promises more license, to the woman more equality; but it also fatigues them by monotony: variety, staging, orgiastic excitement are needed; to return to love its raptures, one resource still offers itself: debauchery.

Arrivé là, toute dignité, toute Justice s’évanouit. Plus de respect, ni pour l’âge, ni pour le sang, ni pour le lien. Toutes les barrières sont franchies : du concubinage légal, puis de la tolérance du lupanar, ou, ce qui revient au même, de la voltige amoureuse qu’entraîne le concubinage, nous entrons comme de plain-pied dans la région du crime : adultère, stupre, inceste, viol. Possible que cette série éprouve de fréquentes interversions : il en est du crime comme de la valeur, qui aux âmes bien nées n’attend pas, dit le poëte, le nombre des années. Je raisonne sur la moyenne de la moralité publique ; et l’on ne saurait nier que la marche de la dépravation dans cette moyenne ne suive le progrès indiqué plus haut :

1. Reduction of religious marriage to a purely civil convention;

2. Assimilation of conjugal love to concubinary love;

3. Desertion of marriage for cohabitation;

4. Concubinage abandoned in turn for prostitution;

5. General promiscuity, debauchery and crime.

Are we at the end? Not yet: the logic is inexorable, and we lack a conclusion.

In this retrograde movement, what does woman signify? To what does she answer? What idea does she serve? What is, before society and before nature, her destiny?

The woman, wife, concubine or prostitute, means of fortune for some, household utensil or article of fashion for the masses, object of consumption for all; the woman, apart from universal lust, has no destiny, no reason for existence, neither political, nor economic, neither philosophical nor aesthetic, nor familial; she no longer even has a puerperal reason, since the main reason that drives marriage away, the pursuit of concubinage and free love, is the fear of pregnancy, the horror of offspring.

So let us go to the end.

Generation declared incompatible with domestic felicity; the woman on the other hand, because of her natural infirmity, becoming more of a burden than a benefit, without a reason for existence, sexuality is superfluous. What good is this dualism, so annoying in its untimely fruitfulness? Nature was wrong. Could she not otherwise provide for the conservation of the species, separate the work of generation from the enjoyments of love? The woman, in this hypothesis, retaining of her present constitution only what is necessary for voluptuousness, becoming the equal of the man, could, without being a burden, preserve her independence, also fulfill the political functions and economic; or rather, all distinction of family, property and sex being suppressed, humanity would have lived in a community of goods and love where Justice, object of so many disputes, would have been as unknown as inequality itself.

L’unisexualité, tel est le dernier mot de cette dégradation de l’amour. Or, comme il ne se peut rien concevoir par l’entendement qui ne tende à se réaliser dans le fait, l’unisexualité a pour expression pratique, chez tous les peuples, la pédérastie.

XX. — How many reasons for both sexes to abstain from it!

Old Rome had presented this miracle of five hundred and twenty years passed without a divorce: we can boldly conclude that adulteries, carefully dissimulated, were rare. What marvelous love, what respect, what charity, what force of continence this single fact recounted by all historians as being of public, official notoriety, supposed among the Quirites and their matrons!.… Such a race was made to conquer the world.

But now, with the nuptial religion, modesty has flown away; and the same men, the same women, who have astonished the world with their chastity, will astonish it with their lust.

At a time of general dissolution, in an environment fevered by luxury and pleasures, devoid of public life, without social communion, everything created endless antipathies in the spouses, everything became grounds for divorce, everything therefore militated against marriage. .

Avarice, first, the weak side of the Roman soul: household expenses are too heavy; the maintenance of the children and their education are so much taken away from personal well-being. Above the maxim Everyone by himself, everyone for himself, whose triumph led to the desertion of the forum and ensured Caesar’s fortune, reigns the fierce Primo mihi. All for me! Faced with this indomitable selfishness, what becomes of love? A consumer item, such as bread, wine, bathtubs, entertainment, which must be obtained at the fairest price. So no marriage.

Disgust with labor: the noble and the knight unload it on the plebs, who send it back to the slaves. Without labor, even that of oversight and administration, no fortune can be maintained; besides, no Justice. If the rich man, indolent and unoccupied, finds himself poor, how will it be for the citizen without patrimony, for whom no vast possessions produce rent? To marry is to condemn oneself to labor: therefore, no marriage.

The horror of offspring: the woman no longer wants them, in the interest of her beauty; the man, who puts his life to waste, for whom the Republic is reduced to the person of the prince, cares even less about it. Paternity, fatherland, patriciate, so many fables: therefore, no marriage.

The over-excitement of idealism, which under all forms, philosophy, literature, arts, invades society; the empire and its pomps; superstition and its research. A single thought governs the world, appears at the bottom of all doctrines, emerges in all works of the mind, serves as the motive force for all actions, _Pleasure_. Concubinage is already no longer sufficient for this: no doubt it is preferable to marriage, more economical, more convenient. To the man it promises more license, to the woman more equality; but it also fatigues them by monotony: variety, staging, orgiastic excitement are needed; to return to love its raptures, one resource still offers itself: debauchery.

At this point, all dignity, all Justice vanishes. No more respect, neither for age, nor for blood, nor for bond. All the barriers have been crossed: from legal concubinage, then from the tolerance of the brothel, or, what comes to the same thing, from the amorous acrobatics that concubinage entails, we enter as if on the same level into the region of crime: adultery, stupor, incest, rape. It is possible that this series undergoes frequent inversions: it is with crime as with value, which to well-born souls does not wait, says the poet, for the number of years. I am reasoning on the average of public morality, and it cannot be denied that the course of depravity in this average follows the progress indicated above:

1. Reduction of religious marriage to a purely civil convention;

2. Assimilation of conjugal love to concubinary love;

3. Desertion of marriage for cohabitation;

4. Concubinage abandoned in turn for prostitution;

5. General promiscuity, debauchery and crime.

Are we at the end? Not yet: the logic is inexorable, and we lack a conclusion.

In this retrograde movement, what does woman signify? To what does she answer? What idea does she serve? What is, before society and before nature, her destiny?

The woman, wife, concubine or prostitute, means of fortune for some, household utensil or article of fashion for the masses, object of consumption for all; the woman, apart from universal lust, has no destiny, no reason for existence, neither political, nor economic, neither philosophical nor aesthetic, nor familial; she no longer even has a puerperal reason, since the main reason that drives marriage away, the pursuit of concubinage and free love, is the fear of pregnancy, the horror of offspring.

So let us go to the end.

Generation declared incompatible with domestic felicity; the woman on the other hand, because of her natural infirmity, becoming more of a burden than a benefit, without a reason for existence, sexuality is superfluous. What good is this dualism, so annoying in its untimely fruitfulness? Nature was wrong. Could she not otherwise provide for the conservation of the species, separate the work of generation from the enjoyments of love? The woman, in this hypothesis, retaining of her present constitution only what is necessary for voluptuousness, becoming the equal of the man, could, without being a burden, preserve her independence, also fulfill the political functions and economic; or rather, all distinction of family, property and sex being suppressed, humanity would have lived in a community of goods and love where Justice, object of so many disputes, would have been as unknown as inequality itself.

Unisexuality, such is the last word of this degradation of love. Now, as nothing can be conceived by the understanding that does not tend to be realized in fact, unisexuality has for its practical expression, among all peoples, pederasty.

XX. — I would like our language to be like Latin, of which Boileau said:

Latin in words defies honesty.

There are things of which one only truly inspires horror by speaking of them like the people, in the most energetic terms, any diverted expression being able to appear an attenuation of the crime rather than a regard for propriety. Since I am forbidden to imitate Juvenal, I beg the reader to consider the constraint to which custom reduces me, and to make up for the modesty of my words as best he can.

Christianity has ranged the sin of sodomy among those that cry vengeance against heaven; following the example of Judaism, Levit. xx, 43, it judged it worthy of death. Without going to the point of death, I regret that this infamy, which is beginning to spread among us, is treated with so much indulgence. I would like it to be, in any case, assimilated to rape, and punished by twenty years’ imprisonment. But the best thing would be to find an antidote to it, and perhaps the pages that we are about to read, which I will shorten as much as possible, will provide some useful insights into this sad subject.

Among the ancient Romans, as well as among the barbarians of the North, Gauls, Germans, Scandinavians, pederasty seems to have been almost unknown: I only want as proof of this the revolution that happened in Rome, the year 326 before Jesus Christ, following the crime of Papirius. It was from the Greeks, their masters of arts and fine manners, that the Romans of the last days of the republic borrowed this variety of the art of loving, against their own inclination, and out of pure emulation of refinement. As for the Bulgars or Bulgres, whose name in the Middle Ages became synonymous with sodomite or pederast, I attribute their infection to the same origin: it is not today that the civilized inoculate nations in childhood with their debauchery and their pox.

But did the Greeks themselves indulge in it of their own nature, or would they not have got into the habit of it anyway? I lean towards the latter opinion. The Greeks belong to the group of Celtic or druidic, warlike and chaste races. Their first initiators, Olen, Linus, the ancient Orpheus, descended from Thrace, resemble the bards of Ossian much more than the Phrygian, Assyrian and other mystagogues. The aesthetic genius of the Greeks, incomparable for purity, sobriety, dignity, is to me yet another argument for their natural chastity. It was through Ionia, contiguous to the East, that Greece was infected with this evil, at the same time as with its innumerable divinities and its mysteries. It was in Ionia that unisexual love, as Fourier calls it, was first sung and deified; then, the myth formed, a philosophy ensued, and what poets had celebrated, thinkers were soon found to reduce it to maxims. Now, it is above all this poetics of pederasts that needs to be explained, as much for the understanding of ancient corruption as for the cauterization of our own.

Thirty years ago, the very idea of this frenzy made me nauseous; it would have been impossible for me to stop my attention there for a minute: how much less would I have thought of undertaking, if I dare say so, the psychology! But the modesty of a man of fifty cannot be that of an adolescent of twenty; and we have too much interest, friends of the Revolution and fathers of families, in seeing that all the mysteries of the human heart are finally unveiled, all the sources of immorality recognized, to shrink from any investigation, so repugnant to nature, so heartbreaking for the reason that it exists.

XXI. — I would like our language to be like Latin, of which Boileau said:

Latin in words defies honesty.

There are things of which one only truly inspires horror by speaking of them like the people, in the most energetic terms, any diverted expression being able to appear an attenuation of the crime rather than a regard for propriety. Since I am forbidden to imitate Juvenal, I beg the reader to consider the constraint to which custom reduces me, and to make up for the modesty of my words as best he can.

Christianity has ranged the sin of sodomy among those that cry vengeance against heaven; following the example of Judaism, Levit. xx, 43, it judged it worthy of death. Without going to the point of death, I regret that this infamy, which is beginning to spread among us, is treated with so much indulgence. I would like it to be, in any case, assimilated to rape, and punished by twenty years’ imprisonment. But the best thing would be to find an antidote to it, and perhaps the pages that we are about to read, which I will shorten as much as possible, will provide some useful insights into this sad subject.

Among the ancient Romans, as well as among the barbarians of the North, Gauls, Germans, Scandinavians, pederasty seems to have been almost unknown: I only want as proof of this the revolution that happened in Rome, the year 326 before Jesus Christ, following the crime of Papirius. It was from the Greeks, their masters of arts and fine manners, that the Romans of the last days of the republic borrowed this variety of the art of loving, against their own inclination, and out of pure emulation of refinement. As for the Bulgars or Bulgres, whose name in the Middle Ages became synonymous with sodomite or pederast, I attribute their infection to the same origin: it is not today that the civilized inoculate nations in childhood with their debauchery and their pox.

But did the Greeks themselves indulge in it of their own nature, or would they not have got into the habit of it anyway? I lean towards the latter opinion. The Greeks belong to the group of Celtic or druidic, warlike and chaste races. Their first initiators, Olen, Linus, the ancient Orpheus, descended from Thrace, resemble the bards of Ossian much more than the Phrygian, Assyrian and other mystagogues. The aesthetic genius of the Greeks, incomparable for purity, sobriety, dignity, is to me yet another argument for their natural chastity. It was through Ionia, contiguous to the East, that Greece was infected with this evil, at the same time as with its innumerable divinities and its mysteries. It was in Ionia that unisexual love, as Fourier calls it, was first sung and deified; then, the myth formed, a philosophy ensued, and what poets had celebrated, thinkers were soon found to reduce it to maxims. Now, it is above all this poetics of pederasts that needs to be explained, as much for the understanding of ancient corruption as for the cauterization of our own.

Thirty years ago, the very idea of this frenzy made me nauseous; it would have been impossible for me to stop my attention there for a minute: how much less would I have thought of undertaking, if I dare say so, the psychology! But the modesty of a man of fifty cannot be that of an adolescent of twenty; and we have too much interest, friends of the Revolution and fathers of families, in seeing that all the mysteries of the human heart are finally unveiled, all the sources of immorality recognized, to shrink from any investigation, so repugnant to nature, so heartbreaking for the reason that it exists.

XXI. — I find in pederasty, as in all affections of body and soul, various degrees of malignity, which it is important to recognize.

First, it may result from prolonged deprivation coupled with incontinence of the senses. In this respect, it does not seem to me to differ very much from masturbation in pairs, so common in educational establishments and which everyone can explain. Another of its analogues is bestiality, in which we should see no more than a supplement to coitus. Under these conditions, can we say that pederasty exists? It is a turpitude that it would be better to punish with a stick than with prison, and which, unless it is repeated, does not turn out to have consequences.

More often it is the effect of a furious pleasure that nothing can appease. So let the magistrate crack down: the sodomitic act is the sign of irremediable depravity.

That wretches, lacking women, procure among themselves such pleasures; that others, more villainous, for whom crime has charms, boast of it: all that is understandable. But philosophy never seized upon theft, perjury, assassination, to make them the object of its theories; poetry never took such monsters as the object of its songs: even in matters of love, adultery, rape, incest, are repugnant to the poet. How did sodomy, the last term of erotic depravity, once make an exception? How did great poets come to celebrate this monstrous ardor, privilege, to hear them, of gods and heroes? Could there be in this coupling against nature, in this frictus of two males, of two females, an acrid pleasure, which awakens the jaded senses, like human flesh which, it is said, makes any other feast tedious to the cannibal? Could pederasty be a substitute for cannibalism?…

On these horrors we should hear those who make a pastime of them; but they hide, their aspect disgusts: impossible to obtain, to support an explanation. In the absence of oral depositions, I consulted the written testimonies; I questioned those elders who knew how to put poetry and philosophy everywhere, and who, speaking to a society accustomed to Socratic customs, hardly bothered themselves. Here are the conclusions I have arrived at: they confirm in every way the theory given above of love and marriage, and of their degradation.

It is consoling for human morality to recognize that all vices, even the most vile, have as their point of departure an error of judgment produced by an illusion of the ideal, and that it is in pursuing the beautiful and the good, but by a false road, that the heart is defiled and the conscience depraved. What I am going to say, without rendering in the least excusable a passion in any case hideous, will at least have the advantage of singularly alleviating the crime of those who were the first to make themselves the cantors and panegyrists of it, at the same time that it will warn us, we civilized people of the nineteenth century who are already leaning towards the side where ancient love has sunk, to be on our guard.

I pass over the explanation of Saint Paul, who believes he has said it all when he attributes the phenomenon that concerns us to the cult of false gods:

“It is for having replaced, he says, the glory of the incorruptible God by simulacra of men and animals, it is for having served the creature instead of the creator, that they have come to outrage their own bodies, and that they have been delivered up to ignominious passions.” (Rom., chap. 1.)

It was quite simple that Christianity, attacking the old religion and the society founded by it, should impute to polytheism the abominations from which it came to purge the earth. But without counting that Christianity did not succeed in its enterprise, and that the passions of ignominy were perpetuated in the Church of Christ as in the synagogue of Belial, it is clear that the explanation of Saint Paul does not explain anything. What is the relationship between idolatry and the sin of sodomy? This is what I would like to know, and what the Apostle does not tell me.

XXII. — I find in pederasty, as in all affections of body and soul, various degrees of malignity, which it is important to recognize.

First, it may result from prolonged deprivation coupled with incontinence of the senses. In this respect, it does not seem to me to differ very much from masturbation in pairs, so common in educational establishments and which everyone can explain. Another of its analogues is bestiality, in which we should see no more than a supplement to coitus. Under these conditions, can we say that pederasty exists? It is a turpitude that it would be better to punish with a stick than with prison, and which, unless it is repeated, does not turn out to have consequences.

More often it is the effect of a furious pleasure that nothing can appease. So let the magistrate crack down: the sodomitic act is the sign of irremediable depravity.

That wretches, lacking women, procure among themselves such pleasures; that others, more villainous, for whom crime has charms, boast of it: all that is understandable. But philosophy never seized upon theft, perjury, assassination, to make them the object of its theories; poetry never took such monsters as the object of its songs: even in matters of love, adultery, rape, incest, are repugnant to the poet. How did sodomy, the last term of erotic depravity, once make an exception? How did great poets come to celebrate this monstrous ardor, privilege, to hear them, of gods and heroes? Could there be in this coupling against nature, in this frictus of two males, of two females, an acrid pleasure, which awakens the jaded senses, like human flesh which, it is said, makes any other feast tedious to the cannibal? Could pederasty be a substitute for cannibalism?

On these horrors we should hear those who make a pastime of them; but they hide, their aspect disgusts: impossible to obtain, to support an explanation. In the absence of oral depositions, I consulted the written testimonies; I questioned those elders who knew how to put poetry and philosophy everywhere, and who, speaking to a society accustomed to Socratic customs, hardly bothered themselves. Here are the conclusions I have arrived at: they confirm in every way the theory given above of love and marriage, and of their degradation.

It is consoling for human morality to recognize that all vices, even the most vile, have as their point of departure an error of judgment produced by an illusion of the ideal, and that it is in pursuing the beautiful and the good, but by a false road, that the heart is defiled and the conscience depraved. What I am going to say, without rendering in the least excusable a passion in any case hideous, will at least have the advantage of singularly alleviating the crime of those who were the first to make themselves the cantors and panegyrists of it, at the same time that it will warn us, we civilized people of the nineteenth century who are already leaning towards the side where ancient love has sunk, to be on our guard.

I pass over the explanation of Saint Paul, who believes he has said it all when he attributes the phenomenon that concerns us to the cult of false gods:

“It is for having replaced, he says, the glory of the incorruptible God by simulacra of men and animals, it is for having served the creature instead of the creator, that they have come to outrage their own bodies, and that they have been delivered up to ignominious passions.” (Rom., chap. 1.)

It was quite simple that Christianity, attacking the old religion and the society founded by it, should impute to polytheism the abominations from which it came to purge the earth. But without counting that Christianity did not succeed in its enterprise, and that the passions of ignominy were perpetuated in the Church of Christ as in the synagogue of Belial, it is clear that the explanation of Saint Paul does not explain anything. What is the relationship between idolatry and the sin of sodomy? This is what I would like to know, and what the Apostle does not tell me.

XXII. — The reciprocal disdain of the sexes, and the depravity of love that was the consequence thereof, had its cause, first of all, in the excessive facility of relations that paganism had created, and which it was in its genius to to create, from the very point of view of the interest and the dignity of woman; then, in universal idealism, which a too weak Justice did not restrain.

I have spoken elsewhere of political idealism, of artistic and literary idealism, of metaphysical and religious idealism. Erotic idealism closes the series; it gives us the last word of all social regressions.

Above all, thought the ancients, man cannot live without love; without love, life is an anticipation of death. Antiquity is full of this idea; it sang and advocated love; it disputed its nature as far as the eye could see, as it disputed the sovereign Good, and more than once it happened to confuse them. With the same power as its artists idealized the human form, its philosophers and poets idealized Love, soul of nature, sovereign of gods and men; and as they strove, by various methods, to arrive, some at wisdom, others at happiness, it was again, among them, who would discover and realize perfect love.

The search for the absolute is the character of human genius; it is to this that man owes his aberrations and his masterpieces.

But this ideality of love, where are we to find it? How are we to enjoy it, and in what measure?

Is it marriage, is it this union surrounded by all the honors of religion, all the prerogatives of the city, that will satisfy our imagination and our heart?

Marriage is the tomb of love, says a proverb; and that was true for the Greeks, twenty-four centuries ago, incomparably more than it is for us. Certainly, virtue, like vice, is contemporary with humanity, and conjugal love has always had its heroes and heroines; but it is necessary to reason on averages, not on types that too often are only exceptions. Now, the first barbarism, favorable to harsh continence, having soon yielded before the first triumphs of civilization, the inequality of conditions having developed, religion being felt less and less, marriage soon lost its low prestige, and the heart, badly defended by conscience, found itself given over to all the passions of love. The dignity of a wife, aristocratic in principle and form, conferred on the ancient woman only haughty pretensions, which made her unlovable; as for her chastity, we can get an idea of it by rereading the burlesque scene between Sosie and his wife, in Molière’s Amphitryon.

In fact, chastity was poorly understood by the ancients. All their epithalamia, from the Song of Songs to the Fescennine Verses, bear witness to this. What can one expect, then, of love, from such a trade? Fenelon has said it somewhere, with that profound feeling that makes up for experience: He who in marriage seeks the satisfaction of the senses will be deceived there, and will repent of it. The wife, such as civilization had to make her at the end of the heroic age, having only her pride, the triviality of her occupations and her importunate lasciviousness on her side, barely suppressed by the troubles of pregnancy and the marital rebuffs, love flew away on the morning of the wedding, and the heart remained deserted. — “There is not the least particle of love in the gynoecium,” said Plutarch energetically, and the comedy of Lysistrate, of Aristophanes, give the reason. No love in the works of the flesh; this is what, many centuries before Christianity, the entirely spiritualist ethics of the ancients had taught them; what Plutarch and Lucian in turn express, with a rawness of language that it is impossible for me to imitate.

Marriage, as the grave censor Metellus Numidicus had formally explained to the Roman people, served only to preserve the free race:

“If we could talk to each other without women, citizens, we would banish this inconvenience far from us; but since nature willed that we could not do without it, it is our duty to sacrifice to the perpetuity of the republic, rather than to the pleasure of a moment.”

It was in these terms that the honest magistrate recommended to the people the practice of marriage.

If the conjugal union is thus devoid of ideal, starting from love, shall we ask it of the hetaira, of the concubine? Shall we descend still lower, to the courtesan?

Contradictions: morganatic love, sought outside the charges and obligations of marriage, love essentially selfish, provisional, conditional, as well as love for hire, is always love at a distance, love reduced to the satisfaction of vanity and of the senses, a secretion of the organism, a cesspit. — To drinking, to eat, to sleep, and the rest, observes Plutarch, is that love? — I possess Lais, said Aristippus, but she does not possess me. I love her, you say; yes, as I love wine, fish and everything that gives me pleasure. As for her person, I feel nothing.

Thus the hetaira and the courtesan offering nothing more, as regards amorous delight, offering even less than the legitimate woman, love such as the human soul desires, idealized love becomes impossible between the two sexes, while it had no other principle than their difference, no other goal than their union. We must either renounce love or abandon sexuality.

The ancients had only too well followed this analysis. They understood wonderfully that beauty, both physically and morally, is immaterial, that the love it inspires is entirely in the soul, that consequently the voluptuousness that possession procures has nothing of the flesh either, and that all the pleasure we perceive on this side is passion and illusion. The venereal act is ridiculous, disgusting for those who witness it, painful and sad for the actor, who loses feeling and freedom in it. The soul feels something shameful in it. I hate, says Hippolytus in Euripides, a goddess who needs darkness. Christianity has made it one of the signs of our downfall, and it is certain that the cynics have not succeeded in rehabilitating it. Nature itself seems to agree with theology: Post coitum omne sad animal.

Where then, wondered the man of antiquity, where to find the love without which I cannot live, and which I cannot seize, neither with my wife, nor with my mistress, nor with my slave? Where is it, this love, a will-o’-the-wisp that shows itself only to deceive men? I found the woman more bitter than death, exclaims Solomon; it obviously designates, not the person, but the sex. Nothingness everywhere, love nowhere: what remains, concludes the devout king, if not to serve God and fall asleep in selfishness?

XXIII. — The reciprocal disdain of the sexes, and the depravity of love that was the consequence thereof, had its cause, first of all, in the excessive facility of relations that paganism had created, and which it was in its genius to to create, from the very point of view of the interest and the dignity of woman; then, in universal idealism, which a too weak Justice did not restrain.

I have spoken elsewhere of political idealism, of artistic and literary idealism, of metaphysical and religious idealism. Erotic idealism closes the series; it gives us the last word of all social regressions.

Above all, thought the ancients, man cannot live without love; without love, life is an anticipation of death. Antiquity is full of this idea; it sang and advocated love; it disputed its nature as far as the eye could see, as it disputed the sovereign Good, and more than once it happened to confuse them. With the same power as its artists idealized the human form, its philosophers and poets idealized Love, soul of nature, sovereign of gods and men; and as they strove, by various methods, to arrive, some at wisdom, others at happiness, it was again, among them, who would discover and realize perfect love.

The search for the absolute is the character of human genius; it is to this that man owes his aberrations and his masterpieces.

But this ideality of love, where are we to find it? How are we to enjoy it, and in what measure?

Is it marriage, is it this union surrounded by all the honors of religion, all the prerogatives of the city, that will satisfy our imagination and our heart?

Marriage is the tomb of love, says a proverb; and that was true for the Greeks, twenty-four centuries ago, incomparably more than it is for us. Certainly, virtue, like vice, is contemporary with humanity, and conjugal love has always had its heroes and heroines; but it is necessary to reason on averages, not on types that too often are only exceptions. Now, the first barbarism, favorable to harsh continence, having soon yielded before the first triumphs of civilization, the inequality of conditions having developed, religion being felt less and less, marriage soon lost its low prestige, and the heart, badly defended by conscience, found itself given over to all the passions of love. The dignity of a wife, aristocratic in principle and form, conferred on the ancient woman only haughty pretensions, which made her unlovable; as for her chastity, we can get an idea of it by rereading the burlesque scene between Sosie and his wife, in Molière’s Amphitryon.

In fact, chastity was poorly understood by the ancients. All their epithalamia, from the Song of Songs to the Fescennine Verses, bear witness to this. What can one expect, then, of love, from such a trade? Fenelon has said it somewhere, with that profound feeling that makes up for experience: He who in marriage seeks the satisfaction of the senses will be deceived there, and will repent of it. The wife, such as civilization had to make her at the end of the heroic age, having only her pride, the triviality of her occupations and her importunate lasciviousness on her side, barely suppressed by the troubles of pregnancy and the marital rebuffs, love flew away on the morning of the wedding, and the heart remained deserted. — “There is not the least particle of love in the gynoecium,” said Plutarch energetically, and the comedy of Lysistrate, of Aristophanes, give the reason. No love in the works of the flesh; this is what, many centuries before Christianity, the entirely spiritualist ethics of the ancients had taught them; what Plutarch and Lucian in turn express, with a rawness of language that it is impossible for me to imitate.

Marriage, as the grave censor Metellus Numidicus had formally explained to the Roman people, served only to preserve the free race:

“If we could talk to each other without women, citizens, we would banish this inconvenience far from us; but since nature willed that we could not do without it, it is our duty to sacrifice to the perpetuity of the republic, rather than to the pleasure of a moment.”

It was in these terms that the honest magistrate recommended to the people the practice of marriage.

If the conjugal union is thus devoid of ideal, starting from love, shall we ask it of the hetaira, of the concubine? Shall we descend still lower, to the courtesan?

Contradictions: morganatic love, sought outside the charges and obligations of marriage, love essentially selfish, provisional, conditional, as well as love for hire, is always love at a distance, love reduced to the satisfaction of vanity and of the senses, a secretion of the organism, a cesspit. — To drinking, to eat, to sleep, and the rest, observes Plutarch, is that love? — I possess Lais, said Aristippus, but she does not possess me. I love her, you say; yes, as I love wine, fish and everything that gives me pleasure. As for her person, I feel nothing.

Thus the hetaira and the courtesan offering nothing more, as regards amorous delight, offering even less than the legitimate woman, love such as the human soul desires, idealized love becomes impossible between the two sexes, while it had no other principle than their difference, no other goal than their union. We must either renounce love or abandon sexuality.

The ancients had only too well followed this analysis. They understood wonderfully that beauty, both physically and morally, is immaterial, that the love it inspires is entirely in the soul, that consequently the voluptuousness that possession procures has nothing of the flesh either, and that all the pleasure we perceive on this side is passion and illusion. The venereal act is ridiculous, disgusting for those who witness it, painful and sad for the actor, who loses feeling and freedom in it. The soul feels something shameful in it. I hate, says Hippolytus in Euripides, a goddess who needs darkness. Christianity has made it one of the signs of our downfall, and it is certain that the cynics have not succeeded in rehabilitating it. Nature itself seems to agree with theology: Post coitum omne sad animal.

Where then, wondered the man of antiquity, where to find the love without which I cannot live, and which I cannot seize, neither with my wife, nor with my mistress, nor with my slave? Where is it, this love, a will-o’-the-wisp that shows itself only to deceive men? I found the woman more bitter than death, exclaims Solomon; it obviously designates, not the person, but the sex. Nothingness everywhere, love nowhere: what remains, concludes the devout king, if not to serve God and fall asleep in selfishness?

XXIII. — It is here that we must follow the course of this idealistic seduction which, for want of a sufficient intelligence of Justice, after having caused marriage to be repelled as foreign by its nature to love, ends in the most execrable hallucination.

There are, according to Plutarch, two kinds of love: vulgar love, which, as we have just seen, is not love, and celestial love, which is universal and has no sex, οὐδετέρον γένους. It is absurd to make love consist solely in the instinct that pushes one sex towards the other: any power that causes beings to unite is love; everything that unites in a superior degree the conditions of strength, beauty, intelligence and virtue, is proper to inspire it.

A hyperbolic definition: God knows where it will lead us.

This idea of the non-sexuality of love is exactly the same expressed by Jesus Christ when he teaches the Sadducees, adversaries of the resurrection, that in heaven, the abode of perfect love, there is no no more conjugal union, neque nubent, neque nubentur, but that all are like angels, neutral beings, before the face of God.

True love, continues Plutarch, therefore has nothing of the defects of matter and the wantonness of the senses, nothing soft, cowardly, effeminate. Lit in a generous soul, it resolves itself, by dint of purifying itself by its own flame, in virtue, είς ἀρετὴν τελευτά. And he cites as an example the famous courtesan Laïs, who, having fallen in love, immediately left her trade and sacrificed all her lovers, her fortune, her fame, to the man she had chosen. Lucian relates facts that are far more strange: men who, disgusted with all carnal intercourse and possessed of true love, spent their lives in the sanctuaries of the goddesses, obtaining from the guardians, at the price of gold, permission to contemplate their statues without veils, speaking to them as if they were alive, kissing them lovingly, and deeming themselves happier with such favors than with the possession of the most beautiful women.

It is therefore by a refinement of delicacy at the same time as by a quintessential search for the beautiful and the honest that the ancients came to despise conjugal love, and with it any physical relationship with the woman. Petrarch, Laura’s idealistic lover, did she do anything else all her life? And wouldn’t the women of his century have had reason to complain of him as much as the women of Thrace thought they had to complain of Orpheus?… The union of the sexes set aside by the logic of the ideal, love no longer has a basis; we have arrived at the contradiction: the catastrophe will not be long in coming.

XXIV. — It is here that we must follow the course of this idealistic seduction which, for want of a sufficient intelligence of Justice, after having caused marriage to be repelled as foreign by its nature to love, ends in the most execrable hallucination.

There are, according to Plutarch, two kinds of love: vulgar love, which, as we have just seen, is not love, and celestial love, which is universal and has no sex, οὐδετέρον γένους. It is absurd to make love consist solely in the instinct that pushes one sex towards the other: any power that causes beings to unite is love; everything that unites in a superior degree the conditions of strength, beauty, intelligence and virtue, is proper to inspire it.

A hyperbolic definition: God knows where it will lead us.

This idea of the non-sexuality of love is exactly the same expressed by Jesus Christ when he teaches the Sadducees, adversaries of the resurrection, that in heaven, the abode of perfect love, there is no no more conjugal union, neque nubent, neque nubentur, but that all are like angels, neutral beings, before the face of God.

True love, continues Plutarch, therefore has nothing of the defects of matter and the wantonness of the senses, nothing soft, cowardly, effeminate. Lit in a generous soul, it resolves itself, by dint of purifying itself by its own flame, in virtue, είς ἀρετὴν τελευτά. And he cites as an example the famous courtesan Laïs, who, having fallen in love, immediately left her trade and sacrificed all her lovers, her fortune, her fame, to the man she had chosen. Lucian relates facts that are far more strange: men who, disgusted with all carnal intercourse and possessed of true love, spent their lives in the sanctuaries of the goddesses, obtaining from the guardians, at the price of gold, permission to contemplate their statues without veils, speaking to them as if they were alive, kissing them lovingly, and deeming themselves happier with such favors than with the possession of the most beautiful women.

It is therefore by a refinement of delicacy at the same time as by a quintessential search for the beautiful and the honest that the ancients came to despise conjugal love, and with it any physical relationship with the woman. Petrarch, Laura’s idealistic lover, did she do anything else all her life? And wouldn’t the women of his century have had reason to complain of him as much as the women of Thrace thought they had to complain of Orpheus?… The union of the sexes set aside by the logic of the ideal, love no longer has a basis; we have arrived at the contradiction: the catastrophe will not be long in coming.

XXIV. — Love exists only on the condition of a duality, a polarity, as the philosophers would say today. This necessary condition, how are we to fulfill it? By composing the loving couple of two people of the same sex, of course without any idea of carnal union. The filiation of ideas and terms led to it. Love, says Plutarch, is virtue; and virtue, in Greek as in Latin, bears a name reminiscent of masculinity, ἀρετὲ, virtus.

Such is the series of ideas by which the Greeks, by dint of speculating on love and freeing it from the indignities of the flesh, arrived at the ultimate excesses. It may seem prodigious, but it is; and the whole story had testified to it. What they were looking for in universal love was not, as we know, in principle, a horrible enjoyment: in this respect the partisans of true love, whom Plutarch and Lucian make speak in their dialogues, protest with indignation against the infamy attributed to them; those who indulge in it, they claim, violate and dishonor love, which they know even less than the regulars of the courtesans.

Anacreon, following Aelian, being at the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, conceived a deep affection for a young man named Smerdias. He cherished him, says the historian, for his soul, not for his body. For his part, the teenager had a respectful affection for the poet.

And Plutarch is careful to note in this connection that it is with this love with similar faces as with that which man feels for woman: enjoyment is its tomb; it goes out as soon as there has been a bringing together and defilement of the bodies. He regards this result as fatal, and he cites examples of the atrocious hatred that the unfortunate object of a love thus profaned immediately conceives for the monster who has abused his person.

We must believe that this extraordinary theory had entered into mores up to a certain point, when we see the most virtuous men of antiquity and the least suspect make profession of it. Socrates, who gave his name to perfect love before Plato had given it his, made love to Alcibiades, in full view of the whole town. He taught him philosophy, reproached him for his pride, rescued him from the seductions of courtesans, trained him in continence and, by his example and his speeches, taught the Athenians to love and respect youth. There is a beautiful lesson from him in Plato’s dialogue called the Theaetetus. Theaetetus is a young man without grace, with a snub nose, small sunken eyes, a true portrait of Socrates, who is presented and recommended to the philosopher by a citizen of Athens, whom his friends accused ironically, and to his great displeasure, of making love to this naughty boy. Socrates questions Theaetetus, forces him by his questions to show his intelligence, brings out his happy nature, and says to him at the end in front of everyone: Go, you are beautiful, Theaetetus; for you possess the beauty of the soul, a thousand times more precious than that of the body. A word worthy of the Gospel, which must have struck the Athenians deeply, and which Plato would have been careful not to lose.

Cornelius Nepos, in the life of Epaminondas, relates that, the king of Persia having intended to buy him, Diomedon of Cyzicus, who was in charge of the commission, began by placing in his interests a very young man, called Micythus, whom Epaminondas loved with all his heart, quem tùm plurimûm diligebat. What did the Theban hero do? After having severely admonished the great king’s matchmaker, he said to his young friend: As for you, Micythus, give him back his money quickly, or I will report you to the magistrate!… A strange occupation for pederasts, to preach to their catamites, by word and example, modesty, study, disinterestedness, chastity, all kinds of virtue, and to threaten them with punishment if they stray from it!.…

In a war which those of Chalcis waged against their neighbors, they owed victory to the courage of Cleomachus, one of them, who devoted himself in the manner of Arnold of Winkelried, on the sole condition of receiving beforehand a kiss from his friend, and die before his eyes. It is Plutarch who relates the fact. I would like to know if chivalry has produced anything more beautiful and more chaste than this trait?

Everyone knows that the sacred battalion of Thebes, which perished entirely at Chaeronea, was made up of three hundred young people, 150 pairs, whose love as well as patriotism formed the discipline. I confess that it absolutely disgusts me to see in this heroic youth, formed in the school of Pelopidas and Epaminondas, frightful initiates in the cult of Sodom.

A law of Solon allowed slaves to trade in women; it forbade them the love of young people. What does this prohibition by the legislator mean? The slave is not safe, because he is not pure: I cannot see anything else in it.

Besides, we have decisive testimony. Virgil, singing of Roman messianism and universal regeneration; Virgil, a disciple of Plato, does not forget this purification of pederastic love. His episode of Nisus and Euryale is an imitation of Greek friendship. United by love and warlike ardour,

His amor unus etat, pariterque in bella ruebant,

he says of the young heroes: Euryale, type of splendid youth and virtuous grace, whom the whole army loves as much as they admire him,

Nisus, his pure and pious lover, Nisus amore pio pueri. Read in the 5th and 9th books of the Aeneid the touching story of this love: it looks like an episode of the sacred battalion of Thebes. And it is after recounting their death that the poet exclaims: Happy couple! If my verses have any power, your memory will last as long as the Capitol, as long as Rome holds the empire of the world!

XXV. — Love exists only on the condition of a duality, a polarity, as the philosophers would say today. This necessary condition, how are we to fulfill it? By composing the loving couple of two people of the same sex, of course without any idea of carnal union. The filiation of ideas and terms led to it. Love, says Plutarch, is virtue; and virtue, in Greek as in Latin, bears a name reminiscent of masculinity, ἀρετὲ, virtus.

Such is the series of ideas by which the Greeks, by dint of speculating on love and freeing it from the indignities of the flesh, arrived at the ultimate excesses. It may seem prodigious, but it is; and the whole story had testified to it. What they were looking for in universal love was not, as we know, in principle, a horrible enjoyment: in this respect the partisans of true love, whom Plutarch and Lucian make speak in their dialogues, protest with indignation against the infamy attributed to them; those who indulge in it, they claim, violate and dishonor love, which they know even less than the regulars of the courtesans.

Anacreon, following Aelian, being at the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, conceived a deep affection for a young man named Smerdias. He cherished him, says the historian, for his soul, not for his body. For his part, the teenager had a respectful affection for the poet.

And Plutarch is careful to note in this connection that it is with this love with similar faces as with that which man feels for woman: enjoyment is its tomb; it goes out as soon as there has been a bringing together and defilement of the bodies. He regards this result as fatal, and he cites examples of the atrocious hatred that the unfortunate object of a love thus profaned immediately conceives for the monster who has abused his person.

We must believe that this extraordinary theory had entered into mores up to a certain point, when we see the most virtuous men of antiquity and the least suspect make profession of it. Socrates, who gave his name to perfect love before Plato had given it his, made love to Alcibiades, in full view of the whole town. He taught him philosophy, reproached him for his pride, rescued him from the seductions of courtesans, trained him in continence and, by his example and his speeches, taught the Athenians to love and respect youth. There is a beautiful lesson from him in Plato’s dialogue called the Theaetetus. Theaetetus is a young man without grace, with a snub nose, small sunken eyes, a true portrait of Socrates, who is presented and recommended to the philosopher by a citizen of Athens, whom his friends accused ironically, and to his great displeasure, of making love to this naughty boy. Socrates questions Theaetetus, forces him by his questions to show his intelligence, brings out his happy nature, and says to him at the end in front of everyone: Go, you are beautiful, Theaetetus; for you possess the beauty of the soul, a thousand times more precious than that of the body. A word worthy of the Gospel, which must have struck the Athenians deeply, and which Plato would have been careful not to lose.

Cornelius Nepos, in the life of Epaminondas, relates that, the king of Persia having intended to buy him, Diomedon of Cyzicus, who was in charge of the commission, began by placing in his interests a very young man, called Micythus, whom Epaminondas loved with all his heart, quem tùm plurimûm diligebat. What did the Theban hero do? After having severely admonished the great king’s matchmaker, he said to his young friend: As for you, Micythus, give him back his money quickly, or I will report you to the magistrate!… A strange occupation for pederasts, to preach to their catamites, by word and example, modesty, study, disinterestedness, chastity, all kinds of virtue, and to threaten them with punishment if they stray from it!.…

In a war which those of Chalcis waged against their neighbors, they owed victory to the courage of Cleomachus, one of them, who devoted himself in the manner of Arnold of Winkelried, on the sole condition of receiving beforehand, in the presence of the army, a kiss from his friend, and die before his eyes. It is Plutarch who relates the fact. I would like to know if chivalry has produced anything more beautiful and more chaste than this trait?

Everyone knows that the sacred battalion of Thebes, which perished entirely at Chaeronea, was made up of three hundred young people, 150 pairs, whose love as well as patriotism formed the discipline. I confess that it absolutely disgusts me to see in this heroic youth, formed in the school of Pelopidas and Epaminondas, frightful initiates in the cult of Sodom.

A law of Solon allowed slaves to trade in women; it forbade them the love of young people. What does this prohibition by the legislator mean? The slave is not safe, because he is not pure: I cannot see anything else in it.

Besides, we have decisive testimony. Virgil, singing of Roman messianism and universal regeneration; Virgil, a disciple of Plato, does not forget this purification of pederastic love. His episode of Nisus and Euryale is an imitation of Greek friendship. United by love and warlike ardour,

His amor unus erat, pariterque in bella ruebant,

he says of the young heroes: Euryale, type of splendid youth and virtuous grace, whom the whole army loves as much as they admire him,

Euryalus formâ insignis veridique juventâ…
Gratior et pulchro veniens in corpore virtus ;

Nisus, his pure and pious lover, Nisus amore pio pueri. Read in the 5th and 9th books of the Aeneid the touching story of this love: it looks like an episode of the sacred battalion of Thebes. And it is after recounting their death that the poet exclaims: Happy couple! If my verses have any power, your memory will last as long as the Capitol, as long as Rome holds the empire of the world!

XXV. — Why should we be so surprised, after all, at an attachment that has roots in nature itself? Do we not know that there exists between the adolescent and the man a reciprocal inclination, which is made up of a thousand different feelings and whose effects go far beyond simple friendship? What was Fenelon’s affection for the Duke of Burgundy, this child of his heart and his genius, whom he had created, formed, the Bible would say engendered, as he had created his Telemachus? Love, in the purest and highest sense given to it by the Greeks. Fenelon instructing the Duke of Burgundy, it is Socrates revealing to his listeners the beauty of Theaetetus, it is Epaminondas reprimanding Micythus. How he would have liked to die for this fruit of his entrails, the tender Fénelon!

I will go further: what was this so remarked predilection of Christ for the youngest of his apostles (_John_, XIII, 23; XIX, 26, 27: XXI, 20)? Some unbeliever has taken occasion of these passages to cast an odious suspicion on the morals of Jesus; for me, I see in it, as in the episode of Nisus and Euryale, a Christian imitation of Greek love. And this is not the least proof in my eyes that the author of the Fourth Gospel was not a Hebrew from Jerusalem, incapable of these delicacies, but a Hellenist from Alexandria, who knew his audience, and found nothing better, to praise the holiness of Christ, than to make him a lover in the manner of Socrates. We slander the ancients, and we do not see that their ideas, reduced to their true measure, have their source in the human heart, and that they have flowed into our religion.

The distinction of loves and the difference of their characters was so well established among the Greeks, that we see them living together, without fighting or being confused with one another: something that does not take place, we are assured, for the Sodomites. Achilles has for his bedfellow, hetaira, Briseis, the beautiful captive; for friend of heart, Patroclus, his hetairos. Also, what a difference in the regrets it gives them! For Briseis, he cries, he swears to fight no more and to return to Thessaly; for Patroclus, he violates his oath, kills Hector, massacres his captives and decides to take Troy.

All the Greek poets who sang of love under its double hypostasis followed the example of Homer. I want Anacreon’s Bathylle to be suspect: the poet’s indiscretion, in the portrait he drew of his friend, cast an obscene shadow on the purity of the original; but how much the feeling that Bathylle inspires in his outweighs all his fantasies of mistresses! What could be more delightful than this song of the messenger dove! And what reverie in these two couplets, which the translators separate as if they were two odes:

“Refresh, O women, with sweet wine my parched throat; refresh my burning head with new roses. But who will refresh my heart, set on fire by love?

“I will sit in the shade of Bathylle, the young tree with the green hair; near him flows and murmurs the fountain of persuasion. It is there, exhausted traveler, that I will find new strength…”

Is it necessary, in order to give meaning to these verses so limpid and so tender, that I have to contrive to find in them horrible metaphors? The comparison of Bathylle to a young and verdant tree is familiar to Orientals: these verses of Anacreon seem to be translated word for word from Psalm I, v. 3-4: “It will be with the virtuous man,” says the Psalmist, “as with a tree planted by the side of running water, and which gives its fruit in its season: its foliage will not dry up, and all his works will be prosperous.”

All that remains of Sappho is reduced to about two odes. In the first, To Venus, Sappho prays to the goddess to fight with her and bring her fickle lover to her feet. Perhaps this ode would seem to us the ne plus ultra of feeling, if chance had not preserved the following one, To a Woman… I will not undertake to translate it; I would think I was violating Poetry itself. But I deny, for Sappho as for Anacreon, the meaning that common opinion gives to these verses (B). What astonishes me in all this Socratic, Platonic, Anacreontic or Sapphic poetry, as one would like to call it, is the extraordinary chastity of thought as well as of language, a chastity that is equaled only by ardor of passion. Explain to me who can, in the hypothesis of an impious love, this inconceivable mixture of all that the most exalted tenderness, the most severe thought, the most divine poetry, could offer in penetrating lines, graceful images and ineffable harmony, with what the rage of the senses would have caused the most atrocious invention; as for me, such an alliance of heaven and hell in the same heart seems inadmissible, and I remain convinced that, if there is any horror beneath it, it is entirely ours.

XXVI. — Why should we be so surprised, after all, at an attachment that has roots in nature itself? Do we not know that there exists between the adolescent and the man a reciprocal inclination, which is made up of a thousand different feelings and whose effects go far beyond simple friendship? What was Fenelon’s affection for the Duke of Burgundy, this child of his heart and his genius, whom he had created, formed, the Bible would say engendered, as he had created his Telemachus? Love, in the purest and highest sense given to it by the Greeks. Fenelon instructing the Duke of Burgundy, it is Socrates revealing to his listeners the beauty of Theaetetus, it is Epaminondas reprimanding Micythus. How he would have liked to die for this fruit of his entrails, the tender Fénelon!

I will go further: what was this so remarked predilection of Christ for the youngest of his apostles (John, XIII, 23; XIX, 26, 27: XXI, 20)? Some unbeliever has taken occasion of these passages to cast an odious suspicion on the morals of Jesus; for me, I see in it, as in the episode of Nisus and Euryale, a Christian imitation of Greek love. And this is not the least proof in my eyes that the author of the Fourth Gospel was not a Hebrew from Jerusalem, incapable of these delicacies, but a Hellenist from Alexandria, who knew his audience, and found nothing better, to praise the holiness of Christ, than to make him a lover in the manner of Socrates. We slander the ancients, and we do not see that their ideas, reduced to their true measure, have their source in the human heart, and that they have flowed into our religion.

The distinction of loves and the difference of their characters was so well established among the Greeks, that we see them living together, without fighting or being confused with one another: something that does not take place, we are assured, for the Sodomites. Achilles has for his bedfellow, hetaira, Briseis, the beautiful captive; for friend of heart, Patroclus, his hetairos. Also, what a difference in the regrets it gives them! For Briseis, he cries, he swears to fight no more and to return to Thessaly; for Patroclus, he violates his oath, kills Hector, massacres his captives and decides to take Troy.

All the Greek poets who sang of love under its double hypostasis followed the example of Homer. I want Anacreon’s Bathylle to be suspect: the poet’s indiscretion, in the portrait he drew of his friend, cast an obscene shadow on the purity of the original; but how much the feeling that Bathylle inspires in his outweighs all his fantasies of mistresses! What could be more delightful than this song of the messenger dove! And what reverie in these two couplets, which the translators separate as if they were two odes:

“Refresh, O women, with sweet wine my parched throat; refresh my burning head with new roses. But who will refresh my heart, set on fire by love?

“I will sit in the shade of Bathylle, the young tree with the green hair; near him flows and murmurs the fountain of persuasion. It is there, exhausted traveler, that I will find new strength…”

Is it necessary, in order to give meaning to these verses so limpid and so tender, that I have to contrive to find in them horrible metaphors? The comparison of Bathylle to a young and verdant tree is familiar to Orientals: these verses of Anacreon seem to be translated word for word from Psalm I, v. 3-4: “It will be with the virtuous man,” says the Psalmist, “as with a tree planted by the side of running water, and which gives its fruit in its season: its foliage will not dry up, and all his works will be prosperous.”

All that remains of Sappho is reduced to about two odes. In the first, To Venus, Sappho prays to the goddess to fight with her and bring her fickle lover to her feet. Perhaps this ode would seem to us the ne plus ultra of feeling, if chance had not preserved the following one, To a Woman… I will not undertake to translate it; I would think I was violating Poetry itself. But I deny, for Sappho as for Anacreon, the meaning that common opinion gives to these verses (B). What astonishes me in all this Socratic, Platonic, Anacreontic or Sapphic poetry, as one would like to call it, is the extraordinary chastity of thought as well as of language, a chastity that is equaled only by ardor of passion. Explain to me who can, in the hypothesis of an impious love, this inconceivable mixture of all that the most exalted tenderness, the most severe thought, the most divine poetry, could offer in penetrating lines, graceful images and ineffable harmony, with what the rage of the senses would have caused the most atrocious invention; as for me, such an alliance of heaven and hell in the same heart seems inadmissible, and I remain convinced that, if there is any horror beneath it, it is entirely ours.

XXVI. — I confess however, and in this I am only following my own thought, I confess that this homoiousian eroticism, however spiritual the principle may be, nevertheless remains an offense against the mutual right of the sexes, and that this lie to destiny, after such beautiful beginnings, deserved to have a terrible end.

One of Plutarch’s interlocutors, the one who defends the cause of androgynous or bi-sexual love, made to his adversary, who protested in the name of the followers of perfect love against the accusations with which they were charged, the following objection: You claim that your love is pure from any bringing together of bodies, and that union only exists between souls; but how can there be love where there is no possession? It is as if you were talking about getting drunk by making a libation to the gods, or of satisfying your hunger by the smell of the victims.

To this objection, there is no response. Whatever opinion one has of the distinction between bodies and souls, it always remains that the latter are united only by the bringing together of the former: from that moment honesty is in danger.

All love, however ideal its object, such as, for example, the love of nuns for Christ or that of monks for the Virgin, a fortiori the love that relates to a living being and palpable, necessarily resounds in the organism and disturbs the sexuality. There is amorous delight in the young virgin caressing her dove; and what delirium, as we know too well, kindles the imagination of mystics in their consumed senses! Arrived at the summit of the empyrean, the celestial love, attracted by this material beauty whose contemplation pursues it, falls down towards the abyss: it is Éloa, the beautiful archangel, in love with Satan, that it is enough for him to look to be lost.

Such, then, is the antinomy to which love, like all passion, is subject: just as it cannot do without an ideal, it cannot do without possession either. The first drives it invincibly to the second; but this obtained, the ideal is defiled and love expires, unless a superior grace revives it and restores its balance.

It is thus that among the ancients woman found herself little by little excluded from pure love, and marriage, despite its institutional honors, found itself tacitly deemed ignoble. Created by the senses and the imagination, love, which a vigorous conscience could not sustain, was extinguished like a meteor falling from the sky into the dead sea of marriage. The day after the wedding woman had lost her prestige; the conjugal bed had swallowed up, in one night, both her maidenhead and her virginity. No poetry of the soul, no tenderness of the heart, no surveillance of the senses, could, in the eyes of a sated husband, rehabilitate this unfortunate woman trained in lust by her own mother. The illusion irreparably destroyed, disgust became invincible. There is a couplet of Sappho in which this thought is rendered with deep melancholy: “Virginity, Virginity! Where are you fleeing that you abandon me? And Virginity replies: “I will never come back to you again, never again will I come back.”

O France! You were a virgin when you possessed justice, the virginity of the nations. And now you have lost your flower, you are no longer within your rights, you have ceased to be chaste. Your children call you a prostitute. Who will give it back to you, homeland, this blessed virginity, who will give it back to you?

Then, love lives on sacrifices: sacrifice to the fatherland by the accomplishment of civic duties; sacrifice to the family, through work; sacrifice to the woman, through continence. Anacreon pretends in an ode that Cupid, wishing to test him, has summoned him to follow him; that he made him run through the forests, the torrents, the mountains, and that the god, seeing him exhausted and out of breath, struck him with his wing, leaving him as a farewell this reproach: You cannot love! Who does not know how to endure, in fact, does not know how to love: such is the thought that only crosses the mind of the poet. How could sacrifice exist in this society based on slavery, where all freedom degenerates into tyranny, where labor is abhorred, where pleasure is given for so little?

Another idea, a flash shines in the eyes of Anacreon. He was flying through space carried on two wings, when Cupid, with leaden boots, pursues him and stops him in three paces. What does this dream mean? The young girls shun him, the women make fun of his bare forehead, the young men reproach him that he no longer knows how to drink: what if he ended his amorous career with a constant love?… But that’s only a dream: how could he be constant, he for whom love multiplies and swarms like the heads of the hydra?

Without chastity, without sacrifice, without constancy, there is no love between man and woman. Hymeneus, this guardian of life, is no more than a painful god, the sorrowful and detested brother of Love.

Then the heart, more and more empty, asks of fantasy what nature refuses it. Hence the celestial love of the ancient philosophers. But, in love as in everything else, idealism is the absolute, and the absolute has no limit. From idealism properly speaking, the imagination passes to an erotic pantheism, to what Fourier, in his half-caste style, called omni-gamy. Everyone knows this delirious ode, so often imitated, where Anacreon says to his mistress:

“Would that I was your mirror! I would see you every day. Would that I was your tunic! You would always carry me. Would that I was your belt! I would gird you every day…”

It is to misunderstand Anacreon to see in this piece only a gallant fantasy. The paneroticism that inspires it bursts out here in all its force. This supreme love, which unraveled the chaos and which animates all beings, does not need, in order to enjoy, the human form. For him, kingdoms, genera, species, sexes, everything is confused. It is the swan of Leda, the bull of Europa, the laurel of Daphne, the rush of Syrinx, the sunflower of Clytie, the rose of Adonis. It is Cenis, changed from girl to boy; Hermaphrodite, both male and female; Proteus, with its thousand metamorphoses. On a chased silver dish, Anacreon represents Venus sailing on the sea, and around the amorous fish that come to peck the body of the goddess and tickle her to make her laugh. Theocritus goes much further: in a lament on the death of Adonis, he claims that the boar who killed him with a fang was only guilty of clumsiness. The poor animal wanted to give a kiss to this handsome young man: in the transport of his passion he tore him!.…

What else! Sodomy, more dreadful, says Plutarch, than an open sepulcher, hideous sodomy, a particular case of idealistic and pantheistic love, long before Socrates desolated Greece. The logic of crime, among the Syrians, the Babylonians and other Easterners, had not needed this philosophical deduction to arrive, in one leap, from the vision of the ideal to the perpetration of the greatest of crimes. Early on religion, beginning where theory should end, had made pederasty one of its mysteries. So true is it that the absolute, in all its aspects, is, by the idolatry it inspires, the cause of all hypocrisy, of all dissolution, of all decadence. And from what ranks of society come the infamous ones that a too lenient police bring before the courts every day? Are they peasants, workers, men of practice and work? No, these people are not advanced enough in the cult of the ideal. They are refined, artists, men of letters, magistrates, priests… Oh all of you, young men and young women, who dream of a perfect love, know it well, your Platonism is the straight way that leads to Sodom.

XXVII. — I confess however, and in this I am only following my own thought, I confess that this homoiousian eroticism, however spiritual the principle may be, nevertheless remains an offense against the mutual right of the sexes, and that this lie to destiny, after such beautiful beginnings, deserved to have a terrible end.

One of Plutarch’s interlocutors, the one who defends the cause of androgynous or bi-sexual love, made to his adversary, who protested in the name of the followers of perfect love against the accusations with which they were charged, the following objection: You claim that your love is pure from any bringing together of bodies, and that union only exists between souls; but how can there be love where there is no possession? It is as if you were talking about getting drunk by making a libation to the gods, or of satisfying your hunger by the smell of the victims.

To this objection, there is no response. Whatever opinion one has of the distinction between bodies and souls, it always remains that the latter are united only by the bringing together of the former: from that moment honesty is in danger.

All love, however ideal its object, such as, for example, the love of nuns for Christ or that of monks for the Virgin, a fortiori the love that relates to a living being and palpable, necessarily resounds in the organism and disturbs the sexuality. There is amorous delight in the young virgin caressing her dove; and what delirium, as we know too well, kindles the imagination of mystics in their consumed senses! Arrived at the summit of the empyrean, the celestial love, attracted by this material beauty whose contemplation pursues it, falls down towards the abyss: it is Éloa, the beautiful archangel, in love with Satan, that it is enough for him to look to be lost.

Such, then, is the antinomy to which love, like all passion, is subject: just as it cannot do without an ideal, it cannot do without possession either. The first drives it invincibly to the second; but this obtained, the ideal is defiled and love expires, unless a superior grace revives it and restores its balance.

It is thus that among the ancients woman found herself little by little excluded from pure love, and marriage, despite its institutional honors, found itself tacitly deemed ignoble. Created by the senses and the imagination, love, which a vigorous conscience could not sustain, was extinguished like a meteor falling from the sky into the dead sea of marriage. The day after the wedding woman had lost her prestige; the conjugal bed had swallowed up, in one night, both her maidenhead and her virginity. No poetry of the soul, no tenderness of the heart, no surveillance of the senses, could, in the eyes of a sated husband, rehabilitate this unfortunate woman trained in lust by her own mother. The illusion irreparably destroyed, disgust became invincible. There is a couplet of Sappho in which this thought is rendered with deep melancholy: “Virginity, Virginity! Where are you fleeing that you abandon me? And Virginity replies: “I will never come back to you again, never again will I come back.”

O France! You were a virgin when you possessed justice, the virginity of the nations. And now you have lost your flower, you are no longer within your rights, you have ceased to be chaste. Your children call you a prostitute. Who will give it back to you, homeland, this blessed virginity, who will give it back to you?

Then, love lives on sacrifices: sacrifice to the fatherland by the accomplishment of civic duties; sacrifice to the family, through work; sacrifice to the woman, through continence. Anacreon pretends in an ode that Cupid, wishing to test him, has summoned him to follow him; that he made him run through the forests, the torrents, the mountains, and that the god, seeing him exhausted and out of breath, struck him with his wing, leaving him as a farewell this reproach: You cannot love! Who does not know how to endure, in fact, does not know how to love: such is the thought that only crosses the mind of the poet. How could sacrifice exist in this society based on slavery, where all freedom degenerates into tyranny, where labor is abhorred, where pleasure is given for so little?

Another idea, a flash shines in the eyes of Anacreon. He was flying through space carried on two wings, when Cupid, with leaden boots, pursues him and stops him in three paces. What does this dream mean? The young girls shun him, the women make fun of his bare forehead, the young men reproach him that he no longer knows how to drink: what if he ended his amorous career with a constant love?… But that’s only a dream: how could he be constant, he for whom love multiplies and swarms like the heads of the hydra?

Without chastity, without sacrifice, without constancy, there is no love between man and woman. Hymeneus, this guardian of life, is no more than a painful god, the sorrowful and detested brother of Love.

Then the heart, more and more empty, asks of fantasy what nature refuses it. Hence the celestial love of the ancient philosophers. But, in love as in everything else, idealism is the absolute, and the absolute has no limit. From idealism properly speaking, the imagination passes to an erotic pantheism, to what Fourier, in his half-caste style, called omni-gamy. Everyone knows this delirious ode, so often imitated, where Anacreon says to his mistress:

“Would that I was your mirror! I would see you every day. Would that I was your tunic! You would always carry me. Would that I was your belt! I would gird you every day…”

It is to misunderstand Anacreon to see in this piece only a gallant fantasy. The paneroticism that inspires it bursts out here in all its force. This supreme love, which unraveled the chaos and which animates all beings, does not need, in order to enjoy, the human form. For him, kingdoms, genera, species, sexes, everything is confused. It is the swan of Leda, the bull of Europa, the laurel of Daphne, the rush of Syrinx, the sunflower of Clytie, the rose of Adonis. It is Cenis, changed from girl to boy; Hermaphrodite, both male and female; Proteus, with its thousand metamorphoses. On a chased silver dish, Anacreon represents Venus sailing on the sea, and around the amorous fish that come to peck the body of the goddess and tickle her to make her laugh. Theocritus goes much further: in a lament on the death of Adonis, he claims that the boar who killed him with a fang was only guilty of clumsiness. The poor animal wanted to give a kiss to this handsome young man: in the transport of his passion he tore him!.…

What else! Sodomy, more dreadful, says Plutarch, than an open sepulcher, hideous sodomy, a particular case of idealistic and pantheistic love, long before Socrates desolated Greece. The logic of crime, among the Syrians, the Babylonians and other Easterners, had not needed this philosophical deduction to arrive, in one leap, from the vision of the ideal to the perpetration of the greatest of crimes. Early on religion, beginning where theory should end, had made pederasty one of its mysteries. So true is it that the absolute, in all its aspects, is, by the idolatry it inspires, the cause of all hypocrisy, of all dissolution, of all decadence. And from what ranks of society come the infamous ones that a too lenient police bring before the courts every day? Are they peasants, workers, men of practice and work? No, these people are not advanced enough in the cult of the ideal. They are refined, artists, men of letters, magistrates, priests… Oh all of you, young men and young women, who dream of a perfect love, know it well, your Platonism is the straight way that leads to Sodom.

XXVII. — I have unveiled the sophism that ruined the Greeks. Now come the Romans, with their titanic debauchery, and society will be swallowed up.

The Roman, a positive and severe spirit, ruthless as his sword, does not seem to know anything about it. Virgil’s Alexis, an imitation of Theocritus, is an exercise in the Philhellene poet, for the amusement of the fashion of Rome. All the features of this eclogue are drawn from the commonplace: it is a boy’s name put in place of a girl’s name. Virgil is getting fashionable, that is all. It is much worse for Horace’s Ligurinus; it looks like Bathylle’s monkey. Cicero allows himself somewhere, on this shameful subject, a joke that just proves that he is not initiated into the matter. Let’s not look for other quotes. I cannot say whether Trajan, who had the apotheosis of his Antinous made, had pushed the delicacy of Socrates and Epaminondas to the limit: I would like it for his glory. what is certain is that the Caesars, with the possible exception of the imbecile Claudius, were all, according to Suetonius, infamous.

À l’exemple des empereurs, sénateurs, chevaliers, plébéiens, tout le monde sodomitisa. Car, dans cette Rome impériale, il fallait que tous, riches et pauvres, jouissent comme César : l’ordre social était à ce prix. Déjà nous savons que la femme, comme la frumentation, le bain, le spectacle, chose de première nécessité, se délivrait à peu près pour rien. Mais ce n’était plus assez que la femme. Un immense commerce de mâles se faisait par tout l’empire pour les joies du peuple-roi, une vraie conscription, dont Sénèque se lamente ni moins ni plus que s’il s’agissait des dîners à cent mille francs par tête, et du vomitoire. Transeo puerorum infelicium greges, aqmina exoletorum per nationes coloresque descripta, quos post transaeta convivia, aliæ cubiculi contumeliæ expectant. C’est ce crime de lèse-humanité que dénonce l’Apocalypse, lorsqu’il montre la nouvelle Babylone sous la figure d’une courtisane qui porte écrit sur le front : « Mère de toutes les fornications et abominations de la terre. » Et c’est en même temps son supplice, comme l’atteste Juvénal :

Thus the induction is confirmed by experience: the negation of marriage results in the confusion of the sexes; it is the affirmation of sodomy.

And since the disuse of marriage has the following causes: 1) the lack of understanding of the sacrament, which has remained in the state of a symbol; 2) an over-excitement of erotic idealism, favored by the development of letters and the arts; 3) the embarrassments of existence in a society given over to luxury and speculation, devoid of balance in its economy, of balance in its powers, of sincerity in its reason; it follows that any nation in which Justice, from these various points of view, has failed, is a nation devoured by sodomitic gangrene, a congregation of pederasts.

Communism, that pretended antidote to inequality, which Plato opposes to tyranny and license as the true form of the republic; communism, I can say it now without being regarded as a slanderer, contains in its principle the same infamies. By its denial of personality, of property, of the family, by its church spirit and its disdain for justice, it tends towards the confusion of the sexes; like its opposites, it is, from the point of view of amorous relations, fatally pederastic.

The facts prove the truth of these assertions. The lamentable end of the Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Orientals, says enough; as for the makers of utopias, platonic promiscuity, the omnigamy of Fourier, the sacerdotal androgyny of the Saint-Simonians, the secret debaucheries that have always distinguished religious communities, barracks, prisons and convicts, have no need of commentary.

I end with a citation that should strike every Christian soul. The people of God did not escape anathema; all his prophets, since Moses, accuse it. Besides the fact that it never had a very high sense of marriage, we see it, from the time of Solomon, delivered to the vices that were to lead it to the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah: initiation into the mysteries of Thammuz or Adonis, exploitation of the plebs by usury and serfdom, morality replaced by aesthetic idealism (idolatry); for government, sometimes the agreement, sometimes the struggle between royalty and the pontificate, double form of divine right, double manifestation of the ideal.

Everything that, having begun with the ideal, continues with the ideal, will perish with the ideal. Therein lies for societies the principle of all decline, which is inevitably translated, for the family, marriage and love, by that word forever execrated, pederasty. Church of Christ, beware! you started as the Synagogue, and you continue as the Synagogue.

XXVIII. — I have unveiled the sophism that ruined the Greeks. Now come the Romans, with their titanic debauchery, and society will be swallowed up.

The Roman, a positive and severe spirit, ruthless as his sword, does not seem to know anything about it. Virgil’s Alexis, an imitation of Theocritus, is an exercise in the Philhellene poet, for the amusement of the fashion of Rome. All the features of this eclogue are drawn from the commonplace: it is a boy’s name put in place of a girl’s name. Virgil is getting fashionable, that is all. It is much worse for Horace’s Ligurinus; it looks like Bathylle’s monkey. Cicero allows himself somewhere, on this shameful subject, a joke that just proves that he is not initiated into the matter. Let’s not look for other quotes. I cannot say whether Trajan, who had the apotheosis of his Antinous made, had pushed the delicacy of Socrates and Epaminondas to the limit: I would like it for his glory. what is certain is that the Caesars, with the possible exception of the imbecile Claudius, were all, according to Suetonius, infamous.

Following the example of the emperors, everyone, senators, knights, plebeians, sodomized. Because, in this imperial Rome, it was necessary that all, rich and poor, enjoy like Caesar: the social order came at this price. We already know that the woman, like the fermentation, the bath, the spectacle, thing of first necessity, delivered herself almost for nothing. But the woman was no longer enough. An immense trade in males was carried on throughout the empire for the joys of the people-king, a real conscription, of which Seneca laments neither less nor more than if it were a question of dinners at a hundred thousand francs a head and the vomitory. Transeo puerorum infelicium greges, aqmina exoletorum per nationes coloresque descripta, quos post transaeta convivia, aliæ cubiculi contumeliæ expectant. It is this crime against humanity that the Apocalypse denounces, when it shows the new Babylon in the form of a courtesan with the inscription on her forehead: “Mother of all the fornications and abominations of the earth.” And it is at the same time its ordeal, as Juvenal attests:

….Sævior armis
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.

Thus the induction is confirmed by experience: the negation of marriage results in the confusion of the sexes; it is the affirmation of sodomy.

And since the disuse of marriage has the following causes: 1) the lack of understanding of the sacrament, which has remained in the state of a symbol; 2) an over-excitement of erotic idealism, favored by the development of letters and the arts; 3) the embarrassments of existence in a society given over to luxury and speculation, devoid of balance in its economy, of balance in its powers, of sincerity in its reason; it follows that any nation in which Justice, from these various points of view, has failed, is a nation devoured by sodomitic gangrene, a congregation of pederasts. (C)

Communism, that pretended antidote to inequality, which Plato opposes to tyranny and license as the true form of the republic; communism, I can say it now without being regarded as a slanderer, contains in its principle the same infamies. By its denial of personality, of property, of the family, by its church spirit and its disdain for justice, it tends towards the confusion of the sexes; like its opposites, it is, from the point of view of amorous relations, fatally pederastic.

The facts prove the truth of these assertions. The lamentable end of the Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Orientals, says enough; as for the makers of utopias, platonic promiscuity, the omnigamy of Fourier, the sacerdotal androgyny of the Saint-Simonians, the secret debaucheries that have always distinguished religious communities, barracks, prisons and convicts, have no need of commentary.

I end with a citation that should strike every Christian soul. The people of God did not escape anathema; all his prophets, since Moses, accuse it. Besides the fact that it never had a very high sense of marriage, we see it, from the time of Solomon, delivered to the vices that were to lead it to the abominations of Sodom and Gomorrah: initiation into the mysteries of Thammuz or Adonis, exploitation of the plebs by usury and serfdom, morality replaced by aesthetic idealism (idolatry); for government, sometimes the agreement, sometimes the struggle between royalty and the pontificate, double form of divine right, double manifestation of the ideal.

Everything that, having begun with the ideal, continues with the ideal, will perish with the ideal. Therein lies for societies the principle of all decline, which is inevitably translated, for the family, marriage and love, by that word forever execrated, pederasty. Church of Christ, beware! you started as the Synagogue, and you continue as the Synagogue.

CHAPTER IV.

Church doctrine on marriage. — Community of loves, concubinage, divorce, confusion of the sexes: negation of women.

XVIII. — When Christianity made its entry into the world, love and marriage, one destroyed by the other, on the whole face of the empire were dying. For reformers who understood the symptoms, medication was indicated.

It was necessary, in the first place, to reestablish the true meaning of love, which is sacrifice and death; defining the essence of marriage, both internally and externally; determine the moral role of women in the family and society; to extinguish finally, by the superiority of the new ideal, that devouring lust that, making the union of the two sexes an insipid commerce, drove them to enjoyments against nature and to their mutual negation.

These conditions, all of personal morality, also presupposed and demanded a general reform of economic relations: division of large landed estates, latifundia; abolition of slavery, restoration of local and political freedoms. Without freedom and without equality, there is no marriage or family that can sustain itself: this truth has been passed down through the ages, and never could its application have come more timely. The man who had then become a worker and a citizen again, the woman housewife and first teacher of the children, love reassured, marriage restored to honor, prostitution fell of its own accord, concubinage was ennobled, public horror would have done justice to the rest.

But a revolution that took place in the name of heaven could not proceed with this wisdom, and less than anyone we should expect it from the preachers of the Gospel. Christianity reacted against the dissolution of pagan mores in the same way as it reacted against slavery, the exorbitance of property and the autocracy of the emperor: it changed, with great accompaniment of anathemas, the terms of the question; it did not solve it. Compared to the Roman theory, the Christian theory of marriage was even a retrograde step.

You must see under what bizarre aspect the founders began to consider the thing.

CHAPTER IV.

Church doctrine on marriage. — Community of loves, concubinage, divorce, confusion of the sexes: negation of women.

XXIX. — When Christianity made its entry into the world, love and marriage, one destroyed by the other, on the whole face of the empire were dying. For reformers who understood the symptoms, medication was indicated.

It was necessary, in the first place, to reestablish the true meaning of love, which is sacrifice and death; defining the essence of marriage, both internally and externally; determine the moral role of women in the family and society; to extinguish finally, by the superiority of the new ideal, that devouring lust that, making the union of the two sexes an insipid commerce, drove them to enjoyments against nature and to their mutual negation.

These conditions, all of personal morality, also presupposed and demanded a general reform of economic relations: division of large landed estates, latifundia; abolition of slavery, restoration of local and political freedoms. Without freedom and without equality, there is no marriage or family that can sustain itself: this truth has been passed down through the ages, and never could its application have come more timely. The man who had then become a worker and a citizen again, the woman housewife and first teacher of the children, love reassured, marriage restored to honor, prostitution fell of its own accord, concubinage was ennobled, public horror would have done justice to the rest.

But a revolution that took place in the name of heaven could not proceed with this wisdom, and less than anyone we should expect it from the preachers of the Gospel. Christianity reacted against the dissolution of pagan mores in the same way as it reacted against slavery, the exorbitance of property and the autocracy of the emperor: it changed, with great accompaniment of anathemas, the terms of the question; it did not solve it. Compared to the Roman theory, the Christian theory of marriage was even a retrograde step.

You must see under what bizarre aspect the founders began to consider the thing.

XXIX. Hardly had the apostles, persecuted in Jerusalem, set foot in the land of the Gentiles, than they had to resolve, for the direction of the neophytes, this serious question of intimate morality, which depended on all the habits of pagan existence:

Were Christians allowed to frequent places consecrated to love?

It is in the Acts of the Apostles, ch. XV, that is the detail of the consultation.

La proposition, ainsi qu’on peut le voir, se borne aux filles ou prêtresses de Vénus ; elle ne regarde point les hétaires ou concubines, qu’il ne pouvait entrer dans la tête de Juifs, s’adressant à des Gentils, de proscrire ; et elle fait abstraction du mariage. Elle fut solennellement débattue, en même temps que la question de la circoncision, au concile de Jérusalem, tenu par les apôtres, autant que l’on peut conjecturer, vers l’an 56, quatorze ans après la conversion de Paul, vingt-huit après la mort du Christ, que je place, avec Lactance et Gibbon, à l’an 29.

At the same time as it declared circumcision useless, the august assembly pronounced that the association of women consecrated to Aphrodite was forbidden; but on what grounds?

“Whereas the said places of love are placed under the invocation of a pagan divinity, the most abominable of all, according to Moses and the prophets; as there are made in the said places, in honor of the goddess, libations and sacrifices, and that commerce with women is inseparable from the eating of the dishes offered, idolothyta: all things which together constitute, according to the scriptures, fornication…”

Such is the recital, not expressed, but obviously implied in the text of the Acts, and which the meaning of the decree presupposes. What offends the religion of the apostolic college, either weakness of moral sense, or consideration for custom, is, what…? The degradation of women? No; — the licenses of the vulgar Venus? They don’t think about it; — it is participation in idolatry, for them the most capital of crimes. According to the Decalogue and the tradition of the prophets, of which Christ closed the series, the prohibition of idolatry is absolute; it prevails over the renunciation of the prostitutes. This is what the council declares by its decree:

“It has pleased the Holy Spirit and us, Visum est Spiritui Sanclo et nobis, that you abstain from meats immolated to idols, blood sausages, stews (the law of Moses forbade eating the blood, the flesh of animals strangled or cooked in their blood), and of fornication: Ut abstineatis vos ab immolatis simulacrorum, et sanguine, et suffocato, et fornicatione. What you do will be blameless. Farewell. To quibus custodientes your bene agetis. Valele.”

Singulier effet du préjugé : ces hommes, qui osaient rompre avec la foi d’Israël et reprendre leur prépuce, s’effrayent d’une vaine cérémonie polythéiste ; dans leur cervelle étroite, c’est la condamnation du boudin bénit qui emporte celle de la fornication. Les idolâtres ne faisaient pas l’amour à jeun ; le temple de Vénus servait aussi de restaurant : c’est par là qu’ils attaquent l’amour libre. Qu’est devenu le prophète de Nazareth ? Qu’aurait pensé sa haute intelligence en voyant ses légats, Pierre, Paul, Jacques, Jean et toute l’Église, gravement occupés de tels scrupules ?

XXX. Hardly had the apostles, persecuted in Jerusalem, set foot in the land of the Gentiles, than they had to resolve, for the direction of the neophytes, this serious question of intimate morality, which depended on all the habits of pagan existence:

Were Christians allowed to frequent places consecrated to love?

It is in the Acts of the Apostles, ch. XV, that is the detail of the consultation.

The proposition, as one can convince oneself from the text of the Acts, is limited to the daughters or priestesses of Venus: it does not concern the hetaries or concubines, which could not enter into the heads of Jews, polygamists, exercising over their servants the right of the lord, and addressing Gentiles, to proscribe; and it ignores marriage. It was solemnly debated, at the same time as the question of circumcision, at the Council of Jerusalem, held by the apostles, as far as one can conjecture, around the year 86, fourteen years after the conversion of Paul, twenty-eight after the death of Christ, which I place, with Lactantius and Gibbon, in the year 29.

At the same time as it declared circumcision useless, the august assembly pronounced that the association of women consecrated to Aphrodite was forbidden; but on what grounds?

“Whereas the said places of love are placed under the invocation of a pagan divinity, the most abominable of all, according to Moses and the prophets; as there are made in the said places, in honor of the goddess, libations and sacrifices, and that commerce with women is inseparable from the eating of the dishes offered, idolothyta: all things which together constitute, according to the scriptures, fornication…”

Such is the recital, not expressed, but obviously implied in the text of the Acts, and which the meaning of the decree presupposes. What offends the religion of the apostolic college, either weakness of moral sense, or consideration for custom, is, what…? The degradation of women? No; — the licenses of the vulgar Venus? They don’t think about it; — it is participation in idolatry, for them the most capital of crimes. According to the Decalogue and the tradition of the prophets, of which Christ closed the series, the prohibition of idolatry is absolute; it prevails over the renunciation of the prostitutes. This is what the council declares by its decree:

“It has pleased the Holy Spirit and us, Visum est Spiritui Sanclo et nobis, that you abstain from meats immolated to idols, blood sausages, stews (the law of Moses forbade eating the blood, the flesh of animals strangled or cooked in their blood), and of fornication: Ut abstineatis vos ab immolatis simulacrorum, et sanguine, et suffocato, et fornicatione. What you do will be blameless. Farewell. To quibus custodientes your bene agetis. Valele.”

A singular effect of prejudice: these men, who dared to break with the faith of Israel and resume their foreskin, are frightened by a vain polytheistic ceremony; in their narrow brains, the condemnation of the blessed sausage is placed on the same line as fornication. Idolaters did not make love on an empty stomach; the temple of Venus also served as a restaurant: all that, in their eyes, is idolatry; it is by means of this generalization that they attack free love. What has become of the prophet of Nazareth? What would his high intelligence have thought when he saw his legates, Peter, Paul, Jacques, John and the whole Church, gravely occupied with such scruples?(D)

XXX.— At least, one thinks, by virtue of this canonical decision, woman will go up a grade: no more courtesans, no more mercenaries, no more of those women whose charms belong to everyone and whose heart belongs to no one; henceforth the woman will be a wife, or at least a companion.

Gently please; let us not go faster than history. The prohibition of fornication did not remove, for the majority of the faithful, the economic difficulty of concubinage. Also, admire the unexpected turn that the affair took. Since, under the name of fornication, it was above all the worship of the gods that the council had wished to affect, sin, it was thought, would cease if the Christians, instead of having recourse to the saints of paganism, addressed themselves to their sisters, that is to say, to women of their sect, with whom they would no longer run the risk of eating forbidden meats. — “We are all members of the Holy Spirit,” they said in their jargon; “we cannot unite with the daughters of Venus, with members of the devil. But the sisters received the Holy Spirit like us: how could we lose the Spirit by uniting ourselves to them?”

Such was the origin of the free loves between brothers and sisters, that is to say between Christians and Christians, loves whose custom passed until the fourth century and motivated those accusations of promiscuity that the rival churches brought against each other, which resounded so many times before the tribunals of the empire. The church of Pergame, where Nicolaüs dominated; that of Thyatira, which was not yet founded in 96, are denounced in the Apocalypse as going beyond the limit set by the council, by allowing the brothers not only the enjoyment of the sisters, but the frequentation of the groves of Venus and participation in the feasts of the courtesans, fornicari and manducare de idolothytis. They are compared for this fact to Balaam, who, according to the book of Numbers, had advised Balac, king of Moab, to send daughters to the Hebrews to initiate them into the worship of Belphegor, and thereby irritate their god Jehovah against them. It even seems that the Nicolaitans found in this latitude a mystical sense, altitudines, mysteria. This was the great temptation of the first century.

The fornication that distinguished the followers of Nicolaus from other messianic sects was in truth too slight to justify a declaration of heresy on the part of the Puritans: so the Apocalypse does not seem to make it a question of dissent, habeo adversùm te pauca, although, in its biblical zeal, it threatens wrongdoers with death. It was only later that the prohibition which struck public women was extended to this fraternal promiscuity, which in a short time became worse than pagan debauchery. Peter, and the others whom the Roman Church has classed among the true apostles; Peter, who had struck Ananias and Sapphira to death for a slight infraction of communist law, was the first, if the two epistles attributed to him are authentic, to retreat on the question of free love: he decided that each would have his each, and himself gave the example of concubinage. But the partisans of community held firm: the epistle of Jude, fifteenth bishop of Jerusalem, published between 417 and 138, which the Church placed in the canon as being of the apostle, denounces them with fury; it calls them corrupters of the flesh, despisers of the hierarchy, blasphemers of power, and threatens them with the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Poor reasons, really, for people who made the community of love a law of charity, and who all considered themselves equal! Also the most fervent part of Christianity persisted in the practice of free love until the emperor, embracing the faith of Christ, came to clean his fold: we see in the letters of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, beheaded in 238, the martyrs receive in their dungeons the visit of the sisters, and, all covered with the blood of their tortures, embrace them in Jesus Christ and Cupid, to the great scandal of the chaste bishop.

I know very well that the so-called Orthodox Church declines responsibility for these aberrations, which it blames on heresy. But you will admit, Monsignor, that the first thought of your Church was communist, its ideal communist, its administration communist, its meals even communist; and when I add that love there was also communist, that it ceased to be so only when the meals and the authority had come out of joint ownership, I am only drawing the consequence of the principle that during the first period governs the sect, and I recall a practice whose long duration shows the original near-universality.

Thus, it is not as shameful that Christianity first condemns free love: the decree of the first council, the epistle of Jude and the Apocalypse prove it; it is only as incompatible with property, ecclesiastical administration, respect for government. The apostolic council had forbidden trade with the daughters of Venus because of the meats offered to the goddess; now the head of the apostolate defends the community of loves out of respect for the morals of the empire. Through these restrictions, we see that the principle does not change: the true faith of the Christian is that love, like labor and property, must be common. If Peter and his successors deviate from it, it is a matter of policy and circumstance, which changes nothing in the spirit of the Gospel and the tendencies of the Church, which in no way affects the essence of the dogma.

XXXI.— At least, one thinks, by virtue of this canonical decision, woman will go up a grade: no more courtesans, no more mercenaries, no more of those women whose charms belong to everyone and whose heart belongs to no one; henceforth the woman will be a wife, or at least a companion.

Gently please; let us not go faster than history. The prohibition of fornication did not remove, for the majority of the faithful, the economic difficulty of concubinage. Also, admire the unexpected turn that the affair took. Since, under the name of fornication, it was above all the worship of the gods that the council had wished to affect, sin, it was thought, would cease if the Christians, instead of having recourse to the saints of paganism, addressed themselves to their sisters, that is to say, to women of their sect, with whom they would no longer run the risk of eating forbidden meats. — “We are all members of the Holy Spirit,” they said in their jargon; “we cannot unite with the daughters of Venus, with members of the devil. But the sisters received the Holy Spirit like us: how could we lose the Spirit by uniting ourselves to them?”

Such was the origin of the free loves between brothers and sisters, that is to say between Christians and Christians, loves whose custom passed until the fourth century and motivated those accusations of promiscuity that the rival churches brought against each other, which resounded so many times before the tribunals of the empire. The church of Pergame, where Nicolaüs dominated; that of Thyatira, which was not yet founded in 96, are denounced in the Apocalypse as going beyond the limit set by the council, by allowing the brothers not only the enjoyment of the sisters, but the frequentation of the groves of Venus and participation in the feasts of the courtesans, fornicari and manducare de idolothytis. They are compared for this fact to Balaam, who, according to the book of Numbers, had advised Balac, king of Moab, to send daughters to the Hebrews to initiate them into the worship of Belphegor, and thereby irritate their god Jehovah against them. It even seems that the Nicolaitans found in this latitude a mystical sense, altitudines, mysteria. This was the great temptation of the first century. (E)

The fornication that distinguished the followers of Nicolaus from other messianic sects was in truth too slight to justify a declaration of heresy on the part of the Puritans: so the Apocalypse does not seem to make it a question of dissent, habeo adversùm te pauca, although, in its biblical zeal, it threatens wrongdoers with death. It was only later that the prohibition which struck public women was extended to this fraternal promiscuity, which in a short time became worse than pagan debauchery. Peter, and the others whom the Roman Church has classed among the true apostles; Peter, who had struck Ananias and Sapphira to death for a slight infraction of communist law, was the first, if the two epistles attributed to him are authentic, to retreat on the question of free love: he decided that each would have his each, and himself gave the example of concubinage. But the partisans of community held firm: the epistle of Jude, fifteenth bishop of Jerusalem, published between 417 and 138, which the Church placed in the canon as being of the apostle, denounces them with fury; it calls them corrupters of the flesh, despisers of the hierarchy, blasphemers of power, and threatens them with the punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Poor reasons, really, for people who made the community of love a law of charity, and who all considered themselves equal! Also the most fervent part of Christianity persisted in the practice of free love until the emperor, embracing the faith of Christ, came to clean his fold: we see in the letters of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, beheaded in 238, the martyrs receive in their dungeons the visit of the sisters, and, all covered with the blood of their tortures, embrace them in Jesus Christ and Cupid, to the great scandal of the chaste bishop.

I know very well that the so-called Orthodox Church declines responsibility for these aberrations, which it blames on heresy. But you will admit, Monsignor, that the first thought of your Church was communist, its ideal communist, its administration communist, its meals even communist; and when I add that love there was also communist, that it ceased to be so only when the meals and the authority had come out of joint ownership, I am only drawing the consequence of the principle that during the first period governs the sect, and I recall a practice whose long duration shows the original near-universality.

Thus, it is not as shameful that Christianity first condemns free love: the decree of the first council, the epistle of Jude and the Apocalypse prove it; it is only as incompatible with property, ecclesiastical administration, respect for government. The apostolic council had forbidden trade with the daughters of Venus because of the meats offered to the goddess; now the head of the apostolate defends the community of loves out of respect for the morals of the empire. Through these restrictions, we see that the principle does not change: the true faith of the Christian is that love, like labor and property, must be common. If Peter and his successors deviate from it, it is a matter of policy and circumstance, which changes nothing in the spirit of the Gospel and the tendencies of the Church, which in no way affects the essence of the dogma.

XXXI. – With Peter and his acolytes, we have arrived at concubinage. How did the apostles of Christ, masters of morality, not believe they had to complete the thought of Augustus from the outset? Why, from the beginning, instead of remaining in this concubinary environment, which had for them neither the patrician dignity nor the frankness of free love, did they not exclusively confirm marriage? Where did this moderation come from? Were justes noces reserved for that terrible day, which formed the basis of messianic hope, when, on the ruins of Rome and of the universe, the marriage of the Lamb was to be celebrated?

It is a fact that the modern historians of the Church conceal as well as they can, but which emerges with evidence from a careful reading of the originals, that up to a late period concubinage was not only authorized, but popular usage in the Church. De Potter, Histoire philosophique, politique et critique du Christianisme quotes Saint Augustine as saying: “That concubines are not wives, not because they lack the nuptial benediction, but because there is no civil act constituent of the dowry.” The same author reports the Council of Toledo, which authorizes concubinage as a supplement to marriage. The collection of Gratien, a famous canonist of the twelfth century, is also cited in favor of this opinion. Early on, however, concubinage seems to have been forbidden to bishops, whose wives were to be legitimate wives. Marriage for high dignitaries, concubinage for the common faithful: this is precisely how old Rome began, with its distinction of marriage by confarretion, coemption and usucapion. We know what resistance the Holy See encountered when ecclesiastical celibacy was instituted. The people made common cause with the priests: concubinage being popular marriage, the brutal interdiction with which it was struck in the person of priests and vicars became an insult to the democracy. To triumph over the opposition, Pope Gregory VIT, entering or pretending to enter into the ideas of the time, maintained on the contrary that the celibacy of priests was precisely intended to prevent the invasion of the Church by feudalism, by making appropriation impossible, by the priests and their families, of ecclesiastical functions and properties. Always politics in place of principles, discipline in place of morality: as if marital law were something variable according to reason of state, as if the family were not the basis of all morality.

Finally, what is the thought, the true thought of the Church, on marriage? Where is it today?

A singular thing, which no one seems to me to have noticed, but which emerges brilliantly from the history of the Church and from all its discipline, the Church, less advanced than paganism, has never distinguished marriage from concubinage. For it, it is all one. It blesses spouses, it blesses concubinaries, as it blesses all things; it used to bless the sheets of the nuptial bed, which the bride and groom carried with them to the Church; it once blessed free love; if it dared, it would bless it again. Whether we marry, or whether we are content to sleep together, such distinctions, all of temperament, convenience or interest, do not concern it; just ask its blessing, and all will be for the best. The Church, in a word, which, on all other parts of social philosophy, has carried theological speculation so far, the Church has remained, on the question of marriage, in pure naturalism; it literally has no religion.

Quoi ! dites-vous, il n’est pas vrai que l’Église compte le mariage au nombre de ses sacrements ?… — Un instant, Monseigneur ; les paroles sont les paroles, et les choses sont les choses. Vous avez pour tout de beaux mots, et je ne nie pas qu’on lise dans saint Paul cette phrase magnifique, à propos de l’union de l’homme et de la femme, Sacramentum hoc magnum est. Ceci est un grand sacrement, ou mieux un grand mystère. Sous la pression de la conscience universelle, qui de tout temps fit du mariage l’acte le plus religieux de la vie, l’Église, distancée par le paganisme, dut comprendre qu’elle ne pouvait entièrement abandonner aux définitions de la loi civile ce qu’il y a de plus véritablement sacramentel dans l’humanité. Elle eut donc aussi son sacrement de mariage, le dernier en rang comme en date, sacrement sur lequel, au rapport de Bergier, hésitaient saint Thomas, saint Bonaventure et Scot, et que rejeta plus tard la prétendue Réforme ; elle eut sa messe de fiançailles, sa messe d’épousailles, sa formule de bénédiction nuptiale, tout l’équivalent du rituel de Romulus et de Numa. Mais, vous le savez mieux que moi, la lettre tue, l’esprit vivifie ; et je vous demande : Quel est l’esprit de ce grand sacrement ? Il n’est pas de jeune fille chez laquelle ce mystérieux nom ne réveille un sentiment indéfinissable, bien différent de l’amour : que vous dit, à vous théologien, votre conscience ? Qu’est-ce enfin que le mariage ? Vous êtes embarrassé : « On dispute, dit Bergier, pour savoir quelle est la matière de ce sacrement, quelle en est la forme ; si le prêtre en est le ministre, ou s’il n’en est que le témoin. » Le fond, la forme, le sujet, le ministre, vous ignorez tout. Laissez-moi donc vous dire à vous-même ce que vous pensez ; je vous dirai après ce que pense la Révolution.

XXXII. – With Peter and his acolytes, we have arrived at concubinage. How did the apostles of Christ, masters of morality, not believe they had to complete the thought of Augustus from the outset? Why, from the beginning, instead of remaining in this concubinary environment, which had for them neither the patrician dignity nor the frankness of free love, did they not exclusively confirm marriage? Where did this moderation come from? Were justes noces reserved for that terrible day, which formed the basis of messianic hope, when, on the ruins of Rome and of the universe, the marriage of the Lamb was to be celebrated?

It is a fact that the modern historians of the Church conceal as well as they can, but which emerges with evidence from a careful reading of the originals, that up to a late period concubinage was not only authorized, but popular usage in the Church. De Potter, Histoire philosophique, politique et critique du Christianisme quotes Saint Augustine as saying: “That concubines are not wives, not because they lack the nuptial benediction, but because there is no civil act constituent of the dowry.” The same author reports the Council of Toledo, which authorizes concubinage as a supplement to marriage. The collection of Gratien, a famous canonist of the twelfth century, is also cited in favor of this opinion. Early on, however, concubinage seems to have been forbidden to bishops, whose wives were to be legitimate wives. Marriage for high dignitaries, concubinage for the common faithful: this is precisely how old Rome began, with its distinction of marriage by confarretion, coemption and usucapion. We know what resistance the Holy See encountered when ecclesiastical celibacy was instituted. The people made common cause with the priests: concubinage being popular marriage, the brutal interdiction with which it was struck in the person of priests and vicars became an insult to the democracy. To triumph over the opposition, Pope Gregory VIT, entering or pretending to enter into the ideas of the time, maintained on the contrary that the celibacy of priests was precisely intended to prevent the invasion of the Church by feudalism, by making appropriation impossible, by the priests and their families, of ecclesiastical functions and properties. Always politics in place of principles, discipline in place of morality: as if marital law were something variable according to reason of state, as if the family were not the basis of all morality.

Finally, what is the thought, the true thought of the Church, on marriage? Where is it today?

A singular thing, which no one seems to me to have noticed, but which emerges brilliantly from the history of the Church and from all its discipline, the Church, less advanced than paganism, has never distinguished marriage from concubinage. For it, it is all one. It blesses spouses, it blesses concubinaries, as it blesses all things; it used to bless the sheets of the nuptial bed, which the bride and groom carried with them to the Church; it once blessed free love; if it dared, it would bless it again. Whether we marry, or whether we are content to sleep together, such distinctions, all of temperament, convenience or interest, do not concern it; just ask its blessing, and all will be for the best. The Church, in a word, which, on all other parts of social philosophy, has carried theological speculation so far, the Church has remained, on the question of marriage, in pure naturalism; it literally has no religion.

What! you say, is it not true that the Church counts marriage among its sacraments?… — One moment, Monsignor; words are words, and things are things. You have beautiful words for everything, and I do not deny that we read in Saint Paul this magnificent phrase, apropos of the union of man and woman, sacramentum hoc magnum est. This is a great sacrament, or rather a great mystery. Under the pressure of the universal conscience, which has always made marriage the most religious act of life, the Church, distanced by paganism, had to realize that it could not entirely abandon to the definitions of civil law what is most truly sacramental in humanity. It therefore also had its sacrament of marriage, the last in rank as well as in date, a sacrament on which, according to Bergier’s report, St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and Scotus hesitated, and were later rejected by the so-called Reformation; it had its betrothal mass, its nuptial mass, its nuptial benediction formula, all the equivalent of the ritual of Romulus and Numa. But, you know it better than I, the letter kills, the spirit vivifies; and I ask you: What is the spirit of this great sacrament? There is not a young girl in whom this mysterious name does not awaken an indefinable feeling, very different from love; what does your conscience say to you, theologian? Finally, what is marriage? You are embarrassed: “We argue,” says Bergier, “to know what is the matter of this sacrament, what is its form; if the priest is the minister, or if he is only the witness.” The content, the form, the subject, the minister, you don’t know everything. So let me tell you what you think; I will tell you afterwards what the Revolution thinks.

XXXII. — The first Christians, by their community of loves; the first council of Jerusalem, by its decree concerning women vowed to Venus; Peter, the chief of the apostles, by his declaration in favor of concubinage; the whole Church, in a word, by its practice and its faith, tended to lower marriage. This tendency only needed to be converted into doctrine: it was Saül or Saul, who has become so famous under the name of Paul, who took charge of it.

Let us get to know this character.

Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin and of the sect of the Pharisees, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, disciple of Gamaliel, inclining, despite his Hebrew education, towards Hellenism, after having served the persecution against Christians, finally understood, according to the example of the Simons, the Menanders and a host of others, that it was made up of Mosaicism, and that the century was marching towards a religious and social renewal that involved all peoples, without distinction of religion or language. The Herodians had disappeared; the Sadducees, the Pharisees, were unpopular; the hated priesthood; Theudas, Judas of Galilee and their ilk, by the ridicule of their undertakings, had discredited messianism, at least such as, until Jesus of Nazareth, public opinion had generally understood it. On the other hand, there was a reaction in favor of the latter, executed by common accord and despite his protest by the Roman proconsul and the pontificate: the disgrace of Pontius Pilate, the exile of Herod and Herodias, the tragic end of Caligula, were cited loudly by Christians as marks of divine vengeance. The sudden death of Agrippa, which happened in the year 43, some time after the martyrdom of James, first bishop of Jerusalem, and regarded by the sect as a new mark of anger from on high, completed the astonishment of minds and plunged the nation into discouragement. It was by the permission of this prince, whose estates comprised, with Judea, Samaria and part of Syria, and who desired to please the Jews, that the pontificate of Jerusalem caused the Nazarenes to be pursued as far as Damascus, against which Saul himself had obtained a commission. Agrippa dead, Judea reduced to a Roman province, the people, in Asia as everywhere, abandoning national ideas in hatred of the aristocracy, what was left for a restless, dogmatic genius, as fit to play the role of martyr as that of executioner, one finally such as Saul? To become a Christian: he would have become a Christ if the place had not been taken.

Suddenly he disappears; he has visions, makes a retreat of three years in Arabia: that of Jesus had been only 40 days; then the brothers learn, to their great surprise, that he who once persecuted them with such fury now evangelizes the faith of Jesus Christ. The means of refusing a supernatural mission to a miraculously transfigured man, who has trampled on all the bonds of flesh and blood, non acquievi carni et sanguini; who ascended to the third heaven, whence he brought back extraordinary things? Also Paul constantly recalls that he was instructed by Jesus Christ in person, although he never saw him; as for the apostles, he owes them nothing. He conferred with Peter, it is true, during his stay of two weeks in Jerusalem; he saw James once: what does this prove? If later he believed he had to go to the council, in the company of Titus and Barnabas, he did so following a revelation, secundùm revelationem, and in order to confront the Gospels, but not to obey an authority that he does not recognize. Let each direct his own mission as he sees fit: he does not interfere with the churches of others, and he will not suffer anyone to interfere with his own. Above all, he claims the apostolate of the nations as his own and does not allow anyone to contradict him on this point. It is in vain that Peter, at the Council of Jerusalem, protests against this monopolization, recalls his mission to Caesarea, where he converts the centurion Cornelius; his trip to Rome, undertaken when Saul was not even baptized: the ex-Pharisee does not listen to reason. “To me,” he said, “the gospel of the foreskin; to Peter, that of circumcision.” The foreskin was the whole empire, 420 million souls; circumcision was Judea and Samaria, plus the synagogues scattered throughout the world, three million souls, perhaps, what was most refractory to the movement.

It is objected that he did not receive the ministry from the hands of Jesus Christ.

“These men,” he replies, speaking of Peter, James and John, “are not Christians, because they compromise with circumcision. But I, who have denied Israel without restriction, am the true representative of Christ; I am nailed to his cross; I am not even alive anymore, I am not me, I am the Christ who lives in me and who speaks to you through my mouth: Vivo ego jam non ego, vivit vero in me Christus.”

A sincere exposition of the epistles of this maniac would be the most curious history of apostolic times, and would show by what mirage of religious fanaticism the most hateful of characters, the most false spirit, became the glory of the Church and the oracle of theology.

I have already noted, speaking of slavery, what were the concerns of the Apostle. What he wanted was not an overhaul of mores and institutions: in his eyes, the thing was not worth the trouble; it was to prepare the faithful, Jews and Gentiles, for the coming return of Christ, who was to put an end to all things. Hence his disposition to consider questions of morality, public and domestic order, through the prism of his messianic expectation. We have seen (Study V) how he urged slaves to take their side of servitude: it is in the same spirit that he deals with marriage. Very weak in intelligence, he thinks, are those who bother with this detail, as if it were a question of deciding for centuries! “Christ is coming,” he cried; “fast, pray, mortify yourselves; deserve, by your penance, to participate in the new kingdom.”

Paul is the doctor par excellence of the fall, of grace, of the superiority of faith over justice and of the millennial idea. On all these points, he separates himself from his colleagues, who found him difficult to understand, did their best, by their concessions, to preserve unity with the very dear brother Paul and, not putting their palingenetic forecasts at such short term, reconciled as best they could the demands of their households with the duties of their apostolate.

We are divided on the point of knowing if Paul had been married: according to the passages that I will relate of his letters, and especially according to his way of thinking on women, the question does not seem to me doubtful; he was, he was celibate all his life. In the absorption of his zeal, he allows neither sister nor concubine to be with him; all the more reason he would not tolerate a wife. How would he take on this yoke, he who even forgets to take nourishment?

“Have I not,” he cried, “the right to break the fast, to drink and to eat, like the other apostles? Don’t I have the right to drag a wife, sister, everywhere with me, like the brothers of Jesus and Peter do? Why don’t I use it? It is because I am totally devoted to preaching. And I have no merit in it; because I am a man of preaching. It is second nature to me, a necessity: Necessitas mihi incumbit. I am sick if I do not preach: Væ enim miki est si non evangelizavero!”

He boasts, the proud apostle. In another letter, he confesses his carnal tribulations: I have been given a demon of flesh that buffets me, he says in proper terms. I prefer Anacreon asking for refreshment from the love that consumes him: Crown with fresh flowers, O women, my burning head!… Yes, despite his shipwrecks, his travels, his beatings, his fasts, his vigils, despite his incessant preaching, Paul cannot escape the proverbial lasciviousness of his race. His obstinate continence makes him unhappy, splenetic, cataleptic; it gives him hallucinations, rage. Why doesn’t he put into practice his maxim: Better to marry than to burn? Why does he not take a sister, a concubine, if he does not want a solemn wife? Why this ridiculous, indecent martyrdom, which disturbs his reason, harms his liberty and deforms his virtue?

Perhaps Paul’s theory of marriage will help us penetrate this secret. It interests us all the more because it is law in the Church.

XXXIII. — The first Christians, by their community of loves; the first council of Jerusalem, by its decree concerning women vowed to Venus; Peter, the chief of the apostles, by his declaration in favor of concubinage; the whole Church, in a word, by its practice and its faith, tended to lower marriage. This tendency only needed to be converted into doctrine: it was Saül or Saul, who has become so famous under the name of Paul, who took charge of it.

Let us get to know this character.

Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin and of the sect of the Pharisees, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, disciple of Gamaliel, inclining, despite his Hebrew education, towards Hellenism, after having served the persecution against Christians, finally understood, according to the example of the Simons, the Menanders and a host of others, that it was made up of Mosaicism, and that the century was marching towards a religious and social renewal that involved all peoples, without distinction of religion or language. The Herodians had disappeared; the Sadducees, the Pharisees, were unpopular; the hated priesthood; Theudas, Judas of Galilee and their ilk, by the ridicule of their undertakings, had discredited messianism, at least such as, until Jesus of Nazareth, public opinion had generally understood it. On the other hand, there was a reaction in favor of the latter, executed by common accord and despite his protest by the Roman proconsul and the pontificate: the disgrace of Pontius Pilate, the exile of Herod and Herodias, the tragic end of Caligula, were cited loudly by Christians as marks of divine vengeance. The sudden death of Agrippa, which happened in the year 43, some time after the martyrdom of James, first bishop of Jerusalem, and regarded by the sect as a new mark of anger from on high, completed the astonishment of minds and plunged the nation into discouragement. It was by the permission of this prince, whose estates comprised, with Judea, Samaria and part of Syria, and who desired to please the Jews, that the pontificate of Jerusalem caused the Nazarenes to be pursued as far as Damascus, against which Saul himself had obtained a commission. Agrippa dead, Judea reduced to a Roman province, the people, in Asia as everywhere, abandoning national ideas in hatred of the aristocracy, what was left for a restless, dogmatic genius, as fit to play the role of martyr as that of executioner, one finally such as Saul? To become a Christian: he would have become a Christ if the place had not been taken.

Suddenly he disappears; he has visions, makes a retreat of three years in Arabia: that of Jesus had been only 40 days; then the brothers learn, to their great surprise, that he who once persecuted them with such fury now evangelizes the faith of Jesus Christ. The means of refusing a supernatural mission to a miraculously transfigured man, who has trampled on all the bonds of flesh and blood, non acquievi carni et sanguini; who ascended to the third heaven, whence he brought back extraordinary things? Also Paul constantly recalls that he was instructed by Jesus Christ in person, although he never saw him; as for the apostles, he owes them nothing. He conferred with Peter, it is true, during his stay of two weeks in Jerusalem; he saw James once: what does this prove? If later he believed he had to go to the council, in the company of Titus and Barnabas, he did so following a revelation, secundùm revelationem, and in order to confront the Gospels, but not to obey an authority that he does not recognize. Let each direct his own mission as he sees fit: he does not interfere with the churches of others, and he will not suffer anyone to interfere with his own. Above all, he claims the apostolate of the nations as his own and does not allow anyone to contradict him on this point. It is in vain that Peter, at the Council of Jerusalem, protests against this monopolization, recalls his mission to Caesarea, where he converts the centurion Cornelius; his trip to Rome, undertaken when Saul was not even baptized: the ex-Pharisee does not listen to reason. “To me,” he said, “the gospel of the foreskin; to Peter, that of circumcision.” The foreskin was the whole empire, 420 million souls; circumcision was Judea and Samaria, plus the synagogues scattered throughout the world, three million souls, perhaps, what was most refractory to the movement.

It is objected that he did not receive the ministry from the hands of Jesus Christ:

“These men,” he replies, speaking of Peter, James and John, “are not Christians, because they compromise with circumcision. But I, who have denied Israel without restriction, am the true representative of Christ; I am nailed to his cross; I am not even alive anymore, I am not me, I am the Christ who lives in me and who speaks to you through my mouth: Vivo ego jam non ego, vivit vero in me Christus.”

A sincere exposition of the epistles of this maniac would be the most curious history of apostolic times, and would show by what mirage of religious fanaticism the most hateful of characters, the most false spirit, became the glory of the Church and the oracle of theology.

I have already noted, speaking of slavery, what were the concerns of the Apostle. What he wanted was not an overhaul of mores and institutions: in his eyes, the thing was not worth the trouble; it was to prepare the faithful, Jews and Gentiles, for the coming return of Christ, who was to put an end to all things. Hence his disposition to consider questions of morality, public and domestic order, through the prism of his messianic expectation. We have seen (Study V) how he urged slaves to take their side of servitude: it is in the same spirit that he deals with marriage. Very weak in intelligence, he thinks, are those who bother with this detail, as if it were a question of deciding for centuries! “Christ is coming,” he cried; “fast, pray, mortify yourselves; deserve, by your penance, to participate in the new kingdom.”

Paul is the doctor par excellence of the fall, of grace, of the superiority of faith over justice and of the millennial idea. On all these points, he separates himself from his colleagues, who found him difficult to understand, did their best, by their concessions, to preserve unity with the very dear brother Paul and, not putting their palingenetic forecasts at such short term, reconciled as best they could the demands of their households with the duties of their apostolate.

We are divided on the point of knowing if Paul had been married: according to the passages that I will relate of his letters, and especially according to his way of thinking on women, the question does not seem to me doubtful; he was, he was celibate all his life. In the absorption of his zeal, he allows neither sister nor concubine to be with him; all the more reason he would not tolerate a wife. How would he take on this yoke, he who even forgets to take nourishment?

“Have I not,” he cried, “the right to break the fast, to drink and to eat, like the other apostles? Don’t I have the right to drag a wife, sister, everywhere with me, like the brothers of Jesus and Peter do? Why don’t I use it? It is because I am totally devoted to preaching. And I have no merit in it; because I am a man of preaching. It is second nature to me, a necessity: Necessitas mihi incumbit. I am sick if I do not preach: Væ enim miki est si non evangelizavero!”

He boasts, the proud apostle. In another letter, he confesses his carnal tribulations: I have been given a demon of flesh that buffets me, he says in proper terms. I prefer Anacreon asking for refreshment from the love that consumes him: Crown with fresh flowers, O women, my burning head!… Yes, despite his shipwrecks, his travels, his beatings, his fasts, his vigils, despite his incessant preaching, Paul cannot escape the proverbial lasciviousness of his race. His obstinate continence makes him unhappy, splenetic, cataleptic; it gives him hallucinations, rage. Why doesn’t he put into practice his maxim: Better to marry than to burn? Why does he not take a sister, a concubine, if he does not want a solemn wife? Why this ridiculous, indecent martyrdom, which disturbs his reason, harms his liberty and deforms his virtue?

Perhaps Paul’s theory of marriage will help us penetrate this secret. It interests us all the more because it is law in the Church.

XXXIII. — Those of Corinth, a city celebrated from time immemorial for the beauty and talents of its courtesans; where continence, said Dom Calmet naively, was more difficult to practice than anywhere else, had written to him on the subject that interested neophytes so keenly, namely, fornication, or, to speak more correctly, free love. Things went far among the Corinthian brethren, since, in the pell-mell, the son took the father’s mistress (I Cor., v).

What is the response of the terrible preacher, the humorous apostle, learned in the Pharisee traditions, who, moreover, had studied the Greek poets and philosophers?

Those of my readers who have never read the Apostle certainly do not expect it. Paul’s thought on marriage is exactly the same as that of the pagans whom he claims to convert: it is the thought of Metellus Numidicus, declaring woman a necessary evil; the thought of Menander, who in these two verses says the same thing:

It is the wish expressed in this verse of Homer, which everyone took as their motto:

This is the theme that Paul unfolds in his first to the Corinthians, chap. VII.

“In principle,” he says, “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.”

It is marvelous, most excellent Paul! But the common people of the faithful do not accommodate themselves to this lofty virtue, which they agree to admire in the priests of Cybele and the evangelists of your stamp; then, it is not with jokes that one moralizes men. Under these conditions, Christianity is impossible; it does not pass. Paul feels it, he therefore proposes, without further transition, monogamy, either solemn marriage, or concubinage legalized by the law of Julia Poppæa: he takes no stand there, he makes no distinction.

“But because of fornications, let every man have his wife, and every woman her husband.”

The Vulgate says propter fornicationem; the Greek is δία τὰς πορνείας, in the plural. By these fornications, the Apostle means, first, frequentation of pagan courtesans, in conformity with the apostolic decree; then, the community of love between Christian men and women, introduced by the first messianists, and against which Paul and Cephas reacted; finally, and above all, the pederastic loves, for which there a commerce for both sexes, according to what Paul himself relates (Rom. I, 26 and 27).

Such, according to him, is the evangelical reason for marriage: a return to natural usage, which had fallen into disuse among the pagans, and the renunciation of all prostitution. Genesis had said, with infinitely more dignity: It is not good for man to be alone; let us give him a companion of his species. Paul’s philosophy is different: for him, marriage is only a remedy for incontinence. Dom Calmet, who follows Saint Chrysostom, finds the apostolic motif more exalted than that of Genesis; forgive the worthy Benedictine, he was, like his authors, celibate.

Loin d’élever l’épouse et d’honorer le mariage, Paul les prend donc, la première comme remplaçante de la courtisane, le second comme supplément de la fornication. Quant à la difficulté économique, si bien mise en lumière de nos jours par Malthus, Paul ne s’en inquiète aucunement ; loin de là, on dirait qu’il s’en applaudit. Le mariage étant une concession regrettable faite à la chair, on ne saurait l’entourer de trop d’épines, le racheter par trop de tribulations. Aussi raisonne-t-il de l’usage du mariage en digne précurseur de Mahomet :

“Let the husband render duty to the wife, and likewise the wife to the husband.”

“For the wife no longer has ownership of her body, but the husband; neither does the man have the property of his, but the woman.”

Earlier we were told that marriage was instituted to prevent fornication; but is not this marital intercourse pure fornication, as Paul understands it, and the whole Church after him? What becomes here, between the spouses, of the personality, the dignity? The wife, subject to duty, is less than the concubine, who, retaining her liberty, can at least demand that her lover be amiable, reserved, even respectful. The husband, in his turn, is less than the free lover, whose his hetaira, if she is worthy of her name, will never reproach him for his weariness and his impotence.

After such a beautiful precept, all that was needed was to regulate the hours and the number. Under the law of the Koran, the town criers, from the top of the minarets, remind lazy husbands of their duty. Paul limits himself to recommending good faith in the exchange; he leaves the figure ad libitum.

“Do not deprive one another, nolite fraudare invicem, or, following Dom Calmet: Do not go bankrupt, like debtors in bad faith, except by mutual agreement, and to attend to fasting and prayer.”

The Vulgate suppresses the word fasting, which is found in the Greek, and which the meaning requires. As a measure of hygiene, the Apostle exempts the spouses from rendering duty when they fast, according to the Hippocratic aphorism: Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus.

“And when you have finished praying and fasting, come back again, iterüm revertimini in idipsum, lest Satan tempt you through your incontinence.”

He means, lest the ardor of the flesh, driving you to fornication, make you fall back into idolatry.

The Apostle Peter, in his First Epistle, ch. m, v. 7, recommends the same thing, and for the same reason, to husbands, but implying that it is above all out of charity for women, whose nature is weaker, and who are nonetheless, with the men, co-heirs of grace: Quasi infirmiori vasculo muliebri impertientes honorem, tanquam et cohæredibus gratiæ vestræ. The word muliebri, which in the Vulgate is an adjective and makes the sentence awkward, is a substantive in the Greek, τῷ γυναικειῷ, the gynoecium, an honest term, to indicate the natural parts of woman. Poor women! It is not enough to subject them to duty; here we accuse their temperament. What becomes of love?

“It is understood,” continues Paul, “that what I say is from pure tolerance, secundüm indulgentiam: I do not make a law of it.”

The law, according to him, would be absolute abstention.

“But as not everyone has received from God the same grace that I enjoy (he speaks of his continence!), I repeat to singles and widows that, if they cannot stand and remain as I do, well, let them marry: it is better to marry than to burn.”

What do you say, Monsignor, who boasts so highly of evangelical modesty, of this materialism? Yet that is all your virtue: a brutal virtue, worthy of the century that saw it appear. How could Greek delicacy, how Roman gravity, how Germanic modesty, without protest, receive this degrading doctrine, inspired by the lasciviousness of the Phoenician-Arab races, in which two reformers from the extreme opposites of asceticism and voluptuousness, Paul and Mahomet, come to join hands?

Among the Romans, it was a principle, not juridical but moral, that an honest woman could, as a general rule, marry only once. In whatever manner she had lost her husband, propriety made it a duty for her to preserve his memory; her glory was to be called univira. Paul does not achieve this degree of marital propriety. He authorizes widows to remarry, and if later the Latin Church condemned second marriages, we know that by this word it meant marriage contracted following divorce, which it is in its particular tradition not to admit. As for remarriage after death, it allows second and even fourth marriages, and declares those who blame them heretics: It is better to marry than to burn! O saints Cornelia, Porcia, Agrippina, too happy to be born idolaters, safe from the accommodations of Christian chastity!

XXXIV. — Those of Corinth, a city celebrated from time immemorial for the beauty and talents of its courtesans; where continence, said Dom Calmet naively, was more difficult to practice than anywhere else, had written to him on the subject that interested neophytes so keenly, namely, fornication, or, to speak more correctly, free love. Things went far among the Corinthian brethren, since, in the pell-mell, the son took the father’s mistress (I Cor., v).

What is the response of the terrible preacher, the humorous apostle, learned in the Pharisee traditions, who, moreover, had studied the Greek poets and philosophers?

Those of my readers who have never read the Apostle certainly do not expect it. Paul’s thought on marriage is exactly the same as that of the pagans whom he claims to convert: it is the thought of Metellus Numidicus, declaring woman a necessary evil; the thought of Menander, who in these two verses says the same thing:

Γαμεῗν, ἑὰν τές αληθείαν,
κακὸν μὲν ἐστι, ἀλλ’ ἀναγκαῒον κακὸν.

It is the wish expressed in this verse of Homer, which everyone took as their motto:

Αἰθ’ ὄφελον τ’ ἔμεναι, ἀγονος τ’ απολέσθαι
Vivre sans femme et mourir sans enfants !

This is the theme that Paul unfolds in his first to the Corinthians, chap. VII.

“In principle,” he says, “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.”

It is marvelous, most excellent Paul! But the common people of the faithful do not accommodate themselves to this lofty virtue, which they agree to admire in the priests of Cybele and the evangelists of your stamp; then, it is not with jokes that one moralizes men. Under these conditions, Christianity is impossible; it does not pass. Paul feels it, he therefore proposes, without further transition, monogamy, either solemn marriage, or concubinage legalized by the law of Julia Poppæa: he takes no stand there, he makes no distinction.

“But because of fornications, let every man have his wife, and every woman her husband.”

The Vulgate says propter fornicationem; the Greek is δία τὰς πορνείας, in the plural. By these fornications, the Apostle means, first, frequentation of pagan courtesans, in conformity with the apostolic decree; then, the community of love between Christian men and women, introduced by the first messianists, and against which Paul and Cephas reacted; finally, and above all, the pederastic loves, for which there a commerce for both sexes, according to what Paul himself relates (Rom. I, 26 and 27).

Such, according to him, is the evangelical reason for marriage: a return to natural usage, which had fallen into disuse among the pagans, and the renunciation of all prostitution. Genesis had said, with infinitely more dignity: It is not good for man to be alone; let us give him a companion of his species. Paul’s philosophy is different: for him, marriage is only a remedy for incontinence. Dom Calmet, who follows Saint Chrysostom, finds the apostolic motif more exalted than that of Genesis; forgive the worthy Benedictine, he was, like his authors, celibate.

Far from elevating the wife and honoring marriage, Paul therefore takes them, the first as a substitute for the courtesan, the second as a supplement to fornication. As for the economic difficulty, so well brought to light in our day by Malthus, Paul is in no way worried about it; far from it, it looks like he applauds it. Marriage is a regrettable concession made to the flesh: one cannot surround it with too many thorns, redeem it with too many tribulations. So he reasons about the use of marriage as a worthy precursor of Muhammad:

“Let the husband render duty to the wife, and likewise the wife to the husband.”

“For the wife no longer has ownership of her body, but the husband; neither does the man have the property of his, but the woman.”

Earlier we were told that marriage was instituted to prevent fornication; but is not this marital intercourse pure fornication, as Paul understands it, and the whole Church after him? What becomes here, between the spouses, of the personality, the dignity? The wife, subject to duty, is less than the concubine, who, retaining her liberty, can at least demand that her lover be amiable, reserved, even respectful. The husband, in his turn, is less than the free lover, whose his hetaira, if she is worthy of her name, will never reproach him for his weariness and his impotence.

After such a beautiful precept, all that was needed was to regulate the hours and the number. Under the law of the Koran, the town criers, from the top of the minarets, remind lazy husbands of their duty. Paul limits himself to recommending good faith in the exchange; he leaves the figure ad libitum.

“Do not deprive one another, nolite fraudare invicem, or, following Dom Calmet: Do not go bankrupt, like debtors in bad faith, except by mutual agreement, and to attend to fasting and prayer.”

The Vulgate suppresses the word fasting, which is found in the Greek, and which the meaning requires. As a measure of hygiene, the Apostle exempts the spouses from rendering duty when they fast, according to the Hippocratic aphorism: Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus.

“And when you have finished praying and fasting, come back again, iterüm revertimini in idipsum, lest Satan tempt you through your incontinence.”

He means, lest the ardor of the flesh, driving you to fornication, make you fall back into idolatry.

The Apostle Peter, in his First Epistle, ch. m, v. 7, recommends the same thing, and for the same reason, to husbands, but implying that it is above all out of charity for women, whose nature is weaker, and who are nonetheless, with the men, co-heirs of grace: Quasi infirmiori vasculo muliebri impertientes honorem, tanquam et cohæredibus gratiæ vestræ. The word muliebri, which in the Vulgate is an adjective and makes the sentence awkward, is a substantive in the Greek, τῷ γυναικειῷ, the gynoecium, an honest term, to indicate the natural parts of woman. Poor women! It is not enough to subject them to duty; here we accuse their temperament. What becomes of love?

“It is understood,” continues Paul, “that what I say is from pure tolerance, secundüm indulgentiam: I do not make a law of it.”

The law, according to him, would be absolute abstention.

“But as not everyone has received from God the same grace that I enjoy (he speaks of his continence!), I repeat to singles and widows that, if they cannot stand and remain as I do, well, let them marry: it is better to marry than to burn.”

What do you say, Monsignor, who boasts so highly of evangelical modesty, of this materialism? Yet that is all your virtue: a brutal virtue, worthy of the century that saw it appear. How could Greek delicacy, how Roman gravity, how Germanic modesty, without protest, receive this degrading doctrine, inspired by the lasciviousness of the Phoenician-Arab races, in which two reformers from the extreme opposites of asceticism and voluptuousness, Paul and Mahomet, come to join hands?

Among the Romans, it was a principle, not juridical but moral, that an honest woman could, as a general rule, marry only once. In whatever manner she had lost her husband, propriety made it a duty for her to preserve his memory; her glory was to be called univira. Paul does not achieve this degree of marital propriety. He authorizes widows to remarry, and if later the Latin Church condemned second marriages, we know that by this word it meant marriage contracted following divorce, which it is in its particular tradition not to admit. As for remarriage after death, it allows second and even fourth marriages, and declares those who blame them heretics: It is better to marry than to burn! O saints Cornelia, Porcia, Agrippina, too happy to be born idolaters, safe from the accommodations of Christian chastity!

XXXIV. — After this, let Paul say: This is a great sacrament or a great mystery, for the word sacramentum is taken in the sense of mysterium among the ancient Fathers; there is really nothing here to establish the religion of the Church with regard to marriage, especially since the Apostle takes care to explain himself what he means when he qualifies marriage as a mystery:

“Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord: for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church, whose body he saved; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so wives should in all things be subject to their husbands.

“Husbands, in your turn, love your wives: as Christ loved his Church and gave himself up for her, in order to sanctify her, to wash and purify her by the word of life, and to make for Himself a glorious Church, spotless, without wrinkle, pure and immaculate; thus husbands must love their wives like their own bodies.

“This is a great mystery: I tell you in Christ and in the Church.” — (To the Ephesians, v.)

Everyone does not guess how these banalities about the submission of women and the affection of husbands cover up a mystery in Jesus Christ and in the Church. It is necessary for that to refer to the Scriptures with which Paul is filled, to remember that under the old law the pact of Jehovah with the Synagogue was represented under the allegory of a marriage; see again, in Chap. xvi and xxiii of Ezekiel the story of the unhappy loves of this Jehovah, who falls in love with two young girls, Jerusalem and Samaria, pulls them out of the mud and ignominy, makes them his wives, then is paid for his devotion by the most abominable infidelity. Thus did Jesus Christ: he loved the Church, poor and slave; he gave himself up for her; he purified her with his blood; he glorifies her, nourishes her, warms her (nutrit et fovet), and he awaits from our fidelity some recompense: that is the mystery.

Nothing could be clearer, with the help of the bringing together of the two Alliances, than this whole allegory of marriage. Woman, according to the Apostle, is a degraded, impure being, whom the man who approaches her must, out of charity, uplift by uniting with her, cleanse and beautify her, as Jehovah and Christ his son have both done, the first for the Synagogue, the second for the Church.

Following this tirade, Paul quotes to the Ephesians the passage from Genesis: A man will leave his father and his mother and will attach himself to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh.

To understand this text and not exaggerate its scope, it is essential to recall the story of creation.

On the occasion of the animals, Genesis had said that God created them each according to a particular type, thus marking the originality and the inconvertibility of the species. When it comes to man, it speaks in a completely different way: God does not create him as he would have made a new term in the animal series, following a particular type, conceived according to the good pleasure of the divine understanding; he makes him in his image, of him creator. The Vulgate has not rendered this opposition, that MM. Clare and Frank, in their literal translation of Genesis, have heard even less, and which no interpreter I know has grasped. Now it is a question of woman: in whose image will she be made? — “It is not good,” said the Eternal, “for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like him.”

Such, then, is the course of the genesiac idea: in the first place animals, all created according to particular conceptions of the divine Spirit, quadrupeds, birds, fish, reptiles, insects; then man, made, by exception, in the image of God and drawn from the earth; then woman, finally, made in the image of the man and taken from one of his ribs. In all this what did Genesis want? Mark the dependence and inferiority of woman: she must be an auxiliary for man; that is why she is made in his image and taken from his substance. The Apostle recalls it elsewhere in singular terms:

Let man stand bareheaded in church, because he is the image and glory of God; but let the wife be veiled, because she is the glory of her husband; otherwise let her be shaved.

For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man. (First to the Corinthians, ch. x1.)

Between these two similar but unequal beings, what will be the relationship? This is the question that Genesis will now answer, and Saint Paul following it. The woman created, God does not proceed, with regard to this last creation, as he had done with regard to the animals, the plants and the stars, approving himself and pronouncing that it was good! He presents Adam with all the animals for him to name, and lastly the woman. The review takes place at first calmly; then suddenly, at the sight of the woman, Adam cries out beside himself: There she is! Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, half of my life!… The man will leave his father and mother, etc.

The Bible, in thus making the first lover speak, recalls Plato’s androgyne, whose two separated halves eagerly tend to reunite. The derivation ischah, woman, from isch, man, on which Genesis insists here, bears witness to the intention: Isch will leave father and mother and will become attached to Ischah. The last words make an image: They will be two in one flesh. The meaning is therefore that the creation of Eve, Adam taken as judge, succeeded, perhaps too well, in the physical and emotional sense. It is the story of the birth of love; there is not a single word that relates specifically to the institution of marriage. Love, that is, according to Genesis, the destiny of woman: it is through her love that she must help man; that if later she deceives him, if she falls into impurity and proves unfaithful, if the love she inspires becomes a scourge for society, the fault lies with the serpent who seduced Eve and made this source of life (Heva, in Greek Zôè, life) an instrument of death. Under these conditions, the man who takes a wife must remember above all that he is her redeemer, as Christ was that of the Church: such is, according to the Apostle, the economy of marriage.

Suppose that Genesis, with regard to the first meeting of Adam and Eve, instead of depicting the fascination that woman exercises over man, had wanted to inculcate the idea of marriage, it would have said, by inverting the terms and remaining in the truth of nature: The woman will leave her father and her mother, and will attach herself to her husband; and they will be one in two bodies.

Unanimity in bodily duality, under the preponderance of the man: that was marriage.

The duality of will in the coupled unity of the bodies, joined to the influencing of the man by the woman: this is concubinage.

The expression is clear, and the writer’s intention is not in doubt: he wanted to represent, not the union of souls, which is the characteristic of marriage, but their loving duality; no more than Saint Paul did he have the true notion of marriage.

This is how the Apostle heard it in his second to the Corinthians, chapter vi, when, to divert his neophytes from frequenting prostitutes, he said to them:

“Do you not know that he who couples with a prostitute becomes one with her? For it is written, ‘They shall be two in one flesh.’”

When, therefore, the Apostle avails himself of the same passage from Genesis, sometimes with the Ephesians, to remind them of what charity the husband owes to his wife; sometimes with the Corinthians, to divert them from their habits of bad places, it is clear that for him permitted love does not intrinsically differ from illicit love, marriage or concubinage from fornication: in his eyes these different statesare distinguished only by external circumstances, such as the continuity of relations, the community of residence, and, as far as possible, participation in the same faith. Under these conditions, conjugal love being granted only as a remedy for fornication, the work of the flesh assimilated to a commutative service, nolite fraudare invicem, the unity of conscience, of spirit, of heart, is in fact excluded; marriage is reduced to a tolerance. The word is ignominious, but it is taken from Saint Paul, and there is no other to express Christian thought.

XXXV. — After this, let Paul say: This is a great sacrament or a great mystery, for the word sacramentum is taken in the sense of mysterium among the ancient Fathers; there is really nothing here to establish the religion of the Church with regard to marriage, especially since the Apostle takes care to explain himself what he means when he qualifies marriage as a mystery:

“Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord: for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church, whose body he saved; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so wives should in all things be subject to their husbands.

“Husbands, in your turn, love your wives: as Christ loved his Church and gave himself up for her, in order to sanctify her, to wash and purify her by the word of life, and to make for Himself a glorious Church, spotless, without wrinkle, pure and immaculate; thus husbands must love their wives like their own bodies.

“This is a great mystery: I tell you in Christ and in the Church.” — (To the Ephesians, v.)

Everyone does not guess how these banalities about the submission of women and the affection of husbands cover up a mystery in Jesus Christ and in the Church. It is necessary for that to refer to the Scriptures with which Paul is filled, to remember that under the old law the pact of Jehovah with the Synagogue was represented under the allegory of a marriage; see again, in Chap. xvi and xxiii of Ezekiel the story of the unhappy loves of this Jehovah, who falls in love with two young girls, Jerusalem and Samaria, pulls them out of the mud and ignominy, makes them his wives, then is paid for his devotion by the most abominable infidelity. Thus did Jesus Christ: he loved the Church, poor and slave; he gave himself up for her; he purified her with his blood; he glorifies her, nourishes her, warms her (nutrit et fovet), and he awaits from our fidelity some recompense: that is the mystery.

Nothing could be clearer, with the help of the bringing together of the two Alliances, than this whole allegory of marriage. Woman, according to the Apostle, is a degraded, impure being, whom the man who approaches her must, out of charity, uplift by uniting with her, cleanse and beautify her, as Jehovah and Christ his son have both done, the first for the Synagogue, the second for the Church.

Following this tirade, Paul quotes to the Ephesians the passage from Genesis: A man will leave his father and his mother and will attach himself to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh.

To understand this text and not exaggerate its scope, it is essential to recall the story of creation.

On the occasion of the animals, Genesis had said that God created them each according to a particular type, thus marking the originality and the inconvertibility of the species. When it comes to man, it speaks in a completely different way: God does not create him as he would have made a new term in the animal series, following a particular type, conceived according to the good pleasure of the divine understanding; he makes him in his image, of him creator. The Vulgate has not rendered this opposition, that MM. Clare and Frank, in their literal translation of Genesis, have heard even less, and which no interpreter I know has grasped. Now it is a question of woman: in whose image will she be made? — “It is not good,” said the Eternal, “for man to be alone: let us make him a helper like him.”

Such, then, is the course of the genesiac idea: in the first place animals, all created according to particular conceptions of the divine Spirit, quadrupeds, birds, fish, reptiles, insects; then man, made, by exception, in the image of God and drawn from the earth; then woman, finally, made in the image of the man and taken from one of his ribs. In all this what did Genesis want? Mark the dependence and inferiority of woman: she must be an auxiliary for man; that is why she is made in his image and taken from his substance. The Apostle recalls it elsewhere in singular terms:

Let man stand bareheaded in church, because he is the image and glory of God; but let the wife be veiled, because she is the glory of her husband; otherwise let her be shaved.

For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man. (First to the Corinthians, ch. x1.)

Between these two similar but unequal beings, what will be the relationship? This is the question that Genesis will now answer, and Saint Paul following it. The woman created, God does not proceed, with regard to this last creation, as he had done with regard to the animals, the plants and the stars, approving himself and pronouncing that it was good! He presents Adam with all the animals for him to name, and lastly the woman. The review takes place at first calmly; then suddenly, at the sight of the woman, Adam cries out beside himself: There she is! Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, half of my life!… The man will leave his father and mother, etc.

The Bible, in thus making the first lover speak, recalls Plato’s androgyne, whose two separated halves eagerly tend to reunite. The derivation ischah, woman, from isch, man, on which Genesis insists here, bears witness to the intention: Isch will leave father and mother and will become attached to Ischah. The last words make an image: They will be two in one flesh. The meaning is therefore that the creation of Eve, Adam taken as judge, succeeded, perhaps too well, in the physical and emotional sense. It is the story of the birth of love; there is not a single word that relates specifically to the institution of marriage. Love, that is, according to Genesis, the destiny of woman: it is through her love that she must help man; that if later she deceives him, if she falls into impurity and proves unfaithful, if the love she inspires becomes a scourge for society, the fault lies with the serpent who seduced Eve and made this source of life (Heva, in Greek Zôè, life) an instrument of death. Under these conditions, the man who takes a wife must remember above all that he is her redeemer, as Christ was that of the Church: such is, according to the Apostle, the economy of marriage.

Suppose that Genesis, with regard to the first meeting of Adam and Eve, instead of depicting the fascination that woman exercises over man, had wanted to inculcate the idea of marriage, it would have said, by inverting the terms and remaining in the truth of nature: The woman will leave her father and her mother, and will attach herself to her husband; and they will be one in two bodies.

Unanimity in bodily duality, under the preponderance of the man: that was marriage.

The duality of will in the coupled unity of the bodies, joined to the influencing of the man by the woman: this is concubinage.

The expression is clear, and the writer’s intention is not in doubt: he wanted to represent, not the union of souls, which is the characteristic of marriage, but their loving duality; no more than Saint Paul did he have the true notion of marriage.

This is how the Apostle heard it in his second to the Corinthians, chapter vi, when, to divert his neophytes from frequenting prostitutes, he said to them:

“Do you not know that he who couples with a prostitute becomes one with her? For it is written, ‘They shall be two in one flesh.’”

When, therefore, the Apostle avails himself of the same passage from Genesis, sometimes with the Ephesians, to remind them of what charity the husband owes to his wife; sometimes with the Corinthians, to divert them from their habits of bad places, it is clear that for him permitted love does not intrinsically differ from illicit love, marriage or concubinage from fornication: in his eyes these different statesare distinguished only by external circumstances, such as the continuity of relations, the community of residence, and, as far as possible, participation in the same faith. Under these conditions, conjugal love being granted only as a remedy for fornication, the work of the flesh assimilated to a commutative service, nolite fraudare invicem, the unity of conscience, of spirit, of heart, is in fact excluded; marriage is reduced to a tolerance. The word is ignominious, but it is taken from Saint Paul, and there is no other to express Christian thought.

XXXV. — All the Fathers were inspired, with regard to marriage, by the sentiments of the Apostle. They denounced this dualism, so formidable to peace of mind and to salvation, unveiled this indelible defilement of the nuptial bed, for which the husband must ceaselessly ask for grace from Christ, the wife grace from her husband. From there their anathemas, so little understood, against the woman, anathemas that are not addressed to the person, participant like her husband in the blood of Jesus Christ, but to this sexuality with the powerful seductions, cause of so much pain and so many crimes.

What a sovereign plague is woman! exclaims Saint John Chrysostom; sharp dart of the devil! Through woman, the devil triumphed over Adam, and caused him to lose Paradise.

What curses this cursed allegory of the forbidden fruit has drawn to the sex!

The woman, says Saint Augustine, can neither teach, nor testify, nor compromise, nor judge, nor a fortiori command.

Saint John of Damascus: Woman is a wicked ass, a dreadful tapeworm, which has its seat in the heart of man; daughter of lies, advanced sentinel of Hell, who drove Adam out of Paradise; indomitable Bellona, sworn enemy of peace.

Saint John Chrysologus: She is the cause of evil, the author of sin, the stone of the tomb, the door to hell, the fatality of our miseries.

Saint Antonin: Head of crime, weapon of the devil. When you see a woman, believe that you have in front of you, not a human being, not a ferocious beast, but the devil in person. Her voice is the hiss of the serpent.

Saint Cyprian would rather hear the hissing of the basilisk than the song of a woman.

Saint Bonaventure compares her to the scorpion, always ready to sting; he calls her the devil’s lance. It is also the opinion of Eusebius of Caesarea, that woman is the arrow of the devil.

Saint Gregory the Great: Woman has no sense of good.

Saint Jerome: The woman, left to herself, does not take long to fall into impurity. And again: A blameless woman is rarer than the phoenix. She is the devil’s gate, the path of iniquity, the scorpion’s sting, altogether a dangerous species.

Our dandy writers affect great anger on reading these imprecations; it would be easier to see in them a desperate homage paid to the power of women.

Besides, meditation on the dogma of the Gospel and reading the Bible were little calculated to inspire in ascetic souls respect for women and for marriage. Paganism, which came at the beginning of civilization, full of joy and hope, had idealized woman in its nymphs, muses, goddesses; it had sanctified marriage, raised the family to the height of a royalty and priesthood.

Christianity, provoked by an unexampled corruption, saw in generation the principle, in woman the instrument of all our defilements. Undoubtedly, after as before the preaching of the Gospel, the species continued to reproduce itself by the ordinary way: as formerly one made love and one married; the woman never ceased to be welcomed by the man; his condition, his character, even gained something. Theologically marriage was without honor, woman without esteem. Baptism, administered immediately after birth, had no other object than to wash away genital impurity. The influence of the Bible, inspired, so far as women are concerned, by the customs and traditions of the harem, was disastrous.

What types of women are the women of the Bible! Eve, the Hebrew Pandora, whose curiosity opens the world to sin and death; the antediluvians, who seduce the angels and give birth to giants; Sarah, wife of Abraham, brooding, incredulous, jealous and vindictive; Hagar, the insolent favorite; Lot’s wife, changed into a pillar of salt; his daughters, in love with their father; Rebecca, who teaches her son Jacob, whose name means the Trickster, to deceive his father and his brother; Lia, glorious and foolish; Rachel, who steals her father’s marmosets; Dina, the cheeky one; the Potiphar, whose name has become a proverb; Mary, sister of Moses, who conspires against him; Job’s wife, who insults him on his dunghill. What to say about Abigail, Michol, Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, a Jahel, a Rahab, a Delilah, an Esther, a Judith?

À l’imitation des Pères, les casuistes ont traité la matière conjugale en vrais Turcs ; ils ont si bien fait que leurs noms sont demeurés infâmes parmi les honnêtes gens. Les honnêtes gens ont tort : accuse-t-on le médecin qui se voue à la guérison des maladies honteuses, alors même que ses remèdes ont pour effet de les aggraver ? Après tout, les dissertations d’un Sanchez et d’un saint Liguori ne font honte qu’à leur religion et à leur siècle ; le traité De Matrimonio est contemporain de l’Aloysia. De pareils livres sont autant de témoignages que, du fait de l’Église et jusqu’au seizième siècle, l’honnêteté n’exista nulle part dans le mariage des chrétiens.

XXXVI. — All the Fathers were inspired, with regard to marriage, by the sentiments of the Apostle. They denounced this dualism, so formidable to peace of mind and to salvation, unveiled this indelible defilement of the nuptial bed, for which the husband must ceaselessly ask for grace from Christ, the wife grace from her husband. From there their anathemas, so little understood, against the woman, anathemas that are not addressed to the person, participant like her husband in the blood of Jesus Christ, but to this sexuality with the powerful seductions, cause of so much pain and so many crimes.

What a sovereign plague is woman! exclaims Saint John Chrysostom; sharp dart of the devil! Through woman, the devil triumphed over Adam, and caused him to lose Paradise.

What curses this cursed allegory of the forbidden fruit has drawn to the sex!

The woman, says Saint Augustine, can neither teach, nor testify, nor compromise, nor judge, nor a fortiori command.

Saint John of Damascus: Woman is a wicked ass, a dreadful tapeworm, which has its seat in the heart of man; daughter of lies, advanced sentinel of Hell, who drove Adam out of Paradise; indomitable Bellona, sworn enemy of peace.

Saint John Chrysologus: She is the cause of evil, the author of sin, the stone of the tomb, the door to hell, the fatality of our miseries.

Saint Antonin: Head of crime, weapon of the devil. When you see a woman, believe that you have in front of you, not a human being, not a ferocious beast, but the devil in person. Her voice is the hiss of the serpent.

Saint Cyprian would rather hear the hissing of the basilisk than the song of a woman.

Saint Bonaventure compares her to the scorpion, always ready to sting; he calls her the devil’s lance. It is also the opinion of Eusebius of Caesarea, that woman is the arrow of the devil.

Saint Gregory the Great: Woman has no sense of good.

Saint Jerome: The woman, left to herself, does not take long to fall into impurity. And again: A blameless woman is rarer than the phoenix. She is the devil’s gate, the path of iniquity, the scorpion’s sting, altogether a dangerous species.

Our dandy writers affect great anger on reading these imprecations; it would be easier to see in them a desperate homage paid to the power of women.

Besides, meditation on the dogma of the Gospel and reading the Bible were little calculated to inspire in ascetic souls respect for women and for marriage. Paganism, which came at the beginning of civilization, full of joy and hope, had idealized woman in its nymphs, muses, goddesses; it had sanctified marriage, raised the family to the height of a royalty and priesthood.

Christianity, provoked by an unexampled corruption, saw in generation the principle, in woman the instrument of all our defilements. Undoubtedly, after as before the preaching of the Gospel, the species continued to reproduce itself by the ordinary way: as formerly one made love and one married; the woman never ceased to be welcomed by the man; his condition, his character, even gained something. Theologically marriage was without honor, woman without esteem. Baptism, administered immediately after birth, had no other object than to wash away genital impurity. The influence of the Bible, inspired, so far as women are concerned, by the customs and traditions of the harem, was disastrous.

What types of women are the women of the Bible! Eve, the Hebrew Pandora, whose curiosity opens the world to sin and death; the antediluvians, who seduce the angels and give birth to giants; Sarah, wife of Abraham, brooding, incredulous, jealous and vindictive; Hagar, the insolent favorite; Lot’s wife, changed into a pillar of salt; his daughters, in love with their father; Rebecca, who teaches her son Jacob, whose name means the Trickster, to deceive his father and his brother; Lia, glorious and foolish; Rachel, who steals her father’s marmosets; Dina, the cheeky one; the Potiphar, whose name has become a proverb; Mary, sister of Moses, who conspires against him; Job’s wife, who insults him on his dunghill. What to say about Abigail, Michol, Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, a Jahel, a Rahab, a Delilah, an Esther, a Judith?

In imitation of the Fathers, the casuists have treated conjugal matters as true Turks; they have done so well that their names have remained infamous among honest people. Honest people are wrong: do we accuse the doctor who devotes himself to the cure of shameful diseases, even though his remedies have the effect of aggravating them? After all, the dissertations of a Sanchez and a Saint Liguori bring shame only to their religion and to their age; the treatise De Matrimonio is contemporary with the Aloysia. Such books are so many testimonies that, by virtue of the Church and until the sixteenth century, honesty existed nowhere in the marriage of Christians.

XXXVI. — It is true, however, that the Church, after a long and useless wait, having decided to abandon the age-old opinion, was forced to modify its theory of marriage. The world not ending, where Paul had seen only a sedative with titillations of the flesh, she ended by discovering the law of conservation of the human race, and, what mattered more to her, the instrument of her own propagation. She therefore condemned the heretics, who, on the faith of the first traditions, counting always on the coming of the Son of man, and judging it useless to have children, condemned both begetting and marriage, and she restored the conjugal union to its ancient and pagan dignity as a sacrament.

But this restoration took place, at least on the part of the priests, only for the form. The religion of marriage, abrogated by the primitive faith, reformed itself little by little in the consciousness of the people; the clergy, devoted to celibacy, to whom love was all the more suspect as their ill-considered continence was more painful to them, continued to regard marriage as a state of habitual pollution; and while the calendar is full of so-called virgins, canonized, like a Teresa of Avila and a Marie Alacoque, for having, during a life of languor, endured the bellows of Asmodeus, it is hardly possible to find there a mother.

In the sixteenth century the Reformation appeared. Do you believe that it is rehabilitating marriage! God forbid! On this point as on all the others, it accuses the Roman Church of superstition, and, returning to the primitive faith, it begins by depriving marriage of the title, which Rome had finally granted it, of sacrament.

Well, you will say, are you going to make a crime to the Orthodox of the sacrilege of the Protestants?

This is not my thought. The Reformation accused the Church of having, in what concerns marriage, varied in faith, added to the apostolic tradition and to the Gospel: I claim that the Church has not varied at all, if not is perhaps in the words. After as before the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome, in agreement with the primitive Christians as with the Reformed, denies marriage, which it always confuses with concubinage.

Conjugal society, say our modern theologians, can exist in three forms, give rise to three kinds of contracts: the natural contract, the civil contract, the religious contract.

The natural contract is the union formed spontaneously by a man and a woman, prior to the existence of the civil order, or outside of this order. It is, strictly speaking, concubinage.

The civil contract is the same as the previous one, but accompanied, for the spouses, by certain reciprocal obligations and prerogatives, expressed or implied, and guaranteed by society, which obligations and prerogatives make the concubinage a civil partnership of goods and gains, something that concubinage by itself does not necessarily entail.

The religious contract consists in the blessing given by the priest to two persons conjoined, either only by nature, or additionally before society: the Church is no more concerned with one than with the other.

The Church, she herself proclaims, does not know and cares even less about the civil contract. She claims to be able to marry notwithstanding this contract; to make married, by virtue of her blessing, concubinaries who reject civil marriage and the intervention of society. Roman marriage, by coemptio or usucapio, was valid at least, by its publicity, for the external forum; but the marriage conferred by the Church, apart from the social guarantee and without any other motive than to give absolution from sin, is in reality valid neither for the interior nor for the exterior: it is the very negation of marriage.

In short: according to the spirit of the Church, marriage, whatever it may be, is not a sacred thing; it is an act essentially tainted with impurity, which the priest’s blessing is intended to wash away, like a sort of baptism given to love.

Until the Council of Trent, the Church was in the habit of giving to all those who asked her the nuptial blessing, without witnesses, without prior announcement, without any concern for families and third parties, and it is still so that it is done in the countries of Frankish Catholicism. A friend of mine, based in Valparaiso, is getting married. He brings his fiancée from Paris and marries her on landing, in a sacristy, without publication or witnesses. The sacrament, in fact, being a gift from God, does not require the assistance of men. The Unitarians of America do it in the same way, faithful on this point to the tradition of Rome. Hence the scourge of clandestine marriages, which the Council of Trent was obliged, on the formal requisition of the sovereigns, to remedy, by decreeing that in future all marriages should, on pain of nullity, be celebrated by the parish priest of the parties or by his delegate, accompanied by two or three witnesses.

Thus the distinction, such as it is made today, between marriage and concubinage, this distinction, however imperfect it still is, does not come from the Church; it belongs to the civil authority, which, in the sixteenth century, imposed on the Church the publication of banns, the attendance of witnesses, and the ministry or delegation of the ordinary.

The Revolution did more: not judging the security of families and public order sufficiently protected by the Church, it radically separated, for substance and for form, civil marriage and ecclesiastical ceremony. But the Church, which does not renounce its ideas, protests against this outrageous separation; it claims for itself alone the power to marry, it should say, to remain in the spirit and the letter of its authors, the privilege of blessing concubinaries. At the time of writing, there are priests who, despite the council and the concordat, driven by factious zeal, interfere in secretly marrying concubinaries; others who administer the so-called sacrament without waiting for the civil act, and do not perceive that this sacrament, given outside society, is a consecration of concubinage, a sacrilege.

XXXVII. — It is true, however, that the Church, after a long and useless wait, having decided to abandon the age-old opinion, was forced to modify its theory of marriage. The world not ending, where Paul had seen only a sedative with titillations of the flesh, she ended by discovering the law of conservation of the human race, and, what mattered more to her, the instrument of her own propagation. She therefore condemned the heretics, who, on the faith of the first traditions, counting always on the coming of the Son of man, and judging it useless to have children, condemned both begetting and marriage, and she restored the conjugal union to its ancient and pagan dignity as a sacrament.

But this restoration took place, at least on the part of the priests, only for the form. The religion of marriage, abrogated by the primitive faith, reformed itself little by little in the consciousness of the people; the clergy, devoted to celibacy, to whom love was all the more suspect as their ill-considered continence was more painful to them, continued to regard marriage as a state of habitual pollution; and while the calendar is full of so-called virgins, canonized, like a Teresa of Avila and a Marie Alacoque, for having, during a life of languor, endured the bellows of Asmodeus, it is hardly possible to find there a mother.

In the sixteenth century the Reformation appeared. Do you believe that it is rehabilitating marriage! God forbid! On this point as on all the others, it accuses the Roman Church of superstition, and, returning to the primitive faith, it begins by depriving marriage of the title, which Rome had finally granted it, of sacrament.

Well, you will say, are you going to make a crime to the Orthodox of the sacrilege of the Protestants?

This is not my thought. The Reformation accused the Church of having, in what concerns marriage, varied in faith, added to the apostolic tradition and to the Gospel: I claim that the Church has not varied at all, if not is perhaps in the words. After as before the Council of Trent, the Church of Rome, in agreement with the primitive Christians as with the Reformed, denies marriage, which it always confuses with concubinage.

Conjugal society, say our modern theologians, can exist in three forms, give rise to three kinds of contracts: the natural contract, the civil contract, the religious contract.

The natural contract is the union formed spontaneously by a man and a woman, prior to the existence of the civil order, or outside of this order. It is, strictly speaking, concubinage.

The civil contract is the same as the previous one, but accompanied, for the spouses, by certain reciprocal obligations and prerogatives, expressed or implied, and guaranteed by society, which obligations and prerogatives make the concubinage a civil partnership of goods and gains, something that concubinage by itself does not necessarily entail.

The religious contract consists in the blessing given by the priest to two persons conjoined, either only by nature, or additionally before society: the Church is no more concerned with one than with the other.

The Church, she herself proclaims, does not know and cares even less about the civil contract. She claims to be able to marry notwithstanding this contract; to make married, by virtue of her blessing, concubinaries who reject civil marriage and the intervention of society. Roman marriage, by coemptio or usucapio, was valid at least, by its publicity, for the external forum; but the marriage conferred by the Church, apart from the social guarantee and without any other motive than to give absolution from sin, is in reality valid neither for the interior nor for the exterior: it is the very negation of marriage.

In short: according to the spirit of the Church, marriage, whatever it may be, is not a sacred thing; it is an act essentially tainted with impurity, which the priest’s blessing is intended to wash away, like a sort of baptism given to love.

Until the Council of Trent, the Church was in the habit of giving to all those who asked her the nuptial blessing, without witnesses, without prior announcement, without any concern for families and third parties, and it is still so that it is done in the countries of Frankish Catholicism. A friend of mine, based in Valparaiso, is getting married. He brings his fiancée from Paris and marries her on landing, in a sacristy, without publication or witnesses. The sacrament, in fact, being a gift from God, does not require the assistance of men. The Unitarians of America do it in the same way, faithful on this point to the tradition of Rome. Hence the scourge of clandestine marriages, which the Council of Trent was obliged, on the formal requisition of the sovereigns, to remedy, by decreeing that in future all marriages should, on pain of nullity, be celebrated by the parish priest of the parties or by his delegate, accompanied by two or three witnesses.

Thus the distinction, such as it is made today, between marriage and concubinage, this distinction, however imperfect it still is, does not come from the Church; it belongs to the civil authority, which, in the sixteenth century, imposed on the Church the publication of banns, the attendance of witnesses, and the ministry or delegation of the ordinary.

The Revolution did more: not judging the security of families and public order sufficiently protected by the Church, it radically separated, for substance and for form, civil marriage and ecclesiastical ceremony. But the Church, which does not renounce its ideas, protests against this outrageous separation; it claims for itself alone the power to marry, it should say, to remain in the spirit and the letter of its authors, the privilege of blessing concubinaries. At the time of writing, there are priests who, despite the council and the concordat, driven by factious zeal, interfere in secretly marrying concubinaries; others who administer the so-called sacrament without waiting for the civil act, and do not perceive that this sacrament, given outside society, is a consecration of concubinage, a sacrilege.

XXXVII. — In this connection, I cannot refrain from saying a few words here about a matter that has recently occupied the public attention, I mean the lawsuit between Madame Weber and the Pescatore heirs.

Here is the problem:

In France, since the Revolution, civil marriage must always precede religious marriage.

In Spain, there is no civil marriage: religious marriage, in accordance with the discipline of the Council of Trent, takes the place of everything.

A French concubin, to please his concubine, desires to marry religiously, but not civilly; to make, as M. Dufaure ironically said, a marriage of conscience, not a social and solemn marriage; Above all, to avoid advertising. To this end, he obtains the recommendation of a French bishop from a Spanish priest, who immediately proceeds to the celebration, without any other formality in France or publication. It is asked whether a religious marriage thus performed abroad entails a civil marriage in France, according to art. 470 of the Code; and if the concubine, washed, purified, mopped up by the Church, can call herself wife and common in property?

Five consultants, Messrs. O. Barrot, Bethmont, Marie, Buignet, Demolombe, in agreement with the bishops of Reims, Bordeaux, Paris, Versailles, answer: Yes. — The court, in agreement with the public prosecutor and the defender of the heirs, M. Dufaure, says: No.

Who is in the truth, in the right? I add: Who, from among MM. Barrot, Bethmont, Marie, Buignet, Demolombe, or the tribunal, best captured the spirit of the Revolution?

After the account that you have just read, the answer cannot be in doubt.

In principle, according to Christian theology, tradition and ecclesiastical practice, religious marriage is not a marriage; it is a natural union, contracted, if you will, before God, but not before society; a union sanctified, for the believer, by the blessing of the priest and his exorcism, but which by itself carries no civil effects; in a word, it is a contract of concubinage.

The word displeases, but that is not my fault. I would like, like the Emperor Augustus, like the Apostles, like the whole Church, that it could be made honest; as such, I would gratefully accept the religious blessing. But whether you marry before Christ, like M. Pescatore, or before the Sun, like Marat, what does this symbolism matter? As soon as you rule out your country, ask nothing of your country: you cannot unite at the same time the franchises of the natural contract, even sanctified by the cult, with the rights of the civil contract that your intention was to avoid. Perhaps one would believe your protest, if Spain, still under the yoke of the priests, had been the only country where it was possible for you to marry; but you were in France, where the regularization of your community would certainly not have been a bad example: what were you doing in Spain?

XXXVIII. — In this connection, I cannot refrain from saying a few words here about a matter that has recently occupied the public attention, I mean the lawsuit between Madame Weber and the Pescatore heirs.

Here is the problem:

In France, since the Revolution, civil marriage must always precede religious marriage.

In Spain, there is no civil marriage: religious marriage, in accordance with the discipline of the Council of Trent, takes the place of everything.

A French concubin, to please his concubine, desires to marry religiously, but not civilly; to make, as M. Dufaure ironically said, a marriage of conscience, not a social and solemn marriage; Above all, to avoid advertising. To this end, he obtains the recommendation of a French bishop from a Spanish priest, who immediately proceeds to the celebration, without any other formality in France or publication. It is asked whether a religious marriage thus performed abroad entails a civil marriage in France, according to art. 470 of the Code; and if the concubine, washed, purified, mopped up by the Church, can call herself wife and common in property?

Five consultants, Messrs. O. Barrot, Bethmont, Marie, Buignet, Demolombe, in agreement with the bishops of Reims, Bordeaux, Paris, Versailles, answer: Yes. — The court, in agreement with the public prosecutor and the defender of the heirs, M. Dufaure, says: No.

Who is in the truth, in the right? I add: Who, from among MM. Barrot, Bethmont, Marie, Buignet, Demolombe, or the tribunal, best captured the spirit of the Revolution?

After the account that you have just read, the answer cannot be in doubt.

In principle, according to Christian theology, tradition and ecclesiastical practice, religious marriage is not a marriage; it is a natural union, contracted, if you will, before God, but not before society; a union sanctified, for the believer, by the blessing of the priest and his exorcism, but which by itself carries no civil effects; in a word, it is a contract of concubinage.

The word displeases, but that is not my fault. I would like, like the Emperor Augustus, like the Apostles, like the whole Church, that it could be made honest; as such, I would gratefully accept the religious blessing. But whether you marry before Christ, like M. Pescatore, or before the Sun, like Marat, what does this symbolism matter? As soon as you rule out your country, ask nothing of your country: you cannot unite at the same time the franchises of the natural contract, even sanctified by the cult, with the rights of the civil contract that your intention was to avoid. Perhaps one would believe your protest, if Spain, still under the yoke of the priests, had been the only country where it was possible for you to marry; but you were in France, where the regularization of your community would certainly not have been a bad example: what were you doing in Spain?

XXXVIII. — I have spoken the word divorce.

The Church, and I speak of all the churches, Greek, Latin, Reformed, without exception, the Church, by the way she has dealt with divorce, alternately admitting it and rejecting it, has once more shown her secret thought on the identity of marriage and concubinage.

According to the tradition followed by the writers of the first three Gospels, the rabbi Jesus spoke of divorce in precise terms, which no interpretation can obscure:

“You know that it was said to the ancients: Whoever wishes to send his wife away must serve her with the act of repudiation.

“And I tell you that he who divorces his wife, except in the case of adultery, makes her a prostitute, and that he who marries a divorced woman is himself an adulterer.”

Is so much penetration necessary to understand the thought of the founder? It takes in hand the defense of women, delivered, by the unlimited privilege of repudiation that the law granted to the man, to the brutality of husbands, and it sets a limit to an abuse that made the institution degenerate into promiscuity. It restricted, in a word, divorce to the case of adultery: this is how it was understood by the immediate disciples, who had seen and heard Jesus, and the Greek Church is there entirely to affirm the truth of this tradition.

But Paul also has his gospel, full of things that are not found in the gospel of Peter, such as breaking off all relations with civil society and abstaining from its tribunals, despite the well-known words of the Master: My kingdom is not of this world. Jesus had professed obedience to established authority; Paul preaches secession, sedition. Jesus had been kind to sinners; Paul concludes with the rigorist. On all points he aspires to surpass Jesus in morality and in gnosis, leaving him only the messiah. To those who objected to his teaching, parts of which were not found in that of the Galilean, he replied sourly:

“God raised up the Master, I agree; but I too he will raise up by his virtue;” Deus verò et Dominum suscitavit; et nos suscitabit per virtutem suam. — Everything is allowed to me, but not everything suits me, and I do not come under any authority.

“Yes, you have been made members (children) of Christ; but what! by picking you up where Christ left you, will I make bastards of you?” Tollens ergo membra Christi faciam membra meretricis?

A passage which further proves that Paul, in Corinth as much as in Rome, had been preceded by the other apostles.

After this forthright apostrophe to the refractory Corinthians, he continues his exposition; and it was then that, raising the bid on Jesus as he had on Moses, and aping in his own way; he pronounces this oracle:

“You know that the Master forbade divorce, except for the case of adultery.

“But I tell you this: If a faithful brother has an unfaithful wife, and she consents to cohabit with him, he must keep her; and conversely, if a faithful wife has an unfaithful husband, she will not leave him.”

A few words of explanation on this text. According to the old law, to which Jesus had alluded, the husband alone had the power to signify the divorce; the abused woman could only run away and return to her parents.

On the other hand, by the word infidelity we must understand all at once: first, idolatry, the greatest of crimes according to the Pentateuch, which constituted an absolute impediment to marriage between the Jews and the proscribed races; second, fornication, and consequently conjugal infidelity, as I explained above.

Paul, embracing in his definition the retreat of the wife to her parents and the repudiation of the husband, prohibits them both, even in the case of idolatry, a fortiori in the case of adultery. “The faithful,” he says, “will have to remain, all the same, with the infidel.” And the reason, divine Apostle?

“It is because the honorability of the faithful husband covers the fornication of the infidel, and that by this the children, who without that would be bastards, are made legitimate.” Sanctificatus est vir infidelis per mulierem fidelem, and sanctificata est mulier infidelis per virum fidelem: alioquin filii vestri immundi essent, nunc aulem sancli sunt.

From the style of the prophets, which Paul affects to use, it is evident that the words faithful and unfaithful refer to two orders of ideas, worship and marriage: the parallel that he draws between the doctrine of Jesus and his own proves it.

Isn it that a fine argument in favor of cuckoldry?

What! Is it to cancel bastardy that you condemn divorce and wipe the slate clean on adultery? Truly adulterers will be obliged to you. But what becomes of conjugal faith? What becomes of the sanctity of marriage? What becomes of love and respect?

Trivia! Is not marriage instituted, according to Paul, simply to remedy fornication? Can a serious man, a serious spirit, a true Christian, care about the love of his wife? What does it matter, in truth, from which father the children come, provided they are baptized! It still happens if the husband who asks for the divorce, if the wife who separates, alleged the refusal of the debitum: then there would be a rupture, the service for which the marriage is granted not being fulfilled. But if the unfaithful husband, if the unfaithful wife, consents to cohabitation, there is no longer the slightest cause for complaint: it is up to the faithful spouse to bring back, by reason and gentleness, the unfaithful.

It is according to this solution, logically deduced from the Epistle to the Corinthians, that the Latin Church, which rejects divorce, even for adultery, authorizes the annulment of marriage for reason of impotence: Si impos. Everyone here remembers the edifying formality of the congress, imagined, under the influence of this orthodox casuistry, to establish the cases of impotence, if a husband naturated or if he did not naturate; a formality that was not repealed until the reign of Louis XIV.

Impotence in marriage judged less excusable than idolatry, less excusable than adultery!… Don’t you think, Monsignor, that after this childbirth, Paul has the right to exclaim with legitimate pride:

Certainly, I believe that I too have the spirit of God; Puto autem quod et ego spiritum Dei habeam?

XXXIX. — I have spoken the word divorce.

The Church, and I speak of all the churches, Greek, Latin, Reformed, without exception, the Church, by the way she has dealt with divorce, alternately admitting it and rejecting it, has once more shown her secret thought on the identity of marriage and concubinage.

According to the tradition followed by the writers of the first three Gospels, the rabbi Jesus spoke of divorce in precise terms, which no interpretation can obscure:

“You know that it was said to the ancients: Whoever wishes to send his wife away must serve her with the act of repudiation.

“And I tell you that he who divorces his wife, except in the case of adultery, makes her a prostitute, and that he who marries a divorced woman is himself an adulterer.”

Is so much penetration necessary to understand the thought of the founder? It takes in hand the defense of women, delivered, by the unlimited privilege of repudiation that the law granted to the man, to the brutality of husbands, and it sets a limit to an abuse that made the institution degenerate into promiscuity. It restricted, in a word, divorce to the case of adultery: this is how it was understood by the immediate disciples, who had seen and heard Jesus, and the Greek Church is there entirely to affirm the truth of this tradition.

But Paul also has his gospel, full of things that are not found in the gospel of Peter, such as breaking off all relations with civil society and abstaining from its tribunals, despite the well-known words of the Master: My kingdom is not of this world. Jesus had professed obedience to established authority; Paul preaches secession, sedition. Jesus had been kind to sinners; Paul concludes with the rigorist. On all points he aspires to surpass Jesus in morality and in gnosis, leaving him only the messiah. To those who objected to his teaching, parts of which were not found in that of the Galilean, he replied sourly:

“God raised up the Master, I agree; but I too he will raise up by his virtue;” Deus verò et Dominum suscitavit; et nos suscitabit per virtutem suam. — Everything is allowed to me, but not everything suits me, and I do not come under any authority.

“Yes, you have been made members (children) of Christ; but what! by picking you up where Christ left you, will I make bastards of you?” Tollens ergo membra Christi faciam membra meretricis?

A passage which further proves that Paul, in Corinth as much as in Rome, had been preceded by the other apostles.

After this forthright apostrophe to the refractory Corinthians, he continues his exposition; and it was then that, raising the bid on Jesus as he had on Moses, and aping in his own way; he pronounces this oracle:

“You know that the Master forbade divorce, except for the case of adultery.

“But I tell you this: If a faithful brother has an unfaithful wife, and she consents to cohabit with him, he must keep her; and conversely, if a faithful wife has an unfaithful husband, she will not leave him.”

A few words of explanation on this text. According to the old law, to which Jesus had alluded, the husband alone had the power to signify the divorce; the abused woman could only run away and return to her parents.

On the other hand, by the word infidelity we must understand all at once: first, idolatry, the greatest of crimes according to the Pentateuch, which constituted an absolute impediment to marriage between the Jews and the proscribed races; second, fornication, and consequently conjugal infidelity, as I explained above.

Paul, embracing in his definition the retreat of the wife to her parents and the repudiation of the husband, prohibits them both, even in the case of idolatry, a fortiori in the case of adultery. “The faithful,” he says, “will have to remain, all the same, with the infidel.” And the reason, divine Apostle?

“It is because the honorability of the faithful husband covers the fornication of the infidel, and that by this the children, who without that would be bastards, are made legitimate.” Sanctificatus est vir infidelis per mulierem fidelem, and sanctificata est mulier infidelis per virum fidelem: alioquin filii vestri immundi essent, nunc aulem sancli sunt.

From the style of the prophets, which Paul affects to use, it is evident that the words faithful and unfaithful refer to two orders of ideas, worship and marriage: the parallel that he draws between the doctrine of Jesus and his own proves it.

Isn it that a fine argument in favor of cuckoldry?

What! Is it to cancel bastardy that you condemn divorce and wipe the slate clean on adultery? Truly adulterers will be obliged to you. But what becomes of conjugal faith? What becomes of the sanctity of marriage? What becomes of love and respect?

Trivia! Is not marriage instituted, according to Paul, simply to remedy fornication? Can a serious man, a serious spirit, a true Christian, care about the love of his wife? What does it matter, in truth, from which father the children come, provided they are baptized! It still happens if the husband who asks for the divorce, if the wife who separates, alleged the refusal of the debitum: then there would be a rupture, the service for which the marriage is granted not being fulfilled. But if the unfaithful husband, if the unfaithful wife, consents to cohabitation, there is no longer the slightest cause for complaint: it is up to the faithful spouse to bring back, by reason and gentleness, the unfaithful.

It is according to this solution, logically deduced from the Epistle to the Corinthians, that the Latin Church, which rejects divorce, even for adultery, authorizes the annulment of marriage for reason of impotence: Si impos. Everyone here remembers the edifying formality of the congress, imagined, under the influence of this orthodox casuistry, to establish the cases of impotence, if a husband naturated or if he did not naturate; a formality that was not repealed until the reign of Louis XIV.

Impotence in marriage judged less excusable than idolatry, less excusable than adultery!… Don’t you think, Monsignor, that after this childbirth, Paul has the right to exclaim with legitimate pride:

Certainly, I believe that I too have the spirit of God; Puto autem quod et ego spiritum Dei habeam?

XXXIX. — That Christian theology has lowered marriage from the height where polytheistic inspiration had placed it, is a fact that the history of the Church, that her Scriptures, her definitions, her practice and all her authorities demonstrate with the latest evidence.

But one would also like to know what was the superior reason for this retrograde movement, which would not sufficiently explain the primitive coarseness of the sect, nor the oriental spirit of its missionaries. To indicate this reason will complete my critique.

Polytheism, with its male and female gods, coupled, married, begotten of each other, had therefore idealized the family and marriage; he had made this ideal the summit of justice and honor to which he invited all human races, all social conditions. Hercules, after his death, received into heaven and becoming the husband of Hebe, was the emblem of barbarism that rises from the violence of love to the sanctity of marriage. We have then seen by what degradation of the religious feeling and what combination of circumstances the pagan family fell from this ideal; how, finally, by the refinements of its eroticism, Greek and Latin society sank into unisexual voluptuousness.

What will Christianity do?

It is a law of history, which has its principle in the evolutionary movement of ideas, that any revolution, while denying and abrogating the previous state, nevertheless only continues it. We have seen an example of this, with regard to labor, in the succession of laws that govern it in turn: Law of selfishness, Law of love, Law of Justice.

So Christianity had to pick up where polytheism left off, do for marriage what it did for slavery, what it had done for all of its theology. This was indeed what happened.

Witness to the degradation of domestic morals, the hypocrisy of marriage, the unsociability of the family, the miseries of prostitution, the horrors of pederastic love; struck at the same time by the logic, at least apparent, of concubinage, so convenient, so popular; convinced, moreover, by the Platonic theory as much as by its monstrous results, that true love is not of this world and does not belong to mortal natures, Christianity condemned the flesh, denied, from the religious point of view, sexuality; as for earthly life, it affirmed in principle the community of women, but contented itself, in the application and in the form of tolerance, with concubinage.

Christianity, in a word, took as its point of departure the term on which the philosophers of the school of Socrates and Epaminondas had stopped, spiritual unisexuality.

Basically, while polytheism, by instituting marriage, had limited itself to calling Justice to the aid of love, Christianity, taking a further step, pronounced the subordination of the latter: in this it served progress, and prepared the higher formula of the institution. In form and in letter, Christianity did more than subordinate love, it deemed it sinful and condemned it: its whole discipline was inspired by this condemnation.

I have already quoted the words of Christ, to whom one asked which, of the seven husbands to whom a woman had successively belonged, would remain to her after the resurrection: In heaven, he replied, there are no more husband nor wives; all are like angels before the face of God. Saint Paul, in the Galatians, III, 28, professes the same doctrine: In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. One could also say: There is neither brother nor sister, as Chateaubriand has shown so well in his Rene. — I have betrothed you to Christ, he says elsewhere, like a chaste virgin… The whole theory of religious celibacy is based on this principle of a spiritual wedding, where sex is no longer of any importance.

Denied in heaven, sexuality, as transcendental logic would have it, is condemned on earth; the woman, to put it better, in the eyes of the Christian, of the true spiritual, does not exist. Error or accident of nature, torment of man, false image of love, she is worth nothing as a person, except insofar as, stripping herself of her sex, she takes on Christian individuality, following the formula: Neither men nor women, all angels before the Absolute.

Hence the consequence that annihilates marriage, that, the union of man and woman having value only for the procreation of children, at most as a prophylactic against fornication, the conjoined persons remain, as to conscience, independent of each other, depending only on their faith, that is to say on the Church.

Take care; concubinage is, in the absence of the community of love, the only form of union that a religious authority can grant to its members of both sexes, and less than any other the Church of Christ could break with this law. There is in marriage this formidable fact for any church, that there is formed between just spouses a common conscience, family religion, domestic justice, incompatible with external sovereignty.

Concubinage, which brings people together, but does not identify them; which unites bodies, leaving free will to hearts; concubinage, without proper justice and without moral ideals, was all that the new religion could support.

Hence also the introduction into the Christian household of a third influence, which testifies energetically to its concubinary nature.

Among the ancients, no one could enter the family: the gynaeceum was walled up; neither priest nor magistrate had anything to do with it.

In Christianity, it is quite another thing: the priest confesses the woman; he is her spiritual husband; to him the soul, the conscience, the heart; to the husband, genitor, the body. He and She are no longer unanimous, that is to say, they do not form one spirit in two separate bodies; they are two, on the contrary, as Genesis says, in one flesh.

Thus the Church, after having branded love and dishonored, without understanding it, the cult of Venus, separates the wife from the husband, in spite of God’s order. Instead of initiating the woman to Justice through the husband, the father or the brother, as the Roman marriage wanted it and as nature wants it, she claims to instruct her herself, through the director. As in the Fourierist household, the husband, a carnal lover, will fill the wife’s belly; the priest, spiritual lover, will fill the spirit. So that Christian marriage could be defined as a mystical cuckoldry: Hoc est magnum sacramentum!

Wherever Catholicism has retained its power, the priest is master of the house. How much spiritual incest and adultery! How many husbands driven to despair by this alienation from their wives!

And any religion will do the same, I attest to it in Plato and Père Enfantin. As soon as society, instead of resting directly on Justice, is based on a faith, a dogma, a transcendental respect, it must break the matrimonial oath between the man and the woman, or all is lost. Just as in their capacity as citizens they are subject to public authority, they must be subject to it as spouses. Thus Jesuits of Paraguay exercised it with their neophytes. Either the community of loves, as Plato and the first Christians wanted it, or the subordination of marriage to the priest, that is, concubinage. Beyond that, there is no Church, no religion.

XL. — That Christian theology has lowered marriage from the height where polytheistic inspiration had placed it, is a fact that the history of the Church, that her Scriptures, her definitions, her practice and all her authorities demonstrate with the latest evidence.

But one would also like to know what was the superior reason for this retrograde movement, which would not sufficiently explain the primitive coarseness of the sect, nor the oriental spirit of its missionaries. To indicate this reason will complete my critique.

Polytheism, with its male and female gods, coupled, married, begotten of each other, had therefore idealized the family and marriage; he had made this ideal the summit of justice and honor to which he invited all human races, all social conditions. Hercules, after his death, received into heaven and becoming the husband of Hebe, was the emblem of barbarism that rises from the violence of love to the sanctity of marriage. We have then seen by what degradation of the religious feeling and what combination of circumstances the pagan family fell from this ideal; how, finally, by the refinements of its eroticism, Greek and Latin society sank into unisexual voluptuousness.

What will Christianity do?

It is a law of history, which has its principle in the evolutionary movement of ideas, that any revolution, while denying and abrogating the previous state, nevertheless only continues it. We have seen an example of this, with regard to labor, in the succession of laws that govern it in turn: Law of selfishness, Law of love, Law of Justice.

So Christianity had to pick up where polytheism left off, do for marriage what it did for slavery, what it had done for all of its theology. This was indeed what happened.

Witness to the degradation of domestic morals, the hypocrisy of marriage, the unsociability of the family, the miseries of prostitution, the horrors of pederastic love; struck at the same time by the logic, at least apparent, of concubinage, so convenient, so popular; convinced, moreover, by the Platonic theory as much as by its monstrous results, that true love is not of this world and does not belong to mortal natures, Christianity condemned the flesh, denied, from the religious point of view, sexuality; as for earthly life, it affirmed in principle the community of women, but contented itself, in the application and in the form of tolerance, with concubinage.

Christianity, in a word, took as its point of departure the term on which the philosophers of the school of Socrates and Epaminondas had stopped, spiritual unisexuality.

Basically, while polytheism, by instituting marriage, had limited itself to calling Justice to the aid of love, Christianity, taking a further step, pronounced the subordination of the latter: in this it served progress, and prepared the higher formula of the institution. In form and in letter, Christianity did more than subordinate love, it deemed it sinful and condemned it: its whole discipline was inspired by this condemnation.

I have already quoted the words of Christ, to whom one asked which, of the seven husbands to whom a woman had successively belonged, would remain to her after the resurrection: In heaven, he replied, there are no more husband nor wives; all are like angels before the face of God. Saint Paul, in the Galatians, III, 28, professes the same doctrine: In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. One could also say: There is neither brother nor sister, as Chateaubriand has shown so well in his Rene. — I have betrothed you to Christ, he says elsewhere, like a chaste virgin… The whole theory of religious celibacy is based on this principle of a spiritual wedding, where sex is no longer of any importance.

Denied in heaven, sexuality, as transcendental logic would have it, is condemned on earth; the woman, to put it better, in the eyes of the Christian, of the true spiritual, does not exist. Error or accident of nature, torment of man, false image of love, she is worth nothing as a person, except insofar as, stripping herself of her sex, she takes on Christian individuality, following the formula: Neither men nor women, all angels before the Absolute.

Hence the consequence that annihilates marriage, that, the union of man and woman having value only for the procreation of children, at most as a prophylactic against fornication, the conjoined persons remain, as to conscience, independent of each other, depending only on their faith, that is to say on the Church.

Take care; concubinage is, in the absence of the community of love, the only form of union that a religious authority can grant to its members of both sexes, and less than any other the Church of Christ could break with this law. There is in marriage this formidable fact for any church, that there is formed between just spouses a common conscience, family religion, domestic justice, incompatible with external sovereignty.

Concubinage, which brings people together, but does not identify them; which unites bodies, leaving free will to hearts; concubinage, without proper justice and without moral ideals, was all that the new religion could support.

Hence also the introduction into the Christian household of a third influence, which testifies energetically to its concubinary nature.

Among the ancients, no one could enter the family: the gynaeceum was walled up; neither priest nor magistrate had anything to do with it.

In Christianity, it is quite another thing: the priest confesses the woman; he is her spiritual husband; to him the soul, the conscience, the heart; to the husband, genitor, the body. He and She are no longer unanimous, that is to say, they do not form one spirit in two separate bodies; they are two, on the contrary, as Genesis says, in one flesh.

Thus the Church, after having branded love and dishonored, without understanding it, the cult of Venus, separates the wife from the husband, in spite of God’s order. Instead of initiating the woman to Justice through the husband, the father or the brother, as the Roman marriage wanted it and as nature wants it, she claims to instruct her herself, through the director. As in the Fourierist household, the husband, a carnal lover, will fill the wife’s belly; the priest, spiritual lover, will fill the spirit. So that Christian marriage could be defined as a mystical cuckoldry: Hoc est magnum sacramentum!

Wherever Catholicism has retained its power, the priest is master of the house. How much spiritual incest and adultery! How many husbands driven to despair by this alienation from their wives!

And any religion will do the same, I attest to it in Plato and Père Enfantin. As soon as society, instead of resting directly on Justice, is based on a faith, a dogma, a transcendental respect, it must break the matrimonial oath between the man and the woman, or all is lost. Just as in their capacity as citizens they are subject to public authority, they must be subject to it as spouses. Thus Jesuits of Paraguay exercised it with their neophytes. Either the community of loves, as Plato and the first Christians wanted it, or the subordination of marriage to the priest, that is, concubinage. Beyond that, there is no Church, no religion.

CHAPTER V.

Corruption of love and marriage among Christians: Character of modern lechery.

XL. — To the ideal of love dreamed up, one after the other, from the diversity of their points of view, by the spiritualist school of Socrates and the sensualist school of Epicurus, Christianity therefore only substitutes, from its particular point of view, another ideal, mystical love. Judicious reformers would have had to do only one thing, that was, in interpreting the sacramental symbol, to re-establish the juridical meaning of marriage. True to their hatred of nature and humanity, the missionaries of Christ outdid all the refinements of pagan philosophy. The same cause that had ruined the ancient family was to ruin the new family as well: however you absorb the poison, powder, liquid or vapor, it kills you.

First of all, what is this mystical love?

Mystical love, a variety of platonic love, consists in relating to God, eternal beauty, creative love, the feeling that nature established between man and woman, and that the indiscreet Greeks had extended to all of nature, without distinction of kingdom, species or sex. Moreover, just like platonic love, and much more than platonic love, mystical love tends to absolute continence, to mental castration: which always entails the negation of sexuality, and finally of love itself.

The origin of this mysticism merges with that of religions. Without speaking of the aphrodisiac mysteries, which led to it, we know that each city regarded itself as united conjugally to a god, who took it under his protection and to whom it devoted itself by a special worship. The prophets are full of this idea: Jehovah found the city of Israel bare and proscribed; he took her in, married her, laden with ornaments and gold; the Law is her marriage contract, the famous Song her epithalamium.

“The mystical poetry of India has as its usual text the ionized and ecstatic love of the soul for its creator. This love, the most ethereal and the holiest that man can feel, is expressed there by the sensual images of the Song of Songs, but with a candor of expression that the Hebrew itself does not reach. We feel the innocent nudity of man and woman in the spotless and shadowless purity of another Eden.” (Cours familier de littérature, by M. de Lamartine, quote from Baron d’Eckstein.)

Christianity, condemning the flesh and all attachment to creatures, was to carry mystical love to the highest degree, to develop it, to teach it in all its forms, to make it a precept and a condition of salvation. — “I have betrothed you all to one husband,” said Paul to the Corinthians, “to Christ, like a chaste virgin.” The New Testament, the Fathers, the mystics, the sermonaries, speak only of the nuptials of Christ with his Church, of the marriage of the soul with its Creator, of the union of virgins with Jesus, their divine spouse. Like paganism, Christianity can be said to resolve itself entirely in one idea, love.

It is understandable that in this system marriage is regarded as a kind of infidelity, of which the author of all good, of all beauty and of all love, God, is jealous, and which he allows only by an excess of mercy.

He who is without a wife, says the Apostle, thinks only of pleasing God, while the married man must still satisfy his wife. Likewise the virgin who keeps herself pure in heart and body thinks of pleasing only the Lord; whereas the married woman must still concern herself with the world and please her husband.

In fact and in right Christian marriage, granted out of tolerance, reserving to God, to the Church, to the priest, the intimate preferences of the heart, is a concubinage, worse than that, an adultery.

Let us follow, in its logical and practical consequences, this new theory of love.

CHAPTER V.

Corruption of love and marriage among Christians: Character of modern lechery.

XLI. — To the ideal of love dreamed up, one after the other, from the diversity of their points of view, by the spiritualist school of Socrates and the sensualist school of Epicurus, Christianity therefore only substitutes, from its particular point of view, another ideal, mystical love. Judicious reformers would have had to do only one thing, that was, in interpreting the sacramental symbol, to re-establish the juridical meaning of marriage. True to their hatred of nature and humanity, the missionaries of Christ outdid all the refinements of pagan philosophy. The same cause that had ruined the ancient family was to ruin the new family as well: however you absorb the poison, powder, liquid or vapor, it kills you.

First of all, what is this mystical love?

Mystical love, a variety of platonic love, consists in relating to God, eternal beauty, creative love, the feeling that nature established between man and woman, and that the indiscreet Greeks had extended to all of nature, without distinction of kingdom, species or sex. Moreover, just like platonic love, and much more than platonic love, mystical love tends to absolute continence, to mental castration: which always entails the negation of sexuality, and finally of love itself.

The origin of this mysticism merges with that of religions. Without speaking of the aphrodisiac mysteries, which led to it, we know that each city regarded itself as united conjugally to a god, who took it under his protection and to whom it devoted itself by a special worship. The prophets are full of this idea: Jehovah found the city of Israel bare and proscribed; he took her in, married her, laden with ornaments and gold; the Law is her marriage contract, the famous Song her epithalamium.

“The mystical poetry of India has as its usual text the ionized and ecstatic love of the soul for its creator. This love, the most ethereal and the holiest that man can feel, is expressed there by the sensual images of the Song of Songs, but with a candor of expression that the Hebrew itself does not reach. We feel the innocent nudity of man and woman in the spotless and shadowless purity of another Eden.” (Cours familier de littérature, by M. de Lamartine, quote from Baron d’Eckstein.)

Christianity, condemning the flesh and all attachment to creatures, was to carry mystical love to the highest degree, to develop it, to teach it in all its forms, to make it a precept and a condition of salvation. — “I have betrothed you all to one husband,” said Paul to the Corinthians, “to Christ, like a chaste virgin.” The New Testament, the Fathers, the mystics, the sermonaries, speak only of the nuptials of Christ with his Church, of the marriage of the soul with its Creator, of the union of virgins with Jesus, their divine spouse. Like paganism, Christianity can be said to resolve itself entirely in one idea, love.

It is understandable that in this system marriage is regarded as a kind of infidelity, of which the author of all good, of all beauty and of all love, God, is jealous, and which he allows only by an excess of mercy.

He who is without a wife, says the Apostle, thinks only of pleasing God, while the married man must still satisfy his wife. Likewise the virgin who keeps herself pure in heart and body thinks of pleasing only the Lord; whereas the married woman must still concern herself with the world and please her husband.

In fact and in right Christian marriage, granted out of tolerance, reserving to God, to the Church, to the priest, the intimate preferences of the heart, is a concubinage, worse than that, an adultery.

Let us follow, in its logical and practical consequences, this new theory of love.

XLI. — The contradiction first appears in the language of the mystics. It is impossible for them to speak of divine love without continually using the images of carnal love:

“We can say, with Denis le Chartreux, that the divine Spouse, seeing the soul completely in love with his love, communicates himself to her, presents himself to her, embraces her, draws her within himself, kisses her, hugs her tightly with marvelous indulgence.

“We can say, with Saint Bernard, that this embrace, this kiss, this touch, this union, is neither in the imagination nor in the senses, but in the most spiritual part of our being, in the most intimate part of our heart, where the soul, by a singular prerogative, receives its beloved, not by figure, but by infusion, not by image, but by impression.” (_Bossuet_, Sur l’union de Jésus-Christ avec son épouse.)

Perhaps this materialism of expression, the examples of which would fill volumes, was necessary in the beginning to lift hearts straying from the materialism of debauchery, and that is why I cannot make such texts a ground for accusation. against the mystics. What power of chastity these men, a Saint Bernard, a Fenelon, a Bossuet, needed to convey a language that, applied to its legitimate object, would be almost obscene! I would not even fear it if the consequences were to end there, for children. It is not in the words that the evil lies: it is in the idea, which makes God the object of a love whose conjugal union is declared, by article of faith, unworthy.

“Adam, our first father, having risen up against God, immediately lost the natural empire he had over his appetites. His disobedience was avenged by another disobedience. He felt a rebellion that he had not expected, and the lower part having unexpectedly risen up against reason, he was left confused that he could not reduce it. But what is most deplorable is that these brutal lusts that arise in our senses, to the confusion of the mind, have so great a part in our birth. Hence it is that it has something shameful about it, because we all come from those unregulated appetites that made our first father blush. Please understand these truths, and spare me the shame of going over once again things so full of ignominy, and yet without which it is impossible for you to understand what original sin is: for it is through these channels that poison and pestilence flow into our nature. What engenders us kills us. We receive at the same time, and from the same root, both the life of the body and the death of the soul. The mass of which we are formed being infected in its source, it poisons our soul by its fatal contagion.” (Bossuet, Sermon sur la fête de la Conception de la sainte Vierge.)

What soul of mud could be scandalized by such language? Bossuet is as chaste as he is sublime when he speaks of love and all that belongs to it: Milton alone can be compared to him. Isn’t it a beautiful and noble thing to have been able, by the force of mysticism, to make people forget the material meaning of words, to make them think only of feeling? Our novelists do just the opposite: under honest words, their talent and their aim is to make people think of the things that are the least. Look in all the literature of the world for something approaching this other passage:

“There is a place, Lord, where the devil boasts of being invincible; he says he cannot be driven out: it is the moment of conception, in which he defies your power.

“When I see my Liberator in this narrow and voluntary prison (of the maternal womb), I sometimes say to myself: Could it be that God would have wanted to abandon to the devil, if only for a moment, this sacred temple that he intended for his son, this holy tabernacle where he will take such a long and admirable rest, this entirely virginal bed where he will celebrate an entirely spiritual nuptials with our nature? This is how I speak to myself. Then, returning to the Savior: Blessed child, I say to him, do not suffer him, do not allow your mother to be raped! Ah! If Satan dared approach it while, dwelling in it, you make a paradise there, what thunderbolts you would cause to burst on his head | How jealously would you defend your mother’s honor and innocence!…”

And he concludes, as Pius IX and the whole Church have just concluded:

“If then we see in Mary a childbirth without pain, a flesh without frailty, senses without rebellion, a life without spot, a death without pain; if her husband is only her guardian, her marriage the sacred veil that protects and covers her virginity, her beloved son a flower that her integrity has grown; if, when she conceived him, nature, astonished and confused, believed that all her laws were going to be forever abolished; if the Holy Spirit held her place, and the delights of virginity that which is ordinarily occupied by lust, who will be able to believe that there was nothing supernatural in the conception of this princess, and that it was the only place in his life which is not marked with some sign of miracle?” (Ibid.)

For myself, I bow down to this style, I love this incomparable purity. This contrast of innocent and holy childhood resting on a stained throne; that series of virginal prerogatives of which the life of the model woman is composed, and which could not begin in the defilement of vulgar conceptions; these images of the temple, of the tabernacle, of the nuptial bed, of maternity, all that delights me, and I say, after Bossuet, but generalizing his thought: No, it is not possible that the human conception be stained, that the true spouse ceases to be a virgin when she becomes a mother, and that this love, which serves as the foundation of the family and of society, be given over to the transports of concupiscence. All this, I say, is of the beast, not of man. If Christianity was wrong, it was by making the rule the exception, it is by restricting to Christ and the Virgin what should be the privilege of every legitimate birth.

Bossuet and the mystics must therefore be held innocent, and my criticism is not directed at their expressions, any more than at their morals. It is their faith, it is their dogma that I consider.

In vain Christianity elevates its ideal, protests that its language is pure metaphor: the word implies the idea, and by its idea Christianity, despite itself, pays homage to love; it recognizes its essential condition, which is the distinction and union of the sexes; and the more it exalts itself in his erotico-theological contemplation, the more it renders in amorous union desirable, irresistible, instantaneous in the mystic realm.

I understand, up to a certain point, that one takes for an allegory the mystical nuptials of the soul with God; but the Christ proposed as husband to the nun, the Immaculate Virgin whom the Carmelites and Franciscans adore, but the marriage of Mary and Joseph, which serves as their model, are these metaphors? And are we not on the slope of a corruption all the more profound, the deeper its roots are in the ideal?

Moreover, it is by their fruits that doctrines are judged, says the Gospel: A fructibus corum cognoscetis eos. Let us come down from this heaven of Christian love, and see what its seed has produced on earth.

XLII. — The contradiction first appears in the language of the mystics. It is impossible for them to speak of divine love without continually using the images of carnal love:

“We can say, with Denis le Chartreux, that the divine Spouse, seeing the soul completely in love with his love, communicates himself to her, presents himself to her, embraces her, draws her within himself, kisses her, hugs her tightly with marvelous indulgence.

“We can say, with Saint Bernard, that this embrace, this kiss, this touch, this union, is neither in the imagination nor in the senses, but in the most spiritual part of our being, in the most intimate part of our heart, where the soul, by a singular prerogative, receives its beloved, not by figure, but by infusion, not by image, but by impression.” (Bossuet, Sur l’union de Jésus-Christ avec son épouse.)

Perhaps this materialism of expression, the examples of which would fill volumes, was necessary in the beginning to lift hearts straying from the materialism of debauchery, and that is why I cannot make such texts a ground for accusation. against the mystics. What power of chastity these men, a Saint Bernard, a Fenelon, a Bossuet, needed to convey a language that, applied to its legitimate object, would be almost obscene! I would not even fear it if the consequences were to end there, for children. It is not in the words that the evil lies: it is in the idea, which makes God the object of a love whose conjugal union is declared, by article of faith, unworthy.

“Adam, our first father, having risen up against God, immediately lost the natural empire he had over his appetites. His disobedience was avenged by another disobedience. He felt a rebellion that he had not expected, and the lower part having unexpectedly risen up against reason, he was left confused that he could not reduce it. But what is most deplorable is that these brutal lusts that arise in our senses, to the confusion of the mind, have so great a part in our birth. Hence it is that it has something shameful about it, because we all come from those unregulated appetites that made our first father blush. Please understand these truths, and spare me the shame of going over once again things so full of ignominy, and yet without which it is impossible for you to understand what original sin is: for it is through these channels that poison and pestilence flow into our nature. What engenders us kills us. We receive at the same time, and from the same root, both the life of the body and the death of the soul. The mass of which we are formed being infected in its source, it poisons our soul by its fatal contagion.” (Bossuet, Sermon sur la fête de la Conception de la sainte Vierge.)

What soul of mud could be scandalized by such language? Bossuet is as chaste as he is sublime when he speaks of love and all that belongs to it: Milton alone can be compared to him. Isn’t it a beautiful and noble thing to have been able, by the force of mysticism, to make people forget the material meaning of words, to make them think only of feeling? Our novelists do just the opposite: under honest words, their talent and their aim is to make people think of the things that are the least. Look in all the literature of the world for something approaching this other passage:

“There is a place, Lord, where the devil boasts of being invincible; he says he cannot be driven out: it is the moment of conception, in which he defies your power.

“When I see my Liberator in this narrow and voluntary prison (of the maternal womb), I sometimes say to myself: Could it be that God would have wanted to abandon to the devil, if only for a moment, this sacred temple that he intended for his son, this holy tabernacle where he will take such a long and admirable rest, this entirely virginal bed where he will celebrate an entirely spiritual nuptials with our nature? This is how I speak to myself. Then, returning to the Savior: Blessed child, I say to him, do not suffer him, do not allow your mother to be raped! Ah! If Satan dared approach it while, dwelling in it, you make a paradise there, what thunderbolts you would cause to burst on his head | How jealously would you defend your mother’s honor and innocence!…”

And he concludes, as Pius IX and the whole Church have just concluded:

“If then we see in Mary a childbirth without pain, a flesh without frailty, senses without rebellion, a life without spot, a death without pain; if her husband is only her guardian, her marriage the sacred veil that protects and covers her virginity, her beloved son a flower that her integrity has grown; if, when she conceived him, nature, astonished and confused, believed that all her laws were going to be forever abolished; if the Holy Spirit held her place, and the delights of virginity that which is ordinarily occupied by lust, who will be able to believe that there was nothing supernatural in the conception of this princess, and that it was the only place in his life which is not marked with some sign of miracle?” (Ibid.)

For myself, I bow down to this style, I love this incomparable purity. This contrast of innocent and holy childhood resting on a stained throne; that series of virginal prerogatives of which the life of the model woman is composed, and which could not begin in the defilement of vulgar conceptions; these images of the temple, of the tabernacle, of the nuptial bed, of maternity, all that delights me, and I say, after Bossuet, but generalizing his thought: No, it is not possible that the human conception be stained, that the true spouse ceases to be a virgin when she becomes a mother, and that this love, which serves as the foundation of the family and of society, be given over to the transports of concupiscence. All this, I say, is of the beast, not of man. If Christianity was wrong, it was by making the rule the exception, it is by restricting to Christ and the Virgin what should be the privilege of every legitimate birth.

Bossuet and the mystics must therefore be held innocent, and my criticism is not directed at their expressions, any more than at their morals. It is their faith, it is their dogma that I consider.

In vain Christianity elevates its ideal, protests that its language is pure metaphor: the word implies the idea, and by its idea Christianity, despite itself, pays homage to love; it recognizes its essential condition, which is the distinction and union of the sexes; and the more it exalts itself in his erotico-theological contemplation, the more it renders in amorous union desirable, irresistible, instantaneous in the mystic realm.

I understand, up to a certain point, that one takes for an allegory the mystical nuptials of the soul with God; but the Christ proposed as husband to the nun, the Immaculate Virgin whom the Carmelites and Franciscans adore, but the marriage of Mary and Joseph, which serves as their model, are these metaphors? And are we not on the slope of a corruption all the more profound, the deeper its roots are in the ideal?

Moreover, it is by their fruits that doctrines are judged, says the Gospel: A fructibus corum cognoscetis eos. Let us come down from this heaven of Christian love, and see what its seed has produced on earth.

XLII. —Whether Christianity limited itself to abolishing prostitution, more or less sacred, by elevating the saints of Venus to the rank of concubines; or, what would have been more democratic and more decisive, whether it caused the two inferior modes of union of the sexes to disappear at a stroke by deciding that all love would be elevated to the dignity of marriage, it was necessary, for this reform, to assure beforehand to every man the means of supporting his wife and children, which implied, as I said, the economic reconstitution of society. Far from repelling the reformers, such a prospect was calculated to excite their enthusiasm more and more. The socialism of 1848 understood this; it did not shrink from the idea. All of us then asserted with equal energy the right to work and the right to marry, the first as pledge and condition of the second: it is in the combination of this double right of the man and the citizen that all the emancipation of woman is contained.

Christianity with its dogma of the fall, with its despairing legend of labor, with its concessions to serfdom, with its prejudices against commerce and industry, with its absolute ignorance of the laws of the production and circulation of wealth, with its spirit of authority, hierarchy and patriciat, was not up to the enterprise.

The family and society disorganized, it therefore found itself powerless to restore anything; it had no energy except to wither man and nature, to destroy the monuments of the ancient cult, to persecute its ministers, to seize its goods and endowments, and to tear itself to pieces for the definition of its dogmas. Just as it failed to save the empire from dissolution and invasion, it failed to preserve marriage and the family from the leprosy that gnawed at them. The disease was not healed; it changed character. Like a reverberating eruption, it passed into a chronic state, and the whole constitution was shaken.

And first of all, idolatry forbidden, communist sects exterminated, the woman who formerly, under the protection of public worship, dedicated herself to free love, was thrown without any form of trial to the Gemonian stairs… Will we regret religious prostitution? God forbid; but it is permissible to regret that human creatures whom we have not been able to provide for, whose commerce we are forced to tolerate, to protect, have gained from the evangelical reform only one more degree of degradation. Prostitution does not end with polytheism, as we all know: wedded to misery, proscribed before the gods and before men, crushed under infamy, it became more abominable, more hideous. No more consecration that begs grace for the courtesan, no more poetry or song, not the slightest ideal that uplifts her. For a time, in Rome, in Venice, the imitation of the antique seemed to resurrect it: this scandal has disappeared. The prostitute is such almost everywhere as her baptism demands, a being close to the monkey, who can serve as a model for the original sin. If the police take care of it, it is to stop in time the infection whose filthy beast threatens the honest population. Even Christian modesty protested against this encouragement given to debauchery: M. Benjamin Delessert was blamed by the devout for having created the Dispensary, and tried to stifle syphilis in its lair. Curse to the victims of the vulgar Venus! Let the man rot, and the canker eat him away, before science is called to help the incontinence. As for the unfortunates, we have all read the story of Manon Lescaut: the government, if it only listened to its Christian conscience, would from time to time make batches of them for Guyana and Noukahiva.

XLIII. —Whether Christianity limited itself to abolishing prostitution, more or less sacred, by elevating the saints of Venus to the rank of concubines; or, what would have been more democratic and more decisive, whether it caused the two inferior modes of union of the sexes to disappear at a stroke by deciding that all love would be elevated to the dignity of marriage, it was necessary, for this reform, to assure beforehand to every man the means of supporting his wife and children, which implied, as I said, the economic reconstitution of society. Far from repelling the reformers, such a prospect was calculated to excite their enthusiasm more and more. The socialism of 1848 understood this; it did not shrink from the idea. All of us then asserted with equal energy the right to work and the right to marry, the first as pledge and condition of the second: it is in the combination of this double right of the man and the citizen that all the emancipation of woman is contained.

Christianity with its dogma of the fall, with its despairing legend of labor, with its concessions to serfdom, with its prejudices against commerce and industry, with its absolute ignorance of the laws of the production and circulation of wealth, with its spirit of authority, hierarchy and patriciat, was not up to the enterprise.

The family and society disorganized, it therefore found itself powerless to restore anything; it had no energy except to wither man and nature, to destroy the monuments of the ancient cult, to persecute its ministers, to seize its goods and endowments, and to tear itself to pieces for the definition of its dogmas. Just as it failed to save the empire from dissolution and invasion, it failed to preserve marriage and the family from the leprosy that gnawed at them. The disease was not healed; it changed character. Like a reverberating eruption, it passed into a chronic state, and the whole constitution was shaken.

And first of all, idolatry forbidden, communist sects exterminated, the woman who formerly, under the protection of public worship, dedicated herself to free love, was thrown without any form of trial to the Gemonian stairs… Will we regret religious prostitution? God forbid; but it is permissible to regret that human creatures whom we have not been able to provide for, whose commerce we are forced to tolerate, to protect, have gained from the evangelical reform only one more degree of degradation. Prostitution does not end with polytheism, as we all know: wedded to misery, proscribed before the gods and before men, crushed under infamy, it became more abominable, more hideous. No more consecration that begs grace for the courtesan, no more poetry or song, not the slightest ideal that uplifts her. For a time, in Rome, in Venice, the imitation of the antique seemed to resurrect it: this scandal has disappeared. The prostitute is such almost everywhere as her baptism demands, a being close to the monkey, who can serve as a model for the original sin. If the police take care of it, it is to stop in time the infection whose filthy beast threatens the honest population. Even Christian modesty protested against this encouragement given to debauchery: M. Benjamin Delessert was blamed by the devout for having created the Dispensary, and tried to stifle syphilis in its lair. Curse to the victims of the vulgar Venus! Let the man rot, and the canker eat him away, before science is called to help the incontinence. As for the unfortunates, we have all read the story of Manon Lescaut: the government, if it only listened to its Christian conscience, would from time to time make batches of them for Guyana and Noukahiva.

XLIII.—The average state of concubinage, an exact expression of the Christian idea, seemed destined to obtain pardon: it was not the case. Its name was impure: he had to choose between the blessing of the priest and the declaration of infamy. We went further: the wives of priests, in the Middle Ages, were assimilated to concubines, and when celibacy had been declared obligatory for all the secular clergy, it was a question, in a council of Toledo, of granting to these concubines, as compensation, the galleys. No theocracy without celibacy, and without theocracy no Church, no religion, no obedience. If secular marriage is already a threat to authority, how much more so is priestly marriage!

Here again, while forming sincere wishes for the extinction of concubinage, I cannot help saying that Christianity, which has branded it without being able to put an end to it, instead of serving morality, has done it a new offense.

On July 10, 1855, the Assize Court of the Seine sentenced a woman convicted of bigamy to two years in prison in the following circumstances:

Abandoned by her husband, she had found a lover who, having taken her to his country and wanting to honor her union, married her. Everything urged the unfortunate woman to marry: the abandonment of her first husband, the wishes of the lover and his family, the proprieties of society, which, thanks to Christianity, no longer accepts concubinage, even modesty. There is more: this woman who is accused of bigamy is in reality monogamous, and the more, to convince her, we insist on the circumstances that determined her to celebrate a second marriage, the more, in spite of the Church and of the law that imitates it, I proclaim her innocent and worthy of respect.

What is her crime? Did she live simultaneously with two husbands? No: abandoned by the first, she attached herself to the second by a loyal, if not legal, commitment. It is against legality, not against love, justice, reason, modesty, that she has sinned. Now, what is this legality? A violent state, created by theological speculation, which leaves no middle ground for the abandoned woman between an alleged bigamy, declared a crime, and licentiousness, which leads to exclusion from society. As if Justice consisted in creating impossible situations, instead of taking hold of those created by the reason of times and things, to raise them little by little by the application of right!

Suppose, however, in the absence of the divorce that our laws reject and that I do not claim, concubinage recognized, surrounded by a legal character, such as the Emperor Augustus had done and as the Church admitted it for so long: what would have happened to this woman? She would have found with an honest companion an adopted family, children, a share in public consideration, the consideration of the magistrate; society, morality, reason, justice, were satisfied. Instead, because she wanted to cut a knot that could not be undone, the same woman is declared, by religion and the laws, on the one hand, for her new loves, libertine, adulterer, prostitute; on the other, for her attempt at remarriage, bigamist, forger, sacrilegious. Whereupon, two years in prison, rupture of the seconds as of the first weddings, universal abandonment, stigma. On her release from prison, all that is left for her to do is jump into the water.

Moreover, it has happened with concubinage as with prostitution: it has never ceased to exist; it grows every day among the people, who, understanding nothing of the legitimate bond except the dowry, abandon it to the rich. One would say that the human heart, deceived by its religion, deceived by its jurists, seeks in the economic joys of concubinary union the restoration of marriage.

XLIV.—The average state of concubinage, an exact expression of the Christian idea, seemed destined to obtain pardon: it was not the case. Its name was impure: he had to choose between the blessing of the priest and the declaration of infamy. We went further: the wives of priests, in the Middle Ages, were assimilated to concubines, and when celibacy had been declared obligatory for all the secular clergy, it was a question, in a council of Toledo, of granting to these concubines, as compensation, the galleys. No theocracy without celibacy, and without theocracy no Church, no religion, no obedience. If secular marriage is already a threat to authority, how much more so is priestly marriage!

Here again, while forming sincere wishes for the extinction of concubinage, I cannot help saying that Christianity, which has branded it without being able to put an end to it, instead of serving morality, has done it a new offense.

On July 10, 1855, the Assize Court of the Seine sentenced a woman convicted of bigamy to two years in prison in the following circumstances:

Abandoned by her husband, she had found a lover who, having taken her to his country and wanting to honor her union, married her. Everything urged the unfortunate woman to marry: the abandonment of her first husband, the wishes of the lover and his family, the proprieties of society, which, thanks to Christianity, no longer accepts concubinage, even modesty. There is more: this woman who is accused of bigamy is in reality monogamous, and the more, to convince her, we insist on the circumstances that determined her to celebrate a second marriage, the more, in spite of the Church and of the law that imitates it, I proclaim her innocent and worthy of respect.

What is her crime? Did she live simultaneously with two husbands? No: abandoned by the first, she attached herself to the second by a loyal, if not legal, commitment. It is against legality, not against love, justice, reason, modesty, that she has sinned. Now, what is this legality? A violent state, created by theological speculation, which leaves no middle ground for the abandoned woman between an alleged bigamy, declared a crime, and licentiousness, which leads to exclusion from society. As if Justice consisted in creating impossible situations, instead of taking hold of those created by the reason of times and things, to raise them little by little by the application of right!

Suppose, however, in the absence of the divorce that our laws reject and that I do not claim, concubinage recognized, surrounded by a legal character, such as the Emperor Augustus had done and as the Church admitted it for so long: what would have happened to this woman? She would have found with an honest companion an adopted family, children, a share in public consideration, the consideration of the magistrate; society, morality, reason, justice, were satisfied. Instead, because she wanted to cut a knot that could not be undone, the same woman is declared, by religion and the laws, on the one hand, for her new loves, libertine, adulterer, prostitute; on the other, for her attempt at remarriage, bigamist, forger, sacrilegious. Whereupon, two years in prison, rupture of the seconds as of the first weddings, universal abandonment, stigma. On her release from prison, all that is left for her to do is jump into the water.

Moreover, it has happened with concubinage as with prostitution: it has never ceased to exist; it grows every day among the people, who, understanding nothing of the legitimate bond except the dowry, abandon it to the rich. One would say that the human heart, deceived by its religion, deceived by its jurists, seeks in the economic joys of concubinary union the restoration of marriage.

XLIV. — The Church, prudish and severe, therefore only wanted to keep the sacrament: we saw in the preceding chapter what the sacrament had become in her hands.

Just as, according to the Gospel, justice, liberty, wealth, science and peace cannot be obtained here below and must be regarded as prerogatives of the other life; in the same way pure and perfect love is promised only for Heaven, where we no longer marry, says Christ, since there are no longer sexes, but where we love each other without uniting, in the manner of angels. On this earth, where the devil more than nature has made us male and female, love is essentially impure; and if marriage, necessary for the preservation of the species, enjoys for this purpose a dispensation from the Church, we must always see in it, as in the water of baptism and the oil of confirmation, only a physical sign, a hollow figure, which contains only the name of love and gives only its shadow.

On this point the casuists agree, and they are logical. The more the priest, devoted by state to mystical love, endures embarrassment, the more he likes to hold back pleasures that his religion forbids him. What the vulgar take in him for the inspiration of a celestial modesty is only the outrage done to nature by mysticism. Husbands whose wives go to confession, each of your caresses is counted at the Holy Tribunal. The veil of ignominy has spread over you; the blows that the demon of the flesh gives to the priest, the priest returns them to his penitent, who returns them to her husband. — “Every married woman,” said the Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, “knows that she has reason to blush.” — Hide yourself, woman; I see on your face the trace of your husband’s kisses.

All this would have been nothing but the impertinence of pedants and cafards, if the laity had taken the wise course of making fun of the clerics; but one is not half-religious. What theology had separated, secular practice separated in its turn; and if there is one trait that distinguishes Christian morals, it is this strange idea, passed into an aphorism, that, love being one thing, marriage another, it is against all propriety to bring them together.

Some do honor to Christianity for chivalrous gallantry and the respect with which it surrounded women. Others attribute it to the races of the North, and in this connection do not fail to quote the famous passage from the book of Tacitus on the customs of the Germans. Still others have traced the origins of chivalry to the Moors; some finally find it among the Celts.

“Woman,” said a writer in the Revue des Deux-Mondes (February 1854), “woman, as chivalry conceived her, ideal of gentleness and beauty, posed as the supreme goal of life, is a creation neither classical, nor Christian, nor Germanic, but really Celtic.”

For me, who do not have great faith in barbarian delicacy, especially when this barbarism has put itself the day before in contact with a refined civilization, I believe that it is doing wrong to our ancestors goths, ostrogoths, visigoths, Longobards, Saracens, Normans and Celts, and slander them, than to attribute to them this chivalry which never existed except in relatively modern novels, which the troubadours knew little or nothing, and of which we hardly cite a few rare examples, such as those of Petrarch and Bayard.

Chivalric love is nothing other than the Christian transformation of platonic love, with this new character that suffices to detect its origin and which we forget too much, it is because, according to the theory of courts of love, the friend of a lady’s heart could no longer become her husband, and because, if by chance they married, she had to look for another knight. Isn’t that how Italian ladies still do it?

Thus, according to the Christian ideal, the theological, feudal, romantic or chivalrous ideal, whatever it pleases you to call it, but the most false ideal that can be conceived, marriage has nothing in common with love: it is a function where everything is regulated with a view to lineage, succession, alliance, interests, but in which the supreme propriety for the spouses is to remain, as to love, and notwithstanding cohabitation and generation, as strangers to each other as if they had never seen each other.

Doubtless, here as everywhere, nature has caused the doctrine to bend; the human heart, more powerful, higher than theology, has done its best to repair the breach made in morality by a foolish ideality. But since every society is formed on its religion, I have the right to judge religion and its ideal according to the mores that this ideal engenders: now, I now ask my readers, Christianity, which has swept away fornication, but in it catechisms only, and unsuccessfully struck concubinage; who popularized and made fashionable, under the nickname of chivalry, its mystical love, sung, celebrated by all its orators and poets; who, finally, by this absurd refinement, separating love from marriage, separated as much as he was in himself the husband from the wife, and made divorce, which he condemned, universal, can christianity boast of have purified love and uplifted marriage again?

XLV. — The Church, prudish and severe, therefore only wanted to keep the sacrament: we saw in the preceding chapter what the sacrament had become in her hands.

Just as, according to the Gospel, justice, liberty, wealth, science and peace cannot be obtained here below and must be regarded as prerogatives of the other life; in the same way pure and perfect love is promised only for Heaven, where we no longer marry, says Christ, since there are no longer sexes, but where we love each other without uniting, in the manner of angels. On this earth, where the devil more than nature has made us male and female, love is essentially impure; and if marriage, necessary for the preservation of the species, enjoys for this purpose a dispensation from the Church, we must always see in it, as in the water of baptism and the oil of confirmation, only a physical sign, a hollow figure, which contains only the name of love and gives only its shadow.

On this point the casuists agree, and they are logical. The more the priest, devoted by state to mystical love, endures embarrassment, the more he likes to hold back pleasures that his religion forbids him. What the vulgar take in him for the inspiration of a celestial modesty is only the outrage done to nature by mysticism. Husbands whose wives go to confession, each of your caresses is counted at the Holy Tribunal. The veil of ignominy has spread over you; the blows that the demon of the flesh gives to the priest, the priest returns them to his penitent, who returns them to her husband. — “Every married woman,” said the Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, “knows that she has reason to blush.” — Hide yourself, woman; I see on your face the trace of your husband’s kisses.

All this would have been nothing but the impertinence of pedants and cafards, if the laity had taken the wise course of making fun of the clerics; but one is not half-religious. What theology had separated, secular practice separated in its turn; and if there is one trait that distinguishes Christian morals, it is this strange idea, passed into an aphorism, that, love being one thing, marriage another, it is against all propriety to bring them together.

Some do honor to Christianity for chivalrous gallantry and the respect with which it surrounded women. Others attribute it to the races of the North, and in this connection do not fail to quote the famous passage from the book of Tacitus on the customs of the Germans. Still others have traced the origins of chivalry to the Moors; some finally find it among the Celts.

“Woman,” said a writer in the Revue des Deux-Mondes (February 1854), “woman, as chivalry conceived her, ideal of gentleness and beauty, posed as the supreme goal of life, is a creation neither classical, nor Christian, nor Germanic, but really Celtic.”

For me, who do not have great faith in barbarian delicacy, especially when this barbarism has put itself the day before in contact with a refined civilization, I believe that it is doing wrong to our ancestors goths, ostrogoths, visigoths, Longobards, Saracens, Normans and Celts, and slander them, than to attribute to them this chivalry which never existed except in relatively modern novels, which the troubadours knew little or nothing, and of which we hardly cite a few rare examples, such as those of Petrarch and Bayard.

Chivalric love is nothing other than the Christian transformation of platonic love, with this new character that suffices to detect its origin and which we forget too much, it is because, according to the theory of courts of love, the friend of a lady’s heart could no longer become her husband, and because, if by chance they married, she had to look for another knight. Isn’t that how Italian ladies still do it?

Thus, according to the Christian ideal, the theological, feudal, romantic or chivalrous ideal, whatever it pleases you to call it, but the most false ideal that can be conceived, marriage has nothing in common with love: it is a function where everything is regulated with a view to lineage, succession, alliance, interests, but in which the supreme propriety for the spouses is to remain, as to love, and notwithstanding cohabitation and generation, as strangers to each other as if they had never seen each other.

Doubtless, here as everywhere, nature has caused the doctrine to bend; the human heart, more powerful, higher than theology, has done its best to repair the breach made in morality by a foolish ideality. But since every society is formed on its religion, I have the right to judge religion and its ideal according to the mores that this ideal engenders: now, I now ask my readers, Christianity, which has swept away fornication, but in it catechisms only, and unsuccessfully struck concubinage; who popularized and made fashionable, under the nickname of chivalry, its mystical love, sung, celebrated by all its orators and poets; who, finally, by this absurd refinement, separating love from marriage, separated as much as he was in himself the husband from the wife, and made divorce, which he condemned, universal, can christianity boast of have purified love and uplifted marriage again?

XLV. — But perhaps in total this dogmatic confiscation of perfect love for the benefit of spiritual eunuchs, perhaps this no less strange practice which makes marriage two parts, one, that of the heart, for the knight, the other that of the senses, for the husband; perhaps this disgrace poured out in full on all the varieties of sexual love, free or conjugated, will have made morals better and, if not eradicated, at least notably diminished the vices begotten by pagan idealism: solitary masturbation, odious incest, stupor worse than infanticide, and cowardly adultery, and unisexual love.

No, the Christian Hercules did not strike down any of these monsters; moreover, supposing that since the propagation of the Gospel there has been a diminution in intensity in general lust, this slight advantage is more than compensated for by the baseness and hypocrisy that Christianity, by its ideal, was to give birth to in the new mores.

To begin with marriage, I doubt whether it has ever been dishonored, by the incontinence of the spouses, so much as among Christians. If the Romans of the Republic showed a mediocre tenderness towards their wives, which no one cannot say, at least they were serious in the testimonies they gave them, and as fornication was not imputed to them as a mortal sin they reserved for others the erotic fantasies that the dignity of their matrons rejected. The Christian has taken literally the precept of the Apostle: In order to prevent fornications, let each have his each; let both do their duty and do not make mistakes. Consult all the authors of moral theology, all the manuals of the confessor, where are found revealed, with such ample detail and consummate experience, the privacies of the nuptial bed: can there be anything more ignoble than marital love between Christians? Tallemant des Réaux recounts in his Histoires, about the famous Antoine Arnaud, the leader of this bigoted race that populated Port-Royal and filled the world with his rigor:

“This man was one of the greatest abatteurs de bois you could find; but he did it in the most inconvenient way in the world. He pushed his wife at night: Cataut! Cataut! woke her up saying: It is for the satisfaction of my conscience. Then, before going any further, he made a prayer to God to sanctify the work of the flesh; and it sometimes took her five or six times in one night.”

See also, on this edifying subject, the stories of Bussi and Brantôme, the Tales of Bocaccio, the Queen of Navarre and La Fontaine, the Latin dialogues of Chorier, the conjugal antics of Rabelais, and all the love literature, before and since the Reformation. Either I am greatly mistaken, or one will be convinced that under the influence of Christian devotion the morals of marriage were really nothing other than those of concubinage, with prudery too. It was in the seventeenth century that the reaction began, and who gave the signal? I regret it for Molière as much as for the Church, this reaction has for authors the Precious.

The priests, fascinated by their mysticism, are still learning what every honest woman knows, that a man who has decided to marry has said goodbye to passion; that from a fiery lover he immediately becomes, by the fact of his resolution, a fiancé full of reserve, tenderness and calm; that marriage, far from being a union for pleasure, is a society of mutual continence, and that this mystery of a spotless generation, imagined for the glory of Christ and his mother, is realized in every conception that a true marriage envelops with its shadows.

Here is the beginning of a sermon given a few years ago in Marseilles, by a Jesuit, in a women’s conference:

“In opening these conferences, my very dear sisters, I believe I must congratulate you on the zeal you show in assisting us in our holy mission. Through the efforts of some of you, lost sheep have been brought home. Persevere on this path. Use all the means of persuasion you have with your fathers, with your brothers, with your husbands, with those who may be dear to you in other ways. May your conversion work never slow down. Work in the vineyard of the Lord at all times of your life; work there during the day, work there in the evening, work there at night, especially at night, my very dear Sisters: the night is your strength!…”

The wretch! He likened in his mind the condition of the husband to that of the monk who asks his superior for permission to tolerate: Domine, ut eam ad lupanar. But, more severe towards the husband than the abbot towards his monks, he requires of the dear sisters that beforehand they make sure that the husbands go to confession: no confession note, no tolerance.

Any lack of respect for oneself leads to the loss of respect for others: how could marriage be sacred, when the first perpetrators of desecration are the spouses themselves?

It is especially since the establishment of Christianity, and thanks to the development of chivalrous mores, that adultery, one of the greatest crimes in the eyes of the ancients, has lost its gravity and has multiplied in such a deplorable manner. I don’t need to explain the reason: it is all in that fatal word, duty. When love, in its ideality, has been separated from marriage, and when, on the other hand, one of the spouses, through impotence or otherwise, neglects their duty, infidelity becomes excusable for the other, Si impos. Hence the ridicule that attaches to the deceived husband, the blame reserved for the jealous, the reprobation that falls on the vindictive. Cuckoldry becomes the corollary of marriage; in this respect, we can say that it is of catholic and apostolic institution. It is part of the marital pact, it enters the church with the bride and groom, it comes back with them, it sits at the table, it watches over the hearth; it is the god Lare that brings, among his herds, every wife. All the erotic literature and banter sings it; the sages take their part in it: he is the patron of a brotherhood that embraces all those on whom the Church has pronounced the conjungo, the understudy of the Hymenee, its good genius, its fortune. If the husband can boast of any advantage, it will be, at best, a vain and dubious priority.

I knew a young married man who, on the exhortations of his confessor and the advice of the gossips, having taken it into his head to pass sleepless the first three nights of his nuptials, had been coiffé in the meantime by his wife, whose secret a suitor had overheard, who could not bear the ridiculousness of her position. Would it not have been better for this imbecile, for his wife, for the future of the young couple, if he made a libation to the goddess Pertunda from the very first day, instead of meditating on mystical love and the glories of the Immaculate?

XLVI. — But perhaps in total this dogmatic confiscation of perfect love for the benefit of spiritual eunuchs, perhaps this no less strange practice which makes marriage two parts, one, that of the heart, for the knight, the other that of the senses, for the husband; perhaps this disgrace poured out in full on all the varieties of sexual love, free or conjugated, will have made morals better and, if not eradicated, at least notably diminished the vices begotten by pagan idealism: solitary masturbation, odious incest, stupor worse than infanticide, and cowardly adultery, and unisexual love.

No, the Christian Hercules did not strike down any of these monsters; moreover, supposing that since the propagation of the Gospel there has been a diminution in intensity in general lust, this slight advantage is more than compensated for by the baseness and hypocrisy that Christianity, by its ideal, was to give birth to in the new mores.

To begin with marriage, I doubt whether it has ever been dishonored, by the incontinence of the spouses, so much as among Christians. If the Romans of the Republic showed a mediocre tenderness towards their wives, which no one cannot say, at least they were serious in the testimonies they gave them, and as fornication was not imputed to them as a mortal sin they reserved for others the erotic fantasies that the dignity of their matrons rejected. The Christian has taken literally the precept of the Apostle: In order to prevent fornications, let each have his each; let both do their duty and do not make mistakes. Consult all the authors of moral theology, all the manuals of the confessor, where are found revealed, with such ample detail and consummate experience, the privacies of the nuptial bed: can there be anything more ignoble than marital love between Christians? Tallemant des Réaux recounts in his Histoires, about the famous Antoine Arnaud, the leader of this bigoted race that populated Port-Royal and filled the world with his rigor:

“This man was one of the greatest abatteurs de bois you could find; but he did it in the most inconvenient way in the world. He pushed his wife at night: Cataut! Cataut! woke her up saying: It is for the satisfaction of my conscience. Then, before going any further, he made a prayer to God to sanctify the work of the flesh; and it sometimes took her five or six times in one night.”

See also, on this edifying subject, the stories of Bussi and Brantôme, the Tales of Bocaccio, the Queen of Navarre and La Fontaine, the Latin dialogues of Chorier, the conjugal antics of Rabelais, and all the love literature, before and since the Reformation. Either I am greatly mistaken, or one will be convinced that under the influence of Christian devotion the morals of marriage were really nothing other than those of concubinage, with prudery too. It was in the seventeenth century that the reaction began, and who gave the signal? I regret it for Molière as much as for the Church, this reaction has for authors the Precious.

The priests, fascinated by their mysticism, are still learning what every honest woman knows, that a man who has decided to marry has said goodbye to passion; that from a fiery lover he immediately becomes, by the fact of his resolution, a fiancé full of reserve, tenderness and calm; that marriage, far from being a union for pleasure, is a society of mutual continence, and that this mystery of a spotless generation, imagined for the glory of Christ and his mother, is realized in every conception that a true marriage envelops with its shadows.

Here is the beginning of a sermon given a few years ago in Marseilles, by a Jesuit, in a women’s conference:

“In opening these conferences, my very dear sisters, I believe I must congratulate you on the zeal you show in assisting us in our holy mission. Through the efforts of some of you, lost sheep have been brought home. Persevere on this path. Use all the means of persuasion you have with your fathers, with your brothers, with your husbands, with those who may be dear to you in other ways. May your conversion work never slow down. Work in the vineyard of the Lord at all times of your life; work there during the day, work there in the evening, work there at night, especially at night, my very dear Sisters: the night is your strength!…”

The wretch! He likened in his mind the condition of the husband to that of the monk who asks his superior for permission to tolerate: Domine, ut eam ad lupanar. But, more severe towards the husband than the abbot towards his monks, he requires of the dear sisters that beforehand they make sure that the husbands go to confession: no confession note, no tolerance.

Any lack of respect for oneself leads to the loss of respect for others: how could marriage be sacred, when the first perpetrators of desecration are the spouses themselves?

It is especially since the establishment of Christianity, and thanks to the development of chivalrous mores, that adultery, one of the greatest crimes in the eyes of the ancients, has lost its gravity and has multiplied in such a deplorable manner. I don’t need to explain the reason: it is all in that fatal word, duty. When love, in its ideality, has been separated from marriage, and when, on the other hand, one of the spouses, through impotence or otherwise, neglects their duty, infidelity becomes excusable for the other, Si impos. Hence the ridicule that attaches to the deceived husband, the blame reserved for the jealous, the reprobation that falls on the vindictive. Cuckoldry becomes the corollary of marriage; in this respect, we can say that it is of catholic and apostolic institution. It is part of the marital pact, it enters the church with the bride and groom, it comes back with them, it sits at the table, it watches over the hearth; it is the god Lare that brings, among his herds, every wife. All the erotic literature and banter sings it; the sages take their part in it: he is the patron of a brotherhood that embraces all those on whom the Church has pronounced the conjungo, the understudy of the Hymenee, its good genius, its fortune. If the husband can boast of any advantage, it will be, at best, a vain and dubious priority.

I knew a young married man who, on the exhortations of his confessor and the advice of the gossips, having taken it into his head to pass sleepless the first three nights of his nuptials, had been coiffé in the meantime by his wife, whose secret a suitor had overheard, who could not bear the ridiculousness of her position. Would it not have been better for this imbecile, for his wife, for the future of the young couple, if he made a libation to the goddess Pertunda from the very first day, instead of meditating on mystical love and the glories of the Immaculate?

XLVI. — Love has its principle in the organism and lives on the ideal: by this double title, it is withdrawn from free will. Since loyalty, honesty, are absent from permitted commerce, would they by chance be found in contraband? These men of good fortune, these gallant women, these naughty little girls, all this wandering chivalry, in full revolt against the law, how is it in its clandestine loves? No doubt we shall find in free lovers this virtue, this honorability so rare between legitimate spouses. We have seen marriage, let us consider licentiousness.

The most ordinary feeling that the Christian experiences for the woman who, outside marriage, has given herself to him, is an indefinable contempt doubled with aversion; and this contempt, this aversion, the Christian woman returns to her accomplice, from whom she expects neither esteem nor mercy. The promise or the regret of the marriage being the pretext, expressed or implied, of any adventure, it is to whichever of the two will deceive the other by a more skillful hypocrisy. Never, among the ancients, did men and women, boys and girls, ever play such a game of personal dignity and family honor. The magistrate, in default of the father, the son, the brother or the husband, would have acted out of office: to lower, by an affair, the free woman below the courtesan, was almost a crime of lèse-majesté. Now, thanks to our pretended chivalrous gallantry, we have learned to treat each other as freedmen. Yet if we had passion as an excuse, we might be guilty, we would not be depraved; but it is only libertinage, a pastime, a fashion. Vitia ridemus, et corrumpere aut corrumpi saeculum vocatur! No more consideration for rank, age, friendship, or public morals, in the face of a debauchery erected into a kind of mutuality, whose risks are accepted by public opinion. No family whithatch does not pay, through one of its females, its contributory share of flesh to pleasure; but no family either that, through its males, does not receive its share of the income. Keep your chickens, said an honest middle-class woman to me, mother of three boys; my roosters are unleashed!.… In love as in war: Each at home, each for himself! So much the worse for those who are not on their guard. I enjoyed you, madam, mademoiselle; but I made you enjoy too: leaving quits, promises void. You have nothing to reproach me with; your husband, your father, your brothers, no more. Their loves cover mine.

Unfortunately, education is in no way related to this morality, which requires a particular initiation. We preach modesty and virtue as much as we can to the young girl, we rock her with chivalry, heroic loves, we do so well that until she has received the first way she suspects nothing of reality. If later on it becomes perfidious and villainous, it must be admitted that it began with excessive credulity. Also, what betrayals and despair! How many suicides! We are so degraded, we are so conscious of our solidarity in this carnival of infamy, that if, by any chance, an act of repression occurs on the part of an outraged father or brother, a dishonored husband, and death ensues, the magistrate seizes the case, Justice accuses, the family of the punished insulter demands revenge, and the murder will be fortunate if, by judicial exposure of his shame, he finally obtains an acquittal.

What is most odious is to see the irresponsibility of the consequences ensured for the man and the risk falling entirely on the woman: it is the bouquet of Christian love, the flower of our chivalry. Woe to the young girl surprised and become a mother! For her, every house closes; pity turns its head away, alms tightens its cords. Shame on the sinner! Curse on its fruit! The coward who made her a mother is unscathed by law: The search for paternity is prohibited.

XLVII. — Love has its principle in the organism and lives on the ideal: by this double title, it is withdrawn from free will. Since loyalty, honesty, are absent from permitted commerce, would they by chance be found in contraband? These men of good fortune, these gallant women, these naughty little girls, all this wandering chivalry, in full revolt against the law, how is it in its clandestine loves? No doubt we shall find in free lovers this virtue, this honorability so rare between legitimate spouses. We have seen marriage, let us consider licentiousness.

The most ordinary feeling that the Christian experiences for the woman who, outside marriage, has given herself to him, is an indefinable contempt doubled with aversion; and this contempt, this aversion, the Christian woman returns to her accomplice, from whom she expects neither esteem nor mercy. The promise or the regret of the marriage being the pretext, expressed or implied, of any adventure, it is to whichever of the two will deceive the other by a more skillful hypocrisy. Never, among the ancients, did men and women, boys and girls, ever play such a game of personal dignity and family honor. The magistrate, in default of the father, the son, the brother or the husband, would have acted out of office: to lower, by an affair, the free woman below the courtesan, was almost a crime of lèse-majesté. Now, thanks to our pretended chivalrous gallantry, we have learned to treat each other as freedmen. Yet if we had passion as an excuse, we might be guilty, we would not be depraved; but it is only libertinage, a pastime, a fashion. Vitia ridemus, et corrumpere aut corrumpi saeculum vocatur! No more consideration for rank, age, friendship, or public morals, in the face of a debauchery erected into a kind of mutuality, whose risks are accepted by public opinion. No family whithatch does not pay, through one of its females, its contributory share of flesh to pleasure; but no family either that, through its males, does not receive its share of the income. Keep your chickens, said an honest middle-class woman to me, mother of three boys; my roosters are unleashed!.… In love as in war: Each at home, each for himself! So much the worse for those who are not on their guard. I enjoyed you, madam, mademoiselle; but I made you enjoy too: leaving quits, promises void. You have nothing to reproach me with; your husband, your father, your brothers, no more. Their loves cover mine.

Unfortunately, education is in no way related to this morality, which requires a particular initiation. We preach modesty and virtue as much as we can to the young girl, we rock her with chivalry, heroic loves, we do so well that until she has received the first way she suspects nothing of reality. If later on it becomes perfidious and villainous, it must be admitted that it began with excessive credulity. Also, what betrayals and despair! How many suicides! We are so degraded, we are so conscious of our solidarity in this carnival of infamy, that if, by any chance, an act of repression occurs on the part of an outraged father or brother, a dishonored husband, and death ensues, the magistrate seizes the case, Justice accuses, the family of the punished insulter demands revenge, and the murder will be fortunate if, by judicial exposure of his shame, he finally obtains an acquittal.

What is most odious is to see the irresponsibility of the consequences ensured for the man and the risk falling entirely on the woman: it is the bouquet of Christian love, the flower of our chivalry. Woe to the young girl surprised and become a mother! For her, every house closes; pity turns its head away, alms tightens its cords. Shame on the sinner! Curse on its fruit! The coward who made her a mother is unscathed by law: The search for paternity is prohibited.

XLVII. — If at least the priest who has given himself the mission of initiating us into the love of the seraphim could provide an authentic and good example of it in his person, the miracle of this celestial virtue granted by special grace to the teachers of the nations would shut his mouth in disbelief. At the sight of this chosen one, happy from that life of the deprivation of the good that he leaves to others, we would recognize the presence of the Spirit of purity in an undefiled priesthood.

But you know better than I, Monsignor, how far you are from this ideal. What incontinence afflicts the clergy throughout the centuries of its history! What sacrilegious lasciviousness! Take the age of feasts or that of gnosis; take that of the martyrs or the solitaries; that of Theodora, Gregory VII or the Turlupins; go down to the schism of Avignon, to the Council of Constance, to that of Trent; push, if you will, as far as the Jesuits; it is always the same base of secret, hypocritical and atheistic debauchery; always the same felony of the priest with regard to the woman, the child, the family, humanity.

By reason of his character and of the authority entrusted to him, the crime of the priest is a compound of incest, adultery and rape; everything the imagination can conceive of that is most horrible is united in the libidinous priest. Oh! You speak of the incontinence of philosophers, of whom the most daring hardly exceed the limit of that concubinage that you once blessed! but you, do you not have scandals among your Levites and even in the choir of your cathedrals!…

Be easy, Monsignor; I know your sorrows, and it is not I who will cause the crime of a few monsters to fall on the whole body of the Church. I will therefore not go, retracing the course of the ages, recalling here and there the old turpitudes of the cloisters, the trade in castrati of the new Rome, nor the sordidness of its cardinals and its popes. I pass over in silence the gallantries of the reverend fathers of Paraguay, and the concubinage of priests throughout Spanish America; I will not even quote you, on this side of the Atlantic, nor this bishop, recently dead, who became the sole father of a company of national guards; nor this priest who, in full view of his parishioners, has ten living children from his three daughters; nor that other, whose story you could tell, who was not long ago forced to leave the country and died in prison after having spoiled, I am told, more than one hundred and fifty children of both sexes. I leave in my file these stories of priests, vicars, chaplains, nuns and sisters of charity, with which the contemporary chronicle teems: let us draw the curtain on these cravings for the sacristy, on this lust in the hospital. It is all worn out, and it is no longer the time to laugh. The shames of Caesarism have been equaled by those of theocracy; the two powers have nothing to reproach themselves with: the profaned sanctity of marriage condemns them by the same judgment.

What I want to show is that the incontinence that saddens you and makes you so worthy of pity has its source in your mysticism, and that the more you exalt your heart with the dream of divine love, the more, through the inevitable reaction of the moral on the physical, you kindle concupiscence within you.

XLVIII. — If at least the priest who has given himself the mission of initiating us into the love of the seraphim could provide an authentic and good example of it in his person, the miracle of this celestial virtue granted by special grace to the teachers of the nations would shut his mouth in disbelief. At the sight of this chosen one, happy from that life of the deprivation of the good that he leaves to others, we would recognize the presence of the Spirit of purity in an undefiled priesthood.

But you know better than I, Monsignor, how far you are from this ideal. What incontinence afflicts the clergy throughout the centuries of its history! What sacrilegious lasciviousness! Take the age of feasts or that of gnosis; take that of the martyrs or the solitaries; that of Theodora, Gregory VII or the Turlupins; go down to the schism of Avignon, to the Council of Constance, to that of Trent; push, if you will, as far as the Jesuits; it is always the same base of secret, hypocritical and atheistic debauchery; always the same felony of the priest with regard to the woman, the child, the family, humanity. (F)

By reason of his character and of the authority entrusted to him, the crime of the priest is a compound of incest, adultery and rape; everything the imagination can conceive of that is most horrible is united in the libidinous priest. Oh! You speak of the incontinence of philosophers, of whom the most daring hardly exceed the limit of that concubinage that you once blessed; but you, do you not have scandals among your Levites and even in the choir of your cathedrals?…

Be easy, Monsignor; I know your sorrows, and it is not I who will cause the crime of a few monsters to fall on the whole body of the Church. I will therefore not go, retracing the course of the ages, recalling here and there the old turpitudes of the cloisters, the trade in castrati of the new Rome, nor the sordidness of its cardinals and its popes. I pass over in silence the gallantries of the reverend fathers of Paraguay, and the concubinage of priests throughout Spanish America; I will not even quote you, on this side of the Atlantic, nor this bishop, recently dead, who became the sole father of a company of national guards; nor this priest who, in full view of his parishioners, has ten living children from his three daughters; nor that other, whose story you could tell, who was not long ago forced to leave the country and died in prison after having spoiled, I am told, more than one hundred and fifty children of both sexes. I leave in my file these stories of priests, vicars, chaplains, nuns and sisters of charity, with which the contemporary chronicle teems: let us draw the curtain on these cravings for the sacristy, on this lust in the hospital. It is all worn out, and it is no longer the time to laugh. The shames of Caesarism have been equaled by those of theocracy; the two powers have nothing to reproach themselves with: the profaned sanctity of marriage condemns them by the same judgment.

What I want to show is that the incontinence that saddens you and makes you so worthy of pity has its source in your mysticism, and that the more you exalt your heart with the dream of divine love, the more, through the inevitable reaction of the moral on the physical, you kindle concupiscence within you.

XLVIII. — First listen to this testimony from one of your victims; it is the same whose words I quoted in my Fourth Study, in connection with the episcopal government:

“Our superiors, old seminarians and nothing more, placed outside the world, without experience of real life, push us into the sanctuary, like blind people leading other blind people; and because, in the exercises of the seminary, they succeed in triumphing over the first troubles of our youth, they believe victory assured for the rest of our days.

“The hard life, severe regime, hard and assiduous labor, continual surveillance, existence in common, subjection to discipline; slavery of mind, eyes, ears, imagination, heart; deprivation of spirits, coffee, good food; exaltation of the soul, of the mind, through meditation, prayer, fasting, conferences, etc.

“The body succumbs: in compensation, the mind becomes intoxicated, the imagination lights up, the brain is set ablaze; we believe ourselves stripped of the old man, clothed in angelic perfection. The time for vows arrives; it surprises us rapt in ecstasy in the third heaven, and dominated by the conviction that

The body is a slave and must only obey.

“Outside of this, comparative ease, freedom, leisure, good food, association with women!…”

That’s good, isn’t it? The story of the virtues of the young priest, of this sage of twenty-four, whom he and his superiors take for an angel, and who, released into the open air, inhales Venus entirely. Here now is the story of his downfall; it looks like the original of the Jocelyn of Lamartine:

“I lived in college with a young student who was gifted with every conceivable quality. His angelic face, which reflected his candor, his friendliness, his talents, won him the esteem and affection of his classmates and his masters. Never has a candidate united to a more eminent degree the conditions required for admission to the priesthood. So the superiors, as usual, did everything they could to secure such a precious subject. Like all children under strong and skillfully directed pressure, Charles B. gave in without resistance. He knew the joys, the ecstasies of the novitiate and ordinations; priest before twenty-three, thanks to an age dispensation, he became vicar at F…

“From the moment of his arrival, an immense consideration attaches to his person and to his ministry. It was marvelous to see him celebrate Mass, marvelous to hear him announce the word of God, and thunder against the vices and corruption of the age. But his most glorious triumphs he obtained at the tribunal of penance. Around his confessional, always a compact and eager crowd. At twenty-three years old, director of women, young girls, who speak with so much charm to young confessors!… What creature has not felt these electric currents?… Youth inevitably attracts youth.

“Among his most assiduous philothées, shone in the first rank Mlle J. L., former pupil of Saint-Denis, daughter of a retired officer. The relations of the ministry bring about social relations between them. The Vicar’s heart suddenly arose from its lethargy, awakened by a sudden commotion. Always the eternal story of Adam and Eve, Héloise and Abailard; always the realization of Plato’s dream, the two halves of the human being separated by a jealous god and tending invincibly to unite.

“They loved each other, as one loves with a first love.

“Death successively took away from Mlle J. L*** her father and her mother, and she retired as a boarder in a community of women. In her solitude, far from her lover, remorse assailed her. She bought peace of conscience, as almost always happens, by confessing her sacrilege to the director of the house. The man of God, a scrupulous observant of the canonical rules, tore from her the name of her seducer and handed him over to the bishop. The latter summoned the culprit, issued a ban without further ado. The affair spread, and the fallen angel went to hide his crime at La Trappe, where he long atoned for the crime of having loved.”

He says of another priest:

“A few words from the mouth of one of my friends will give an idea of our tortures. He too, a victim of family influences and recruiters from the clerical militia, woke up at the age of thirty-five in his shroud, like the Vestal Virgin buried alive among the Romans. His mother tried to lull his regrets to sleep: Ah! he replied, know well that despite all my love for you, not a day goes by that I am not tempted to curse you!”

“I affirm boldly,” concludes my narrator, “that few priests resist the laws of nature and of love… For me, I am approaching sixty, and I am beginning to taste a little calm. If I had to start my priestly life over again and come back at twenty-five, I would rather be shot on the spot!”

Unfortunates! I knew one, with the heart of a hero, with unfailing charity, childlike sincerity, who ended up falling like the others, and whom I sometimes joked about. May he forgive me! I supported, as well as I could in my career as a worker, the honor of my celibacy; but I declare it to the defense of these unfortunate ecclesiastics, the temptations of the man who feels his liberty, who has before him the future, with him work, who can love in broad daylight and look in the face of the young girl waiting for him to possess her, are nothing compared to that torture of the priest consumed by mystical love, who says to himself in a low voice, looking at a woman on the sly: Never!

Well, isn’t that the story of all your ascetics? Of an Antoine, who until he was over eighty saw, in his erotic hallucinations, his Thebaid peopled with courtesans? Of a Jerome, who, in his tomb at Bethlehem, worn out with years, fasts and vigils, was constantly transported in spirit to the salons of the ladies of Rome? Of this one, whose name I have forgotten, who, to tame his flesh, rolled naked on the thorns? Of that other, who threw himself up to his neck in a frozen pond?… The exhaustion of the body, the abolition of the heart, the dulling of the mind: these are the recipes by which the heroes of Christianity rise to the holy virtue of continence. A decoction of water lily and a strong bloodletting have for you, like the liver of Tobit’s fish, a sure effect against the evil one. It does not even occur to you that these so-called remedies of love, such as those recommended by Ovid, instead of curing the disease only irritate it. And you call that chastity! Medicine, Monsignor, would call it satyriasis; and if Your Jurisprudence wanted to look at it even more closely, it would see that this moral restraint to which, under the pretext of chastity, you subject the youth of your seminaries, falls just into the category of nameless offenses provided for by articles 334 and 335 of the Penal Code.

Moreover, not everyone pushes the sacrifice to these extremes. In a century of libertine skepticism, where the public takes no account of any conviction, of any effort, we soon made up our minds; we tell ourselves that we have been deceived; you don’t want to be duped either, and, provided decorum is preserved, you consider yourself sufficiently in good standing with the public and with its conscience. — Avoid scandal, said an old magistrate to his young colleagues, the rest is nothing. — This is doubtless not said among ecclesiastics; but it is thought, and, however well taken the precautions, everyone knows that it is practiced. “My vow of poverty,” said a prelate of the last century, “earned me 200,000 livres a year; my vow of obedience has made me prince of the Church.” — “And your vow of chastity, My lord?” He lowered his eyes and was silent, out of respect for morals.

XLIX. — First listen to this testimony from one of your victims; it is the same whose words I quoted in my Fourth Study, in connection with the episcopal government:

“Our superiors, old seminarians and nothing more, placed outside the world, without experience of real life, push us into the sanctuary, like blind people leading other blind people; and because, in the exercises of the seminary, they succeed in triumphing over the first troubles of our youth, they believe victory assured for the rest of our days.

“The hard life, severe regime, hard and assiduous labor, continual surveillance, existence in common, subjection to discipline; slavery of mind, eyes, ears, imagination, heart; deprivation of spirits, coffee, good food; exaltation of the soul, of the mind, through meditation, prayer, fasting, conferences, etc.

“The body succumbs: in compensation, the mind becomes intoxicated, the imagination lights up, the brain is set ablaze; we believe ourselves stripped of the old man, clothed in angelic perfection. The time for vows arrives; it surprises us rapt in ecstasy in the third heaven, and dominated by the conviction that

The body is a slave and must only obey.

“Outside of this, comparative ease, freedom, leisure, good food, association with women!…”

That’s good, isn’t it? The story of the virtues of the young priest, of this sage of twenty-four, whom he and his superiors take for an angel, and who, released into the open air, inhales Venus entirely. Here now is the story of his downfall; it looks like the original of the Jocelyn of Lamartine:

“I lived in college with a young student who was gifted with every conceivable quality. His angelic face, which reflected his candor, his friendliness, his talents, won him the esteem and affection of his classmates and his masters. Never has a candidate united to a more eminent degree the conditions required for admission to the priesthood. So the superiors, as usual, did everything they could to secure such a precious subject. Like all children under strong and skillfully directed pressure, Charles B. gave in without resistance. He knew the joys, the ecstasies of the novitiate and ordinations; priest before twenty-three, thanks to an age dispensation, he became vicar at F…

“From the moment of his arrival, an immense consideration attaches to his person and to his ministry. It was marvelous to see him celebrate Mass, marvelous to hear him announce the word of God, and thunder against the vices and corruption of the age. But his most glorious triumphs he obtained at the tribunal of penance. Around his confessional, always a compact and eager crowd. At twenty-three years old, director of women, young girls, who speak with so much charm to young confessors!… What creature has not felt these electric currents?… Youth inevitably attracts youth.

“Among his most assiduous philothées, shone in the first rank Mlle J. L***, former pupil of Saint-Denis, daughter of a retired officer. The relations of the ministry bring about social relations between them. The Vicar’s heart suddenly arose from its lethargy, awakened by a sudden commotion. Always the eternal story of Adam and Eve, Héloise and Abailard; always the realization of Plato’s dream, the two halves of the human being separated by a jealous god and tending invincibly to unite.

“They loved each other, as one loves with a first love.

“Death successively took away from Mlle J. L*** her father and her mother, and she retired as a boarder in a community of women. In her solitude, far from her lover, remorse assailed her. She bought peace of conscience, as almost always happens, by confessing her sacrilege to the director of the house. The man of God, a scrupulous observant of the canonical rules, tore from her the name of her seducer and handed him over to the bishop. The latter summoned the culprit, issued a ban without further ado. The affair spread, and the fallen angel went to hide his crime at La Trappe, where he long atoned for the crime of having loved.”

He says of another priest:

“A few words from the mouth of one of my friends will give an idea of our tortures. He too, a victim of family influences and recruiters from the clerical militia, woke up at the age of thirty-five in his shroud, like the Vestal Virgin buried alive among the Romans. His mother tried to lull his regrets to sleep: Ah! he replied, know well that despite all my love for you, not a day goes by that I am not tempted to curse you!”

“I affirm boldly,” concludes my narrator, “that few priests resist the laws of nature and of love… For me, I am approaching sixty, and I am beginning to taste a little calm. If I had to start my priestly life over again and come back at twenty-five, I would rather be shot on the spot!”

Unfortunates! I knew one, with the heart of a hero, with unfailing charity, childlike sincerity, who ended up falling like the others, and whom I sometimes joked about. May he forgive me! I supported, as well as I could in my career as a worker, the honor of my celibacy; but I declare it to the defense of these unfortunate ecclesiastics, the temptations of the man who feels his liberty, who has before him the future, with him work, who can love in broad daylight and look in the face of the young girl waiting for him to possess her, are nothing compared to that torture of the priest consumed by mystical love, who says to himself in a low voice, looking at a woman on the sly: Never!

Well, isn’t that the story of all your ascetics? Of an Antoine, who until he was over eighty saw, in his erotic hallucinations, his Thebaid peopled with courtesans? Of a Jerome, who, in his tomb at Bethlehem, worn out with years, fasts and vigils, was constantly transported in spirit to the salons of the ladies of Rome? Of this one, whose name I have forgotten, who, to tame his flesh, rolled naked on the thorns? Of that other, who threw himself up to his neck in a frozen pond?… The exhaustion of the body, the abolition of the heart, the dulling of the mind: these are the recipes by which the heroes of Christianity rise to the holy virtue of continence. A decoction of water lily and a strong bloodletting have for you, like the liver of Tobit’s fish, a sure effect against the evil one. It does not even occur to you that these so-called remedies of love, such as those recommended by Ovid, instead of curing the disease only irritate it. And you call that chastity! Medicine, Monsignor, would call it satyriasis; and if Your Jurisprudence wanted to look at it even more closely, it would see that this moral restraint to which, under the pretext of chastity, you subject the youth of your seminaries, falls just into the category of nameless offenses provided for by articles 334 and 335 of the Penal Code.

Moreover, not everyone pushes the sacrifice to these extremes. In a century of libertine skepticism, where the public takes no account of any conviction, of any effort, we soon made up our minds; we tell ourselves that we have been deceived; you don’t want to be duped either, and, provided decorum is preserved, you consider yourself sufficiently in good standing with the public and with its conscience. — Avoid scandal, said an old magistrate to his young colleagues, the rest is nothing. — This is doubtless not said among ecclesiastics; but it is thought, and, however well taken the precautions, everyone knows that it is practiced. “My vow of poverty,” said a prelate of the last century, “earned me 200,000 livres a year; my vow of obedience has made me prince of the Church.” — “And your vow of chastity, My lord?” He lowered his eyes and was silent, out of respect for morals.

XLIX. — Since I am charged, since it is a question here much less of religion than of psychology, and since after all, by attacking mystical love, I am pleading in favor of unfortunate priests the extenuating circumstances, let one allow me to report an observation made about myself, and in which more than one reader will recognize himself.

As happens to many others, my youth began with a platonic love that made me very stupid and very sad, but which I had to, in compensation, remain for ten years after my puberty in the state of agnus castus. What determined in me this mental affection, over which parents should watch with as much care as over the most shameful habits, was the reading of Paul et Virginie, a pastoral thought to be innocent, which should be on the index of all families.

Every deviation produced by love, in any sense, is wrong and, in my opinion, immoral. It disturbs the soul, softens the character, causes liberty to be lost; it is an offense to oneself, to the sex and to society. For all these reasons, I make no distinction between honest novels and obscene works; I condemn them all equally. And the man who, under the pretext of innocence, inspires a love of this kind in a young person, is as guilty in my eyes as the one who abuses the intoxication of the senses: for one as for the other, I would like the law to declare that there is a rape of seduction…

This long crisis over, I thought I was free; but it was then that I was assailed by the devil who was teasing Saint Paul, and, I may say, to my extreme displeasure. The devil, who for so long had burned me on the side of my heart, was now roasting me on the side of my liver, and neither labor, nor reading, nor walks, nor cold treatments of any kind, could restore my peace of mind. I was a victim of the reaction of the senses against the spirit. My principles—I took my Platonism for principles—having had time to establish themselves, a painful split took place in me, between will and nature. The flesh said: I want; conscience: I don’t want to. Was I going to contradict myself, or was I consumed again in this mystification to which I saw no end? Fight physical love with platonic love, it is not done on command; this one exhausted, the other exploded in all its violence. I have since read the story of Abailard: the poor man had reached that point when he met Héloïse.

In the seminaria, the nun, the zeal of religion and the fervor of mysticism produce the same effect as platonic love. The kindling of the brain absorbs the sparks that come from the senses; but, the fever passed, you have nothing left but lamentable martyrs of continence, lustful madmen whom the fatigue of the heart delivers without defense to the tyranny of the hypochondria.

It is the case, you will say, to follow the precept of the Apostle, Better to marry than to burn. The advice is very wise; but notice that the Apostle, who preaches to others so well, does not marry; he rejects love, legitimate and illegitimate; he steeps in himself, he insults woman, who alone, however, can restore him to peace. Where does this contradiction come from?

Let us recognize here the danger of this Platonism that a vain literature would like to set up as a virtue.

He whom an ideal passion seized early and led far forward into virility has become, by his very idealism, clumsy and awkward with sex, disdainful of gallantry, where he does not succeed, abrupt and sarcastic with pretty women. people, inflexible with regard to the middle positions, which he qualifies, not without reason, as immoral. In short, he balks, despite his appetite and his teeth, against the love that stings him, irritates him, makes him roar like a lion. If sometimes, with the help of the occasion and the devil, he lets himself go, he encounters only disgust, displeasure, remorse; he feels extravagant, ridiculous; he recognizes with spite the accuracy of this pretty phrase: Leave the women, Jean-Jacques, and study mathematics.

So, like the Apostle, he takes aversion to love, and marriage, and woman. But beware of this virtuous celibate; the older he gets, the more of a satyr he becomes. No true chastity begins with love: the true types of purity, Kant, Leibnitz, Newton, never loved. Keep your children, your young girls away from the old lover: his smell alone would deflower them.

The phenomenon that I have just described can occur in the opposite direction: it is not uncommon for a voluptuous person to end up with an exclusive and solid attachment, and what happens for love can also happen for religion; Abbé de Rancé, founder of La Trappe, is an illustrious example.

L. — Since I am charged, since it is a question here much less of religion than of psychology, and since after all, by attacking mystical love, I am pleading in favor of unfortunate priests the extenuating circumstances, let one allow me to report an observation made about myself, and in which more than one reader will recognize himself.

As happens to many others, my youth began with a platonic love that made me very stupid and very sad, but which I had to, in compensation, remain for ten years after my puberty in the state of agnus castus. What determined in me this mental affection, over which parents should watch with as much care as over the most shameful habits, was the reading of Paul et Virginie, a pastoral thought to be innocent, which should be on the index of all families.

Every deviation produced by love, in any sense, is wrong and, in my opinion, immoral. It disturbs the soul, softens the character, causes liberty to be lost; it is an offense to oneself, to the sex and to society. For all these reasons, I make no distinction between honest novels and obscene works; I condemn them all equally. And the man who, under the pretext of innocence, inspires a love of this kind in a young person, is as guilty in my eyes as the one who abuses the intoxication of the senses: for one as for the other, I would like the law to declare that there is a rape of seduction…

This long crisis over, I thought I was free; but it was then that I was assailed by the devil who was teasing Saint Paul, and, I may say, to my extreme displeasure. The devil, who for so long had burned me on the side of my heart, was now roasting me on the side of my liver, and neither labor, nor reading, nor walks, nor cold treatments of any kind, could restore my peace of mind. I was a victim of the reaction of the senses against the spirit. My principles—I took my Platonism for principles—having had time to establish themselves, a painful split took place in me, between will and nature. The flesh said: I want; conscience: I don’t want to. Was I going to contradict myself, or was I consumed again in this mystification to which I saw no end? Fight physical love with platonic love, it is not done on command; this one exhausted, the other exploded in all its violence. I have since read the story of Abailard: the poor man had reached that point when he met Héloïse.

In the seminarian and the nun, the zeal of religion and the fervor of mysticism produce the same effect as platonic love. The kindling of the brain absorbs the sparks that come from the senses; but, the fever passed, you have nothing left but lamentable martyrs of continence, lustful madmen whom the fatigue of the heart delivers without defense to the tyranny of the hypochondria.

It is the case, you will say, to follow the precept of the Apostle, Better to marry than to burn. The advice is very wise; but notice that the Apostle, who preaches to others so well, does not marry; he rejects love, legitimate and illegitimate; he steeps in himself, he insults woman, who alone, however, can restore him to peace. Where does this contradiction come from?

Let us recognize here the danger of this Platonism that a vain literature would like to set up as a virtue.

He whom an ideal passion seized early and led far forward into virility has become, by his very idealism, clumsy and awkward with sex, disdainful of gallantry, where he does not succeed, abrupt and sarcastic with pretty women. people, inflexible with regard to the middle positions, which he qualifies, not without reason, as immoral. In short, he balks, despite his appetite and his teeth, against the love that stings him, irritates him, makes him roar like a lion. If sometimes, with the help of the occasion and the devil, he lets himself go, he encounters only disgust, displeasure, remorse; he feels extravagant, ridiculous; he recognizes with spite the accuracy of this pretty phrase: Leave the women, Jean-Jacques, and study mathematics.

So, like the Apostle, he takes aversion to love, and marriage, and woman. But beware of this virtuous celibate; the older he gets, the more of a satyr he becomes. No true chastity begins with love: the true types of purity, Kant, Leibnitz, Newton, never loved. Keep your children, your young girls away from the old lover: his smell alone would deflower them.

The phenomenon that I have just described can occur in the opposite direction: it is not uncommon for a voluptuous person to end up with an exclusive and solid attachment, and what happens for love can also happen for religion; Abbé de Rancé, founder of La Trappe, is an illustrious example.

L. — Let us end this critique of Christian love and marriage with a final stroke, and sum up the whole of this Study.

What is love? wondered the elders. — It is God, replied the poets and philosophers in a unanimous voice. And we have seen ancient society, by virtue of this sublime definition, fall like Molière’s Malade, from marriage into concubinage, from concubinage into promiscuity, from promiscuity into pederasty, from pederasty into omnigamy and death.

Qu’est-ce que l’amour ? se demandèrent à leur tour les chrétiens. — C’est Dieu, répondirent d’une voix unanime les missionnaires de l’Évangile. Et depuis le premier jusqu’au dix-neuvième siècle, la chrétienté a vu tour à tour gnostiques, nicolaïtes, adamites, carpocratiens, condormans, manichéens, etc., maudire la génération et le mariage ; tenir la fornication, l’adultère, l’inceste, pour choses insignifiantes ; se mettre tout nus, femmes et hommes, dans leurs assemblées ; s’accoupler au hasard des ténèbres et donner de leur mieux contentement à la chair, afin de vaquer ensuite, sans distraction du malin, à la contemplation de l’amour pur. Elle a vu la chevalerie déshonorer systématiquement la société conjugale ; le cocuage s’élever, par l’universalité du libertinage, à la hauteur d’une mutuelle tolérance ; le stupre et l’inceste souiller la famille, et le prêtre, après avoir répudié sa concubine, entrée dans son lit avec la bénédiction de l’Église, chercher dans des réalités sacriléges un soulagement au mysticisme qui le dévore.

Would to God that was all! Like the ancients, we have arrived at the last aberrations of idealism; and if the crime of sodomy is prosecuted by our laws, the trade is nonetheless flourishing, and as among the ancients it has found apologists. From birth to death we sail on the river of _Tender_ between the two extremes of divine love and unisexual love, the first taught to little girls at their first communion, the second revealed to adolescent girls through novels.

The following extracts are taken from a book of prayers approved by the Archbishop of Rouen and imposed on children of both sexes by the parish priests of the diocese; this is not Bossuet’s style, but it is his idea:

“Act of desire. — Oh! come, beloved of my heart, adorable flesh, my joy, my delights, my love, my God, my everything!

“My impatient soul longs for you, sighs after you, wishes for you with ardor, my treasure, my happiness, my life, my everything.

“Act of love. — So I finally have the happiness to have you! Embrace me, burn, consume my heart with your love. My beloved is mine! Jesus gives himself to me! I love you with all my soul; I love you for the love of you.”

After the acts come the hymns, most of which are composed to worldly tunes that the eucology is careful to indicate.

AIR: Te bien aimer, ô ma chère Zélie !

AIR: Dans un verger, Colinette.

AIR: Un inconnu pour vos charmes soupire.

Another hymn:

All this, in the mind of the Church, is innocent: who denies it? But that is precisely what I reproach you for, Monsignor: you do not know yourself; you no more know, in your fatal innocence, what lies at the bottom of your mysticism than you know love. You resemble children chasing each other with lighted candles in a powder magazine. And when these furious eruptions arrive among you which, in a Mingrat, a Leotade, terrify the world, you are the first to testify to your affliction and your astonishment.

Do you want to know now what fruit the little girls whom you catechize derive from your lessons? Read this piece, which I extract from Lélia.

“Listen, sister. It was in your innocent arms, it was on your virginal bosom that for the first time God revealed to me the power of life… Don’t walk away like that; listen to me without prejudice!

“Well, we were sleeping peacefully on the moist, warm grass; the cedars exhaled their exquisite scent of balsam, and the south wind passed its burning wing over our damp brows. Until then, carefree and laughing, I welcomed each day of my life as a new blessing. Sometimes sudden and penetrating sensations made my blood boil, an unknown ardor seized my imagination; nature appeared to me in more sparkling colors; youth throbbed more lively and more cheerful in my bosom; and if I looked at myself in the mirror, I found myself in those moments more vermilion and more beautiful. So I wanted to kiss myself in this mirror which reflected me, and which inspired me with an insane love…

“That day, a strange, delirious, unheard-of dream revealed to me the mystery until then impenetrable, and until then quietly respected. O my sister! deny the influence of heaven, deny the sanctity of pleasure! You would have said, if this ecstasy had been given to you, that an angel sent to you from the bosom of God undertook to initiate you into the sacred trials of human life. Me, I dreamed _very simply_ of a man with black hair leaning towards me to brush my lips with his warm, ruby-red lips; and I awoke oppressed, palpitating, happier than I had imagined I should ever be. I looked around me: the sun was casting its reflections on the depths of the wood; the air was good and sweet, and the cedars raised their great fingered branches with splendor, resembling immense arms, and long hands stretched to the sky. I looked at you then. O my sister, how beautiful you were! I had never thought you beautiful before that day. In my complacent girlish vanity, I preferred myself to you; it seemed to me that my shining cheeks, my rounded shoulders, my golden hair made me more beautiful than you. But at that moment the sense of beauty revealed itself to me in another creature. I no longer loved myself alone: I needed to find an object of admiration and love outside of myself. I raised myself gently, and I gazed at you with a singular curiosity, with a strange pleasure. Your thick black hair clung to your forehead, and its tight curls rolled on themselves as if a feeling of life had tensed them close to your velvety neck of shadow and sweat. I ran my fingers through it; it seemed to me that your hair clung to me and drew me towards you. Your shirt, white and fine, tight on your bosom, made your skin, tanned by the sun, appear even darker than usual; and your long eyelids, heavy with sleep, stood out against your cheeks, then animated with a more solid tone than today. Oh! You were beautiful, Lélia! but beautiful otherwise than me, and that troubled me strangely. Your arms, thinner than mine, were covered with an imperceptible black down that luxurious care has since removed. Your feet, so perfectly beautiful, bathed in the stream, and long blue veins stood out there. Your breathing lifted your chest with a regularity that seemed to announce calm and strength; and in your features, in your attitude, in your forms more fixed than mine, in the darker shade of your skin, especially in that proud and cold expression of your sleeping face, there was something masculine and strong that prevented me almost from recognizing you. I thought you looked like that beautiful black-haired child I had just dreamed of, and I kissed your arm, trembling. Then you opened your eyes, and your gaze filled me with an unknown shame; I turned away as if I had done a sinful deed. Yet no impure thought had come to my mind. How would that have happened? I knew nothing; I received from nature and from God, my creator and my master, my first lesson in love, my first sensation of desire.”

Reconnaissez-vous, à cet agaçant partage, tout rempli de ciel, de Dieu, d’anges, d’extases, de mystères sacrés, de nature, de pudeur, reconnaissez-vous le style de vos mystiques ? M^me Sand a été dévote, et les jésuites ont conservé son estime : elle le raconte dans ses Mémoires. Que dites-vous de cette combinaison érotique, où la fornication, l’inceste, le viol, la tribadie, se trouvent cumulées tout simplement ? Il y a beaucoup de ces simplicités-là dans les romans de George Sand.

Deux femmes, deux sœurs, l’une blonde et joyeuse courtisane, l’autre platonicienne désespérée, ayant je ne sais quoi de masculin, se rendent compte de leur vie. La première soutient la théorie du plaisir comme fin de l’existence ; l’autre, dégoûtée de la chair, ne croit plus à rien, pas même au plaisir. C’est dans le cours de cette conversation que la prostituée raconte de quelle manière elle a perdu son pucelage. La chosette, dirait Tallemant des Réaux, est arrivée ainsi : Pulchérie était couchée auprès de sa sœur… Tenons-la quitte du reste ; donnons-lui même acte qu’aucune pensée impure ne s’était présentée à son esprit.

Mais je vous le demande, pour combien pensez-vous que l’Église soit dans cette description ? Tout se tient, dans la littérature et dans l’histoire, et vous ne pouvez pas plus répudier la Lélia de George Sand que le René de Chateaubriand.

Very Christian France has nothing more to envy to idolatrous Rome and Greece. In all things we have surpassed our models: we surpassed them by philosophy and science, surpassed by law and industry, surpassed by the depth of our ideal and the heroism of our Revolution; we still surpass them by the baseness and hypocrisy of our debauchery.

C’est l’impudicité qui a perdu la noblesse française et qui perd aujourd’hui bourgeoisie et plèbe. Les mœurs chevalières et galantes qui distinguèrent nos aïeux ont disparu ; le mariage devenu une affaire, le concubinage dédaigné, nous sommes en pleine promiscuité, tant la paillardise est devenue universelle, tant elle est pour nous chose légère. Nous voilà parvenus à l’amour unisexuel : on parle de parties fines où la fashion féminine se livre, comme les Romaines de Juvénal, à des combats tribadiques,

et l’on m’assure que l’usage commence à s’en répandre dans les pensionnats de demoiselles et parmi les ouvrières.

Last word from a society that is dying calling for love, and which will not find love, life, honor, until the day when the cry of salvation escapes from its conscience: Justice!

LI. — Let us end this critique of Christian love and marriage with a final stroke, and sum up the whole of this Study.

What is love? wondered the elders. — It is God, replied the poets and philosophers in a unanimous voice. And we have seen ancient society, by virtue of this sublime definition, fall like Molière’s Malade, from marriage into concubinage, from concubinage into promiscuity, from promiscuity into pederasty, from pederasty into omnigamy and death.

What is love? wondered the Christians in their turn. — It is God, replied the missionaries of the Gospel in a unanimous voice. And from the first to the nineteenth century, Christendom has seen in turn Gnostics, Nicolaitans, Adamites, Carpocratians, Condormans, Manichaeans, Flagellants, Quietists, etc. curse generation and marriage; regard fornication, adultery, incest, as insignificant things; put themselves quite naked, women and men, in their assemblies; mate at random in the darkness and give their best contentment to the flesh, in order then to go about, without the distraction of the evil one, in the contemplation of pure love. It has seen chivalry systematically dishonor marital society; cuckoldry rise, by the universality of licentiousness, at the height of a mutual tolerance; stupor and incest defile the family, and the priest, after having repudiated his concubine, entered her bed with the blessing of the Church, seek in sacrilegious realities relief from the mysticism that was devouring him.

Would to God that was all! Like the ancients, we have arrived at the last aberrations of idealism; and if the crime of sodomy is prosecuted by our laws, the trade is nonetheless flourishing, and as among the ancients it has found apologists. From birth to death we sail on the river of Tender between the two extremes of divine love and unisexual love, the first taught to little girls at their first communion, the second revealed to adolescent girls through novels.

The following extracts are taken from a book of prayers approved by the Archbishop of Rouen and imposed on children of both sexes by the parish priests of the diocese; this is not Bossuet’s style, but it is his idea:

“Act of desire. — Oh! come, beloved of my heart, adorable flesh, my joy, my delights, my love, my God, my everything!

“My impatient soul longs for you, sighs after you, wishes for you with ardor, my treasure, my happiness, my life, my everything.

“Act of love. — So I finally have the happiness to have you! Embrace me, burn, consume my heart with your love. My beloved is mine! Jesus gives himself to me! I love you with all my soul; I love you for the love of you.”

After the acts come the hymns, most of which are composed to worldly tunes that the eucology is careful to indicate.

AIR: Te bien aimer, ô ma chère Zélie!

Let us yield, my soul, to Jesus who urges me:
At this moment, he is coming to fulfill my wishes.
He receives me, kisses me, caresses me,
Unites with me with inescapable knots.
Sweet union, incomparable mixture!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Already my heart, full of extreme love,
Drinks in long drafts the celestial sweetness,
And, resting in the bosom of God himself,
Tastes there in peace the rarest favors.

AIR: Dans un verger, Colinette.

I have sinned since my childhood,
I have chased God from my heart;
I have lost my innocence:
What a loss! Ah! What a pity!

Inestimable innocence,
How little I knew you,
When of so desirable a good
The loss was a game to me!

AIR: Un inconnu pour vos charmes soupire.

Adorable Heart (of Jesus),
Happiness of heaven!
It is him, I feel, I recognize his fires!
Cede, my heart, to His amiable empire
. . . . . . . . . How much in your presence
Are born in me of secret movements!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He has offered me this kiss so divine!
Can’t I rest on your bosom,
Of my love, speak there without constraint?

Another hymn:

You, faithful wives
Of the most faithful husband,
For ardor so beautiful
What pleasures do you taste?

All this, in the mind of the Church, is innocent: who denies it? But that is precisely what I reproach you for, Monsignor: you do not know yourself; you no more know, in your fatal innocence, what lies at the bottom of your mysticism than you know love.

You resemble children chasing each other with lighted candles in a powder magazine. And when these furious eruptions arrive among you which, in a Mingrat, a Leotade, terrify the world, you are the first to testify to your affliction and your astonishment.

Do you want to know now what fruit the little girls whom you catechize derive from your lessons? Read this piece, which I extract from Lélia.

“Listen, sister. It was in your innocent arms, it was on your virginal bosom that for the first time God revealed to me the power of life… Don’t walk away like that; listen to me without prejudice!

“Well, we were sleeping peacefully on the moist, warm grass; the cedars exhaled their exquisite scent of balsam, and the south wind passed its burning wing over our damp brows. Until then, carefree and laughing, I welcomed each day of my life as a new blessing. Sometimes sudden and penetrating sensations made my blood boil, an unknown ardor seized my imagination; nature appeared to me in more sparkling colors; youth throbbed more lively and more cheerful in my bosom; and if I looked at myself in the mirror, I found myself in those moments more vermilion and more beautiful. So I wanted to kiss myself in this mirror which reflected me, and which inspired me with an insane love…

“That day, a strange, delirious, unheard-of dream revealed to me the mystery until then impenetrable, and until then quietly respected. O my sister! deny the influence of heaven, deny the sanctity of pleasure! You would have said, if this ecstasy had been given to you, that an angel sent to you from the bosom of God undertook to initiate you into the sacred trials of human life. Me, I dreamed _very simply_ of a man with black hair leaning towards me to brush my lips with his warm, ruby-red lips; and I awoke oppressed, palpitating, happier than I had imagined I should ever be. I looked around me: the sun was casting its reflections on the depths of the wood; the air was good and sweet, and the cedars raised their great fingered branches with splendor, resembling immense arms, and long hands stretched to the sky. I looked at you then. O my sister, how beautiful you were! I had never thought you beautiful before that day. In my complacent girlish vanity, I preferred myself to you; it seemed to me that my shining cheeks, my rounded shoulders, my golden hair made me more beautiful than you. But at that moment the sense of beauty revealed itself to me in another creature. I no longer loved myself alone: I needed to find an object of admiration and love outside of myself. I raised myself gently, and I gazed at you with a singular curiosity, with a strange pleasure. Your thick black hair clung to your forehead, and its tight curls rolled on themselves as if a feeling of life had tensed them close to your velvety neck of shadow and sweat. I ran my fingers through it; it seemed to me that your hair clung to me and drew me towards you. Your shirt, white and fine, tight on your bosom, made your skin, tanned by the sun, appear even darker than usual; and your long eyelids, heavy with sleep, stood out against your cheeks, then animated with a more solid tone than today. Oh! You were beautiful, Lélia! but beautiful otherwise than me, and that troubled me strangely. Your arms, thinner than mine, were covered with an imperceptible black down that luxurious care has since removed. Your feet, so perfectly beautiful, bathed in the stream, and long blue veins stood out there. Your breathing lifted your chest with a regularity that seemed to announce calm and strength; and in your features, in your attitude, in your forms more fixed than mine, in the darker shade of your skin, especially in that proud and cold expression of your sleeping face, there was something masculine and strong that prevented me almost from recognizing you. I thought you looked like that beautiful black-haired child I had just dreamed of, and I kissed your arm, trembling. Then you opened your eyes, and your gaze filled me with an unknown shame; I turned away as if I had done a sinful deed. Yet no impure thought had come to my mind. How would that have happened? I knew nothing; I received from nature and from God, my creator and my master, my first lesson in love, my first sensation of desire.”

Do you recognize yourself, in this irritating talk, filled with heaven, God, angels, ecstasies, sacred mysteries, nature, modesty, mixed with skin and shirt, do you recognize the style half emphatic, half trivial, of your mystics? Madame Sand was devout, and the Jesuits have retained her esteem: she recounts it in her Memoirs. What do you say to this erotic combination, where fornication, incest, rape, tribady, are simply combined? There are many such simplicities in the novels of George Sand.

Two women, two sisters, one blond and joyful courtesan, the other desperate Platonist, having something masculine, become aware of their life. The first supports the theory of pleasure as the end of existence; the other, disgusted with the flesh, no longer believes in anything, not even in pleasure. It is in the course of this conversation that the prostitute tells how she lost her virginity. The little thing, as Tallemant des Réaux would say, happened like this: Pulchérie was lying next to her sister… Let’s get rid of the rest; let us even acknowledge to her that no impure thought had presented itself to her mind. But I ask you, how much do you think the Church is in that description? Everything is connected, in literature and in history, and you can no more repudiate the Lélia of George Sand than the René of Chateaubriand.

Very Christian France has nothing more to envy to idolatrous Rome and Greece. In all things we have surpassed our models: we surpassed them by philosophy and science, surpassed by law and industry, surpassed by the depth of our ideal and the heroism of our Revolution; we still surpass them by the baseness and hypocrisy of our debauchery.

It is shamelessness that has ruined the French nobility and is now ruining the bourgeoisie and the plebs. The chivalrous and gallant manners that distinguished our ancestors have disappeared; marriage has become an affair, concubinage despised, we are in full promiscuity, so lewdness has become universal, so light is it for us. Here we have arrived at unisexual love: we speak of fine parties where feminine fashion engages, like the Romans of Juvenal, in tribadic combats, Ipsa Medullinæ frictum crissantis adorat; and I am assured that the use is beginning to spread in the boarding schools for young ladies and among the workers.

Last word from a society that is dying calling for love, and which will not find love, life, honor, until the day when the cry of salvation escapes from its conscience: Justice!

APPENDIX.

NOTES AND CLARIFICATIONS.

Footnote (A), page 10.

Idealism in love. — Is love purely physiological among the animals, as the text suggests, or is it also accompanied by some ideal, as in man? In principle, nature does not make leaps; it knows no sharp demarcations; of all human attributes, even the highest, there is probably not one of which we do not find at least the rudiments among beasts. The lion’s attachment to its lioness extends well beyond the birth of the cubs: if it is permissible to reason by analogy from the man to the lion, — and why not? — this conjugal attachment, perfectly disinterested, of the lion, does not seem to be able to exist without a certain impression of the ideal. In the sheepfolds there is almost always a sheep that the ram prefers to all the others, for which he has a love of heart, while there are others whom he despises and chases away, although they are neither less young nor less pretty creatures. The same thing is observed in the rooster, the most polygamous of all the feathered and furred males: certain hens please him more; others are put off by him outrageously. Housewives notice this by the germless eggs found in the nests. How to explain these fantasies, if the animal truly obeys only the reproductive appetite, the impulses of instinct? Just as they have received the spark of intelligence, a certain ray of beauty and goodness would thus fall into the soul of animals: which would raise them far above the rank that La Fontaine claimed for them, and would bring them even closer to our nature. The cat seeks cleanliness; the peacock hides when it has lost its feathers; the dog cannot tolerate beggars and bad-looking people; all domestic animals, and some among savages, attach themselves more willingly to children and women, as if they find them prettier and nicer than men; several finally seem to give signs of a real conscience and remorse. Once again, if man is the crowning and pivot of creation, why should this induction be treated as a chimera? What would the laws of reason, morality and art have to lose if we were to recognize their presence, their influence, in all that lives, sees and loves?

Whatever may be the case with ideal love in animals, the principle subsists as far as we are concerned: it is that the power to idealize has been given to us as an auxiliary of physical love and of generation, and that this power plays in man a part proportionate to the strength and extent of his intelligence.

Footnote (B), page 69.

Anacreon and Sappho. — It pleased M. Villemain, in his Études sur Pindare, to consider Anacreon only as a lyric poet of the second order; moreover, he did not hesitate to charge him with the infamous vice which was for the Greeks such an active cause of dissolution. On this sad subject, M. Villemain explains himself with a lightness of irony unworthy of academic gravity. It would seem, to hear him, that he received the confession of the Greek poet, or that at least he is so perfectly initiated into the mysteries of the unisexual Venus that the fact in question does not seem to him to be able to be revoked in doubt. As for Sappho, he professes the highest admiration for her verses, although he also deplores the bewilderment that precipitated her into a monstrous love.

For our part, without pretending to more knowledge in such matters than it befits honest people to have, we maintain the opinion established by us in the text, namely, that pederastic love did not imply necessarily, for the ancient Greeks, as it implies today for us, corporeal relations; that, on the contrary, this love had the pretension of remaining pure, and that this is how Socrates, Epaminondas, and a host of others practiced it. The passages that we have quoted from Plutarch, Plato, Virgil, and the Gospel according to Saint John, are irrefutable proof of this. We will therefore maintain that it is this pure love that Anacreon and Sappho sang; that it is important, if we want to be fair, to distinguish here between the passionate theory of the ancients and what their practice may have been, and that before accusing the greatest of poets of abominable morals, it would be necessary to begin by understanding their sentiments and their ideas. In whatever way Anacreon with Bathylle, Sappho with her friend used it in secret, of which we know absolutely nothing and will never know anything, one thing remains positive, demonstrated, established: it is that neither the neither the poets nor the philosophers of ancient Greece, as poets and philosophers, advocated what we mean by that abhorred word, sodomy. In this respect I share the opinion of the German scholars, and I pity M. Villemain for having only smiles for their naivete. The ancients had a different ideal of love from ours, an ideal that it is not a question of justifying here, and whose immense danger I do not underestimate; but an ideal irreproachable in their thought, which had its poetry, as one can convince oneself of by reading Anacreon and Sappho. (1)

Let us therefore be permitted to protest in favor of Anacreon against the judgment of M. Villemain, and to say that with him the error of the moralist has misled the judgment of the critic. There is no difference between the poetry of Anacreon and that of Sappho: they are of the same age, of the same thought, of the same style, of the same language; they have in common the amorous reverie, the deep feeling of the infinite in love and of the impotence of the human heart to achieve it.

_________________

(1) M. About has expressed, in La Grèce contemporaine, an opinion entirely in keeping with ours. He says that pederastic love was among the Greeks the product of a sophism, but not at all of their temperament, which was as chaste as it was sober. Those who have read Mr. About’s work know, however, how far he is from showing himself partial to the Greek race.

Footnote (C), page 75.

Greek love. — In support of the opinion expressed in the preceding note, and already developed at length in the text, we had proposed to insert here extracts from the Étude médico-légale of Dr. Tardieu on Pederasty. We wanted to show, by the very horror of the descriptions, two things: the first, that sodomy is the last degree of human depravity, the core of the crime, a monster that every society must pursue with iron and fire; the second, that it is absolutely necessary, for the truth of history, to distinguish among the ancient Greeks unisexual love, pure, ideal, even virtuous, such as it was known and recommended by Socrates, Epaminondas, Virgil, and, according to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus Christ, from the practices of sodomy. We would have liked to share with all our readers the conviction of one of our friends, who, after having read the famous medical examiner’s brochure, wrote to us: “This reading has made me ill… No, I can no longer believe that so many great men, such fine geniuses, have dragged their souls into this sewer. There is an abominable misunderstanding here which it is for erudition to point out, against which you were right to protest, but on which it would not be good for moralists to insist too much, however, for fear of imitation and its sequels. Socratic love is dead; let’s not wake it up. You say it yourself: unisexuality, in its most innocent, most poetic aspect, is a sophism, and already a crime; it is right that some of the shame for which it once served as a pretext should be reflected upon it.”

We will take this friend’s advice. We have pleaded, in favor of some characters, the greatest who have illustrated our race, in favor of Greek poetry and philosophy, eternal honor of the human spirit, the innocence of unisexual love: we will stop there. This erotic fantasy faded with the civilization that had produced it; all that remains to us is the defecation, against which the moralist will never have enough vehemence, the magistrate enough rigor.

Moreover, by turning our eyes to the work of M. Tardieu, we perceive that any quotation is impossible. What it is commendable to the doctor to persecute, to reveal, to describe, in the interest of Justice, is forbidden to the philosopher. Let us content ourselves with recalling, according to M. Tardieu, that pederasty is the school where the most skilful and the most daring criminals are formed; that in Paris this prostitution has had an incredible increase in the shadows, which makes it go hand in hand with the other. The same facts are observed in most of the capitals of Europe. Were we to have only this symptom, we could boldly pronounce that the old world is in full dissolution.

Note (D), page 80.

Defense of fornication by the apostles. — Some people having reproached us for having forced or even falsified the meaning of the 15th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we must clarify, a little better than we have done in the text, all this controversy.

The most interesting moment in Christian formation was when the apostles, driven out by Judaic persecution, had to look outside Palestine, outside the people of God, for recruits. Souls were prepared everywhere: the destruction of nationalities, leading to the destruction of local religions, had wiped out beliefs; the world was looking for a faith, a law, a god. Augustus had given the signal for the movement by centralizing the cults and founding the Pantheon. If the East, by its theological spirit and its innumerable superstitions, was the point of departure for this new current of ideas, Rome was its home. Whether the new religion took its point of departure in Spain, in Gaul, Greece, Egypt or Syria mattered little: it had to be made for everyone, to synthesize, as best as it could, all creeds, old and new; it must, above all, be Roman. Jesus had preached, in the restricted circle of his nation, not even the transformation of Mosaicism, but a particular development of Mosaicism, which can be defined in two words, Tolerance, Charity. Tolerance in the interpretation of the law and the practice of worship, in other words, worship in spirit, inner and spiritual worship; Charity, instead of self-righteous rigor, Sadducean exploitation and hatred of the foreigner. This is what Jesus called his own messianism, a messianism which had nothing in common with that of the so-called messiahs of the time, and in no way interested the Roman authority, which in short was no longer of this world, as Jesus himself told Pilate. Reduced to these terms of high morality and broad doctrine, the messianism of Jesus was, in fact, a universal religion, like the pantheonism of Augustus: the day it asserted itself as such, all the ancient cults, that of Moses included, would be denied, and the new religion founded. That day came, as I said, twenty-eight years after the death of Christ, in Jerusalem, and through the fault of the Jews themselves. Excommunicated by the synagogue, what remained for the apostles, if not to excommunicate it in their turn by positing the religion of Humanity, and by denying both polytheism in its entirety, and their own national religion, the religion of Moses? This is what the apostles did, under the influence of Paul and Barnabas, the two main promoters of the rupture.

To separate Christianity from both paganism and Mosaicism: such was the work of the Council of Jerusalem, the most revolutionary act that has been produced up to the present in the splendours of Humanity. How was this double separation expressed by the Council? It is here that we must reread Chap. XV of the Acts of the Apostles, the only monument that remains to us, with the Epistle to the Galatians, of this great event.

Christianity being a descendant of Mosaicism, Jesus the founder being an Israelite, his apostles Israelites, none of them having abjured his religion, the question naturally arose, whether the neophytes, that is to say the converts of the Gentiles, would be bound to follow, in all its prescriptions, the law of Moses. — Yes, said some: without circumcision you cannot be saved, Quia nisi cirqueumcidamini secundüm morem Moysi, non potestis salvari. — No, replied others: God no longer makes any distinction between Jew and Gentile. The proof, it is that today he pours out his grace on one as on the other; that he calls all men to him, as he announced in his Scriptures, Nihil discrevit inter nos et illos, fide purificans corda eorum; and manifesting himself among the nations with all kinds of wonders, Narrant quest Deus fecisset signed et prodigia in gentibus. How then could we impose on our disciples a yoke that we ourselves have not been able to bear, Jugum quod neque patres nostri neque nos portare potuimus? These last words testify to the energetic tendency of minds, on the one hand, towards the simplification of dogma, on the other, towards the softening of discipline.

Such was the debate: what does the Council answer? It begins by exempting new converts from Mosaic observance; it removes from off their shoulders this yoke so heavy for the Jews themselves, whose principal articles were: circumcision, the Sabbath, the distinction of meats, the prohibition of marriage between Jews and Gentiles, the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the tithe for the priests, the legal offerings, the prohibition of all commerce with the girls consecrated to Venus, and the whole menu of monthly, weekly and daily devotions. In short, it is the entire religion of Moses, in its theology, in its rites, in its nationality, that is suppressed. There remains only the unity of God, but already affected by these two notions, still ill-defined, of the Word and the Spirit.

But, if it is permissible for the followers of Christ to leave Judaism aside, they must not remain pagans for that; they must abjure all their gentility, that is to say all previous worship, all religious nationalism. The gods are called demons, less than that, idols of wood, metal and stone; their temples are abominated, and all participation in sacrifices and feasts forbidden. It is this participation that the Council indicates with these words; Abstention from offered meats, blood, stews and fornication. The renunciation of acts of idolatry is the price exacted from the neophytes for the handing over to them of the Mosaic observances; one is the complement of the other, and both are the pledge of the Christian faith, the essence of which is, as we have just said, worship in spirit and in truth, and the practice of good works.

What has fornication to do with all this? How, in a general, constitutional law, having for its object both the abolition of the old forms of worship, and the founding in their place of a new church, how, I say, did the Council introduce this prescription, which for us, people of the 19th century, is all about private morality, which for the ancients had even less interest, lewdness not even being a venial fault with them?

The reason for this prohibition, in the thought of the Council of Jerusalem, we have said. The apostles had no intention of settling the question of the morality or non-morality of free love, considered in itself; a question of secondary casuistry, which they certainly did not consider in the same way as their successors in the episcopate did later. What they proscribed above all in fornication was that it was inseparable from idolatry. It was practiced in temples and sacred groves, under the protection of gods and goddesses; it had for excitement and seasoning the feasts and ceremonies, the sacrifices, all the festivities of an essentially aphrodisiac cult. Note that the city of Antioch was famous for its wood of Daphne, and that it was at Antioch itself that the question had been raised. Anyone who touched a daughter of Venus entered the religion of the empire. Without this consideration, it is probable that the Council would not have hesitated to relieve the disciples of Christ of this burden, so painful to libidinous races, the weight of which had formerly made the Jews so many times unfaithful.

Prostitution is forbidden by the law of Moses: Deut. XXIIT, 17, 18; Levit. XIX, 29. We must understand the meaning of this prohibition. The Bible distinguishes three species of prostitutes: 1) the qédèches, allow me this Frenchification of the Hebrew term, that is to say, the saints, daughters consecrated to Astarte and the most dangerous of all the courtesans, since they led the Israelite to apostasy, and since they were thus for the nation a permanent cause of dissolution. These gédèches had their males, qadschim, consecrated, like them, to the cult of love; — 2) the zénoth, innkeepers, giving in their homes to drink, to eat, to sleep and the rest, like the famous Rahab, who hid the spies of Joshua and who appears in the genealogy of J.-C.; — 3) finally the mechilloth, or dancers: these are the almees. These three species fit more or less into each other. Now, the law forbids the Jew, not precisely, notice this, fornication, in the restricted sense of lewdness; it forbids that among the maidens or minions consecrated to Astarte, there will be any of Israelite blood. “There will be none consecrated, male or female, among the children of Israel,” said the Hebrew; what St. Jerome, who insisted, despite the text, on condemning the salaciousness through Moses, translates as follows: Non erit meretrix de filiabus Israel, aut scortator de filiis Israel. The law still forbids the Israelite, not precisely the frequentation of dancers or innkeepers, but to make his daughter a dancer or innkeeper, Ne prostituas filiam tuam, translated the Vulgate. Finally, to show his contempt for prostitution, the law goes so far as to say that Jehovah rejects the offerings and premises of fornicators? No, of prostitutes; that he does not want the money of prostitutes for his priests, unlike the priests and priestesses of Venus, who lived on the tribute of prostitution. It was a whole branch of considerable income, of which the Aaronic priesthood was deprived. But in all this we find nothing that formally condemns fornication, as a free relationship of love.

Among all the peoples of antiquity, prostitution was forbidden to women of free or noble condition. Now every Israelite is noble before Jehovah; he is forbidden to derogate and debase himself by prostituting his daughters: the law goes no further. And common sense indicates it: was it the Jew, polygamist, whom the law allowed to take, in addition to his wife or his legitimate wives, as many concubines, his compatriots, as he could support; who, according to the same law, had the right of seigneur over his slaves; who, if he allowed himself a gallantry with a slave belonging to his neighbour, had to pay a fine, because he had made an attempt on the property of another; Was it the Jew, I say, who, more than the Greek or the Roman, could have the slightest scruples of conscience with regard to what we call fornication? How is it now that this prohibition of fornication seemed harsh, and that it weighed so heavily on the people? It is, I repeat, that any Jew unable to maintain a wife and concubines, prostitution being forbidden to Jewish women, and the association of others being prohibited on account of religion, the unfortunate Jew found himself, in fact, weaned from a reputedly legitimate enjoyment of natural right, which in itself the legislator did not defend. The same defense was renewed by The Apostles, and for the same reason: the spirit of the Mosaic law is here the best commentary on Christian law.

It therefore remains established, according to the object of the apostolic meeting of the year 56 and according to the spirit of the Mosaic law concerning prostitution, that fornication was forbidden to the first Christians, not so much as sin only as an idolatrous practice, leading to idolatry, to apostasy, and consequently to eternal damnation. Of all the ordinances of the Mosaicism of which the faithful asked for the repeal because they were too onerous for them, this alone was maintained, with the prohibition of meat offered to idols. In fact, if we admit that the disciples of Christ, abjuring the entirety of the Mosaic law, could in safety of conscience sacrifice to Venus and Priapus, attend the mysteries of Flora and Adonis, participate in the sacred feasts , they remained pagans; their faith was no longer a religion, it was a philosophy: there was neither reform nor revolution. How then this express reservation of the apostles was taken up by the first Christians: this is explained by the following part of the text, which is the subject of the note below.

Footnote (E), page 81.

Of love in the primitive church. — I dared to say that fornication, that is to say, intercourse with the daughters or priestesses of Venus, forbidden, on account of idolatry, by the law of Moses, having been again, and for the for the same reason, forbidden by the apostles, it had been replaced by free love between Christian men and women, in short, by fraternal agape. On which I was asked what proof I had of the fact, what testimonies, what texts I provided in support.

These written proofs, which I am summoned to produce, it is obvious that I cannot find them in the canonical books, subsequently collected by the so-called Orthodox Church, whose principal seat was Rome, and which, drawing inspiration from the customs and Roman institutions, reacted early against messianist shamelessness. No, I do not believe that there exists an authentic document from which it positively results that the community of loves was in use among all Christians of the first and second centuries, even among the Orthodox; that it was, so to speak, an apostolic institution, a supplement, demanded by neophytes and granted by evangelizers, of pagan fornication. I do not claim that either Peter, or James, or John, or Paul, or any of their coadjutors and immediate disciples, have formally authorized such a custom: it is misunderstanding me to lend me such a supposition, and then to accuse me of calumny. The first three, immediate disciples of Jesus, who always inclined strongly toward him, who saw idolatry everywhere, whom the theories of pure love were to touch very little, were naturally not very favorable to this promiscuity. As for Paul, so bold in the schism, the rigorism he professed, his hatred of philosophers and their mores, did not allow him, on this delicate point, to push the logic of the split to its ultimate consequence.

But these leaders of the apostolate, already so divided between them (see pages 82 and following the biography of Paul), must we therefore consider them as the only authors of Christianity? Do we not see them in perpetual contradiction with countless rivals, some coming from all corners of Palestine, Egypt, Persia; the others, coming out of their own ranks, and who, following the example of Paul, set themselves up as independent apostles, preaching, catechizing and baptizing each for his own account? The New Testament, the books of the first fathers, are full of the noise of false christs, false apostles, false prophets, false evangelists: proof that those whom we take today for the _true_ ones were themselves only particular agents of a movement that enveloped them. Messianism, finally, Syriac or Hebrew name of Christianity, is it not prior to Jesus himself? Was it not nourished and swollen with a host of elements from every nation, every tradition and every language? And is it not so with this revolution as with all the others, the real author of which was, not a man, but the masses? We have been accustomed from childhood to see in Christianity the work of a sage, named Jesus, a native of Galilee, crucified for his doctrine, who by the sanctity of his life and the heroism of his death merited that this doctrine become the faith of the human race. The churches, which after the death of Jesus arose on all sides as if by enchantment, these are, our masters tell us, the foundations of his apostles, executors of the mandate he had given them; these innumerable neophytes are the spiritual children of the Word who spoke through their mouths. But just the opposite is the truth. Jesus and those who will continue his work were themselves the product of messianic agitation, representatives of this multitude whom they baptized, confirmed, administered: which means that, far from being its fathers, they were in reality its creatures. What the messianic plebs thought, they said; what they wanted, they executed; what, in the spontaneity of his intuition, seemed obscure to them, they ignored; and when, in the ardor of their revolutionary religiosity, they happened to stray, either they strayed with the multitude, or they were abandoned by it. Such is the immutable law of human collectivities, above all collectivities in revolution: those who seem to direct them, to preside over them, are only their ministers; their word is only the expression of them, and this expression is always incomplete, often unfaithful.

Thus Christianity is not the work of man, as was said at the very time of Christ; it is a divine work, that is to say, a revolution at once religious, political and social, which had its principles and its causes in the state of the populations, such as the Roman conquest and the autocracy of the Caesars. This revolution takes its ideas from everywhere, especially in the East, the ancient center of religions, and in Rome, seat of the imperial government. A particular combination of circumstances makes Jesus, a Galilean agitator, the Christ or God-Man of this religion, and the sacred books of the Jews his monument. It is therefore to this multitude, of every country, of every race and of every language, not to the Church or to the Synagogue, that we must ask for primitive Christian thought; it is this immense anarchy of the first three centuries.

What was, in the first place, at the time of the formation of Christianity, the general state of minds on the question of love and marriage? How did the Good News change it? Finally, how was dogma determined, as it survived in the Church and as we possess it today? These are the questions we have to answer.

On the first question, chaps. II and III of this study have, it seems, enlightened us sufficiently. In the polytheistic world, amorous, free, omniform delight, replacing marriage and the family, held the greatest place in life. In this eroticism, the Latins had surpassed the Greeks, if not in poetic talent, at least in fervour: Ovid, Tibullus, Catullus, Propertius, a host of others, were concerned with nothing but love. Virgil had sung alternately of concubinary love and unisexual love; Horace taught, recommended, in the name of public morality, the association of courtesans. Augustus, as head of state to whom the care of the population is important, despairing of bringing back the Romans to marriage, had returned this law Julia, which ennobled concubinage and made it a kind of marriage. But, vain effort! Marriage had definitively fallen into disuse, as too burdensome; it was little in favor among the plebs, as an institution of aristocracy. In short, the family had become odious to everyone, generation held in horror. All the historians, and Gibbon who sums them up, accuse a growing depopulation over the whole face of the empire. Love, in full freedom, prevailed: Elagabalus tries to make it the very basis of worship; the reign of this young debauchee was only an attempt to bring back to the mysteries of Venus and Adonis all the religious movement of the time. Rome, the political center, which had also become the center of superstitions and pleasures, was the abyss into which generations were to be engulfed, attracted by cheap love. She is called in the Apocalypse, the work of a Judaizing Christian, the great Babylon, the mother of fornications.

On the side of the Jews, a similar movement had taken place. Certainly, the true Jew, the rigorist and devout Jew, did not defile himself with the daughters of Venus: but these were the minority, and there is no doubt that the mass profited without scruple from the licenses that Hellenism offered them. One of the first things that the kings of Syria did, and, after the fall of the Hasmoneans, the emperors, was to erect in Jerusalem a temple of Venus: this policy, welcomed by the masses, is self-explanatory. Any Jew could have concubines, if he had enough to feed them; otherwise, he had to either abstain from love, since fornication was forbidden, or be content with the love of his wife, who soon, and for all sorts of reasons, became a heavy burden to him, as is said in the book of Acts. The Jew was also to abstain from pederastic love; but he was already initiated into the celestial and quintessential love of the Greek philosophers. The Synagogue, diverting the Song of Songs from its literal meaning, had long since made it the picture of Jehovah’s love with the Jewish nation, with the soul of each Jew. It is in limiting this mystical love that Saint Paul said to the Corinthians, who tormented him with their amorous needs: “What are you saying to me about love and marriage?” This is indeed what it is. I have betrothed you all, as a chaste virgin, to one spouse, who is Christ; Despondi vos uni viro, virginem castam exhibere Christo.” Jesus for his part had taught that in heaven sexuality no longer took place, Neque nubent neque nubentur; neither husband nor wife, all like angels before the throne of God. This is where the Jews were: I do not need to say what effect was produced on the people, in this amorous distress, by the erection of a temple to Venus alongside that of Jehovah.

Such then, with regard to marriage and love, was the disposition of souls throughout the world, as much in Jerusalem as in Rome or Babylon.

What change must the new religion have brought about?

The motion is given: the movement starts from below, provoked by the misery of the masses, by slavery, usurious and territorial exploitation, imperial tyranny, the enormity of tributes, the destruction of nationalities, and all the desolations of existence. The cry rises, from the oppressed multitude, against the powerful, the rich, the lucky ones of the century, the priests; against property, finance, tax farmers, the idlers and parasites of every sort.

The object of the revolutionary protest being given, the program, or the profession of faith, follows. What will this new doctrine be?

Religious dogma: One God, invisible, without sacrifice, without statue, without temple, without altar; requiring only interior worship, prayer, either in common or individually. Behold the priesthoods and all their dependencies abolished; food is cut off from the priests: the poor people will be rid of this leprosy and will recover all their wealth.

Political dogma: Equality of all citizens; no more nobles, no more slaves, no more emperors. The man charged with the interests of society is only its servant. And here is the empire, with its armies, its proconsuls, its officers, its fiscal agents, abolished.

Economic or social dogma: Community.

To all this those of Judea add the approaching and supernatural reign of Christ, who must, for a thousand years, reign over all the nations, fill his faithful with all goods and all voluptuousness; after which the world will end, and the blessed will be transported to heaven for all eternity. This was the marvelous side of the revolution, a side which soon dominated all the rest.

With regard to marriage, the family, offspring, the new religion posited nothing: it was because, in fact, it had nothing to posit. Age-old opinion, a capital point of apostolic doctrine, did not admit an institution whose principle, meaning and scope would have been the negation of Christianity, as they then understood and propagated it. The messiah having to arrive from one day to another, to give victory, wealth and happiness to his chosen ones, to abolish death, then, after a wedding of a thousand years, to retire with them into heaven, there was no longer any place for marrying and having children. What would be the purpose? Such is the thought of Peter and Paul, which they never cease to recall, both in connection with marriage and with regard to slaves. As if they had said: Be patient; your wait will not be long; and you will be rewarded for your abstinence. But if you absolutely cannot do without love until then, well, get married; it is better to marry than to burn. Let each have his own, and do what he can. But, above all, abstain from frequenting courtesans, who would induce you to infidelity.

Here is the whole thought of the apostles on marriage and love. It conforms to the decision of the Council of Jerusalem, which prohibits commerce with the courtesans of idolatry; it does not imply, I admit, the authorization for Christian men and women to make love in common; but it supposes, in the very churches to which the apostles are addressed, the existence of this communism: and this is the only thing that I maintain and that I wanted to say.

Yes, the community of women, in other words, the practice of free love between brothers and sisters, that is to say between Christian men and women, substituted for the commerce of courtesans, was the characteristic feature of the first churches, the great fact that, notwithstanding rare exceptions, distinguished Christendom during the first and second centuries; a fact that inspired the reveries of gnosis, and whose multiple source is to be found in the erotic theories of philosophers and the mores of paganism; in the mystical love professed by Jesus Christ and the Synagogue; in the prohibition of Moses, maintained by the Council of Jerusalem, to participate in the aphrodisiac mysteries; in the low esteem that the apostles, like all their contemporaries, had for marriage and the little importance given by them to fornication in itself; finally in millennial opinion.

Plato, following the example of Lycurgus, had instituted in his Republic the community of goods and of women as the ideal of society and morality. Following the example of Plato, and weighed by the logic of their movement, the Christians embraced this ideal, and everything, in the canonical writings, in the books of the Fathers, in what the pagan authors have transmitted to us on this strange revolution, everything, I say, proves that this enthusiasm was, for a time, almost universal. This assertion, which today seems an atrocious calumny, would be accepted without difficulty, if one were first of all convinced that in the time of Christ, as in that of Plato, as in that of Lycurgus or Minos, the community of women, which for us is the height of immorality, involved nothing at all extraordinary for a philosopher, and that it was even regarded as the perfection of the social state. Any opponent of the aristocracy was, ipso facto, an opponent of the family. Plato’s Republic passed for the ideal of fraternity and human virtue. Far from such morals having anything ignominious, it was considered a sign of original prevarication to be unable to achieve it. Now, the Christians had been redeemed and purified by the blood of Christ; they were called saints; they proscribed between them all inequality of rank and fortune, all property; they ate in common, like the Spartans of Lycurgus and the Republicans of Plato, thereby renouncing household and family; finally they had to flee the women consecrated to Venus: how could they not have tried to realize the Platonic ideal to the end?

We have preserved the memory of this bishop, immediate disciple of the apostles, Nicolas, who, possessor of a beautiful wife, was accused of wanting to keep her for himself alone, and saw himself obliged, for his justification, to make an homage of her to the community. He is the same, it seems, as the one spoken of in the Apocalypse, and which gave its name to the Nicolaites. Now, I have already noticed that it is not for the fact of the community of loves that Nicolas is reprimanded by the Spirit, but because he judged the frequentation of pagan courtesans an insignificant thing. Pooling women was nothing; to touch the daughters of Venus, what an inexpiable crime!

When Peter and Paul, writing to the brothers, recommend that each have his own, they are obviously responding to a consultation made to them, and by whom? By people living in community of goods and women. Without it, the recommendation is meaningless. What a fine novelty, indeed, this precept of monogamy, if they had addressed themselves to men who, like the old Romans, would have known only marriage! And where does this strange scruple come from for the apostles? The First to the Corinthians, chap. V, 1, reveals it to us: it is that, in the exercise of the common love, it could happen that the same woman had in turn the father and the son; that the same man knew the mother and the daughter, from which resulted incest, a thing formally condemned by the law of Moses. Saint Paul cries out against this abomination, which does not appear to have astonished the faithful of Corinth in the least. One could answer, which no doubt one does not fail to do, that what caused incest and adultery was not love, but appropriation; and that where the community was received, the crime foreseen by monogamous and proprietary law disappeared. So the community was going its own way, and since we value written proof, I will quote this same verse from the Epistle to the Corinthians: “All of you, cries the Apostle, give yourselves among yourselves to fornication, and to such fornication as there is not the like even among the Gentiles; so that one of you possesses his father’s wife.” Omnino auditor inter vos fornicatio, et lalis fornicatio, qualis nec inter gentes, ità ut uxorem palris sui aliquis habeat. What the Apostle here calls fornication, or prostitution, by insult, is obviously not public prostitution; it is that which is practiced between the brothers, inter vos, that is to say community.

Was the Apostle’s rebuke received? It does not seem like it. The community of women, by rapidly destroying every ideal of love, led the Christians to extravagances that rendered them infamous in the eyes of the pagans, and were the determining cause of the persecutions. All the follies of Elagabalus were put into practice in these communities: the testimony of the Fathers here joins that of pagan authors. Marriage was condemned, generation detested, Malthusian onanism erected into a precept, and all the abominations of pederasty translated into acts of religion. For two centuries Gnosticism was overwhelmingly triumphant in the Church; fornication reigned with it. The revolution of the Gospel, corrupted from its birth, would have been aborted a hundred times, if it had not been due to deeper causes than Hebrew messianism, and if millennial opinion, falling into ridicule, had not finally brought back Christians to more positive and above all more moral ideas.

One now understands, without my needing to insist on it, how this restoration of the family took place, and consequently the restoration of the Church itself, so strangely compromised by millennial madness and Gnostic promiscuity. The centuries passing without the expected messiah appearing, they took the decision to say that he was not to descend until the end of the world, which end of the world, supposed at first to be very near, was itself adjourned indefinitely. But the revolution was then effected: Christianity, in its essentials, was established; all that remained was to organize it, according to the data of the imperial hierarchy, on the one hand, and of the Roman family, on the other. It was understood that an institution whose purpose was to maintain society could not be a suggestion of the devil: marriage was reestablished for once in its sacramental dignity, and the same principle, by virtue of which it had first been concluded that there was community of property and of women, served to separate loves, children, and interests. It had been said: All Christians are equal and free before God, and all must work. So no marriage, no property, no government: all that is aristocracy. Long live love and community! It is the kingdom of God. We now say: All Christians are equal and free, therefore they are all noble; hence they must all be married, and each work for his own account. Down with community; it is prostitution. And to say it was to do it. No one noticed that Christ, the Apostles, the Doctors, the vile multitude and the whole Church, had, for three hundred years, divagated on the first and most important of social questions.

Footnote (F), page 132.

Of Clerical Indecency. — Those of my readers who would like to know more about the manners of the Christian priesthood can consult, among others, l’Église et la Morale, by Dom Jacobus, 2 vol. in-18, Brussels, 1859; — The Rome des Papes, by a member of the Roman Constituent Assembly, 3 vols. in-8o, Basel, 1860; — and, for the Church of the first centuries, all the ecclesiastical historians. They will see there that never, at any time, among any people, under any influence, was debauchery carried so far, and under such outrageous and dissolving conditions, as among the Catholic clergy. As for me, I am tired of all this rubbish, and it is with real contentment that I keep the promise made by me to Mgr. Mathieu to draw the curtain on this mountain of infamy. One observation only, before finishing.

We can say that among the ancients debauchery, denounced with so much force by Saint Paul and by Juvenal, was the effect of an error of good faith as much as of concupiscence. Polygamy reigned throughout the East; examples authorized by law were not uncommon in Europe either. Divorce, or to speak more correctly the faculty of repudiation, was everywhere in use: all that was needed for a husband to send his wife away was a simple declaration, with restitution of the dowry. Concubinage was admitted by morals, and up to a certain point honored in the concubine or hetary. Every slave-owner had the right of lordship, as the Mussulmans do today, over his female slaves; in war, female prisoners belonged to soldiers. As for simple fornication, that is to say, free and transient intercourse between persons of different sexes, except in the case where the woman was of free status, there was absolutely nothing shameful or unlawful about it. Love was considered a fungible thing, an object of special consumption: and it was in order to elevate it, to give it more attraction, that the creatures dedicated to this profession were consecrated to Venus and placed under the protection of the temples. Finally, the community of women itself, more or less in use in Sparta and Crete, erected in principle by Plato in his Republic, was regarded as a very tenable philosophical-political hypothesis, a custom that might not be suitable for all peoples, but which was in itself in no sense against nature and justice. It is conceivable that men brought up in such ideas, could allow themselves many things, in matters of love, without their conscience being interested in it and their morality suffering from it. Only the laws of temperance could be opposed to them: add to that, but in an excessively weak measure, the interest of the republic.

It was quite another thing when Christianity was established in the world, bringing, with the principle of equality and fraternity, a notion of superior Justice. By virtue of this new ideal, love is subordinated to the rights of persons; consequently, polygamy is abolished, divorce restricted, public prostitution condemned. Any woman, of whatever birth and condition, assimilated to the matron, has the right to respect. Concubinage itself is finally abandoned as being below the dignity of the Christian: in short, by the sole fact of this mystical regeneration, which declares all men called to the faith of Christ, therefore equal and free before God, and by the abolition of slavery which followed, all sexual relations outside legitimate marriage were condemned. And make no mistake about it, what Christianity wanted, but was unable to do, the Revolution wants in its turn, and it will do: all prostitution, all secret licentiousness is a crime against the family and the republic.

Now, what does the lustful priest do? He lies to his dogma, to his faith and to his God; he lacks public faith; he violates his mandate. Minister of a religion of freedom and equality, as far as it is in him he treats his sheep as slaves; he destroys the marriage he is responsible for administering; he dissolves the family, of which he is the spiritual father; he re-establishes promiscuity, the shame of the primitive church; he encourages prostitution, condemned by the councils. Instead of leading the people along the paths of justice, liberty, and equality, he pushes them back toward aristocratic and feudal manners; his whole existence, in a word, is a monstrous hypocrisy. There is no villainy comparable to that of the Christian priest: now this villainy resides entirely, it has its principle, its middle and its end, in fornication.

NEWS OF THE REVOLUTION.

JACOBINISM AND THE EMPIRE.

The article that you are about to read, having the aim of explaining one of the main causes of French decadence, should have been placed after our last study, on Progress. The length of this study forced us to refer it to this installment.

I

Jacobinism is in France, like the Papacy in Italy, the Inquisition in Spain, spleen in England, a particular trait of the national character that one does not encounter elsewhere, at least to the same degree. One can say, with sufficient accuracy, in what this affection consists, indicate the time and the circumstances in which it raged with the most intensity: it would be much more difficult, not to say impossible, to explain by what cause the French people seem more than any other predisposed to this fault, why, in a word, each nation is subject to certain diseases of the body, the soul and the spirit, which the others do not know.

It was especially from 1789 that Jacobinism, as it was called, developed in our country, to the great damage of the people and of the Revolution. In 89, when the Estates General were called, the vast majority of French people were pure of the Jacobin spirit: this can be seen only in the federations, in the frankness of the views expressed in the notebooks, and in the general feeling of confidence resulting from the near unanimity of the wishes. The constitutional monarchical party, which under the auspices of Sieyès, Mirabeau, Barnave, Duports etc., was formed immediately after the opening of the Estates General and to which France rallied, has nothing of Jacobinism. The first who met in the church of the Jacobins to discuss public affairs and agree on the way forward in these difficult times, cannot themselves be considered to have been part of the sect, from which they later separated. The Republic, which in less than four years replaced the monarchy, is not Jacobin either: the proof is that Robespierre and the Jacobin society were the last to rally to the republican idea. Neither the Gironde, which the day after its defeat of May 31 involved seventy departments, nor Danton and the Cordeliers, nor Marat and his Sans-culottes, nor the Mountain itself, were Jacobins. But the Convention is dominated by Jacobinism, the Terror is Jacobin, the Directory Jacobin, the Empire in its turn Jacobin. Under the Restoration and after 1830, the nation, restored to the ideas of 1789, appears again, for the most part, what it has not yet ceased to be, constitutional monarchy; however the opposition, partly formed from the remains of Bonapartism, is strongly nuanced with Jacobinism. After 1848, this element weakened again: neither the Cavaignaquist bourgeoisie any more than the Orléanist bourgeoisie, nor the socialist plebs any more than that of Marat, Hébert or Baboeuf, belonged to Jacobinism. Finally, Jacobinism reappeared after the coup d’etat of December 2; for two years it seems to have regained the influence that the clergy had first obtained. But already its star is beginning to fade again, and if it is permissible to say that at this moment everyone in France, even the partisans of the legitimate monarchy, incline to liberty and democracy, it must be added that, precisely because of this, everyone separates from the Empire and Jacobinism.

Such is the brief history — shall I say of this sect or this influence? — which everyone hates and nevertheless suffers; which everyone imagines, according to his particular impressions, to be able to recognize at first sight, and which we are going to try to define.

Jacobinism, as it has manifested itself on various occasions in France since the revolution of 1789, is the product of a superficial idea, suggested in part by a reading the Social Contract, which one can thus formulate: — “Divine right, which governed the old society, having been abolished and replaced by human right, it sufficed, for the Revolution, that the governmental mechanism, which previously functioned by and for the Court and its privileged, functions in the future for the benefit of the true sovereign, who is the people, and through the ministry of their elect.”

Here, in a few words, and only from the point of view of principles, is the whole of Jacobinism. It is a simple displacement that it is, according to it, to operate, between the summit and the base of the old edifice, whose body must remain whole. To imagine that, because the starting point and the goal have been changed, the political and economic system must be transformed from top to bottom, that would be, the Jacobins think, throwing oneself into a dangerous complication, which nothing justifies, and which would only be fit to mislead and retard the Revolution, by delivering the people up to the speculations of a few intriguers. “A revolution,” said one of the most illustrious Jacobins of our time, “is an opportunity for a party to avenge itself on its enemies.”

It is against this thought of Jacobinism that have protested and still protest, first of all, the partisans of the constitutional monarchy, in second place the republicans properly so called, and finally the socialists.

The former felt perfectly that it would be nothing to make the monarch reign in the name and on behalf of the nation, to declare that he held his authority from it alone and that he was only its agent, if the constitution monarchy was not itself changed, and they have changed it: in which they obviously exceeded the scope of Jacobinism. The republicans in their turn, taking up the idea of the constitutional monarchists, believed that, in this governmental reorganization, the functions could balance each other in such a way as to render superfluous the employment of a moderating organ, which, in the previous system, is the king. This is the whole difference, and it is serious, that distinguishes the republicans from the dynastics. As for the socialists, they have only extended the thought common to the two fractions of the constitutional party, by arguing that the transformation should not stop at the political order, that it should also embrace the economic order.

Thus Jacobinism, as an idea, is reduced to a misunderstanding; it is the substitution of the sovereign people for the sovereign by divine right, of one fiction for another fiction: which is always resolved, any idea of organic renewal being set aside, in absolutism. Jacobinism owes its birth to the Revolution, that is indisputable: we see to what extent it can call itself revolutionary. All that since then it has been, all that it has done; its progress, its tyranny, its crimes, its stubborn existence and the deep antipathy it excites, are explained by this. Public reason has confounded it twenty times: constitutional monarchists, republicans and socialists have repeatedly demonstrated its illogicality, inanity and impotence. Before the first Constituent Assembly, Robespierre was only a flat rhetorician, and we saw, after 1848, what his heirs were capable of. The sect nevertheless subsists; it had its day of triumph; while its adversaries are reduced to silence, it alone, by the grace of Napoleon III, has retained its word.

This is because Jacobinism is not just an idea: it would soon be the end of it if it were reduced to living off this poor little idea. It has itself never dared to define itself and formulate its program. In the sphere of ideas, it only knows how to hold off and make reservations. Jacobinism is above all an affection, a disease, a kind of moral pestilence, peculiar to the French temperament. Let’s follow the biography: better than all reasoning it will explain what I mean.

The Jacobins are of every class and condition, of every profession, of every religion, of every school. There are materialists and spiritualists, Protestants and Catholics, commoners and nobles, soldiers and priests, workers and bourgeois, men of letters and people without letters, doctors, lawyers, artists. They are recruited at all rungs of the social scale, not by the propaganda of ideas, but by a certain contagious humor, from which even the Socialists and the Constitutionalists do not always defend themselves. It is not a doctrine that solicits them; it is, I repeat, a malignant affection both of the heart and of the brain.

Let us consider, on the one hand, that the Jacobin idea is excessively simple, since it consists in using power, such as the old regime left it and without changing anything in its notion, but only with other views and for another purpose; while the constitutional, republican and socialist idea is full of complications, supposes a whole new creation to operate, a whole transformation of the political and social order. The result is that the masses, who do not grasp this system of counterweights and guarantees, who are impatient to act and who are excited by their tribunes, prefer to throw themselves towards the parties that seem to them the most expeditious and the simplest: little concerned with method and legality, provided that its need for execution is satisfied. — Let us consider, on the other hand, that the more the revolutionary feeling is developed, hatred of the old regime, its instigators, its beneficiaries, furious, the more chance there is for this multitude, or its heirs, to pass over all forms, to trample on all the principles, using without scruple, in times of revolution, of the law of war and its licenses, Dolus an virtus quis in hoste requirat? Such is Jacobinism: and what man in France, even the most advanced in the knowledge of the new law publishes, even the most convinced of the need to respect, above all, and if necessary at the peril of the nation, the principles, can boast of never having felt its attack?

Jacobinism, by the very fervor with which it is possessed, by this zealousness, repeated from the Jews, that characterizes it, is therefore above all dictatorial, inquisitorial, terrorist. It cares little for the law; it willingly proceeds by violent measures, summary executions: this is what it calls governing in a revolutionary manner. The Revolution, for it, lightning strikes, raids, requisition, forced borrowing, the maximum, purges, terror. Isn’t that, after all, how the old regime acted? Who could find fault with it when it comes to overthrowing this regime and saving the people? The crime of the Provisional Government in 1848, in the eyes of the Jacobins, was that it did not know how to use power, that it was not revolutionary. Unfortunately the revolution of 1848 had been made precisely against personal government: what constitutes the crime of the provisional government before Jacobinism is what will make its merit before history. It is through the dictatorship that the Jacobins boast of having saved France and the Revolution in 93: now, the more one studies this history of 93, the more one remains convinced that the danger came above all from the Jacobins, and that if France has extricated herself at the same time from their hands and from those of foreigners, liberty and right, thanks to them, have remained on the field of battle.

The idea not existing for Jacobinism, or having only a mediocre value, what worries it are the intentions. Now, it judges these intentions according to the ideas of the parties and the formulas which express them. Thus, in the partisans of representative monarchy, it will not fail to see again the promoters of ancient royalty and of divine right; in the republicans, federalists; in the friends of legality, moderantists; in the sans-culotte plebs, anarchists; in all, enemies of the Revolution.

By what, then, according to the Jacobins, will the true revolutionaries be recognized, if the Revolution is neither with the Constitutionalists, nor with the Federalists, nor with the Anarchists, nor with the Moderates, nor with the Ultras? What is the thought, the true thought of the Revolution? — The Revolution, replies Robespierre, is where the good citizens are. Good citizens are those who stay equally away from constitutionalists, federalists, moderates, anarchists, and who carry a citizenship card. Citizenship cards are distributed at the Société des Jacobins, where suspects are purged. It seems to you as stupid as it is atrocious; but beware: it is nonetheless profound and formidable. This is how France was governed from May 31, 1793 to July 28, 1794; it is the embodiment of absolutism in the sovereignty of the people.

Defiant, hostile to ideas, partisan of the reason of state, now decorated with the name of public safety, living on equivocation, Jacobinism easily turns to hypocrisy and Machiavellianism: the Jacobins are the Jesuits of the Revolution.

Jacobinism is essentially immobilist and retrograde: this is demonstrated by its horror of constitutions. The Constitution of 93, sloppy with phrases from the Social Contract, in which the people, with their primary assemblies, seem to hold such a large place and exercise all the powers, is much less liberal, it offers far fewer guarantees than the constitutions of 91 and 95, in which there is, with less democratic ostentation, an attempt to balance powers. Likewise, the constitution of the year 8 and that of 1852, accepted by universal suffrage, are also infinitely less liberal, and offer far fewer guarantees to the citizens and to the nation than those of 1814, 1830 and 1848. The reason for this, a reason that I no longer need to explain, is that the constitutions of the Empire, no less than that of 98, were made according to Jacobinic thought, the application of the absolutism of divine right to the sovereignty of the people.

Jacobinism assumes democratic airs: it has to, its dogma of the sovereignty of the people and universal suffrage condemns it to this. In reality, the Jacobin is by no means a democrat; he has no spirit of liberty at all; he does not support discussion; he distrusts all meetings and associations: in all these respects, the constitutions produced bear witness to his sentiments. What the Jacobin takes for democracy is quite simply demagoguery. He does not aspire to govern the masses by reason, which would lead to instructing them, to making them reason, and above all to provoking examination and inspection. What the Jacobin wants is to govern by instincts, passions, appetites, prejudices. This is why the Jacobin is neither a jurist, nor an economist, nor a philosopher, nor a statesman; he is not an instructor of the multitude: he is a rhetorician and a charlatan, who puts images in the place of ideas, and instead of seeking conviction, creates agitation. The harangues of Robespierre, the proclamations of Bonaparte, the speeches and sandwiches of Napoleon III, are models of the genre.

As regards religious opinions, the Jacobin generally shows a great horror for superstition; but he has no less horror of atheism. It was the Jacobins who, during the Revolution, after having proscribed and massacred the priests, guillotined the atheists. The Jacobin, generally a deist, managed in his religious faith, as in his political opinions, the most complete arbitrariness: but he retained from the pious bigotry and intolerance. Robespierre, said Michelet, is a priest.

I said earlier that in politics the Jacobin carried, further than any other, the zeal of the Revolution and the hatred of the old regime. But as it is for him in all this only a simple displacement, this zeal and this hatred stop at the names; they do not go back to institutions. In the song which has the title Nostradamus, the character to whom Béranger makes the last of our kings give alms is a regicide; but he is at the same time a senator, he has a palace, notice that. He loathes Bourbon, but he adores Bonaparte; he abominates the old nobility, but he strongly relishes the new. On the assassination of the Duc d’Enghien he said amen, but he raised a Marshal Ney. Its demagogy does not suffer from bourgeoisie; but he gladly shoots the Socialists, partisans of garlic, whom he suspects of resenting his rents, his actions, to its capital and property. Hypocrite, Machiavellian, deist and demagogue, basically without beliefs, without respect for God or men, the Jacobin is to the highest degree a rocking politician, a doctrinaire.

Jacobinism, still on the trail of the old regime, perfected centralization, that great machine of tyranny. This is what was called in 1993 the one and indivisible Republic, limited to the style of the old notaries, who began their acts with these words, In the name of the holy, one and indivisible Trinity. For this formula, which twice revived despotism in France, the Jacobins guillotined the Girondins.

The Jacobin is antipathetic to any idea of positive political economy. Partisan, above all, of governmental initiative and of the prepotence of the State, he reserves the right, in the name of the public safety, to think and to do as he pleases, according to the circumstances. He has ready-made phrases for liberty and for protection; he is for regulation and against regulation; he is for the equalization of taxes, but he does not want this equalization to be done at the expense of rent, nor farm rent, nor dividends. All his wishes are for peace, but he does not renounce war. In the past, he will tell you, only the nobles had the right to achieve ranks: it is the opposite now, any simple soldier can become a general. It is enough: let us beware of disarming; the problem of perpetual peace is extra-revolutionary. In the same way, the serf did not formerly have the right to acquire, the worker to become a master, the colonist to be a proprietor. Today all that has changed: any citizen can be a rentier, any wage-earner can become an entrepreneur and a capitalist; the State itself invites them to do so through its savings banks. Ask for nothing more: all these questions of credit, currencies, balance of population, balance of functions, organization of labor, workers’ association, etc., raised by dreamers, are proper only to maintain the agitation, and must be prohibited by the Revolution. — Once well off, the Jacobin is the most conservative of men.

Jacobinism, which has no theory either of Public Right or of Economic Right, has no more for International Right. It was Jacobinism that invented, in recent times, and put into circulation the famous principle of nationality, which, according to the way in which it explains it, would be nothing else, at bottom, than the negation of  history and the return to the state of nature, abandoned by everyone as far as public right and civil right are concerned. The Jacobins therefore became the patrons of the Polish, Hungarian and Italian nationalities; they even add, at times, the Irish. This zeal for nationality is sincere on their part, I do not deny it: they see in the subordination of one nationality to another, in the incorporation of one state into another state, a form of the old regime. But that in no way prevented the Jacobin citizens from valuing conquest very highly, from liking war requisitions and contributions as much at least as incorporations. They proved it under the Directory and the first Empire. To this end, they have at their service two other great principles, also of their invention, which serve them to modify, according to need, the principle of nationality: one is the principle of natural frontiers; the other is that of revolutionary propaganda. By the first, the frontiers of a state can be pushed back indefinitely: this is how Napoleon I was dragged from conquest to conquest, and Napoleon III would be quite ready to lay his hand, either on Italy, in case the affairs of Messrs. de Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi should be spoiled; or on the Rhine and in Belgium, if only the great powers were willing to allow it. By the second principle, it is understood that all the old governments must disappear and be replaced by governments according to the heart of Jacobinism, that if the nations themselves show themselves powerless, they will be provided for by the French nation, which, for more safety, will incorporate them.

It was Jacobinism that has been the first cause of the loss of French liberties, and which, from 1804 to 1815, threatened to swallow up those of Europe: after what I have just said, I will be exempted from new proofs. Napoleon I, a demagogue in the first place, trained in the school of Robespierre, who was always a great genius for him, became, immediately after his usurpation, the idol of Jacobinism. So he was nicknamed Robespierre on horseback; his 18 Brumaire can be seen as a revenge for 9 Thermidor. He fills his councils, his staffs, his administration with Jacobins, and ennobles them all. But he loathed the Constitutionalists, the Republicans, the free thinkers, all those who tended to develop, through ideas, the Revolution. Let us reread the history of this despot in cold blood: it is pure government, pure politics, the pure thought of Jacobinism. The ideas of Sieyes were just as unbearable to him as the pretensions of Louis XVIII. The sect also showed itself grateful to him: it invented (wonderful inventors these Jacobins!) the formula of consecration: The Emperor is the Revolution; the Emperor is the democracy. This is repeated by Napoleon III and by the same men: proof that neither the Republic nor liberty mean absolutely anything to Jacobinism.

Jacobinism exists above all in Paris. Faithful to its principle of centralization, it fled the provinces and grouped itself in the hearth of the government. Paris, it says, governs France; Paris and France are all one. It would take very little, however, for Paris, instead of governing France, to be itself governed by her: but that would not be the account of Jacobinism nor that of the Emperor. Also the preponderance of capital, like centralization, has no greater defenders than the Jacobins.

By dint of agitating and making noise, of dissimulating its misery under the beautiful words of Revolution, of democracy, of nationality, Jacobinism seems to have made some progress abroad: Kossuth, Mazzini, are Jacobins. We have seen with what ease the latter subordinated his republicanism to the unitary monarchy of Victor-Emmanuel. Events will teach us to what extent the Hungarian and Italian populations share the feelings of their tribunes. But to something misfortune is good. From nationality to nationality Jacobinism is for itself an antidote. Jacobins against Jacobins do not make their business. Jacobin and unitary France has no greater enemy at this time than Jacobinized and unified Italy. Do you still want to make Hungary a bitter enemy of the French name? Make it independent; replace the dynasty of Habsburg-Lorraine by that of any Kossuth, Croi or Bathyani. You will see, in the place of imperial and apostolic Austria, a great state re-form, a natural adversary of France as much as the Austria of Charles-Quint and Marie-Thérèse ever was, and the same rivalry that once existed. between the two crowns, burst again between the two jacobinières. Then give rise to Germanic nationalism, then to Scandinavian or Polish nationalism; and, with all these conspired nationalities, from Italy, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, you will have found the means of flattening this poor French nation, you will have found a way to flatten this poor French nation, whose influence on the world is never greater than when it is free and cares the least for its neighbors, but which is miserably fooled each time it gives itself up to its despotic agitators.

Jacobinism will end with the ambiguity that gave birth to it, with the chauvinism of which it is the father. The Socialist Republicans dealt it a severe blow in 1848; the failure of imperial policy over the past two years throughout Europe gives hope for a speedy and radical recovery for France. We will end this interesting monograph with that.

II

We know what Jacobinism is by nature and temperament. We will show it in action.

In recent years there has been a growing rapprochement between the sect and the Emperor. The day after December 2, the thing would have been difficult. The affair had been so abrupt; so little counted on the success of this despised suitor; the mystification was so outrageous for Jacobinism; it had been so cruelly struck in all those who then passed for its representatives; its was so strongly committed to the partisans of right, freedom and economic reform, that it was difficult for it not to stand, for a time, in silent expectation, at a distance from a power that glorified above all things having buried it.

But, at the time of the Crimean War, sympathies reappeared, conversions began. Didn’t the imperial government finally enter into the real revolutionary policy, which was to throw the masses on the battlefields? In vain would you have observed that this government was a government without principles, based on perjury and assassination, hostile to all freedom and all rights, living on trickery and rocking, apart from the economic tendencies of the era and without the slightest understanding of the European movement: you would not have been heard. Scruples were lifted, consciences satisfied. Liberties, rights, an economic revolution! Does Jacobinism care about that? The European movement! But it is precisely to divert it that Jacobinism aspires. As for the coup d’état, no doubt there was something to be said from the point of view of legality and good example. But what! If it is the case of December 2 as of Brumaire 18, if the event turns to the profit of the revolution, the end will justify the means. We have to accept the fait accompli.

And thereupon we intone, in honor of Napoleon III, the antiphon composed for Napoleon I: Napoleon III is, in short, the popular dynasty; Napoleon III is the democracy; Napoleon III is the Revolution; Napoleon III is nationality; Napoleon III is universal suffrage. We must take Napoleon III into account for what he did for the nation; you have to walk with the masses, with progress. Rather this one than the others!…

The others! This is the word released; this is the secret of the Jacobin consciousness. And who are they, please, these others? Supporters of the regime prior to 89? For a long time it is no longer a question. The others are all those who aspire to develop, by liberty, by right, by science, in the political and economic order, the thought of 89, whatever their flag or motto, partisans of constitutional monarchy, legitimate or quasi-legitimate, formal republicans, or promoters of social revolution. To all these others, the Jacobin prefers this one: his reason is simple. The Revolution having no other goal than to displace the benefits of power, to make the new men enjoy it in place of the old, any power that fulfills this goal is revolutionary, is legitimate. The Jacobins live, in general, in the capital; they see each other; they can chat at their ease about domestic and foreign policy, be informed of everything that happens; they make noise in Europe; the loss of guarantees and public liberties is not heavy for them; and if it suits them to take their share of the imperial favours, all will be for the best under the most revolutionary of governments. Every day this band of howlers and devourers swells, apostates of all parties, traitors to all opinions.

When Napoleon III seized power, his first thought was to pose before the powers of Europe as the exterminator of the social republic and the policeman of the Revolution, whom he boasted of bringing back to his bed. This is how, before 1848, Louis-Philippe was accused of having paid court to kings, who always held rigor against him. The Jacobins must remember that. In front of the country, the attitude was different: Napoleon III was the avenger of national injuries; he tore up the treaties of 1815; he made it understood that through him France was going to recover its old limits, the limits of 1813, and that the Western Empire would be reestablished, drawing into its orbit Italy, Spain, the Rhine, and all the Germanic Confederation. So finally we would get the better of England… Just the presence of Napoleon III in power was a countdown to the revenge to be taken for our defeats from 1812 to 1815.

This double program was difficult to complete, the first part excluding the second, and vice versa. Let us not forget that, as a price for his good offices, Napoleon III asked the French people to sacrifice the rights and liberties of 1989, while from Europe he hoped or intended to demand cessions of territory. By the mere fact of his elevation to the empire and by his manifestos, Napoleon III declared himself at war with the tendencies of the French nation and with the established right of Europe: it is precisely by this imbroglio that he conquered the admiration of Jacobinism.

If the Jacobins had ever had the slightest understanding of history, they would have understood, in 1804 as in 1852, that the time had passed to undertake the work of a Julius Caesar, a Charlemagne, a Charles-Quint or a Louis XIV; that the Revolution, by killing feudalism, had killed the spirit of conquest (1); and that the law of the states, a necessary, invincible law, henceforth rested on these two great words: as public right, Constitution; as international right, Equilibrium. Such is the thought that, leaving aside the more or less arbitrary and easily reparable cut-outs of the Congress of Vienna, presided over the famous treaties of 1815, which we have designated for this reason as opening a new era in history. (Study IV, News of the Revolution.)

Such an idea, which has become today, everywhere else but in France, a vulgar truth, could not agree with Jacobinism. What Napoleon I had so unfortunately undertaken, Napoleon III was to try in his turn. The uncle had made himself the anachronistic imitator of Caesar, Charlemagne and Louis XIV; the nephew became the no less heterogeneous copyist of the uncle. First, he entices the middle classes through the Stock Exchange and the railroads, the Church through honors and salaries; he makes of order, of religion, of property itself a counterfeit of the consulship. The Jacobins looked on, were jealous, but were still silent. Then, believing he had found the opportunity, the new Emperor pledged, on a half account with England, with the moral support of Austria, the neutrality of Prussia, the help of Piedmont and all the effort of Turkey, the Crimean War. And the Jacobins applauded. After a year, Napoleon III to overcome, in the fourth, to remove the mound of Malakoff; then he hastens, unable to do more, to conclude a peace that has become more necessary than ever. He had had time to realize that, waging a war of balance, in society with four other states, he had nothing to hope for for his aggrandizement. This first campaign cost the belligerent powers a million men and six billion francs for nothing. I have misspoken, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which the Emperor of the French had boasted of bringing to life, was the fruit of it. In this respect, we can say that the real loser is not Russia: it is the coalition directed against her by Napoleon III. What does Jacobinism think about it?

It is obvious that Napoleon III, aspiring to the empire of the West, went astray from the first step. “With the English alliance,” say the chauvinistic Jacobins, not without reason, “there is nothing for him to expect.” England, always ready when it is a question of stopping the encroachments of Russia, Austria or any other power, will never allow the Emperor of the French, her magnanimous ally, either to expand into Europe or to seize supremacy. Our natural ally is Russia. For a moment they had toyed with the Scandinavian alliance. But one cannot be with Christ and Belial at the same time: the Scandinavian alliance is sacrificed to the Russian alliance. The port of Cherbourg is built; preparations are made, with great noise, for a descent into England. The question is no longer about the Rhine; it is on the Thames. It is to London that one proposes to go to seek the scepter of the West!…

In the meantime, a new opportunity presents itself. It was Monsieur de Cavour who prepared the case: the bomb exploded on January 1, 1859. What happened between the potentate and his humble protege, the King of Piedmont? We don’t know yet; we will find out some day. But the logic of the situations, the spirit of the traditions, the character of the man, the sequence of the facts, make it possible to guess it.

Whoever says emperor, says man of war and, in France, conqueror. Napoleon III, who wrote a book on artillery, had not yet seen fire. His uncle’s trophies, his interrupted, failed work, kept him awake. Naturally he must have, with the Rhine, Rome for his son, Naples for his cousin; Milan and the iron crown for himself. Grateful Italians will be happy to place themselves under the scepter of the Bonapartes, a dynasty of their race. The King of Piedmont will content himself with a few annexes, and will become a submissive ally. Later, one will think of Spain: because it is necessary that the work of Louis XIV is remade, but by a capacity resulting from the Revolution and to the profit of the patriots.

The Italian campaign is decided, a chivalrous and liberal campaign, of course. If the French enter Italy, say the protocols, it is to deliver it from Austria, whose influence violates the principle of nationality and compromises the European equilibrium; it is to obtain the secularization of the pontifical government, which is no longer in harmony with the lights of the time, and to make the Italians enjoy French liberties. All the scribes of the imperial government and the journals of Jacobinism are responsible for developing this theme. Hungary is taken into confidence; Kossuth has an interview with the Emperor of the French: the effects have been seen at Magenta and at Solferino. Besides, the Emperor asks nothing for himself: the Italians will freely decide their own fate.

Although full of distrust of Napoleon III, public opinion in Europe was favorable to Italy. Russians, Germans, English, Belgians and Swiss are in favor of Italian independence. Condemned by this union of moral forces, betrayed by her own, Austria was beaten by the united French and Italians at Montebello, Palestro, Magenta, Turbigo and Solferino. But if the French army picked up splendid laurels, Italy took away all the profit from the victory. King Victor-Emmanuel conquered there, along with vast estates, a reputation as a valiant and gallant king, while Napoleon III saw his dearest illusions shattered. He proved, as for himself, that he was not at all a general, and hardly a soldier; as for the Italians, he soon had reason to judge, by the way they thanked him, that these Austrians of the day before cared not at all to be Frenchmen of the morrow. Universal suffrage, on which we had counted, came as a single man on the side of Victor-Emmanuel, and spectator Europe, that is to say England, Russia, Prussia and all of Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, who had in their wishes supported Italian emancipation, declared that it was justice.

Then the sad emperor realizes that he is taken for a dupe; he recoils before his work; he accuses both the revolution and the coalition; he could not bear the sight of these heaps of corpses and these torrents of blood: in short, he hastened to sign peace at Villafranca as he had signed it after Malakof, without worrying about his ally, and fled to Paris to enjoy his triumph. He simply does not see the truth that emerges from this whole expedition and which blinds the eyes: it is that the thought that leads the populations, in Italy as elsewhere, and that directs events, is precisely the double idea of the treaties of 1815 which he flatters himself with destroying, on the one hand constitutional, monarchical or republican government, on the other the balance of states. If Italy protests against the Papacy and against Austria, it is that the Papacy and Austria are hostile to constitutional government, to modern liberties, and because the latter adds to this wrong that, denounced by Napoleon III himself, of compromising, by its deaf invasions, the European balance. How, after that, would Italy give itself to the Emperor of the French, whose meaning is the same as that of the Emperor of Austria, the negation of constitutionality and balance?

Thus, the battles of Montebello, Palestro, Magenta, Turbigo and Solferino, having been won exclusively for the benefit of the treaties of 1815, which the Emperor of the French was to tear up, and for the benefit of the Kingdom of Italy, which would not come under the French empire, which will even become all the more hostile to it as it acquires more extent and strength, any project of a restoration of the Western empire being on this side completely annihilated, France being in it for her cost of men and money, it is absolutely as if she had been vanquished, at the same time as Austria, at Montebello, Palestro, Magenta, Turbigo and Solferino: that is mathematical.

The Jacobins, heated by gunpowder, would have liked, for the honor of imperial policy, that the French army should push its success, as had been announced, as far as the Adriatic; that after displaying so much disinterestedness, they should not show so much vexation; and, since one had only to reap the glory of a satisfied principle, let the principle be followed to its last consequence.

It couldn’t be more logical. But, in thus putting on a good face at a bad game, the Emperor of the French was abandoning his tradition, his aim, his significance, and controlling himself with his own hands. It only remained for him to declare in the presence of Europe, after having created, in spite of himself, this unitary Italy, that he retained henceforth of his title of emperor only the word, that he renounced any extension of territory, that he was going to change his policy and rally to the thought of 1815, by disbanding his armies, restoring the constitutional regime, and returning to the system of peace at all costs, as Louis-Philippe had done. He might as well file his abdication.

Let us admit that Napoleon III was wiser here than his coterie. Liberal France, whatever flag she adopts, can smile at Italian unity. She knows that the movement of states is no longer in the direction of reciprocal absorption, and that it is elsewhere than in conquest that influence must henceforth be sought. But military France, imperial and Jacobinic France, is in a completely different situation. For her, the dominant thought is still that of Napoleon, Louis XIV, Charlemagne, Caesar, the reduction of peoples to unity, if not by general incorporation, at least by a powerful protectorate. However, how to complete this program, whether the principle of nationality should receive the divergent application given to it today; if Italy does not detach herself from Austria and get rid of her absolutist sovereigns only to become an independent power, at the gates of France; if Hungary rises only to remake, on other principles and with an increase in vigor, the empire of the Habsburgs; if the Rhine is agitated only to unite in a single empire thirty-six million Germans; if Russia, finally, which it would be a question of dividing, must gather under its scepter all the Slavs? What becomes of the Napoleonic Idea in this overflow of nationalities? Isn’t it a second battle of Leipsig that we will have lost soon? So, deceived in his calculations, forced to fall back on his capital, the Emperor will have to reckon with the country, with the liberals, republicans, socialists, decentralizers. Is it Jacobinism that will save him?.…

Such, then, was the deplorable situation in which Napoleon III found himself after the battle of Solferino. In the presence of the Italian movement which declares itself for unity and for Victor Emmanuel, if the Emperor of the French fulfills his program against Austria to the end, he betrays military France and gives himself up; if he stops halfway through his career, he breaks his word to Victor-Emmanuel and betrays Italy. Naturally, he prefers the latter option: as much ardor as he has put in pursuing Austria, so much he will now endeavor to prevent Italian unity. Let us now count his defeats.

Under the pretext of stopping the revolutionary torrent, but in reality to prevent the expansion of Piedmont, Napoleon III stipulates with Franz-Joseph an Italian Confederation. Ridiculous monument of an inexpiable fault! We know what happened to the Treaty of Villafranca, how much the signature of Napoleon III weighed. — Battle lost.

Garibaldi leaves for his expedition to Sicily: the imperialist papers fulminate against the condottiere; the government of the Tuileries informs that of Turin. But the Garibaldians, the Mazzinians, the Cavourians laugh at the warnings of His Imperial Majesty; Sicily is conquered and annexed to the kingdom of Italy. — Battle lost.

At least Garibaldi will not have Naples. On the advice of the Emperor, King Francis II hastened to grant a constitution to his subjects: he was told that it was too late. By the same advice, the unfortunate king asks Victor-Emmanuei for an alliance, who refuses it, and Garibaldi enters Naples. — Battle lost.

The Emperor clings to the Pope. He authorizes General Lamoricière to take command of the pontifical army; allows in France the collections of money, which he stops today; gives or allows the papal army to hope for the help of the French army; seeks to intimidate the Turin government, which ignores the intimidation, and continues to act in the fullness of its independence. Defeat of Lamoricière by Cialdini, which amounts to saying: Battle lost by Napoleon III against Victor Emmanuel.

The King of Italy then publishes his manifesto. It is a perfectly reasoned argument, and ad hominem, in which the principles of the French Revolution and of 1815, freedom, constitutional guarantees, the end of the temporal power of the Popes, the European balance, combine with those of the empire and Jacobinism, unity, indivisibility, centralization, nationality, natural borders. The Emperor is defeated at the same time, both by revolutionary tradition, and by treaties, and by his imperial idea: what do you expect him to answer?

But, it is said, Savoy and Nice are glorious compensations; they have uplifted France and nullified the treaties of 1815. Truly, the patriots of Jacobinism are easy to please. They make it clear to what extent Napoleon III is the man of their choice, an emperor according to their heart. What would Louis-Philippe have been told if, under the guise of redrawing the political map of Europe and reforming the treaties of 1815, he had allowed his son-in-law King Leopold to incorporate eighteen million souls, while he himself would have been awarded 500,000?… Alas! Of what advantage, then, can imperial France be to poor Savoy, with its snows, its marmots and its cretins? What a boost to the future Western empire! Napoleon I told the Swiss, at the height of his power, that he did not want their country; Napoleon III is less disgusted, he takes Savoy. The Savoyards stretched out their hands; it is for this that they gave themselves. As for Nice, which had to be contained by terror from the first day, Nice which wants to be French no more than Venice wants to be Austrian, it will at least be, until further notice, in this universal apathy in which dies France, a hotbed of conspiracy.

Everything turns out badly for the unfortunate emperor; everything becomes disappointment, failure. Never did a more treacherous star shine on the brow of a prince; never did a will-o’-the-wisp betray the lost traveler more cruelly. A meeting of German princes takes place in Baden. He appears there. What a figure he made there, God and Europe know. — Battle lost.

Another interview, more solemn still, takes place in Warsaw. He does not appear there. The great powers, England, Russia, Austria, Prussia, despite their reciprocal grievances, despite the extreme divergence of their interests, are in agreement on one point: Napoleon III is left to himself; France is isolated, as it was in 1840. — Battle lost.

It is the Coalition that is reforming! shout the Jacobins with rage. — Would to God! The peoples would turn to France; with the sympathy of the peoples would return power and glory. But no, there is no coalition: on the contrary. No one dreams of attacking France. With regard to the events in Italy, the Prince Regent of Prussia declares, it is true, that he could not, as a man, approve of the conduct of Victor-Emmanuel with regard to the Pope and the King of Naples, but that the principles of his government do not allow him to attack it. For his part, the Emperor François-Joseph entered the way of constitutions by giving his patent of October 20th. Finally, while Russia works for the emancipation of her serfs, gravitating in her turn towards The constitutional system, England informs the world, through the mouth of Lord John Russell, whom she supported to the end, against the Emperor of the French and notwithstanding the observations of the other powers, the unity, independence and constitutional reorganization of Italy. As if he had said: Frenchmen, who you believe are always threatened by coalitions, know it then: the counter-revolution is no longer in Berlin, nor in Petersburg, nor in Vienna; it is in Paris. What a rout!

With Italy slipping away, one chance still remained: the union of Belgium and the Rhine with France. Immediately the newspapers of the empire open the campaign. Belgium, they exclaim, stretches out its arms to the Emperor; she sighs after incorporation; it asks only to become French. But Belgium is strongly opposed to incorporation; it organizes its national fires, and gives to liberal, peaceful and conservative Europe, the certainty that it needed, namely, that the Belgian people were perfectly resolved to remain independent and free. Those who had initially spoken against the project of fortification of Antwerp rally to it now; a rapprochement is taking place between Holland and Belgium, and it is against France that the Brabançonne is now being sung. What a disappointment!

The war having broken out between Spain and Morocco, despite the representations of England, Napoleon III gave his support to Spain. For a moment it seemed that the English influence in the Peninsula was going to pass entirely to France. To hasten this result, the emperor proposes, the war with Morocco ended, to admit Spain to the number of the great powers. But now the Spaniards take it the wrong way: the Madrid newspapers think it wrong that the Emperor of the French meddles in the affairs of their nation; the memories of 1809 to 1814 are awakened; in any event, the Spanish army, returned from Africa, is staggered along the frontier. Such is the confidence inspired by the words of the leader of the French, such is the opinion people have of him.

Is it true now that France is hermetically blocked? To the north, England and the Netherlands; to the east, Prussia and the Germanic Confederation; further on Austria; in reserve Russia; to the southeast, Italy; in the south, Spain. Not a state, neither of the first, nor of the second, nor of the third order, whose friendship we have preserved; we have lost even the esteem of the United States.

Forced to cultivate the English alliance, as Louis-Philippe had done, Napoleon III, after threatening England from the top of his fortress of Cherbourg and causing the song of war to be sung against the English, found himself quite happy and at ease to offer his hand to Lord Palmerston. He asks her for a probity certificate. He proposes to bring the two nations still closer together by a treaty of commerce, according to the English principles of free trade. England accepts the treaty, and then continues to mock the Emperor. The French ambassador, M. de Persigny, protests, at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, of the Emperor’s desire to live in perpetual peace with England. Lord Palmerston replies that he congratulates the Emperor on his good will, but that England will continue her armaments none the less. Is that enough humiliation? Who, at this hour stands the head of the nations in Europe? Is it France or England?

Beaten everywhere, demoralized and losing his head, Napoleon III sometimes tried to justify himself. He deigns to speak to his people, to his faithful Jacobins, sometimes through the pen of M. Laguéronière, sometimes through that of Sieur Boniface. What did he say in his October 23 manifesto?

I am a bird, see my wings;
I am a mouse, long live the rats!

A pitiful attempt at doctrinaire politics, renewed from the worst times of the Restoration and the dynasty of July, when Revolution and Reaction are caressed in turn, and which made men of all parties shrug their shoulders, even those who don’t belong to any party. Is Napoleon III currently with François II or with Victor-Emmanuel? With the Papacy or against the Papacy? With the Church or with the Revolution? Whatever party he takes, his policy remains unjustifiable: all these marches and counter-marches constitute on his part, and for everyone, betrayal.

No, say the Bonapartists; this is how politics is conducted: all this is comedy… Comedy! And for whose benefit is it being played? Consider the situation in which Imperial France finds itself placed by this clever comedy.

We do not yet know what will become of Italian unity, pursued with ardor by the three great parties, — Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi, — supported by England, justified by the Jacobinic and imperial tradition, protected by Napoleon III, who could not defend himself from protecting Piedmont, his ally, but prevented by this same Napoleon who refused to evacuate Rome.

If this unity is achieved, the powers last summoned to Warsaw lose nothing. Far from it, a unified Italy is one more fortress against France. Austria herself, it is the opinion of many people, would lose little by it: by effecting her constitutional transformation, she would rather find in Italy, either against France or against Russia, a point of support. France alone would find itself tighter, and relatively diminished; but Napoleon III would not have the right to claim the smallest compensation, since it was he who, by his alliance with Piedmont and his war against Austria, would have brought about this unification.

If, on the contrary, unity is not achieved, the situation for France is no less unfortunate, and that of the powers no less beautiful. First, the only obstacle to the unity of Italy being the will of the Emperor of the French, it follows that the real adversary of nationalities would be him; the support of absolutism and theocracy, him again. But one thing would remain no less certain for Italy, the establishment of a constitutional regime in all the states of the Peninsula and their confederation. Under these conditions, Italy would be an equally formidable power; according to the Italian federalists, it would be more so. In any case, through the policy of Napoleon III, France finds itself more than before confined within its limits; its expansion is stopped short: the Napoleonic empire becomes nonsense.

Italy revolutionized and centralized, or at least confederated, Spain inaccessible, Belgium and the Rhine placed under the protection of Europe, the Emperor of the French found himself reduced to impotence. Like formerly M. Guizot, like M. Thiers, like Louis-Philippe, he is forced, while chomping at the bit, to bow before the treaties of Vienna; and as one consequence leads to another, the recognition of the European balance, according to the data of 1815, involves for France the return to the constitutional regime, either monarchical or republican, that is to say, for the Emperor, abdication.

If that is what Jacobinism wants, well and good: we agree with it. But then, why declaim so much against the old parties, whose only fault is to have recognized, for forty-five years, this inevitable law of treaties? Why accuse the government of the Restoration, and that of Louis-Philippe, and that of the Republic, when it is proven that these governments did by wisdom what that of Napoleon III does today by constraint? From what front can we maintain that this government, which, by its useless Crimean expedition, by its absurd campaign in Italy, by its immoral despotism, has precipitated the French nation into a long and perhaps irreparable decadence, from what front can we dare to say that it raised up this same nation, that it restored its prestige to it, that it healed it of its wounds, that it avenged its wrongs, by tearing up the treaties of 1815 and changing the public right of Europe?

Ah! please look a little where you are, and do not put words in the place of things. Is it true, yes or no, that the thought of 89, I speak of political thought only, is constitutional, representative, and parliamentary government, organized either under the monarchical form as in England, or under the republican form as in the United States? Now, while the whole of Europe, obeying this fundamental thought, marches with great might on the road to liberty, France alone, tormented by her Jacobinic passions and her Caesarian fantasies, has never ceased to retrogress towards the ancient absolutism. England, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Saxony, Germany, Württemberg, Hesse, Hanover, Baden, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria itself, Moldo-Walachia, Russia, Servia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, all shout in Europe: Forward! ahead! Only Bonaparte’s France responds: Back!

Inquisitorial Spain has driven out its monks; it has become constitutional.

Italy, papal and imperial, has just become constitutional.

Austria, apostolic and absolutist, in turn took the constitutional path.

Prussia; and all Germany with her, forgetting her historical right, affirms the constitutional principles.

Russia, working for the emancipation of her serfs, is preparing for a constitution.

France alone, Voltairean France, revolutionary, democratic, socialist, is remade Jesuit, monastic, imperial. It replaced the feather with the saber and the bottle brush. Liberty has become a European idea; but it is no longer a French idea. In France, it was sacrificed to the Napoleonic Idea. And now the Napoleonic Idea is convicted today of impotence: we have lost the joys of liberty, but we will not have those of conquest. The cord has formed around us; the peoples withdraw; the powers shrug their shoulders; we are not threatened, we are pitied; and while we dream of a new Holy Alliance against the principles that we have ceased to represent, we are limited to friendly requests to live in peace at home, if we can. To all our complaints, to all our boasting, we oppose, like a shield, these invincible words: “Respect for treaties! Respect for nationalities! Respect for liberties, foundation of right and principle of equilibrium.” Frenchmen as blind as they are brave, you want to come back to the treaties of Vienna. What do you mean by that? Does Belgium want you? Does the Rhine want you? Does Italy want you? Just come back to yourselves, and understand that what was, in 1815, the expression of the rigorous right of war, has become over time, and through your fault, the expression of the will of the people.

Let us summarize and dare to conclude.

What, for more than sixty years, after the lightning of 89, has determined in France the exaggeration of militarism, and consequently the decadence of the nation? It is Jacobinic thought, in other words, imperial idealism.

Just as the Roman democracy, after having conquered the patriciate, instead of seeking its development in right and liberty, demanded it from a dictatorship organized for its profit and always armed; in the same way French democracy, after having vanquished divine right and put in its place the right of man, instead of following its new principle, attached itself to a despotism that, by redoubled energy, was to assure it the spoils of the world and the benefits of the old feudal state. From the year 1789, the light of the Revolution was darkened in the smoke of the Jacobins club; the eclipse is complete under Robespierre. The completely military constitution of the Consulate and the Empire came out of that. The results were not long in coming: Caesarism was the cause of the decadence and fall of the Roman Empire (Study IX, chap. V); the same Caesarism began the decadence of the French nation and will bring about its dissolution if it is not stopped.

The first Bonaparte, much less by the temper of his genius than by the ideal of which he was the representative, rendered himself fatal to France, odious to Europe. What he was, it was Jacobinism that made him, a false politician, a false conqueror, a false great man. Bonaparte, in all his proclamations, in his articles in the Moniteur, in his correspondence, is never anything but a demagogue. Like his masters the Jacobins, he had no principles: we saw him when, after 18 Brumaire, he pretended to want to come to an agreement with Sieyès for a Constitution, and later, when, after his return from the island of Elba, he tried to deceive people’s minds by his Additional Act.

Napoleon III does not represent an idea more than his uncle, neither that of 1789, nor that of 1814 or 1830, nor that of 1848. He understood nothing of the march of the century; his whole policy is to keep France in suspense and to agitate Europe by a display of boastfulness and the exhibition of false successes. Nothing will remain of the passage of this dynasty, except spilled blood, ruinous prodigalities, and the nervousness of generations. We are talking about nationality. The Bonapartes continue for the French people the series of those foreigners whose influence was so unfortunate for them: Catherine de Medici, the Spaniards under the League, Marie de Medici and her favorite Concini, Mazarin, Law, Necker himself, Napoleon I and Napoleon III. Doesn’t it seem like a mockery of fate? The people who pride themselves on so much nationality, who boast so loudly of their patriotism, who undertake to emancipate peoples, are perhaps the ones who have most frequently given themselves up abroad. Compared with these individual influences, the invasions of 1814 and 1815 were nothing: Alexander and Wellington were not masters for us, but liberators.

Napoleon III wanted, like his uncle, absolute power. This constitutional monarchy, with which the old dynasties of Europe are content, with which Victor-Emmanuel covers himself like a shield, he deemed unworthy of him, unworthy of his genius. He wanted to be sole master, saying like the other: I take responsibility for it.

Well, since he declared himself responsible (Constitution of January 14, 1859, art. 5), let him submit to his own law. The law of an absolute sovereign, or of one who affects absolutism, and who is mistaken, whom events condemn, is abdication. Napoleon I abdicated twice, in 1814 and 1815; Charles X abdicated; Louis-Philippe abdicated; Ferdinand IV, uncle of Franz Joseph, abdicated; Charles-Albert, father of Victor-Emmanuel, abdicated. Strange Power of Principles! In order to preserve the monarchs and their dynasties from the peril of this pitiless responsibility, the creators of the constitutional system made the ministers, no longer representing the thought of the prince but that of the majorities, solely responsible: this is why, according to the laws of the constitutional and parliamentary system, any minister whose actions condemn him and who loses the majority must resign. Let Napoleon III therefore abdicate, since he wanted to; since it is neither M. de Persigniy, nor M. Fould, nor M. Thouvenel who answer for him. Let him abdicate, for never was abdication better deserved and more necessary. One does not kick against the sting of Fate.

Post-Scriptum.—The pages that you have just read were already composed, when the imperial decree of November 25th reached us, which authorizes the Senate and the Legislative Body to vote each year an address in reply to the speech of the Emperor, and allows the deputies to discuss government bills in secret committee.

Everyone agrees to see in this act a retreat of despotism, and we share this feeling. It is not, it is true, the Emperor who abdicates, as we ask; it is the Empire that is leaving. Napoleon III is in the process of depositing his Additional Act. As he insists on his job, he will not have the heroism to leave power after reversing his judgment. Thus France will have sacrificed ten years of rest, of liberty, of progress, of honour, of immense wealth, to carry out an experiment, and to demonstrate to the conspirator of Strasbourg and Boulogne that his Napoleonic Idea was a utopia!

As for Europe, it has every reason to congratulate itself. France’s return to constitutional principles, however insignificant, is a pledge given to international equilibrium and the development of political liberties. Napoleon III had been defeated by the patent of the Emperor Franz-Joseph; he takes his revenge by his decree of November 25th. Is it clear that absolutism has become impossible?

The Bonapartists celebrate the magnanimity of Napoleon III: a little longer, it will be he who will have invented the constitutional system. We shall soon see what use MM. the Deputies and Senators will be able to make of their new prerogative.

Yes, the decree of November 25 is a serious act because of the causes that determined it, of which we have just given a rapid enumeration. But let us not flatter ourselves too much. The liberties granted by the Emperor to the great bodies of the State were reduced to very little, and nothing guaranteed them. What a decree has granted, a decree could take back, without the nation having the right, as in 1880, to protest. Napoleon III feels at this moment the need to throw the responsibility for his ten-year policy upon the Country: that is all. What can he fear from a Senate and a Legislative Body made up of his creatures? The address approved by vote, that is to say, the approval he seeks obtained, a new lease begins: and from renewal to renewal, we can arrive at a total exhaustion. But Napoleon III will have reaped the fruit of his plots, and, as Louis XV said, après nous le déluge.

(1) There has just appeared, under the name of M. JEAN REYNAUD, a biography of Merlin (de Thionville), in which it is demonstrated, by reasoning and by facts, that the policy of war is contrary to the interests of the Republic and the principles of the Revolution. This publication is said to have been a great success. It is one more testimony to record, of the collapse of imperialism and the triumph of liberty.

END OF THE TENTH STUDY.