French Morality

III.—LAWS FOR REPRESSION.

“He was convinced that good could only flow, in a State, through the channel of the laws; that the way to make a benefit lasting was by practising the virtue of following them; that the way to make an evil lasting was by practising the vice of hindering their effect; that the duties of princes did not less consist in defending the laws against the passions of others than against their own personal ones.”—Montesquieu, Arsace et Isménie.

“The liberty which shows favour to the passions and licentiousness is a fatal license, a fresh yoke, a shameful slavery; and the rule of good morals is the leading principle of the happiness of empires.”—Massillon.

If woman too frequently acquiesces in depravity, man makes choice of it; it is against this active agent of corruption, therefore, that societies for the maintenance of the integrity of their original laws should fortify themselves beforehand; we moreover see ancient and purer civilisations ward off decay by prosecuting those who pay for prostitution, and by involving the accomplices of a common sin in a common punishment.

The best ages of Greece and Rome exhibit to us an extreme severity against breaches of good morals. So long as the body of laws framed by Lycurgus remained in force at Sparta, prostitution was unknown there. The laws of Solon followed up immoral men with an inexorable rigour, by requiring a public examination into the morals of those who were looking forward to public appointments; they degraded public officials of every rank discovered in a brothel, and declared the citizen who had been seen there a single time unworthy to serve his country. Independently of the archon commissioned to try these matters, every Athenian had the right and the obligation of prosecuting for the prostitution of a woman or of a child; in certain cases the criminals were put to death. Prostitutes, 22banished from society, wore a peculiar uniform. We observe similar regulations existing in the Roman republic, where the censor of morals degraded dissolute functionaries, and branded the citizen with disgrace who made prostitutes of his slaves or freed women-servants. Panders could not make over their property, nor sue in law, nor be sworn, nor retain legal authority over their children. Every harbourer and accomplice of a prostitute was condemned to the same punishment as herself. This wise legislation did not survive the ruin of liberty, and profligacy was the fruit of the system of governing which substituted the informer for the censor.

When the world-wide Roman empire had perished through excess of sensual gratification, Christianity caused the old laws to be resuscitated; and Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian put them in practice in Gaul; the last-mentioned ruler put panders to death. These measures corresponded in other things, for Gaul, to the mind of the Germans who, after dragging through a horse-pond men convicted of prostitution, threw a hurdle on their bodies and sunk them to the bottom of the slough.^[18] With the same penalties, Charlemagne subsequently punished prostitutes, their accomplices and harbourers, who were all whipped together. Our parliaments condemned those who paid for prostitution to a whipping, to temporary transportation, to the galleys, to fine, to confiscation of their property, and to the iron collar. St. Louis, who had shielded the destitution of women against profligacy, had incorrigible girls and the gentlemen, their accomplices, publicly flogged with the same whip. Philip the Bold, following up his father’s work, assigned to prostitution specific districts within which it was to be strictly confined. Charles V. likewise contributed to the moral amelioration of the nation; but, in the following reign, the precarious position of women, the 23effect of the war, and the excesses of the troops, again plunged France into serious profligacy.

The totality of our old legislation exhibits everywhere a considerable degree of severity against procurers and libertines; the decrees of our parliaments, and the proclamations of the provosts of Paris, often branded the former with disgrace, and condemned them to death; they had them even buried alive when they had cajoled women by flatteries or presents. A bill of the 15th century gives the cost of a dozen new brooms used at the execution of some procuresses, who had their ears cropt, were put in the pillory, whipped, and afterwards burnt.

At other times the brothel-keeper was led through the town, mounted on an ass, with her face to the animal’s tail; afterwards the executioner branded her with a hot-iron and expelled her from the locality. In the 18th century several examples of this kind of punishment occur, and it was inflicted in Paris as recently as A.D. 1756.

Every one conspired to punish the mother infamous enough to procure her daughter’s prostitution; the spectators beat her with rods, and the executioner cut off her nose.

The agents of profligacy were, in like manner, punished if they lent clothes or money to a woman of ill fame, with the design of encouraging her profligacy; the things supplied could not be legally re-demanded, and if an attempt were made to regain them by force from the woman to whom they had been lent, or to take others in way of compensation, they were prosecuted as thieves.

How far were our ancestors from this modern progress, which gives us, in the case of procuresses of infamy, ladies of the house sufficiently respected and sufficiently respectable to find husbands, and legionaries for sons-in-law! Oh, honour! Oh, my country!

These vile creatures, the objects of the just severity of laws, 24were marked out for public contempt by infamous designations; we may judge of that by the vehement indignation of old authors against this disgusting traffic, which was formerly looked upon, in France, and with so much reason, as the most horrible of crimes.

“What else do the procurers, if not restore, in their entirety, all the detestable slaveries abolished by law—to effect better than before the sale of men?”

“As for panders and procuresses,” exclaims another writer, “they are quite insufferable as enemies to respectability, betrayers of matronly and maidenly modesty, assassins of holy human society, traitors to the lawful succession of true heirs, firebrands of hell, and faithful interpreters of the filthy mind.”

This severity did not extend to the victim of loose morals, to whom the path of re-instatement was ever open.^[19] If we did not know how much unreasonableness and cruelty there are in a corrupt nation, we might learn it in the fact that France began to treat the common prostitute with severity at the close of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War had ruined the country, and when the excesses of the troops and the profligacy of the Court were beginning to extinguish the national morality; then, the birth of a free class developing personal responsibility, called for the means of livelihood for the friendless woman, who was getting them by the sale of her person; for the writers of that age attribute the progress of public corruption to the difficulty which women found in living by respectable means.

The Journal du Bourgeois de Paris, 1445, thus expresses itself:—“At that time, when everyone learned how to earn, wages were so bad that respectable women, who had learned how to earn five or six blancs a day, were willingly letting themselves out for two, and living on them.”

25This sad picture sufficiently resembles that of the fifth quarter of the working day, which disgraces our time. Let it be observed, however, that instead of trying to ameliorate woman’s position by work, she was punished for not finding any at all. The edicts of the time overwhelm her by extending indulgence to her purchasers, who, beginning from that period, acquired new prerogatives daily. A writer on morals is, with reason, astonished at the cruelty of the 16th century in this respect. “It is,” he says, “truly remarkable, that never were royal and municipal enactments against public women more frequent or severe than during this period of disorder. No pity was shown to public prostitutes at a period when decency and shame seemed banished from morals.”^[20]

This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. When the French people, wallowing at a later period in the unchastity of royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of love to be enthroned on its altars, it offered, on the revolutionary scaffold, the innocence, beauty, and attractions of women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then the guillotine gathered its harvest from the young girls of Verdun, as the scythe cuts off a basket of lilies.

Nevertheless, in its moral debasement hitherto, France had made profligacy a privilege and not a right. If the nobles had freed themselves from the curb, if the middle class was irritated by it, the lower orders still endured it, and, up to the Revolution, the prison of St. Lazare tried to reform immoral men, over whom the Government reserved a discretionary power. Young people of dissolute morals, under 25, picked up by the police, were confined at La Salpétrière, and at Bicêtre; severe penalties were also attached to the prostituting of modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our decline since that period, let us recall the enactment of 6th 26November, 1778, which prohibits provoking to debauchery in the public street,^[21] and enjoins upon tavern and lodging-house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine of 200 to 500 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons they admit. The police, who made a strict inspection of these houses, brought into court the tavern and the lodging-house keepers guilty of harbouring women of doubtful character, and, in the event of their transgressing a second time, had their houses closed. When the Revolution abolished the old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose of establishing fresh ones, the lower orders, in their saturnalia, again became violators of women—a crime which, after having destroyed the aristocracy, was ruining the middle class. The Convention, alarmed at excesses which were threatening the very foundations of social order, thought to nip the evil in the bud, by enacting the distant deportation of abandoned women; but the instability of its short-lived powers did not admit the application of this measure.

Notwithstanding that, the feverish activity of the nation, its sacrifices during the wars of the Republic and the Empire, greatly restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitution, which Napoleon I. regarded with horror.^[22] M. M. Pasquier and D’Anglés subsequently made a demand, but vainly, for effectual measures for extirpating this social canker; in presence of its rapid progress, honest magistrates and upright counsellors felt the necessity of having the old enactments put again in force. Tavern-keepers, harbourers of prostitutes were, at the instance of the public ministry, often brought before the Court of Correctional Police, and condemned to a fine, by the application to them of the enactment 27of 6th November, 1778. The Court of Cassation had quashed these verdicts but three times up to the year 1866, when the before-mentioned enactment received its last application from the Correctional Court of the Seine, which expressed the wish to see the laws of former times again put in force in modern legislation. Since that period, our judges, alleging their limited powers, declare that the fact of the tavern-keepers admitting prostitutes is only a breach of police-regulations, satisfied by a fine fixed at five francs, by the application of the article 471, No. 15, of the Penal Code.^[23] It is useless to say that this fresh moral weakness, by rendering the most cynical impunity in these immoralities certain, permits young men freely to indulge in illicit intercourse. Our Code referring all the means for repression to the police, it remains to be seen how this discretionary power acts with respect to the pander who procures the debauchery, to the man who pays for it, and to the woman who is the subject of it.

The brothel-keeper, as we know, acquires a right, even a monopoly, by becoming the mistress of a licensed brothel; her privileges are sacred to the degree that no one may meddle with them as regards that matter. I have no longer to touch upon the respect we owe to the ladies of the house, and I pass over that infamy. As for the individual sufficiently degraded to seek for the gratification of his brutal appetite in debauchery, he is under the very special protection of the public power, which keeps watch, night and day, to sanction his rights. The police by the Vagrants’ Act, it is true, strike down in the lower classes a few debauchees among respectable people, but for every man who has a home there is no curb; the “magistrate for morals” goes so far even as to object to the tears and supplications of a mother who implores him to take pity on the soul of her son, losing his health, money, and honour in brothels.

28Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the sin by a threefold fear, our society even tries to take that fear away from him by using the utmost solicitude to set him free from every duty in contriving, if possible, to rid him of those selfish subjects of prior interest for him, which might have proved his safeguard upon the brink of ruin. The sanitary visits and the imprisonment of women guilty of not having kept the debauchee unharmed, cost nearly half a million in Paris. Let an approximate calculation be made for our other towns, and it will be apparent how valuable a citizen, in the interests of public order, is the frequenter of permitted brothels. His cynicism will have victims, above all among those women who have no material independence, and no moral development. We know the fate of the common prostitutes who, formerly kept down by laws applied equally to their accomplices, are now accounted for nothing in the eye of the law, for the profit of these same accomplices.^[24] The girl of the town is no longer a person, she is a thing in the eye of a species of roving commission, which gives its stamp of security to the bargain; prostitution is no longer an unspeakable infamy, it is a social want, as necessary as, more imperious even, than nutriment in the opinion of the legislator, since he does not permit a theft which might even be the sole means of appeasing a devouring hunger, whilst he is destroying human dignity and social justice in the interest of debauchery. The lower-class girl becomes as the sweepings of the streets, will be imprisoned therefore, not for her immoral way of getting a living, but for not complying with the law after the markets are closed, or for want of customers; because, from the moment she accepts an offer, she escapes from the control of 29the police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of debauchery are termed service of morals; they are usually made by old soldiers—models, doubtlessly of chastity—in a military spirit, who have the right to treat, without ceremony, every woman guilty of walking about, and who will be looked upon as prostituted if she has no relatives to claim her. An absolute judge gives his sentence, without any appeal, for condemning this one to be registered, that to be imprisoned; if, week by week, they do not present themselves for detestable investigations, they will be imprisoned as persons guilty of intended prostitution. Twelve verdicts of guilty of this kind are, on an average, pronounced daily at Paris, to the gain of profligacy. In our seaports, the police, established for the security of evil, intrude even upon domestic privacy to oblige female servants to be enrolled.

The intense nausea this system has lately caused France may make apparent to what kind of despotism it gives up self-dependent women. Moreover, if a head official is continued in power after the mistakes which are the necessary consequence of his orders, it is a crying injustice; if he is deprived, it is as great an injustice, since this victim is sacrificed for having done what he considered his duty. Our machinery for morals will remain for ever an evidence of the degree of barbarity which depraved communities may attain to; let us not expect anything more humane from them, and if we have forgotten the history of prostitution in ancient France, let us recall that when slavery had developed in the Roman Empire those excesses which are consistent with the right of citizenship among ourselves, Tiberius was compelled to put down the incontinence of women, and Domitian issued sumptuary edicts against women of loose morals. The protection accorded to the immoralities of the man is the cause of the incessant persecution of the girl of the town; she alone is followed up in furnished rooms 30and hotels, which are likewise the refuge of the workwoman, the female-servant, and the art-worker without employment, who, when there, find themselves the subjects of the harsh misconstructions of the police, who are invested with the right of intruding upon, and of arresting them at any minute. Immorality has, from this motive, gone to the length of driving women from our boarding-houses who were trying to get a respectable living. In 1845, the Prefect of the Seine, acting on the express order of the Minister of Public Instruction, issued a regulation prohibiting mistresses of boarding-houses and secular institutions from receiving women-lodgers as boarders, and ordered them, under the penalty of a prompt closing of their establishments, to turn out of doors, without delay or exception, those then residing with them. As a consequence of this severe measure, the modest woman, often not knowing where to rest her head, sees herself obliged to submit to the discretionary discipline of public girls. The convents, it is true, not being included in the regulation cited above, admit women very far advanced in pregnancy, who are presented to them by an ecclesiastic.

The young woman endowed with youth and beauty cannot show her face alone in our streets without being exposed to insulting looks and words; if she accept a situation behind a counter, in a spirit dealer’s establishment, she will, by the laws of 1861, fall under the action of the police, as guilty of corrupting young people.

To finish on the subject of this despotic law, it must be added, that a large number of places of public resort, of promenades, cannot be frequented by unaccompanied women, and that a quite recent regulation forbids every unaccompanied woman to enter any of our cafés on the boulevards. Formerly, public places of resort were forbidden to prostitution; at present, having obtained the wall-side there, it drives respectable people away from them.

31The anxiety of the Administration for the debauchee might, however, leave him some monetary miscalculations; but legislative enactment and legal exposition are on the watch, in their turn, like anxious mothers, that mistresses should not be too expensive. Every day our courts of law sanction the rights of prostitution by annulling his presents and debts, and issuing orders like this: “It exists as a principle in jurisprudence, that the individual who has excited to debauchery to gratify his own passions is by no means looked upon as guilty by our legislation.”^[25]

This solemn charter is confirmed in all the specific applications. Formerly our law courts, refusing their countenance to men whom they looked upon, and with justice, as the greatest disturbers of social order, refused to entertain any of their suits whatever, upon the ground of this old maxim of law; “Nemo auditur turpitudinem suam allegans.”^[26] Practically, those who support courtesans never appear before the judges except as complainants to claim protection, if these women owe or get money from them unfairly, or continue to use the name which they themselves had inscribed upon their crests.

Let us judge of the complicity of the courts of law by some facts recorded in our judicial annals, which constantly corroborate the same principles in similar occurrences. A clerk, convicted of having stolen 45,000 francs, which he had sent to his mistress, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, while the woman had to undergo five years of the same kind of punishment.^[27]

Justice sometimes goes so far as to punish the woman for the theft committed by him who keeps her. A young man of 20, after having freely prostituted himself with a courtesan, 32robbed his mother. The judge, by an inquisitorial examination, tried to make the thief acknowledge complicity on the part of the woman he was cohabiting with. He affirmed, on the contrary, that he left her in the belief that the money expended with her was part of the salary attached to his appointment. The court, however, let this precocious debauchee off, and sentenced the courtesan to 8 months’ imprisonment.^[28]

The young man who has not attained his majority thus meets with a special protection in corrupting himself; for, while our law courts, upon the pretence that it is swindling, annul the pecuniary engagements made with courtesans by men of all ages, they keep the young man under 21 especially safe. When robbery occurs, the fact of prostitution brings the two principles of family and property face to face, but the former is, in this matter, always sacrificed to the latter.

Military men, even officers, bring before the law courts the robbery of their epaulettes, which has been effected in a brothel; and, without any blame, without any penalty against these family destroyers, the Government or Magistrate, after imprisoning the woman inculpated, replaces the symbol of official honour on the shoulders of her accomplice in profligacy.

Has not the student, too, the privilege of declaring to our judges that he claims the repayment of 30, 40 francs, &c., pilfered by women with whom he was cohabiting; not only does the court not pronounce him guilty, it by no means seeks to know if this youth, the hope of his country, has been the cause of a wrong, irreparable, perchance, to society, by allying himself with abandoned women and outlawed youths, whom his irresponsibility in wickedness has urged on to commit larceny. It neither condemns this rebel against society 33to a fine nor to disgrace as a citizen, and, by imprisoning the woman, it proclaims the man’s right to be dissolute.

A well-known courtesan who lived in a splendid town-house in one of our wealthiest districts, was there receiving, every year, from her admirers, an income of about 100,000 francs. Carriages, liveries well known in the official world, were shamelessly standing at her door. In those orgies, which are only to be compared to the Babylonian nights, she boasted of having the particular charge of training young people. The police, forcing an entrance into her house, accused her of illegal gambling. It is unnecessary to say that the court did not sentence—did not even name, any of her high-placed accomplices; certain organs of the periodical press gave an account of this affair, and spoke of the courtesan under the appellation of amiable hostess, well-known in the fashionable world of Paris for the choice suppers she gave. Our jurisprudence is still the zealous protectress of these men who manifest an equal shamelessness in tricking out the courtesan with their heraldic name, and taking it from her when they are in search of the marriage portion necessary to restore their fortune impaired by profligacy. With an unfeeling barbarity they then set to work to drag their discarded mistress before the courts of law, to take her ducal coronet from her, to efface the coats-of-arms they had themselves engraven upon her carriage, and, at length, to have her sentenced for usurping the titles of the aristocracy.

The seducer unpunished, (what do I say,) protected, encouraged! is not even prosecuted for the purchase of girls under age; for our code only recognises guilt where this traffic is made a regular calling. As to the seller bungling enough to fulfil all the required conditions, he renders himself liable to an imprisonment of from one month to five years, and to a fine of from 50 to 500 francs; but the full extent of the punishment being never imposed, the risk is small, the 34advantage certain from the time that the sale of a young girl can fetch, from 1,500 to 10,000 francs. No search for, no mention even is made in any case of these monsters with a human face, who have a constant right to the produce of this horrible traffic; no indemnification is granted to the wretched parents from whom the victims have been carried off by stratagem. I have already cited the solemn right which the spirit of our laws acknowledges for those who procure debauchery on their own account. Different decrees declare that Article 334 of the Penal Code, relating to the exciting to debauchery, is not applicable to this kind of crime. Even when there has been systematic persuasion, cleverly exercised by a man of ripe years upon a girl under age hurried away from a respectable way of life, our courts acknowledge that they have no means of bringing the guilty person to justice.

To the privileges I have just enumerated, prostitution on the part of the man adds that of honour intact. Every time a punishment loses anything in its degree of publicity, or is no longer available for an act that is blameable and hurtful to society, the cry of public opinion is stifled; its isolated manifestations remain powerless, especially when they are looked upon as a crime. Then indignation, no longer finding a free course, a tacit acquiescence, which may be thought a voluntary one, gives daily, new force to the reign of vice, and a great confusion of principle exists between good and evil. It must be confessed, with sorrow, never did civilization in this matter protect evil with more effrontery than ours does. Respect for the man of dissolute morals is, among ourselves, imposed by a system of vicious laws which furnish him with an impenetrable breast-plate; he is able to brave, and he does brave, honour and duty, beneath the shield of the interdiction of investigation to discover the father of illegitimate children, and by the law which refuses to admit proof in cases of libel, and forbids the making known any act of private life. If he 35is in the service of the State or of his country, his irresponsibility will be still greater; his freedom from annoyance will follow him even in death, for society has further provided that his vices may sleep in the grave with him. Sullied by baseness, he will even receive distinctions that will enrol him in the list of those chosen for official rewards. Do not let us be any longer surprised, then, at the discredit into which these rewards are falling; for, if the cross of honour is given to a man who has deserved well of his country, it will lose its value if a man who has done nothing remarkable obtains it also; it will fall into contempt if a despicable man can get it. Hence result the indifference and disdain which, in depraved societies, certain men profess for official honours, whose symbols which might serve as a safeguard against infamy, they sometimes refuse to wear.

The study of our present subject has shown us a thorough absence of discretionary measures and of penal laws against prostitution in men—a fact unheard of, I think, in the history of civilizations based on the principle of the family.

Is this culpable toleration the effect of a general relaxation of morals? Is it possible to reform our laws? This is what every serious mind must ask itself in view of such a rapid downward course.

This consideration is so much the more important that, in its economical aspect, it is connected with the European balance of power. The relative strength of the powers especially consists, it will not be denied, in the manner, more or less effectual, which they adopt in order to maintain, together with the dignity of the man and the woman, the vigour of the child and the honour of the family. We see, in fact, that those nations only which sanction the principle of moral responsibility, have been able to preserve themselves from the decay which prostitution brings in its train. England,^[29] Sweden, 36Switzerland, Prussia, Saxony, the United States, &c., permit, as France in former times did, the private initiative in the closing of the places for debauchery; they refuse to allow the accomplices of prostitutes to bring any action for debt, and impose penalties for the immoralities which we both condone and surround with outward signs of splendour.^[30] On the contrary, we see the greatest slavery—that of the passions—among peoples which, having the likeness of liberty, are governed according to the French code. Thus Belgium, suffering from the like social wounds with ourselves, gives the title conversational drawing-room (salons de conversation), to places where young girls are to be bought, and where important personages go to be supplied.

Without pausing here upon all the economic consequences of debauchery, I shall draw attention to the fact that it enervates, enfeebles, and diminishes population, accumulating and scattering, besides, riches got without labour; and devoting to orgies food obtained by pinching the poor, it creates a pauperised community in the midst of one of sybarites.^[31]

The European nation which shall most imperfectly put down this vice will therefore be the weakest, the most unstable, and, consequently, the ripest for downfall. Experience teaches that this truth applies alike to ancient and modern civilizations.

37Moral responsibility, interpreted in Egypt, by the duty which the lawgiver imposed upon fathers and mothers of providing for their illegitimate children, and by their custom of passing judgment on the dead, had fashioned that granite people which will continue to be the wonder and admiration of all ages. So long as Greece and Rome preserved this Egyptian policy, whose light had been introduced among them by severe lawgivers, they were in a position to defy, in like manner, all external enemies; but, from the time that the absolutism of profligacy towards their slaves had hurried them along the downward path to ruin, they refused to submit to those wise laws, which had constituted their strength, and ensured a hopeful future. What vigour, what energy, did this unceasing control bestow upon the administrator! Despite the depravity which found its way into Greece, in the age of Pericles, still what a noble spectacle there is in the struggles of Æschines and of Demosthenes—in that immortal discourse upon the crown in which we perceive the heart of a free people throb in the reciprocal responsibility of the public man and his accusers!

It is, on the other hand, sad to consider the work of absolutism, not so much in the pyramids formed out of human carcases by the Genghis Khans and the Tamerlanes, as in the civilized systems, polished like the Roman Empire, that of the Low Countries and of France, in which are observed the highest development of material and intellectual progress side by side with moral decline.

Certes, reformers, moralists and satirists, were not wanting in the Roman empire. Honest men, saddened and indignant at the depravity of their age, tried to stem the muddy torrent which was hurrying it in the direction of degrading gratifications. What noble efforts we see, whether among the Catos, the Tacituses, and the Juvenals; or among the Origens, the Tertullians, and the Justins! What moral energy among 38the Stoics, who took for their maxim endurance and self-denial! What grandeur of soul among those obscure Christians, whose performance of the moral obligations which are based upon respect for the dignity of humanity, caused spiritual development to be carried to such a high degree! Did not this reformation, seated upon the throne itself, produce the admirable epoch of the Antonines!^[32]

Individual virtues were unable, notwithstanding, to save the empire, ruined as it was from the day when the rule of morals no longer found a place in either law or authority; from the moment when there were no longer either tribunes to denounce abuses, or censors to repress them. Yes, the Roman empire received its death-warrant at the inconsistent epoch in which Cæsar erected his vices into laws; in which Augustus destroyed, by his example, the morality he preached by his precepts; in which that censor of morals, who issued severe edicts against an unmarried seducer, who caused the consecrated fire to be maintained by the virgins on the altar of Vesta, being personally affected by the contagion of the period, secretly introduced the courtesan at home, by paying public and hypocritical honours to Livia. It is all over with that power which shall have for its moral law nothing more than the individual temperament of those who wield it, and Juvenal shall very soon utter his prophetic warning:—

Rome shall drink the poisoned cup by copious draughts; when the queen of the world shall have emptied the fatal 39beverage, God shall make a sign to the barbarians, and the Northern hordes shall arise. A thousand times unhappy should we be, similarly, if, by scandalous privileges, we continued to attract the dregs of the entire world which will sacrifice France’s future by corrupting her youth and her women. Before pointing out the remedies which the evil calls for, let us, however, see to what degree of horror its too great freedoms have brought the prostitution of the man.

IV.—MALE PROSTITUTION, AND PARTICULARLY THAT OF THE STUDENT, THE OFFICIAL, AND THE SOLDIER.

“May the unworthy man perish who makes a market of the heart, and renders love mercenary! He it is who covers the earth with the crimes that debauchery causes to be committed in it. How should she not be always for sale who has allowed herself to be bought once? And, in the ignominy into which she soon falls, who is the author of her wretchedness—the brute who ill-treats her in a place of bad repute, or the seducer who drags her there, by being the first to put a price on her favours.”—J. J. Rousseau.

“By refusing virtue the right of being the matter of primary importance, you have granted to vice the right of being so.”—M. Alex. Dumas, fils.

“There are bad examples worse than crimes; and more States have perished from violated morals than from infringed laws.”—Montesquieu.

The legislative impunity, the administrative and judicial protection granted to the excesses of the man, must take away from them the stigma of infamy, and, by making them universal, cause them to be lost sight of even to the very odiousness of their name. Every vice which forms part of a nation’s life is disguised under an honourable term. Thus prostitution is called gallantry, and to live in those bonds which degrade woman, suppress the child before or after its birth, and hurry society to ruin, is to divert one’s self, to be a man of pleasure, an agreeable companion, a captivating knight, &c. The facility with which young men can procure instruments of vice, wherever they go, the guardian-hand of the administration which goes with them for protection into the very haunts of profligacy have caused them to lose their moral sense to such a degree that their passions, nursed by habitual gratification, no longer acknowledge any check. Who has not heard those Societies spoken of which give their candidates 41formal banquets, to which every member, married or not, repairs, accompanied by one of his mistresses? Our towns are honoured by a crowd of illustrious “gaudins,” who call themselves followers-up of workwomen; of celebrated foreigners, earls and viscounts, &c.; hunting-dogs more or less clever at following up the track of hunger and destitution. Upon our boulevards, in our coffee-houses, at races, clubs, theatres, they riot and box for these women, whose champions they glory in being. Fathers, eldest sons, generals, literary men, bankers, &c., even dare to set themselves up as supporters of registered girls. They sign, without any shame, the letters they address to them, and have the assurance to go to the office of the commissioner of police to give themselves out as their lovers, and there to claim them.

Elsewhere such and such a man acknowledges that he is looking for a fortune by marriage to repair the inroads made on his heritage, by more than a hundred women he has kept. Young masters of establishments, where many workpeople are employed, are seen, moreover, reserving to themselves the right of choosing their mistresses in the workroom, and exacting that the mother of the work-girl, who is the sport of their whims, should keep a constant watch over her, and give her up to them herself. Certain fashionable foreigners look out in the “Petites Affiches” the addresses of women out of work, whom they engage under the title of servants, governesses, needlewomen, &c., and afterwards hand over to the public streets those who, having neither means of their own, nor savings, have been put in their power by hunger.^[34]

42In all classes we meet these men, whose polygamy, simultaneous or successive, has no other limits than the caprices of unbridled passion. This process of making licentiousness common, imparts to it, in the present day, an instability unknown even to the corruption of the 18th century, in which the courtesan was, so far as the aristocracy and the rich among the middle classes were concerned, a woman of inferior rank, with an assured status, like that of the legitimate wife; in practice, our dissipated men, rich and poor, allow their mistresses of a day to pass through every successive step in degradation. Such and such a youth writes down among the records of his life, the possession of a girl whom he was able to pay for three months or three days when he left college. Thus the debauchee, not rich enough to keep a mistress, obtains unlawful gratification on a species of five-percent. principle; it is the fact of the existence of these morals that gave occasion to the writing of this:—

But, in order to appreciate better an evil which is sapping society in its very foundations, let us especially consider those who symbolize truth, justice, law and national defence; that is to say, the student, the public official, and the soldier—the soldier who, previously enlisted to defend his country, seems to be no longer kept in pay but in order to corrupt her.

The young man’s course of depravity begins at college; the pestiferous atmosphere in which we are living causes bad books to find their way into our schools, where children are often detected reading the memoirs of our dancing and singing celebrities, to get acquainted with the details of their lives and that of their illustrious lovers; the greater part of them 43conceive the hope of following their elders in backstairs society, and their young imagination places its beau-ideal in the wealth acquired by corruption and for corruption.

The sayings of young men have been collected, of whom one claimed that the unlimited use of the horse, the cigar, and the mistress, should follow upon a course of philosophy; whilst another affirmed that it might be substituted for it with advantage. In fact, we have rhetoricians who fight duels on account of harlots. It is this type of libertine which affects a supreme contempt for modest women, rejects the advice of his elder sisters, the wise counsel of his mother, and would fear to be ridiculed among his fellow-students for his respectful conduct towards her. The manners of some of them are such that they glory in smoking in a carriage, in the presence of women, who seem to them too timid to remind them of the bye-laws.

Religion and the family oppose but a feeble obstacle to the profligacy of youths during the period of secondary instruction; but in that of the higher grade, the young man shaking off this uncomfortable check, inaugurates his life as a citizen by procuring a degraded mistress, who initiates him into every sort of wickedness.^[36]

The student away from home often lives in those social circles which are the most corrupting. It is incredible to what extent the guests at these social gatherings dread the company of respectable people. They give themselves out as ‘bored’ if they have to make their appearance at a family dinner, try to escape from a ball in good society, shun a drawing-room where they must observe some proprieties of behaviour, and curse every atmosphere which keeps them away 44from their cigar, their beer, the racket of the billiard-table, the public-house and the orgie where their nights are spent. Far from being ashamed of this kind of life, they have, as we can testify, the impudence to appear in our law courts as complainants, if the women with whom they are cohabiting rob them of a few francs. Students of law, medicine, &c., often picked up drunk in the streets, at two and three o’clock in the morning, are brought up for creating a disturbance at night. “You have,” the judge tells them, “ill-used women with whom you are cohabiting; but the fact of notorious profligacy is not an object of legal repression or even of censure.” A law student twice attempted to stab with a poinard one of his rivals who was seated at a table of the Eldorado café. The prosecution proved that this assassin had for four years been living with prostitutes in the most unrestrained debauchery.^[37] By an odd coincidence, the newspapers were giving a report of this degradation of a young man entrusted to our society, by an honourable family, for the sake of his education, viz., for the elevation of his mind and heart, on the very day that the Senate, after having approved of the irresponsibility of public officials, was adding a peroration to an address, to celebrate the principles of loyalty and morality in which we are bringing up the young. Let us look a little more closely at the language of facts, and we shall understand the unhappiness of parents compelled to have their sons brought up amidst circumstances in which the principles of loyalty and morality may be trampled under foot with a cynicism of this character. There is no longer such a thing as youth, some one exclaims with sadness, in taking notice of morals of this description. There is no longer a fatherland, one might rejoin. Are the domestic virtues, then, no longer the school for civil ones? If any guardianship, or disciplinary regimen, is exercised over students, apart 45from acts which do not fall within the penal law, is it logical to make them out to be so rigorous in discourses read to foreigners while shutting our eyes to the crimes I am enumerating? Should not tutors that have charge of the heart, from the time they stand in place of the absent family, take care of and be anxious about the morality and higher nature of these youths, who are the advance-guard of the future, and have been confided by France to their care? And yet this corruption, all odious though it be, is not to be placed by the side of the fierce selfishness of those students who, with a calculating heartlessness, seduce workwomen, artless girls who become attached to them. In order to show the connection between seduction and prostitution, I instance the following among those which abound on this melancholy subject:—

A rich foreign student, whose parents used to send him 600 to 700 francs monthly for his personal expenses, became acquainted with a young shopwoman living away from home in Paris. After keeping her for some time, he deserted her when she had told him she expected to become a mother. This woman in the most frightful poverty, reduced to bring forth her child in the street, was conveyed to the hospital. Despite the student’s unfeeling conduct to herself, she was hoping he would provide for the daughter she had given birth to; but he proceeded to take away from her her last hope, and informed her, when sending her 30 francs, that if she had the audacity to annoy him, French police and French law would very soon set all that to rights. Stunned by this last blow, the young girl never again arose from her bed of sorrow. Let us say, for the honour of human nature, that there was a general feeling of indignation among those who knew about this odious action; they did not know how to brand this selfish debauchee who imagined he could, with 30 francs, atone for the murder of a woman and the sacrifice of a 46child. I, however, consider he was generous, this student. The laws of his own country, sentencing him to allow the deserted child and agonised mother a means of support in proportion to his fortune, might, it is true, have imposed upon him a sufficient fine; but, as he was living under the personal advantage of a code of laws he had been wise enough to call in to his aid, as a protection for his profligacy, and as he was the sole judge of the reparation, he gave 30 francs too much. Perhaps he denied himself an orgie; he showed himself superior to a code which, to preserve the prerogatives of debauchery inviolable, does not condescend to grant the consideration to the human soul which it bestows upon broken glass. The French legislator has said to us, in effect: “I forbid you to interfere with this man; he is my chosen one, my anointed, the apple of my eye; I pronounce him inviolable. Let him cause ruin, let him make victims, I applaud; it is his right, it is my principle of the education of youth.”^[38]

These poor girls are also seen to commit suicide from despair. One of them threw herself out of her window on hearing of the marriage of a law student who had just deserted her. Another was seized with asphyxia in the room of the medical student who was leaving her. Have we not reason to shudder, then, in reflecting that these assassins, seated one day on the bench, will be the interpreters of the fundamental law which regulates the relations of the sexes?

In directing special attention to such monsters, let us consider youth away from home, entering life with the most generous aspirations—with the healthiest impulses with respect to individual rights and social obligations. Well, these students, not being more than about 25 to 30 years old—not having the social position which will admit of their marrying—meet 47with numerous obstacles in the path of honour. In their minority for lawful wedlock or for reparation, they are in their majority for error and crime. Their conscience speaks in vain; society, fashion, speak louder still, and stifle this voice. Minority, the issue at the termination of their student career, the demands of their future profession, are insuperable obstacles. Custom and prejudice superadding their barriers, give the names of heedlessness, and senseless marriage, to the fulfilment of a duty from the non-fulfilment of which an honest man would recoil. In proportion as the student lives in this deadly atmosphere, the depravity of his heart vitiating his judgment, impels him, without remorse, to sacrifice mothers and children as a holocaust to profligacy. The lower-class girl is no longer anything but the sport of his passions. It is all over with him. He proceeds from seduction to prostitution; provides himself with victims without name, by the intervention of the agents of human merchandise, the hucksters of shame; and France has lost a man. This is the history of numbers of young men fixed in our towns for years, between their duty, the abstract idea of good, and the social current of example, and the allurement of the senses. They had promised marriage to a woman they had seduced; their promise was a sincere one; they even attempted to get rid of the material obstacles which were opposing either their lawful union or the legitimation of their children. But as their promise did not receive the sanction of the law, they made themselves familiar with perjury. Time, absence, satiety made them forget their former engagements. They then, no longer as novices, but with deliberate design, made false oaths to other women, and constancy foresworn in regard to one will be so in reference to a thousand.

A celebrated novel has made the names of Tholomyés and of Marius familiar to many. The former personifies the 48student with base passions, the hero of the day, whose morals I have sketched—who becomes an important personage, a member of parliament, all the while he is continuing to be, without control, the cause of ruin to women and children. The second pictures the young student, true to a first love, which keeps alive in him noble and elevated feelings, and confers happiness on him through marriage. Men affecting to be serious, have, in this matter, accused the author of exaggeration and falsehood. It may, nevertheless, be asserted that our higher course of instruction reckons, among those who are its objects, many more of the Tholomyés than the Marius type, and that it is even organised in a way to nourish these profligate men. Who does not know that on the appearance of the Misérables our Tholomyés of the quartier latin were making sport of their mistresses by styling them Fautine?

If we wish to leave the domain of fiction, let a careful inquiry be made into the number of young men away from home in our towns without becoming depraved in them; let this investigation be made among the fifteen and twenty thousand students living in Paris, far from their families, and let us be informed how many Tholomyés seduce Fautines, and how many Mariuses marry, or can marry, their sweethearts. For myself, I am endeavouring to base my assertions upon conscientious investigation: I have questioned many families having relations with students who are recommended to them from the provincial towns. All have assured me, sadly, that they have not been able to save one of them from vice. A respectable woman, among others, after keeping in view twenty young men, had seen some who had remained one year, others two or three years, without contracting vicious habits; but all of them, before their departure from Paris, had finished by, more or less, losing their innocence in the fumes of excess, and were giving themselves up to those debasing 49pleasures, which, by corrupting the individual, destroy all social-ties. It is young men like these who, baptised in luxuriousness, make, as it were, a distinctive livery of it; for the rest, it is not a question of knowing if good or evil is the exception here, but of demonstrating all the odiousness there is in the impunity of a possible vice while the student is being initiated into the duties of the citizen.

In the face of the actual state of things, let us no longer ask why our system of advanced training produces so few superior men, and let us deplore the mistake of the instructors of youth, who do not pay sufficient attention to moral culture—to the elevation and dignity of the feelings of man—to the enquiry whether the youth entrusted to their care has not been guilty of any of these stolen-marches upon justice which confuse the harmonious relations indispensable to the maintenance of all social order. For ourselves, conscious of the worth of a human soul, we weep over the unhappiness of France, which, year by year, is losing its vigour. I shall have to speak of the antagonism in society which results from male irresponsibleness. Let us follow, for a moment, those young men prepared for filling the part of public officials by acts of violence against the institution of the family, and which would deprive them of the rights of citizenship in a state of society sufficiently logical to regulate its morals by its principles.

It is among these that we meet with those selfish and avaricious men who, having a host of ruinous wants, contract mercenary marriages. It is in their ranks that we include those intending husbands, dragged into marriage by their families, and by certain conveniences of position, which impose it upon them as a means of purgation; they have had pointed out to them a young lady disposed to place in their power a large fortune, attractions of person and heart by relatives who must decide about them. The marriage is, nevertheless, 50arranged without their being consulted; everything around them is going forward for the nuptials; nothing is wanting but their affection. Eventually the marriage takes place; they make as few and short calls as possible; in the midst of the heartiness of their family connexions, they alone remain abstracted, bored, awkward and unpolite, absorbed as they are in regrets for the seduction of the lower-class girl for which they had not to answer, and for the courtesan’s drawing-room. Restrained for a very short time by the life of the domestic circle, they are ill at ease while kept at a distance from their ideal, all the while looking forward to be released on the very first opportunity.^[39]

To get at the origin of these immoralities, so widely spread in the present day, we must put royalty itself upon the culprit’s stool, and exhibit it on the scaffold where it expiated the guilty inconsistency which made it defy those moral laws, the observance of which was its most sacred title to the veneration of subjects. When the dynasty of the Mérovingians was implanted in our soil, a conquest to Rome, civilization, and Christianity, the Gallican bishops, it is true, made the haughty Sicambrians bow their heads to regenerate them in the water of baptism. But these men of the sword and blood did not leave all their pollutions there, because their moral sense was not sufficiently developed to understand the purity of practice, the holiness of the Christian teaching. The Church tolerated in these barbarous kings and their enervated sons, the Roman system of concubinage which, be it observed, by determining the lot of the woman and the child, guarded against the crimes resulting from irresponsible profligacy.

Nevertheless, absolute power would have brought its customary 51abuses in its train if, in the Church, it had not found a moderator invested with the noble mission of giving a sanction to justice by making the principle of marriage triumph for the protection of the weak against the brutal caprices of the strong; history ought to bless those pontifical fulminations which hovered constantly over the head of royal culprits from the moment they had taken their passions as their rule of conduct.^[40]

But restraint irritated these kings, these princes and great ones, senseless enough not to understand that they were ruining themselves, together with respect for authority, by teaching the people contempt for the moral law. The age of the “Renaissance” was, from this point of view, perhaps the most fatal era of our old monarchy. Paganism, when it left Constantinople, proceeded to take possession of the papacy, and, being infiltrated into all the pores of our society, dominated in literature, art and morals. In the “saturnalia” of debauchery, Rome lost her empire over the souls of men; the Reformation carrying with it the principle of vitality, substituted the authority of conscience for that of divine right; but France, corrupted to the extent of having abbots like Brantôme, had not recuperative force sufficient to regenerate her morals, and, pagan in her customs, she was yet illogical enough to believe she was Christian and profess herself Catholic. Her kings, putting themselves out of the page—that is, ceasing to be guided by common sense or reason, wallowed with impunity in the most monstrous debauchery. Sending to execution those who reproved them,^[41] they 52paid honour to their morganatic queens (queen-mistresses). From this period, moreover, every principle of respect was destroyed by these great violators of the social compact, henceforward in no fear from judges; it is in this way that France experienced the humiliation of sullying her history by the disgraces of the court during the dynasty of the Valois, and by the scandals and infamies of that of the Bourbons.

The example afforded by royalty having roused the courtiers and nobles to emulate it, they vied with each other in deserting their duty of making their estates productive and enlightening their vassals. Wholly taken up in the gratification of their selfish passions, they gradually lost their long kept honour in the ostentatious idleness of Versailles, and communicated their corruption, more and more closely, to the rich of the middle class. Still, however, the law, which was no longer anything but a dead-letter for royalty and the aristocracy, continuing to exercise authority over the masses, the condition of morals at the close of the 18th century may be thus summed up: the nobles paraded their mistresses, the middle class concealed them, the lower orders coveted them. But peace to these Manes, since rivers of blood have cleansed these Augean stables.^[42]

53It is not useless to compare this period of decline with our present morals. Then the debauchee infringed the laws—he keeps them now; the corruption which was at the head of the nation has affected its heart; the privilege of the few has become the right of all.

was then the poet’s indignant protest. In the present day, the highest functionary prostitutes himself with prerogatives as princely as those of the Duke of Orleans. There is even no longer any magisterial authority for exercising a wholesome restraint, in this direction, upon the governing class.

Every debauchee is an absolute sovereign, not after the manner of our former monarchs who robbed God through his representatives, but like the Tiberiuses and the Neros, whose only law was their own passions.

The scandals of the uncontrolled conduct of certain officials set at defiance all sense of rectitude and indignant feeling. The blows they deal at the rights of the family are so public, so deplorable, and so numerous, that the State might be thought partial to debauchees if we did not know in what an atmosphere the greater part of the men entrusted with high-office for the purpose of directing us are prepared for their work, if we did not especially note their emulation in, and boasting of, the lax morals which obtain among the upper classes.

If I specified a few of these offences, our law for libel would consider me guilty—to such a degree does it pay respect to immorality. Let us merely say that no government whose aim might be the destruction of the institution of the family could find either better servants or a better state of affairs by which to accomplish its ends than that of France.

54Let us speak at least of one of these men whose morals are no longer under the protection of the law.—Reynaud who, in 1861, came up before the Isire Assize Court^[44] under the law for the prevention of assassination, was a former public official, that is to say, a guardian of religion, the family, and propriety; he had even been foreman of the jury in this court some years previously. As the proceedings at the trial proved, the successive registry-receivers in that district were causing scandal and demoralising it by their illicit intimacies. Reynaud, the murderer of his daughter in a fit of jealous anger against the Registrar, whose mistress she was, was convicted of having committed every kind of outrage upon the family institution. A husband and father, he incessantly solicited his female domestics, day labourers, and the farmers’ daughters &c., on his estates, never letting them alone; he forced them by threats of killing those who were proof against his terrifying intimidations, to the extent that several women lost their health through fear. A farmer gave evidence at the trial that, in one year, three poor servants had been obliged to submit to the monstrous desires of Reynaud, and that others, in a more independent position, had saved themselves from it by flight. A friend of his daughter, overcome by him, was also obliged to yield to solicitations which, in the defence, were toned down into partial violence. Reynaud had, moreover, seduced an idiot, and cruelly left her in great destitution while she was pregnant; he drove her away with blows with a stick when she came with her mother to ask him for some assistance for the child. This ex-official, who understood the law as applicable to his own case, even boasted at the trial of having bought as many women of the labouring classes as he wished for, by throwing them a five-franc piece as an inducement. “That is how those things are done,” he added sardonically, with a consciousness of his right. So far 55it was well, and the cup would never have been full if he had confined himself to this species of crimes, for none of the facts I have just recounted constituted the smallest delinquency, nor even the slightest responsibility in the eye of our legislation, which, at the same time, discountenances divorce as an outrage on the family institution. After the recital of these horrors, the President could say to the accused, “You have been an honourable man to the verge of the criminal code.”

At this trial, the judges, without respect for public decency, put upon the stool of repentence all the women whom the respectable citizen and upright functionary Reynaud had bought for five sous or five francs. Let these female domestics and day labourers, whose honour is worth a few francs, pass in review, and let girls belonging to the wages-earning class be fastened to the pillory! The court did not blush to compromise even a wife and mother who had had dealings with Reynaud: it violated the sanctity of the domestic circle in summoning this woman to give her evidence. The unhappy creature seeking, as in a barbarous age, an asylum at the foot of the altar, knelt down for a whole day in a church, in the hope of escaping the shame of this trial, at which she was questioned, in inquisitorial language, in presence of the public, about the most minute details of her illicit connection with the accused man. After in this way sacrificing the weak, the judges manifested particular leniency to the officials, the lovers of the daughters assassinated by Reynaud, as necessary to the proceedings as the women who figured at them; inviolability, the protectress of their profligacy, prevented justice from summoning them, and even uttering their names; their “honorabilité,” kept safe by the letter “h,” suffers them to continue preaching social morality in our departments, and leading the people back to healthy notions of law and duty!

To understand the immense mischief which a single profligate 56man can do, we must refer to our multitudes of Reynauds who have neither killed nor stolen, but who, submitting like himself to the yoke of unbridled passions, sow death wherever they go without being punished for it.^[45]

In the face of an irresponsibility of such a nature, instead of lamenting lest morality should no longer exist, we should rather wonder that there is any to be found.

I am aware that with our dissolute officials we might place in contrast noble types of moral qualities in other public functionaries, who are honourable and devoted to the public welfare; but this contrast would be a fresh condemnation of the society which despises the family to the extent of not making any distinction between these and those whose morals I have sketched. Did not this confusion of principles already exist in the Roman Empire at the period in which Corneille depicts it in his “Polyeucte”?

To the profligacy of the student and the public official, let us add that of the soldier:—

We should look into history in vain for a method of defending our native country, more opposed to its true interests than is our peace-army. Conformably to a memorandum of the Council of State (December 21st, 1808) declaring that it is for the good order of the army and the interest of society that military men should not be able to contract inconvenient marriages, susceptible of altering the consideration due to their character, the generals and colonels on active service and liable to be called out, half-pay officers, and reserve-conscripts, must obtain a special authorisation to marry, under penalty of being left unprovided for, of being reduced in rank, and of the loss of all rights and titles. We know that the marriages of convenience consist 57in the settling the minimum of the marriage portion; but, in spite of these conditions, the official permission being only given to the heads, marriage is very exceptional in the army, and still more so in the imperial guard. Hence follow prostitution in towns, seduction and concubinage in the rural districts, and female degradation and the sacrifice of infant life everywhere. The government had, in this matter, even lost the sense of economy to the extent of almost requiring, after a five years’ active service, three years in the reserves without marrying. If the “Corps législatif” has, by its energetic opposition, procured three years reserve with power to marry, we must not congratulate ourselves too much upon this victory, for the relative advantage the man finds in irregularity of life, and the prospect of being again called out for active service, will keep him in those injurious bonds which banish family duties in the interests of the rights of profligacy.

As to the military man on active service, he must, on that account, reject a poor girl who would gain an honourable livelihood by working; if a marriage contract with her is signed, the minister of war intervenes to punish the delinquent and the notary guilty of this (so-considered) discreditable transaction.^[46] The same prohibition is enforced by the commanders of the army against making reparation for a wrong to a seduced woman who might not have any marriage portion whatever; consequently, according to the reports of the societies of St. Vincent de Paul and François Régis, the formal opposition of superiors to the legitimation of soldiers’ natural children.

It is impossible to estimate the lax morality which results from this. Independently of the scandals caused by particular leading military men, it has been noticed that illegitimate births increase, in towns, in direct proportion to the presence 58and increase of garrisons, which have also carried prostitution into out-townships till then preserved from this pest.

Of this, an opinion may be formed from the fact that our soldiers defile themselves to the extent of maintaining a third of the common prostitutes; that uniform which should only be met with on the field of honour, even serves to enable soldiers to obtain a reduction of one half the payment in brothels. It is incredible how far the license of knights who wear the colours of the famous women of our streets extends; their military honour is the negation of the virtues which make the good citizen.

Idleness, provocations, contests with non-military power, drunken and degrading brawls, in which the name of father of a family is thrown in the teeth of the moral soldier by way of insult,—such is the life of a great number of troopers who have never been in action. Base gratifications have so perverted their moral sense, that brothers carry off from sisters who have not enough to live upon, the fruit of their earnings; insensible even to the distress of indigent parents, they frequently spend their pay in a few days’ orgie. These are the veterans who, adopting the manners of courtesans, spend their time, as they do, in tightening their waists, arranging their hair, and loading themselves with perfumes. An automaton-like precision and instincts of slaughter, will be powerful enough, nevertheless, to make them deserve the distinctions to which the terms country and honour are attached.

The license and brutality of the soldiery in reference to women, the distorted gallant attentions, the unhappy complicity of the commanders in breaches of morals, become incomprehensible if they are contrasted with the rigid discipline which sometimes punishes with death the least rebellion against a superior, and condemns to loss of rank, to long years of confinement, the theft of a pair of officer’s gloves. 59Just minds are expressing the opinion that France will only escape ruin by a more healthy recognition of social obligations, which may cause her, at length, to understand that the honour of the woman of the masses, the future of her children, the personal dignity of the man, should have more value in the eye of the military code than a pair of officer’s gloves, or than the demands of shop-keepers.

In the face of promises violated, of prospects blighted, the garrison nevertheless goes away, insulting occasionally with a cruel irony, the tears of mothers, and the lamentations of families. The commanders, faithful to the laws of French honour, have caused the tobacco and drink supplied by too confiding hands to be respected. This kind of integrity satisfied, the bugle sounds, the trumpets re-echo, the drum beats, the ensign is unfurled, France marches to glory, advancing in her onward path over the bodies of children and women sacrificed by our soldiers.

These profligate habits, hawked from town to town by our garrisons, appear especially lamentable in small localities. Uproarious orgies which, from morning to evening, sadden the passer by, issue from public-houses termed officers’ “cafés.”

There, men who wish for nothing in life beyond sensual gratifications, spend their entire day, glass or billiard cue in hand, cigar in mouth, and make themselves conspicuous by the brutality of their manners. One understands that, with these notions of morals, our courts-martial sometimes treat rape as a pastime, hardly within the jurisdiction of the police-court, if they do not give it triumphant acquittal, and that their verdicts often condemn to a few days’ imprisonment, public outrages on modesty. To give an idea of the spirit of this legislation, I shall make reference to the case of Léandri.^[47] 60That officer was brought before a military tribunal, under the law for preventing rape. A large body of soldiers escorted him with a defiant and threatening attitude that had the air of setting justice and morality at nought. Léandri’s counsel went so far as to make his frequenting the “quartier Bréda” meritorious in him: “He has mistresses,” said he, “is not that the common practice?”

The imperial commissioner interfered, in his turn, to reproach the accused for having dressed himself in the character of a Joseph. Why was he ashamed to acknowledge that he was a jovial pleasure-seeker? He could not be blamed for that. The acquittal of this valiant defender of France permitted him to protect us by his good morals, until the theft of a cash-box caused him to be sentenced. His wrong was not having been rich enough to pay for his mistresses with his small coin, otherwise he would be still a brave fellow, resembling many others, for the army reckons thousands of men of honour of this description, whose particular talent is the theft of women and not of cash-boxes. Certain courts-martial have, through it, even come to look upon rape as an extenuating circumstance in a case of assassination. A Vincennes artillery-man was convicted, on the inferences of doctor Tardieu, of having violated a child of seven years with the most revolting atrocity, and then of assassinating her with seventeen stabs of his poinard. Out of seven judges of this monstrous occurrence, three voted for the acquittal of the culprit, who escaped through having a minority favourable to him.^[48]

These rakes, returning again to their native district, after being liberated, spread corruption even to our smallest villages, where they constitute themselves instructors in vice for the young of both sexes. Let not these plain-spoken truths, however, cause it to be thought that I confound the real men 61of honour of our army with these numerous supporters of taverns and brothels. Besides, I am not so much attacking the persons as the institutions which are the causes of the evil, like our peace-army, hateful in all its bearings; the negation of the moral law, and, consequently, of civil order, which is order in the intellect and not in the street. In order to raise a revolt against this state of things, it should suffice to point out that it keeps no account of the soldier’s respectability of morals, and even degrades from official honour the courageous man who sets himself determinedly to practise natural morality in despite of social.^[49] For the rest, if this evil should spread generally, it is the downfall of society; if it check itself, the reaction will beat back the leaders who endure or exact it.

This investigation has shown us that prostitution does not bring dishonour, among us, upon the man who is defiled by it, and does not shut against him the road to any public appointment. We may be convinced that, in France, these prerogatives have caused the principle of the family to fall into the contempt in which that of property is in the East.

Theft does not there disgrace public officials, because its immediate advantages often triumph over a dilatory repression, uncertain, and always ineffectual. If our criminals, our robbers, were sheltered from the public vengeance, we should, in the same way, have to be resigned to the evil of an unchecked brigandage.

Our social arrangements, therefore, by going against nature, in the physical, intellectual, and moral consequences she attaches to crime, offers to the vicious man the advantages of a robber who, sure of impunity, should see patrols 62watching over his safe-keeping, and racking their brains to perfect the instruments he wants for his midnight burglaries. Moreover, they have taken away every security from the victims of the wrong, in order to extend them to its promoters. Hence results the extent of the canker which is gnawing us; we have to endure even vanity of vices become fashionable, against which nothing can defend us, whilst we ought to be armed against the unpunished evil-doer. Prostitution, apart from marriage, has brought contagion to marriage itself. Take away from it the mercenary character of the contract, and none of these men will clog themselves with a permanent tie. Meanwhile, as they have one foot in respectable and the other in doubtful society, they have established the link of connection between the two hemispheres, and exact that their wives should adopt the courtesan’s manners, or make the courtesan adopt them by the imitation of theirs. But still the progress is not fully realised; for, if the so-called respectable man must obtain his civilian education in the haunts of profligacy, these haunts cannot be any longer closed to our modest girls, and we ought to think it as moral to admit into respectable society the daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, who go to the public thoroughfare to get lovers, as the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers who go there to get fresh mistresses. If we shudder at these logical consequences, they may, at least, teach us where we are in respect to them from the stand-point of law, natural morality and justice, for conjugal union is only possible where there exists, in those united, conformity of education and morals.

Society, like the family, finds itself afflicted by this profligacy, which, in relation to marriage, further destroys the proportionate balance of the births of each sex. It takes for granted a hundred, and even a thousand times, more male than female debauchees, and corresponds to an equal number of modest girls who are living in discomfort or poverty, since 63wherever a hundred men can run after one woman for the purpose of prostitution, it follows that a hundred women ought to run after one man for the purpose of marrying him.

When the evil has reached these proportions, the fall of the arts and literature follows the corruption of morals. This is the cause of those debased talents, those obscenities which bring discredit upon art, and which, instead of the severely chaste creations of the Poussins and the Lesueurs, present for our contemplation the orgies of artistes falling, when overcome by drunkenness, into the courtesan’s arms; the impurities displayed in our monuments, in our public squares, is the result of a like cause.

In literature, the corruption of particular authors inspiring their writings, keeps them floating by the motive power of their unchaste wishes; and we should not, I imagine, look for noble creations from these young authorlings who, not blushing to sell themselves to old mistresses, by whom they are paid, desert them as soon as they meet with the favours of another who pays them better. Their code of morals must be that of the contemporaries of Plautus, claiming that rich women should choose their lovers, but that poor ones must love the man rich enough to buy them. This absence of true and deep seated feelings, this mercenary species of love, gives birth to a mass of scribblers without principles—of would-be poets of the affections, who, being neither poets nor in love, prostitute their pen to every subject, as they do their person to every harlot.

What shall we expect, moreover, from the art of observation? Why should our numerous “Messieurs aux camélias” after what they call their term of youthful folly, and when they have become faithful husbands, tender fathers, upholders by conviction of the family institution, become indignant at seeing an abandoned woman attain to their own nobleness of sentiment? Why should not the stage have the right to exhibit 64for us these fellows, just liberated from college restraint, who get up women’s parties? Why should it spare those far-seeing fathers, who take as much pains to procure modest mistresses for their sons as to buy them pure-bred horses? Art and literature, let it not be forgotten, are the reflections of the state of society; let not sweet-smelling odours be looked for from an atmosphere loaded with infection.

Let us no longer behave as insensates, who, after breaking a mirror that shows them uglier than they are, credit themselves with as many more attractions as they see fewer. The theatre, which is the mirror of our manners, ought even to go so far as to produce, on the stage, the courtesan in person, and to have her applauded in those “tableaux vivants” of which she is the heroine.

V.

“In short, the truth must be spoken. Woe to those who speak it not, and woe to you if you are not worthy of hearing it.”

The investigation of this melancholy subject has placed before us the progress of the evil, through the destitution and dependence of the young women of the lower classes; and the impunity, and even the protection, of the agents and accomplices of profligacy. This too clear and a thousand times attested degradation of the woman by discomfort and poverty, this glut in the supply of prostitution on the market in seasons of dearth of employment, enables us to understand the error of certain anti-economical doctrines representing that the man, who is the bread-winner for four, is ever his wife’s and mother’s and child’s protector at his fireside.^[50]

The sad eloquence of facts too often shews us the possessors of income, fortune and wealth corrupting those suffering from destitution and hunger. We must in a measure base the regeneration of France upon material independence, the source of woman’s dignity; and, consequently, we call for a widely extended system of professional instruction, of liberty of action which may, if possible, introduce into the laws of wages the equality which obtains in those of real estate.

With reference to the impunity and protection of the immoral man, they are condemned by sound reason bearing testimony that every society disloyal to the laws that maintain its vitality, must perish by continually-increasing degeneracy. The purpose of human existence is moral perfection, not 66happiness, much less those vulgar, coarse, and fatal pleasures which, by lowering man to the level of the brute, destroy the institution of marriage, together with the domestic virtues and the rights of the weak. Let us then reject the sophisms of erring and depraved intellects, which represent that paths must be opened to profligacy if we would have the sanctuary of the family institution respected. In the slough of the Roman empire, the rights and necessities of passions not to be resisted were already being talked of, when Christianity replied by raising man and woman to the same moral perfection.

Let us further remind our self-satisfied people of the prosperity of the family principle among nations which put down prostitution, and of its decline among those who permitted it: perhaps they will, at length, understand the value of the argument from facts.

Be it, in the first place, remarked that the irresponsibility of the father of children born out of wedlock, which gives him every advantage in going after prostitutes, is the most fruitful cause of profligacy. I would, then, make other repressive measures subordinate to the effort to make the father responsible. After placing this corner-stone of social law in such a position as to act with rigour against prostitution, we shall scarcely need to inquire if that evil can be restrained.

Human dignity and civil equality are opposed to penal measures against the common prostitute as such. This is the point from which to start on the effort to discover a just measure for checking prostitution. Ancient France was ignorant alike of registration and the frightful “surveillance” it necessitates. We know that modern nations governed by the laws of true honour have maintained justice enough to be horrified at this utter destruction of the human soul for the benefit of debauchery. The nations that are seized with the desire of emulating our system for the regulation of morals 67have, on the contrary, fallen to an unspeakable degree of degradation.^[51]

What deep seated corruption does the unrestricted haunting of places of ill-repute by beings endowed with that threefold bridle of the passions—reason, intelligence, and liberty—take for granted! Prostitution is an irreparable ill for young men who, by it, lose the pure source of the moral affections. We must therefore, at any cost, snatch them from this infamy, make them feel its horror, and, above all, not make use of the threefold complicity of government, legislation, and jurisprudence, to promise the safe-keeping of their health, their money, and their secret in their profligate courses.

I have, previously, made apparent the immorality which this organization indicates; for physical, intellectual, and moral penalties are, let us repeat, society’s only safeguard against vicious persons. It is everywhere attested, by experience, that the certainty, the hope merely, of escaping punishment, multiplies vicious habits; thus, when the Government does not watch over the debauchee with so paternal a solicitude, a first step in vice is frequently—on account of the misery, disgrace, maladies and mental incapacity it entails—a living lesson for the young, who imbibe the feeling of discretion by making a comparison between the gratification and its consequences. It is a stringent duty of morality and logic, then, to take away from human merchandise the official impress, in order that the buyer, acting at his own risk and peril, may become more circumspect; so that, trained to imbibe a horror of profligacy, individuals should not persist in feeding on the poison, and should catch some sense of self-respect by at least the feeling of responsibility, added to the interposition of other subjects of interest. Certain men would perhaps be 68ashamed to haunt places which, if left unprotected in their infamy, would no longer be looked upon as necessary institutions. Let us then deplore the infatuation of those communities which talk of the teaching of morality while they protect the debauchee; as if a part of the teaching of morality did not consist in causing the good and bad consequences of human action to be apparent; as if moralists could have authority in circumstances where vice is compulsorily invested with rights, while virtue is clogged by penalties.

I go on to add, that our immorality is cruel. If it be a folly to preserve certain men from the natural contagion consequent on their vices, it is a crime to multiply opportunities for vice, so as to decoy the individuals who, after disgracing themselves on the faith of what society holds out to them as safe, bequeath to us a heritage of curses when they are on the brink of the grave prematurely dug by their own profligacy. It is a crime of treason against the nation to send carcases, whether dead or living, back to families needing citizens and regulators of social education. Let us, then, get rid of all the frightful tolerations which set prostitution free from the rebuking and regenerating influences of a personal initiative. At all events, as the dens of infamy would not exist if there were not proprietresses to keep them, and men to frequent them, measures of repression brought to bear on girls only must be ineffective, since they do not reach the source of the evil. The same action should be brought to bear by the police on these houses as on gambling houses. This practicable and greatly-needed reform would inevitably be followed by the making every excitement to debauchery in the public street illegal, and by the right of complaint for every man accosted by a woman to whom he is not known, as for every woman addressed by a man with whom she was not previously acquainted. What a shame it is that, owing to debauchery, a civilization should tolerate, at particular hours, 69in these human flesh-markets, the suspension of God’s laws, which is the cause of ruin for thousands of young men who would never have become acquainted with profligacy if it had not been offered to them daily with such persistency, and who are unable to take a step, in our towns, without meeting with it.^[52]

We have been enabled to see what a mistake it is to pretend that our Government toleration is necessary for the protection of modest women. If that were the case, we may be sure they would reject this annihilation of their sisters for their benefit; but it is proved, on the contrary, that the insecurity of every woman results from the prerogatives granted to vice in France. Are we not aware, that nations which have not our monstrous measures of preservation, permit the girl to go out, to travel, and live by herself, for the purpose of either the secondary or the higher course of instruction; whilst in Paris more than 100,000 regulars and soldiers of the national guard, and a numerous body of police, fail to inspire the young woman of the middle class with sufficient confidence to allow her to venture a single step without a protector, or the lower-class young woman with a security sufficient to keep her from being made a merchantable article? Without even leaving our territory, any one may be convinced, by comparison, that the unprotected woman is so much the more respected in proportion as profligacy has less of license. Charts of France have been made, coloured more or less black according to the degree of instruction in each of our “departments.” It would be easy to make such an one for morality. It would demonstrate that the departments in which the machinery for morals is the most active, the most inquisitorial towards the registered girl, are those in which a young girl who should have committed the offence of walking out “unprotected” is no longer marriageable.

70Debauchery, driven from the street, would also be driven from cafés, hotels, &c., otherwise than by laughter-moving and arbitrary regulations against the “unprotected” woman. In this matter, then, we must further substitute, for police rule, a general law to reach the real doers of the evil, in the persons of those lodging-house keepers, tavern-keepers, coffee-house proprietors, &c., who, by the greediest complicity, make vice a matter of trade. But, alas! the law promulgated in 1778 alone remained to us for dealing a blow at this abuse, and, after applying it during the former half of the century, we declare it to be inapplicable in the latter, without finding a substitute for it. Shall we profess ourselves too much depraved to go back in this matter even to the measures adopted by a reforming Government at the period of the greatest decay of morals in our former monarchy?

The offence of treating for girls under age also demands a more severe law. The uncertainty of the penalty, the feeble attempts to put down the evil, as they appear when viewed with reference to the certainty of immediate advantages to be gained by it, do not stop the agents of procuration. The impunity assured to the person for whom the sale is effected also gives to this kind of offences a deplorable frequency and daring, in a country that punishes for a triple complicity, and by civic degradation, the printer, author, and editor of writings whose offence has sometimes been disseminating useful truths.

Profligacy driven from the public thoroughfares in this way, and from establishments frequented by men without a home, the honour of the girl under age being efficiently cared for, inexperienced youth will no longer fall into the inextricable pitfalls of prostitution; no one but the depraved man will, with the utmost caution, go into these sties of infamy, to gratify a vicious propensity which would be left to its natural consequences.

71A community which sanctions the family principle should, further, spare us the scandal of actions for debt and theft brought by the prostituter against the prostituted. When our courts of law intervene to annul the engagements which those above or those under age have contracted with courtesans, it follows that these corrupters or these corrupted ones have procured for themselves, by false pretences, on credit or for a specific period, a gratification which the judge, as they have reason for knowing, will take upon himself to make a gratuitous one, and that their disgrace, which ought to close the ear of justice to their suits, finds such privileges as to permit them to do a wrong to the tradesmen who supply them with goods. Sound views will recognise the validity of these debts, or, in annulling them, punish the complainant for the fact of having prostituted himself; it is, above all, for cases such as these that article 60 of our Criminal Code should be declared applicable, thereby punishing every individual who incites to profligacy by presents. Very much to the contrary, the application of the law becomes deplorable in this matter; Lovelaces aged from 15 to 20, precocious Don Juans, become villains with impunity by the assistance of the law’s protection—spend some hundreds of thousands of francs in orgies, with the certainty of committing robbery; they promise, give their signatures, subscribe documents, and the court declares them white as snow, provided they do not pay anything; and this is the education by which we prepare young people for their life as citizens! What! is it to be supposed that these young men, who to-morrow will be electors, citizens, public officials, judges, magistrates perhaps, are not capable, at the age of 19 and 20 years, of a greater moral responsibility than the infant in long-clothes? Cancel their debts, if you like; but at least brand them for their cynical attacks on the fundamental laws of public propriety.

72We must get rid of our confusion of principles with respect to those young people who, separated from their family by their profession, are entrusted to society. In the first place, in what has reference to the soldier, patriotism and a feeling of true honour, would not give him up to be corrupted by long years of inaction in garrison, and would not permit any man to lead the life of a pig under cover of the flag of France. Now that we are threatened with the corporal-instructor, we ought, I think, to be permitted to know that his certificate of good conduct has not compelled him to disavow his illegitimate children, nor to denounce and imprison the victim guilty of having aimed a blow against his security in debauchery.

As for that numerous body of civilian youths fighting on the battle-field of life in schools, in public offices, workshops, commerce and so forth, shall we leave them without a guide, to succumb to the degradation of the companions of Ulysses? No; they must henceforward do themselves honour by putting a curb on their passions and mastering their excesses. It is the duty of us all to shew them, from the commencement of their course, marked distinctions between the road to honour and that to infamy by imposing obligatory limits to stop them in bad courses. It is the right of moral families to know that the member they wish to unite to them by marriage is a man, and not a living carcase, sullied with all sorts of profligacy.

Let us then establish courts of honour to separate goodness from evil—great associations which will confer distinction on themselves by the morality they exact from their candidates and those whom they employ, putting us thus upon the road of reformation.

Each of us has, in this matter, his work to accomplish, and we shall succeed if we know how to be united in a common feeling. The law for outrage on public morals would authorize 73us in a rebellion against our administrative toleration of vice; all men of courage, claiming the emancipation of destitution sold to profligacy, must likewise denounce the shamelessness of those men who would, with one hand, punish the freedom of the press while protecting the obscenity of the streets with the other; who ill-use free-thinkers while they grant charters to free livers. In what has reference to legislative repression Art. 334 of our Criminal Law, joined to Art. 60, of which I have spoken, would be sufficient for putting down the evil, if applied to direct profligacy, especially in actions for debt and theft which debauchees bring against their accomplices.

It is, nevertheless, to Art. 340 of our Civil Code that the guilty complaisance of our interpretation of the law for profligate morals must be attributed. The license into which the irresponsibility there laid down hurries a great number of law students, greatly contributes to warp their judgment in these suits, and to take from vice its last restraint. Alas! shall we have the energy necessary for a real reform? We have astonishingly perfected the physical sciences, and developed material civilization; but we have so little advanced in the science of the law and the duty which govern our connexions in society, our ambition is so little excited for the development of human dignity, that we put our frightful complaisance for debauchery under the patronage of St. Augustine and St. Louis. Should we be willing to retrograde to such an extent in the arts and mechanical processes—we who, in morals, dare to take our ideal in pagan and barbarian society? When our Senate, some years ago, discussed this grave question, it did not put the inquiry to itself, whether seduction and irresponsible debauchery are the great highways of public infamy; still less did it examine if despotic centralization, which arbitrarily deprives the young girl of professional instruction, 74and the woman of an honourable income, does not at all contribute to her ruin. This Senate, the guardian of morals, refrained from looking round within its own precincts, to see if it were not, in any way, harbouring members whose example might weaken the authority of its precepts; it did not seem to suspect that a courtesan is the effect of a debauchee who pays for her, and it did not at all wish to know if its sons were contributing to the evil: laying it wholly upon the luxuriousness of women, it contented itself with some pleasantries, and, far from opposing strong means of resistance to profligacy, declared that Art. 484 of our Criminal Code sufficed for putting down vice.^[53] Almost immediately after this discussion, the Asiatic pest, raging around us, threatened our physical existence. Oh! then we became the champions of progress; we knew how to attack the evil in its very source; our civilizing efforts were proposing to purify the Ganges itself—the home of the epidemic: ordering inquiries, putting sixteen questions to the meeting of the international conference at Constantinople, we made an appeal to the enlightened intelligence of the whole world. Why then does our energy fail in view of the plague of public profligacy, more fatal to the moral life of a nation than is the cholera-epidemic to its material life? Since we know the causes of the evil, we deserve to be execrated if we do not look for wholesome means of reaction—if authorities established to put it down continue to protect it. The measures I am proposing, if they are examined by the prismatic glass of history, reason, national and personal rights, are the conditions of liberty and public decency. They will confine the evil to the dregs of society.

75When we are governed by a moral Code, the Family institution grounded on morality and labour, will be able, without aid, to tread down the hydra of debauchery, wallowing in the mire of idleness and licentiousness. But, if justice and honour do not come out victorious from the present struggle, woe, a thousand times woe, to the vanquished!