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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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