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FEENCH MORALITY, 
 
 UNDER 
 
 THE REGULATION SYSTEffi 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF MADLLE. J. DAUBIE. 
 
 LONDON : 
 TRUBNER & CO., 8, and 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 LIVEEPOOL: 
 
 THOMAS BRAKELL, 7, COOK STREET. 
 1870. 
 
 PRICE SIXPENCE. 
 
A Cornell University 
 y Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924021 845502 
 
FRENCH MOEAUTY, 
 
 UNDER 
 
 THE REGULATIO]^ SYSTEM. 
 
 TEANSLATED FEOM THE FRENCH OF MADLLE. J. DAUBIE. 
 
 LONDON : 
 TRUBNER & CO., 8, and 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 LIVEEPOOL : 
 
 THOMAS BRAKELL, 7, COOK STREET. 
 1870. 
 
/\'77fl^J 
 
 i 1^1 $10 ;^ 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Mademoiselle Julie Daubib has published a book in tbiee 
 volumes, entitled La Femme pav/vre au dix-neuvieme Siecle.* This 
 work is the result of many years of careful research, aeeom- 
 panied by self-denying labours among the poor, and the 
 outcasts of society. 
 
 The foUowing pages are a translation of those chapters 
 of her book which bear upon the state of the most unhappy 
 of her countrywomen. In granting permission for the pub- 
 lication of these chapters, Mad'Ue Daubie writes as follows : — 
 
 " Paris, January 18th, 1870. 
 
 " Our new Parliament has made an emphatic declaration that it has 
 in view a great moral reform, which fills us with hope. Our eyes are 
 turned towards your Parliament, tbs wisdom of which is boasted 
 everywhere. It is assuredly not the English PArliam«nt whi<!h wiU 
 make a law to tolerate (that is to say to encourage) prostitution ; for 
 such an infamy as this is not yet inscribed in any Code of any civilised 
 or Christian nation. Even in France, prostituitLaia m regulated by asa 
 article of the Fenal Code, which refers this question to the police. Our 
 Civil Code has not yet had the impudence to proclaim the immunities 
 of profligate men to be a civil right ; and the expenses of this depart- 
 ment are municipal. 
 
 " But if it be true that provocations in the public thoroughfares 
 are so frequent in the towns of England, and that places of ill fame 
 are not watched, &c., your Parliament has left much undone, and has 
 much to do for the repression of vice. 
 
 " The principal means for this appear to me to be good laws for the 
 punishment of seduction, measures for making women independent 
 through a sufficiency of wages, the severest prohibition of all provo- 
 
 • Published by Ernest Thorin, 7, Eue de M^diois, Paris, 1869. 
 
cations in the public way, and the right of the police to enter infamous 
 houses, and to exercise the same powers against the men as against the 
 women who frequent them ; (an impartiality exercised in France in 
 gambling houses.) 
 
 " But we must abhor and reject all those odious measures which 
 treat woman as an impure being for debauchery to profit by. Scorn all 
 the advice which may be given you, on this subject, by timid or corrupt 
 men, who can see nothing beyond that which actually exists ! The 
 progress of prostitution in France is frightful, and the number of 
 public women is said to be doubled even since the Great Exhibition. 
 Every day new houses of infamy are opened, authorised by the 
 Chef, who replies to any one who remonstrates, ' It is because they are 
 necessary, do., &c! 
 
 " We shall do well, I think, in our International League, to give 
 ourselves especially to questions of justice and of human dignity in 
 connexion with the relations of the sexes, and to endeavour to bring all 
 the nations of Europe to the adoption of uniformly just laws on this 
 subject — a subject on which it is not permitted to cherish with impu- 
 nity false sentiments or unjust laws." 
 
 Who shall dare to prophesy for the future of England, 
 if, at such a crisis as the present, when the eyes of Trance — 
 of Europe, it may be said — are upon us, the Parliament 
 whose wisdom is vaunted on the Continent, should endorse, 
 and not repudiate, the policy of a clique who have succeeded 
 in gaining a footing in our country for a system which else- 
 where has been tried and condemned ? 
 
 Josephine E. Butlbb, 
 
 Hon. Secretary to the Ladies' National Association for the 
 Bepeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. 
 
FRENCH MORALITY, 
 
 UNDKB 
 
 THE REGULATION SYSTEM. 
 
 I. 
 
 Infamy as known to the Law and Secret Infamy ; 
 Panders and Courtesans. 
 
 " There are so many drawbacks attached to the loss of virtue in 
 " women ; this principal point being taken away is the cause of 
 ■ "so many others falling with it, that' public unchastity may be 
 " looked upon as the greatest of misfortunes." — Montesquieu. 
 
 " Woman is the embodiment of evil when evil exists about her : 
 " she is the impersonation of evil when society must be ruined 
 " through evil." — Pierre Leroux. 
 
 Public immorality has pushed its excesses so far as to cause 
 the poor woman to become a nuisance which has neither a 
 name nor a right in our code. I have undertaken the painful 
 duty of considering with attention the profligate portion of the 
 community, which is controlled by the police authorities; 
 I shall not flinch from my sorrowful task — one that will not, 
 in anyway, afford the lovers of scandal cause for laughter 
 
 Is it my fault, indeed, if, after having gone back to Eden 
 itself for woman as created in God's image, I must pick the 
 infected vase out of the gutter and look into it for woman as 
 made in man's image ? 
 
 Social injustice causes the greater part of the young women 
 of the lower orders both to fall into and to remain enslaved in the 
 sink of prostitution : the writers of their history agree in calling 
 them the victims of destitution, ignorance and seduction. The 
 insufficiency of the city-workwoman's earnings sometimesioroes 
 
her, even in a season of industrial prosperity, to supplement 
 her means by the sale of her person; that is termed the fifth 
 quarter of the working day. When employment fails, this 
 species of right to labour makes up the entire day's earnings. 
 In different towns, according to the evidence of the inspectors 
 of the department of morals, women who have not totally lost 
 every sentiment of modesty are driven to ignominy by the 
 want of the means of support 
 
 In our manufacturing towns, even children serve as food 
 for profligacy. Generally, the destitution of these women is 
 such, that out of 6000 registered in Paris, only two had any 
 other resource. One woman might be instanced who struggled 
 for three days with the pangs of hunger before yielding. Two 
 young girls, through having recoiled from this horrid expe- 
 dient, dropped down, in an hospital, half dead from want of 
 nourishment. Ignorance is another so fruitful cause of ruin 
 for these women, that, of 4000 natives of Paris, hardly a 
 hundred were able to sign their name. In other towns facts 
 as sad are borne witness to. The privileges enjoyed by 
 seducers are often their original cause, for these privileges are 
 the cause of women without resources being borne down by 
 the burden of maternity, and of illegitimate daughters being 
 left in destitution. These, moreover, constitute the fourth part 
 of the total number of the inmates of the recognised brothels, 
 completed partly by the victims of seduction.* These latter 
 have followed men, who, after having promised them marriage, 
 have cruelly deserted them in the towns where they were 
 without the means of support. Others, incurring the disgrace 
 and curse of a first fall, find no refuge but in profligacy. 
 Girl-mothers are also to be met with, who are forced to become 
 
 ' One of our salaried seducers learned that destitution was reducing one of 
 his illegitimate daughters to have herself registered at th« office of the depart- 
 ment of morals. A friend of his urged him to claim her, so as to save her from 
 this disgrace :—" If," said he, "I were obliged to help all my daughters, my 
 income would not he sufficient to do it." 
 
prostitutes to bring up their children. Oftem, says one of 
 their historians, cases very embarrassing to the Administration 
 are brought under notice ; young girls not wholly corrupted 
 evince penitence, can be reclaimed, and wish to return to 
 their homes, but their parents disown them, and they are 
 ohlifed to he registered. Others', forsaken from their very 
 birth, have been brought up by themselves ; they know neither 
 their father nor mother, their age nor name. What is to be 
 done ? They are forced to be admitted. No path opens 
 before them ; the Administration offers a passport gratuitously, 
 and, sometimes, a pair of shoes, to the young female under 
 age, without profession, shelter, clothes, or food, and sends 
 her back to her native place. One of our depraved men, in 
 whom genius kept alive some ray of feeling, sometimes expe- 
 rienced a profound pity for these victims whom destitution 
 gives over to debauchery; he confesses that they often con- 
 jured him, with tears, not to withdraw his unhappy protection 
 from them. One of these suppliants assured him that if he 
 abandoned her he would be the cause of herself and mother 
 dying of hunger.* By the side of the liberty which girls of 1 5 
 have to become prostitutes, is placed that of parent-procurers. 
 The weakening of family ties among us often causes these 
 monstrous transactions to occur, on account of which women 
 have been known to commit suicide. The moral sense is, 
 moreover, perverted to such a degree, in our rural districts, 
 that you there hear of mothers congratulating themselves on 
 living by the proceeds of their daughters' dishonour. Apart 
 from the cynicism of the concubine-keepers who sell their 
 unacknowledged daughters, workmen are met with who marry 
 with the object of enslaving their wives; one such person 
 assaulted his to make her go on the streets, saying to her : 
 "Don't think you deserve to eat, if you do not per- 
 
 • Alfred de Mussel — " Confessions d'un enfant du siSole." 
 
form the only work you can make lucrative for me — I want 
 money."* 
 
 The foregoing facts belong to legal prostitution, which is 
 always conjoined with that carried on clandestinely ; it is 
 certain that the toleration-certificate of procuresses is nothing 
 hut a permit for all sorts of infamy. Agents for intercourse 
 with certain women of fashion, they likewise carry on, almost 
 without impediment, negotiations respecting girls under age. 
 
 An author of the 15th century, estimating the number of 
 " girls of the town" in Paris at 5000, attributes this enormous 
 figure, unknown before, to the war which had affected the 
 earnings of women, and to the culpable indifference of the 
 provost, Ambroise de Lore. Statistics do not supply us, 
 nevertheless, with reliable indications of the progress of the 
 evil earlier than from the close of the year a.d. 1812. In 
 Paris, less than a third of the fallen girls belong to prostitu- 
 tion as known to the law ; the rest haunt the permitted 
 houses, drive a profitable trade at the singing-saloons, public- 
 houses, lodging-houses, and taverns. More than 25,000 of 
 them are supported by a number of immoral men who, in 
 their turn, are the support of a great many places of public 
 resort, where both soul and body are lost through drunken- 
 ness and profligacy. In our different towns.t secret prostitu- 
 tion works the same kind of ravages. It is generally noticed 
 
 • To turn, for a moment, from these horrors, let ns say they horrify the 
 moral working-men who have undertaken the responsibilities of the family 
 without selfish ideas conceived previously. These men generally give proof of a 
 sentiment of honour, too often extinguished in the upper classes ; hut what is their 
 state of mind when they are not ahle to guard their wives and daughters against 
 a disgrace which is the daily bread of an insufficient labour-market 1 Their faces 
 are then stern, their eyes vindictive ; their heads droop, but they cherish in their 
 hearts, against the peace of society, a profound hatred and projects of vengeance 
 which are only too inveterate. Ah I let us dread the storms we are collecting 
 over our heads, in a gloomy future ; if we have not the energy to put down 
 profligacy from a love of virtue, let us, at least, do it from considerations of its 
 cost. 
 
 + Clandestine prostitution invariably increases wherever the system of regis- 
 tration and police regulation exist, 
 
that the destitution of women gives a great increase to it 
 during industrial "crises." Our soldiers and colonists have 
 likewise carried into Algeria morals previously unknown to 
 the Arah polygamy. So great was the horror the Mussulmans 
 had for prostitution, that at Algiers, as recently as the 1 7th 
 century, prostitutes were thrown into the sea. In the present 
 day, women who go to get employment in our colony ordi- 
 narily find their livelihood only in dehauchery and concu- 
 binage; "unfortunates" subjected to the brutalities of our 
 soldiery, are bartered, like beasts of burden, at every change 
 of garrison, and our army may be followed by the track of the 
 infection it leaves in even the smallest villages. After the 
 conquest (of Algeria) the daughters of the original possessors 
 of the soil had not even the means of living except by shame.* 
 This sketch suffices to show how unfitted we are to colonise 
 a people which, on the evidence of every high and competent 
 authority, has adopted our vices without acquiring any of our 
 good qualities.t In fact, the Mussulman code, the Jewish 
 religion and morals, permit, upon the African soil, polygamy, 
 divorce, and repudiation, with the obligation, on the father's 
 part, of supporting all his children, and the prohibition of 
 repudiating a woman without providing for her ; these duties 
 rendered manifold marriages a privilege of wealth. The 
 " senatus-consultum" which governs, on the model of our 
 code, the Arabs who are naturalised French, changes nothing 
 of the influence exerted on them by climate, religion, educa- 
 tion, and manners. Thus, by abjuring every duty to wives 
 with whom, otherwise, they are free to maintain relations, 
 uncurbed and uncontrolled, under the title of concubines; by 
 leaving their unacknowledged children to die of destitution, 
 
 * E. A. Duchesne — " De la prostitution dans la ville d'Alger, depuis la 
 conqulte, 1853." 
 
 t Letter &am tbe Bishop of Algiers to the Govemor-Geneial of Algeria, 
 May 1868. 
 
10 
 
 they obtain the title of French citizen, which should be to 
 them the reward of virtue and honour. 
 
 In that frightful famine when the brutality of the strong 
 to the weak was so monstrous, in which Eeligion and Charity 
 had not arms wide enough to enfold the legions of repudiated 
 women, and of children without fathers, the conviction might 
 force itself that our code is more deadly for Algeria than are 
 its noxious animals.* Our legislation for morals is ain active 
 cause of our want of success in colonizing; for our moral 
 responsibility being able to bring nothing but intermixture to 
 the races in our colonies, degenerated by polygamy or slavery, 
 the young negresses, seduced and abandoned, knowing none 
 of the duties of the family and of maternity, are living in the 
 most deplorable degradation. 
 
 In France, the police authorities entrust the lucrative estate 
 {ferme) of profligacy (which private persons are not autho- 
 rised to farm out) to brothel-keepers who represent a con- 
 siderable capital. At Paris, where their business connexion 
 is sometimes transferred at prices as high as those of solicitors' 
 and notaries' practices, the moveable effects of one of them 
 have been appraised as high as 100,000 francs (£4,000). The 
 sums invested compel the brothel-proprietresses to hunt up 
 buyers incessantly, and God knows how they perform their 
 
 • I shall better stUl define the respective condition of the Mussulman and 
 French morals and laws by recalling to recollection that Emir who went about 
 Paris displaying, in a triumphal manner, two girls under age purchased under the 
 title of wives. If we take the oneness and the sacred nature of our indissoluble 
 marriage-institution as the measure of this outrage on the dignity of humanity, 
 we see in it a defiance to our civilisation. It is, nevertheless, a fact that Abdel 
 Kader could have been supplied with human flesh on the Parisian market on 
 much easier terms ; if he repudiates his Circassians, he must provide for them, 
 while he would have been free, on his departure, to turn Parisians out into tihe street! 
 In the investigation of our scandalous morals, we shall meet, among our officials, 
 with types of degradation which would make the Grand Chief Mussulman blush. 
 If, therefore, from our lawful monogamy to the Arab polygamy, the distance 
 from heaven to earth be measured, there is between our irresponsible profligacy 
 and that polygamy all the interval from earth to hell. Before our time the 
 children born in the harem belonged to the father ; in our time, those born out 
 of It belong to the mother. The economical results of this state of things in a 
 country where woman has no means of support, can be calculated. ' 
 
ID 
 
 task. It would be difficult to foim an idea of the eorruption 
 they sow in our boroughs, in our villages even, by sending to 
 them detaohm'enta of girls whom authority tolerates as soon 
 as they place themselves under the government regulations. 
 Prance is no longer anything but a vast field of prostitution, 
 since railways have brought this traffic within reach of oujt 
 rural districts. The brothel-keeper, whose receipts are enor- 
 mous, has agents who accustom the workman and the 
 fenaiale domestic servant to look upon her house as an institu- 
 tion for the deserving. 
 
 The prO'CuresSj having full authority for mixed education, 
 takes further upon herself the social education of the young 
 men living away from home in our towns : she puts herself 
 on the track of students, collects from the Botin Almanac the 
 address of certain known men, sends them ambiguous letters 
 by gold-laced lacqueys, whose business it is to supplement 
 the intimations. For the negotiations about girls under age, 
 the brothel-keeper goes out herself from apartments fitted up 
 in princely style, steps into her carriage, has herself announced 
 by her footman, introduces herself into aristocratic drawing 
 rooms, has a perfumed note delivered on a silver salver, 
 announcing to such and such an important personage the 
 purpose which brings her there. It is asserted that the 
 inefficiency of our laws is so great as not to admit of the 
 guilty being reached once in a thousand times, and never 
 effectually represses them, as we shall see from the sequel of 
 this investigation.* 
 
 Apart from this traffic, the brothel-keepers are found to be 
 protected by the police authorities, who leave the registered 
 
 • Some years since, a wealthy foreigner offered a brothel-proprietress 10,000 
 francs (f 400) for a young girl. She bought her from a greerly mother, who was 
 to receive half the price of the sale, but the procuress disappeared after deUvery 
 of the girl, and receiving payment for her. The mother, disappointed of the 
 part she agreed for, went to a lawyer with her case, but he declined to have any- 
 thing to do with this unsavoury affair. 
 
12 
 
 girl dependent upon them : they send clothes to the half-naked 
 workwoman and domestic servant on their leaving the hospital 
 or the prison, to get them into their power through deht, and 
 trade on the ignorance and poverty of unfortunate creatures, 
 wretched to the extent of heing ohliged to hire from them 
 clothing in which to present themselves for sanitary inspec- 
 tion. In the event of subterfuge, the brothel-keeper brings a 
 charge of taking away with intent to defraud, and our law 
 courts place her victims in her power. If we did not know 
 the debasement of the girls of the lower orders, we should, 
 perhaps, be astonished that hunger should give over to these 
 procuresses, women who, getting none of the money for which 
 they are sold, will finish by rotting in the street into which 
 they are thrust like refuse, when they can no longer bring 
 profit. Their destitution and degradation then become 
 extreme. They live in filthy lodgings, or take shelter under 
 doorways and under carriages. Those women whom our 
 troops bring in from all parts are crowded in narrow and dark 
 caverns, take refuge in plaster-kilns, in partially built houses, 
 in cells as narrow as graves, in which they pass the night 
 upon horrible truckle-beds full of filth and vermin, receiving 
 as their only food some ration-bread which the soldiers throw 
 in the mud to them ; they have thus come to look upon prison 
 as a retreat, and often to beg in vain the favour of admission 
 to institutions for beggars.* Does the brothel -keeper who 
 has worked their youth for her profit at least share their dis- 
 grace ? No ! from the moment that she makes choice of the 
 evil — that she makes a gain by it, she is no more dishonoured 
 by it than the man who pays the price of it. The unjust 
 assumption of the most respectable titles — the names alone 
 of lady, mistress of the house, or of matron, attest the pro- 
 gress of this woman in general consideration. A burgess in 
 
 • At the July Eevolution, the gates of St. Lazare were opened for them, but 
 they declined to go out from it. 
 
13 
 
 the fullest sense of the term, she dowers and marries her 
 daughters honourably, sometimes to legionaries, and to agents 
 of the police for morals. Then as a woman of independent 
 means, retired from business, she lives in the country, attracts 
 notice there for her wealth, her dovoutness, and her prayer 
 hook at the parish mass every Sunday. I do not know if such 
 an ending would appear moral in romance, or whether it would 
 not, on the stage, startle, however little, the indulgent con- 
 servators who look upon the tolerated house as a necessary 
 evil, without reflecting that if men guilty of the trade in 
 Blacks are punished with death, the trade in Wliites ought not 
 to be made an institution protected by the public power. 
 
 By the side of this in importance in society is placed that 
 of the avowed kept women {femmes lancees), who are sought 
 after like a race-horse or dog of high breed — a numerous 
 family which daily reckons new varieties. Here still the 
 original cause of the evil lies in the want of independence for 
 the woman, who, after having been supported by a father or 
 a brother, is reduced, in the absence of such props, to have 
 recourse to a lover. When this fragile reed comes to be 
 broken, she remains at the mercy of the first comer who gives 
 her the means of livelihood. The impossibility of getting a 
 competence and distinction in the liberal professions plunges 
 into this gulf even women like the exhibitioners of St. Denis ; 
 in the same way certain young women of the working classes 
 have connected themselves with manufacturers, famous 
 bankers, wealthy public officials, who, living on family pro- 
 perty or pension, give up to them the ten, twenty, or thirty 
 thousand francs lopped from our budget ; these goddesses in 
 the heyday of their spring-time are floating on the surface of 
 perdition. The short-lived favours of their prostituters have 
 tirifled their natural qualities-; they show themselves very 
 proud of mortgagee lovers, while rejecting mortgager ones ; 
 but all despicable as they seem, they are far from being so 
 
14 
 
 much so as their supporters, who, possessing a competency, 
 wealth, social appointments, and honours, sacrifice the most 
 sacred duties to their passion for degrading gratifications. 
 The woman trampled on hy these attachments of a day is often 
 she who knows how to cherish and preserve constancy in love, 
 she, in short, who might possibly have become a faithful 
 spouse and tender mother ; while the harlot at the zenith of 
 her avocation is she who can stoop to the degree of the cor- 
 ruption of her purchasers. 
 
 The luxuriousness, the sensation, the independence, the 
 very borrowed honour which, in the present day, encircles the 
 name of a certain mistress of an exalted personage, the remem- 
 brancers which the public compete for at the sale of her 
 effects, are the saddest indications of our decay. Formerly, 
 prostitution, which had no name in respectable language, was 
 confined to particular streets with a stigma of infamy which 
 forbade its breathing the common air ; in our time it gives 
 the tinge of hope to its peculiar type admitted into good 
 society; if there still exist accursed abodes where human 
 beings are shut up like lepers, they belong to the hives of the 
 working classes which are tasked to the utmost to create 
 wonders. Who does not recall the economist Blanqui's heart- 
 rending stories of the streets of Lille, those catacombs of 
 people having no property ? Who does not remember those 
 of the " Bassesse" and of the " Gloaque" at Eouen, where 
 families of working-men, deprived of air and space, seemed 
 buried alive in their underground dwellings ? 
 
 Everywhere, however, in our most luxurioius districts, 
 splendid mansions, palaces indeed, are built for high-class and 
 fastidious prostitution, where it is loaded with gems and per- 
 fumes, and receives the respectful attentions of tradespeople, 
 ambitious people and hangers-on. Without speaking of the 
 monuments erected to it by art; without pointing to the 
 stairs of marble and porphyry which it walks on in the 
 
15 
 
 temples of its glory, it may be asserted that, in general, our 
 women of doubtful position are lodged in rooms which the 
 respectable woman could not pay for with the fruits of her 
 industry nor of her talent, however exceptional that might be. 
 My personal inquiries have shewn me in Paris a number of 
 kept women, whose rent rises from 800 to 4,000, 5,000, and 
 10,000 francs yearly. 
 
 The moral reaction which took place in ] 848 caused the 
 scale on which these women's pay for what they do is based, 
 to be lowered temporarily ; but they very quickly regained 
 their professional connection and their accustomed following 
 when the pyramid was resettled on its base. There are houses 
 where the porters even prefer the feept-woman to every other 
 lodger, for her proverbial donations and prodigality, and 
 whose virtues they vie in extolling.* 
 
 The courtesan preserves in society the importance which 
 attaches to her in her private apartments. Photographs of 
 her decorate our streets ; her memoirs enrich our literature ; 
 her showy personality sets off our public platforms {trelaux); 
 she often displays it, moreover, at the theatres and the public 
 baths ; she cuts a figure on the fashionable promenades, in 
 the most gorgeous equipages of the higher classes. When 
 she finds herself at her own disposal, instead of beating the 
 air and space, with the illustrious lover who glories in being 
 as infatuated as herself, on returning from the races, the con- 
 cubine remains in her chariot, where a long row of carriages 
 with their contents are for hire in this novel market for 
 prostitution. Amateurs of all classes pass in review this 
 living corruption ; they address these women in a loud tone, 
 with their hats on, their riding whip in hand, and debate the 
 
 • A Parisian tenant was complaining that the house which he thought was 
 well-tenanted should lodge women of doubtful reputation and be the theatre for 
 riotous and scandalous orgies. The porter replied : " These women, who pay 
 for their occupancy as you do, are more generous than yourself; if you are not 
 satisfied with the neighbourhood you can look for a better — in any event, theiT 
 money is worth as much as yours." 
 
16 
 
 conditions of purchase and sale which are made for them, as 
 for horses, to the highest applicant and richest outhidder. 
 
 In the presence of this corruption, -which has never had a 
 precedent except on the eve of the downfall of kingdoms and 
 empires, certain short-sighted moralists are exclaiming : " It 
 is the passions of concubines that are dragging us into a 
 bottomless abyss." I could point out that the passions of 
 rich women have not the social consequences of the necessi- 
 ties of poor ones, aud that there is a deplorable legislative 
 fault wherever man pays woman to corrupt her, while she 
 must pay the man for trying to reform him by marriage ; but 
 I shall say, " Misfortune, a thousand times misfortune upon 
 civilizations which fear the passions because they do not 
 know how to direct them." Suppress this source of devoted- 
 ness and progress, and there will no longer be either vices or 
 virtues, and the facility, the satiety of profligacy, will hurry 
 society on to an irremediable fall. 
 
17 
 
 II.— PENITENT GIBLS. 
 
 " The harlots enter into the kingdom of heaven before you." 
 
 — Gospel according to St. Matthew. 
 
 If we recall the causes which force women into the sewer of 
 prostitution, — if we remember the humiliations of registered 
 and non-registered girls, — we shall not be at all astonished 
 that common prostitutes often feel all the horror of their lot, 
 and we shall understand the talent of observation presented 
 by certain types rendered familiar by literature. 
 
 Apart from romance and the drama, the authors who have, 
 at Paris, studied this subject with such scrupulous accuracy, 
 declare to us in like manner, that a great number of these 
 " unfortunates" are conscious of their degradation, and hasten 
 to quit their infamous means of living when they find normal 
 means of livelihood. Unhappily this recovery is but an 
 exceptional fact; the brothel-keeper, who collects the pro- 
 ceeds of their sale, makes them giddy by intoxication to 
 dissemble from them the horror of their degradation. Their 
 mirthfulness is often but a mere external display, provoked by 
 the impure jokes of those who support them. Among those 
 confined in the St. Lazare, too, are found instincts of shame, 
 united to the sentiments of motherly love. Most of them 
 impose heavy sacrifices upon themselves to bring up their 
 child, the only creature, say they, who will not at all despise 
 them. 
 A few words of sympathy astonish them. A young female 
 . foundling, whom want had caused to take to bad ways, was 
 admitted into the " Bon Pasteur" institution : the fulness of 
 her joy made her shed tears abundantly, because it was the 
 first time, she said, that any one had spoken kindly to her. 
 
 B 
 
18 
 
 The horror of this condition has many a time been the cause 
 of mental aberration and suicide.* The consciousness of 
 their degraded condition has been apparent even in the queens 
 of fashion who have become famous in backstairs society. 
 Theroigne de Mericourt one day recognised, in Paris, the 
 gentleman who had deceived her ; she darted so vindictive a 
 look at him that he perceived how dangerous his position was 
 becoming, at a time when the lower orders were exercising 
 such an implacable justice against crimes unpunished till 
 then, and he dared to ask forgiveness of her. " My forgive- 
 ness ! " she replied, " and with what price could you pay for 
 it ? My innocence betrayed, my honour lost, that of my 
 family sullied, my brothers and sisters pursued in their native 
 place by the sarcasms of their neighbours ; my father's curse ; 
 my exile from my native land ; my enrolment in the infamous 
 caste of courtesans ; the blood with which I stain and shall 
 stain my hands; my memory execrated among men; that 
 immortality of virtue which you have taught me to doubt — 
 this is what you wish to redeem ! Let us see : do you know 
 a price on earth able to pay me for all that ? "t Theroigne 
 not believing that the guilty man's blood was too precious or 
 too pure to wipe out her shame, allowed, or caused, him to 
 perish in the September massacres. J 
 
 At periods of religious revival especially, the courtesan has 
 a consciousness of her debasement. Under the influence of 
 gospel enlightenment the most abandoned women were 
 reformed to the length of hastening to martyrdom, in order to 
 wipe out the stains of their life in this baptism of blood. 
 When the age of persecution was past, the church tried to 
 reinstate fallen women ; coucils granted a dispensation from 
 canonical penance to those who gave up their evil ways, and 
 
 • Bri6re de Boismont haa made out a list of seventeen suicides, in ten years 
 among the girls registered in Paris. 
 
 + Lamartine — History of the Girondins. 
 
 I According to Lairtullier, she stabbed him herself with a dagger. 
 
19 
 
 granted forgiveness of their sins to the men who should marry 
 them.* Different societies were formed with the design of 
 raising a dower for them. The middle age opened numerous 
 asylums to them : St. Louis had a large refuge built for them, 
 and gave them the name of " Filles-Dieu." — "And caused," 
 says Joinville, " a great number of women to be put in a 
 refuge, who from poverty were made to sin by the luxurious, 
 and gave them 400 livres annually to live upon." This dota- 
 tion (endowment), enormous for the age, was higher than that 
 of the " Quinze-Vingts," which received only 300 livres.tj 
 Louis IX. also helped them with his advice, or founded with 
 his money several similar institutions, as places affiliated to 
 the " Filles-Dieu." "The King," says Joinville further, 
 " caused houses of nuns to be instituted in several places of 
 his kingdom, and gave them incomes to live upon, and recom- 
 mended that they should be admitted into them who were 
 willing to resolve (Jere contenancej to live in chastity." 
 
 The Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XIL, collected in 
 a part of his "hotel" two hundred penitent girls, whom 
 destitution and licentiousness had perverted during war ; but 
 France was then so ruined, and existence was so rough- for 
 modest women, that several of them became prostitutes with 
 the design of getting admission. The Corporation of Paris 
 also supplied penitent women with money-aids, which are 
 found entered thus in a bill of the 16th century: — "To poor 
 penitent girls, six livres j)arisis for charity and alms, to get 
 bread, of which they stand in great need." 
 
 Louis XIV. founded the Madeleine asylum ; he granted his 
 patronage to that of the Bon Pasteur, which a widow founded, 
 
 • " He who takes a prostitute for his wife," says Innocent III., "performs an 
 act of piety, for he rescues her from the road to ruin, and obtains ft)rgireneEa 
 of his sins." 
 
 + The livre was worth about 10 J d. 
 
 } A basis of comparison may be formed by remembering that Joinville, one 
 of the richest noblemen of that age, who went to the crusade with troop* 
 equipped at his own charges, had an income of ]l,SOO lines. 
 
20 
 
 and to Sainte P61agie, the work of Madame de Miramion. 
 Paris built, in tlie 18th century, four more establishments of 
 this kind, under the titles of the Saviour, St. Valerius, St. 
 Theodore, and St. Michael. These refuges, so richly endowed 
 by royal or private munificence, had numerous subsidiary 
 institutions in the provinces ; the letters-patent of our Kings, 
 even the bulls of the Popes, gave authority for making them 
 permanent. 
 
 Other societies reinstated fallen women by affiancing them 
 to Christ. 
 
 After the revolution had destroyed these rich and numerous 
 places of refuge, the Consulate re-established the house of St. 
 Michael; the City of Paris and the Ministry for charitable 
 institutions also founded that of the Bon Pasteur in 1821 ; 
 but the inadequacy of the sums placed at their disposal did 
 not admit of these institutions fulfilling their original purpose. 
 There was the same poverty of resources in all France. This 
 state of things seemed deplorable, whether it be regarded in 
 reference to the wealth of the spoliated refuges, or be com- 
 pared with the stability and the opulence of those other social 
 institutions that are called toleration-houses, and to the sums 
 absorbed in the interest of profligacy upon the pretext of 
 public health and security. An effect of our moral impoverish- 
 ment, and of certain economical doctrines which have gone 
 to the extent of making the refuges guilty of the progress of 
 prostitution, may be seen in that. Without doubt, there is 
 immorality in the efforts made to take away from vice the 
 consequences which nature has attached to it ; but this con- 
 sideration can only be applied to individuals who choose it 
 voluntarily. In going back to the causes of the downfall of 
 the greater number of women, we can but bless the hand 
 which tries to raise them up, though tardily. Every measure 
 which relates to them is, however, but a powerless palliative 
 of an evil which must be attacked in its causes, by putting 
 down the profligacy of the man. 
 
21 
 
 III.— LAWS FOU KEPEESSION. 
 
 " He was convinced that good could only flow, in a State, through 
 " the channel of the l«ws ; that the way to make a benefit lasting 
 " was by practising the virtue of followiiig them ; that the way 
 " to make an evil lasting was by practising the vice of hindeiing 
 " 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 Ismenie. 
 
 "The liberty which shows favour to the passions and licentious- 
 " ness is a fatal license, a fresh yoke, a shameful slaveiy; and 
 '• the rule of good morals is the leading principle of the happi- 
 " uess of empires." — Massillon. 
 
 If woman too frequently acquiesces in depravity, man 
 makes choice of it; it is against this active agent of corrup- 
 tion, 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 com- 
 inon 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, 
 
Z2 
 
 banished from society, wore a peculiar uniform. We observe 
 similar regulations existing in the Roman republic, where the 
 censor of morals degraded dissolute functionaries, and bran- 
 ded 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 harhourer and 
 accomplice of a prostitute was condemned to the same punish- 
 ment as herself This wise legislation did not survive the 
 ruin of liberty, arid 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.* 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 confisca- 
 tion 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. like- 
 wise contributed to the moral amelioration of the nation ; but, 
 in the following reign, the precarious position of women, the 
 
 • Tacitui : Manners of the Germans — XII. 
 
23 
 
 effect of the war, and the excesses of the troops, again 
 plunged France into serious profligacy. 
 
 The totaUty of our old legislation exhibits everywhere a 
 considerable degree of severity against procurers and liber- 
 tines ; the decrees of our parliaments, and the proclamations 
 of the provosts of Paris, often branded the former with dis- 
 grace, 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 hrooms 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 ; after- 
 wards 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 suflBciently respected and sufficiently respectable to 
 find husbands, and legionaries for sons-in-law ! Oh, honour I 
 Oh, my country ! 
 
 These vile creatures, the objects of the just severity of laws, 
 
24 
 
 were marked out for public contempt by infamous designa- 
 tions ; we may judge of that by the vehement indignation of 
 old authors against this disgusting traf&c, 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, be- 
 trayers 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.* 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 loth 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 hlancs a day, were willingly letting 
 themselves out for two, and living on them." 
 
 • A decree of February 13th, 1434, is made the protector of public girls 
 against the dissolute men who beat them. 
 
26 
 
 This sad picture suflBciently resembles that of the jiflh 
 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.* 
 
 This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. 
 When the French people, wallowing at a later period in the 
 UDchastity of royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of 
 love to be enthroned on its altars, it offered, on the revolu- 
 tionary scaffold, the innocence, beauty, and attractions of 
 women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then the guillo- 
 tine 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 
 Eevolution, 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 Salpetriere, and 
 at Bicetre ; severe penalties were also attached to the prosti- 
 tuting of modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our 
 decline since that period, let us recall the enactment of 6th 
 
 • p. Dufour : History of Prostitution — Vol. IV. 
 
26 
 
 November, 1778, which prohibits provoking to debauchery 
 in the public street,* and enjoins upon tavern and lodging- 
 house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine of 300 to 500 
 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons they 
 admit. The police, who made a strict inspeclion 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 Eevolution abolished the 
 old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose of establish- 
 ing 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 Eepublic and the Empire, 
 greatly restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitu- 
 tion, which Napoleon I. regarded with horror.f M. M. 
 Pasquier and D'Angl6s subsequently made a demand, but 
 vainly, for effectual measures fer extirpating this social canker ; 
 in presence of its rapid progress, honest magistrates and 
 upright counsellors felt the necessity of having the old enact- 
 ments 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 con- 
 demned to a fine, by the application to them of the enactment 
 
 * Art. 1st — Women and girl prostitutes ore forbidden to do fancy work (to 
 crochet) on the quays, in the Squares, public walks, bonlevard's, &c. 
 
 + One of the noblest and most constant subjects of interest to the Emperor 
 at St. Helena was the discoyery of effectual means for guardiiig against pro- 
 fligacy iu towns. 
 
27 
 
 of 6th November, 1778. The Court of Cassation had quashed 
 these verdicts bat 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 47], No. 15, of the Penal Code.* 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. 
 
 • Law of Norember 19th, 1866. 
 
28 
 
 Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the 
 sin by a three-fold 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 safe-guard 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 prosti- 
 tutes 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.* 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 appeas- 
 ing 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 im- 
 prisoned 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 
 
 • For the tendency of similar legislation in England, see Saturday Review, 
 January 8th, 1870 :— "The law accepts the fact of a contagious disease which 
 happens to exist in a human subject only as the law accepts the fact of a bad 
 drain or an unhealthy factory, and deals with it accordingly. In neither case 
 IS either the woman or the nuisance treated as a moral agent, but as a physical 
 /act."— [Editob.] ' "^ 
 
29 
 
 the police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of de- 
 bauchery 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 walkivg 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-depen- 
 dent women. Moreover, if a head official is continued in power 
 after the mistakes which are the necessary consequence pf 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 any- 
 thing more humane from them, and if we have forgotten the 
 history of prostitution in ancient Trance, let us recall that 
 when slavery had developed in the EomanEmpire those excesses 
 which are consistent with the right of citizenship among our- 
 selves, 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 
 
30 
 
 and hotels, which are likewise the refuge of the work-woman, 
 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 Instruc- 
 tion, issued a regulation prohibiting mistresses of boarding- 
 houses and secular institutions from receiving women-lodgera 
 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 con- 
 sequence 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 gmlly 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 pro- 
 menades, cannot be frequented by unaccompanied women, and 
 that a quite recent regulation forbids every unaccompanied 
 woman to enter any of our cafes on the' boulevards. For- 
 merly, public places of resort were forbidden to prostitution ; 
 at present, having obtained the wall-side there, it drives 
 respectable people away from them. 
 
31 
 
 The anxiety of the Administration for the debauchee might, 
 however, leave him some monetary miscalculations; but 
 legislative enactment and legal exposition are on the watch, 
 in their turn, like anxious mothers, that mistresses should not 
 be too expensive. Every day our courts of law sanction the 
 rights of prostitution by annulling his presents and debts, 
 and issuing orders like this : " It exists as a principle in 
 jurisprudence, that the individual who has excited to 
 debauchery to gratify his own passions is by no means looked 
 upon as guilty by our legislation.* 
 
 This solemn charter is confirmed in all the specific appli- 
 cations. 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"\ Practi- 
 cally, 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' imprison- 
 ment, while the woman had to undergo five years of the same 
 kind of punishment.J 
 
 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, 
 
 • Correctional Coart of Niort, re Plassiart — Sitting of Dec. 7, 1861. 
 
 ^ No one is permitted to come into court nho mast avow his own shame. 
 
 { Assize Court of the Seine— Sitting of May 13, 1868. 
 
32 
 
 robbed bis mother. Tbe judge, by an inquisitorial examina- 
 tion, 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 de- 
 bauchee off, and sentenced the courtesan to 8 months' 
 imprisonment.* 
 
 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 com- 
 mit larceny. It neither condemns this rebel against society 
 
 • Law of October 35, 1864. 
 
33 
 
 to a fine nor to disgrace as'a citizen, and, by imprisoning the 
 woman, it proclaims the man's right to be dissolute. 
 
 A well-known courtesan who lived in a splendid town- 
 house in one of our wealthiest districts, was there receiv- 
 ing, 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 train- 
 ing 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 perio- 
 dical 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, encou- 
 raged ! 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 
 c 
 
34 
 
 advantage certain from the time that the sale of a young girl 
 can fetch, from 1,500 to 10,000 francs. No search for, no 
 mention even .is made in any case of these monsters with, a 
 human face, who have a constant right to the produce of this 
 horrible traffic; no indemnification is granted to the wretched 
 parents from whom the victims have been carried off by 
 stratagem. I have already cited the solemn right which 
 the spirit of our laws acknowledges for those who procure 
 debauchery on their own account. Different decrees declare 
 that Article 334 of the Penal Code, relating to the exciting 
 to debauchery, is not applicable to this kind of crimes. 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 
 
35 
 
 is in the service of the State or of his country, his irrespon- 
 sibility will he 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 base- 
 ness, 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 falhng ; 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 sym- 
 bols 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 espe- 
 cially 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 responsi- 
 bility, have been able to preserve themselves from the decay 
 which prostitution brings in its train. England,* Sweden, 
 
 • The authoress, when she wrote these pages, had not heard the fact that the 
 Contagious Diseases Acts had become law in England.— [Ediioe.] 
 
36 
 
 Switzerland, Prussia, Saxony, the United States, &c., permit, 
 as France in former times did, the private initiative in the 
 closing of the places for debauchery ; they refuse to allow the 
 accomplices of prostitutes to bring any action for debt, 
 and impose penalties for the immoralities which we both 
 condone and surround with outward signs of splendour.* 
 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 con- 
 versation), 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 ener- 
 vates, enfeebles, and diminishes population, accumulating 
 and scattering, besides, riches got without labour ; and devot- 
 ing to orgies food obtained by pinching the poor, it creates a 
 pauperised community in the midst of one of sybarites. + 
 
 The European nation which shall most imperfectly put 
 down this vice will therefore be the weakest, the most un- 
 stable, and, consequently, the ripest for downfall. Experi- 
 ence teaches that this truth applies alike to ancient and 
 modern civilizations. 
 
 * In the United States the Constitution thus establishes the principle 
 of responsibility; — "The president, vice-president, and all civil function- 
 aries, shall be liable to be turned out of their places if, after being 
 accused, they are convicted of treason, the waste of public money, or other 
 offences, and of libertinism." In the same way, every elector, before voting, 
 must give proof of his morality. The Prussian laws sentence the pander who 
 allures women, even those above age, by artifice, to ten years' hard labour, and 
 have him flogged when he is sent to, and when discharged from, prison. They 
 deprive fathers, mothers, masters, patrons, tutors, &c., of their rights, if they 
 abuse, merely by licentious words, those placed in their care. Russia whip's 
 debauchees with the knout. Spain has parUy kept up her old laws, which were 
 severe only on the purveyors of profligacy and the frequenters of places of 
 infamy, by declaring that " The shame proceeds from him who pays for debauchery, 
 and not from her who sells it and receives its price." Public prostitutes there, 
 ■who engage maid-servants under 40, are sentenced to one year's transportation, 
 and a fine of 2000 marvedi, &c. J f i 
 
 I onn mn? °* °" !"'"'' °^ ^°°'°°° inhabitants, the brothels receive about 
 l,)iO0,Q00 francs yearly. 
 
37 
 
 Moral responsibility, interpreted in Egypt, by the duty 
 which the lawgiver imposed upon fathers and mothers of 
 providing for their illegitimate children, and by their custom 
 of passing judgment on the dead, had fashioned that granite 
 people which will continue to be the wonder and admiration 
 of all ages. So long as Greece and Rome preserved this 
 Egyptian policy, whose light had been introduced among 
 them by severe lawgivers, they were in a position to defy, 
 in like manner, all external enemies ; but, frorn 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 consti- 
 tuted 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 ^Eschines and of Demos- 
 thenes — 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 th6 pyramids formed out of 
 human carcases by the Genghis Khans and the Tamerlanes, 
 as in the civilized systems, polished like the Eoman Empire, 
 that of the Low Countries and of France, in which are ob- 
 served 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 gratifica- 
 tions. 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 
 
38 
 
 the Stoics, who took for their maxim endurance and self- 
 denial ! What grandeur of soul among those ohscure Chris- 
 tians, -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 !* 
 
 Individual virtues were unable, notwithstanding, to save 
 the empire, ruined as it was from the day when the rule 
 of inorals 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 Csesar erected his vices into laws ; in which 
 Augustus destroyed, by his example, the morality he preached 
 by his precepts ; in which that censor of morals, who issued 
 severe edicts against an unmarried seducer, who caused the 
 consecrated fire to be maintained by the virgins on the altar 
 of Vesta, being personally affected by the contagion of the 
 period, secretly introduced the courtesan at home, by paying 
 public and hypocritical honours to Livia. It is all over with 
 that power which shall haVe for its moral law nothing more 
 than the individual temperament of those who wield it, and 
 Juvenal shall very soon utter his prophetic warning : — 
 
 " Saevior armis 
 " Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem."+ 
 
 Rome shall drink the poisoned cup by copious draughts ; 
 when the queen of the world shall have emptied the fatal 
 
 • Marons Aurelius, who nnderstood all the importance of moral perfection, 
 thanks the gods for having had a youth of chastity. How few sovereigns can 
 say with him : " Men want a head as flocks do a leader. Tliia head is not 
 above the laws, his life separated from the body of society would be a factious 
 one. ^. . . . A sovereign cannot do liis duty if he does not find advisers to 
 .point It out to him," &o. 
 
 + Luxuriousness, more ruthless than war, overmastered us, and avenges the 
 world (we have_) conquered. 
 
89 
 
 beverage, God shall make a sign to the barbarians, and the 
 Northern hordes shall arise. A thousand times unhappy 
 should we be, similarly, if, by scandalous privileges, we con- 
 tinued to attract the dregs of the entire world which will 
 sacrifice Fraiice'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. 
 
40 
 
 IV.— MALE PROSTITUTION, AND PARTICULABLT 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, fXs. 
 
 " 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, hy making them uni-- 
 versal, cause them to he lost sight of even to the very odious- 
 ness 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 he a man of pleasure, 
 an agreeable companion, a captivating knight, &c. The 
 facihty with which young men can procure instrument's of 
 vice, wherever they go, the guardian-hand of the administra- 
 tion 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 gratifi- 
 cation, no longer acknowledge any check. Who has not 
 heard those Societies spoken of which give their candidates 
 
41 
 
 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 
 tlaemseUes followers-up of workwomen ; of celebrated foreign- 
 ers, earls and viscounts, &o. ; 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 cham- 
 pions 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, gover- 
 nesses, 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.* 
 
 • A young debauchee used to get women into a house for base purposes. 
 After debauching his Tictims he deserted them in the darkness of night in the 
 middle of winter, among the intricacies of a house unknown to them. When, 
 half dead &om cold, they dragged' themselves in the morning to the doorstep to 
 complain of this barbarity, the young man, questioned by the porter, feigned 
 surprise. At other times, he made sport, impudently, of recriminations he knew 
 to be unable to reach him, and commonly boasted of the privileges of irresponsi- 
 bility which convert marriage into a profession of trickery. This guardian of our 
 social morality was decorated, in 1848, for having, in the June days, fought 
 in defence of public tranqmllUy. 
 
4:2 
 
 In all classes we, meet these men, whose polygamy, simulr 
 taneous or successive, has no other limits than the caprices of 
 unhridled passion. This process of making licentiousness 
 common, imparts to it, in the present day, an instability un- 
 known 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 legiti- 
 mate wife; in practice, our dissipated men, rich and poor, 
 allow their mistresses of a day to pass through every succes- 
 sive 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-per- 
 cent, principle; it is the fact of the existence of these morals 
 that gave occasion to the writing of this : — 
 
 " Impuissants a porter un Tice tout en tier 
 
 " lis sont amants, joueurs, libertius par quartier."' 
 
 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 
 
 » The purport of this couplet may be thus freely rendered : — 
 " Denied of one fat vice to take their fill, 
 Morsels of several serve them for a meal," 
 
43 
 
 conceive the hope of following their elders in backstairs 
 society, and their young imagination places its heau-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 harlets. It is this type of libertine which 
 afi'ects 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 instruc- 
 tion ; but in that of the higher grade, the young man shaking 
 ofi' this uncomfortable check, inaugurates his life as a citizen 
 by procuring a degraded mistress, who initiates him into every 
 sort of wickedness.* 
 
 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 
 
 ' lored ' if they have to make their appearance at a famiiy 
 
 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 
 
 • The protection of the student is insufficient, even in the special schools 
 which have pupil-boBirders. They are, it is true, supposed to hare guardians, 
 but, in reality, left to themselves twice a week, and on some days, as exti'a holi- 
 days, when they come back, they proceed to get a certificate of good behaviour 
 signed by a guardian, who, busied with his own aflFairs, cannot have known how 
 they spend their time. 
 
44 
 
 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 cafe. The prosecution proved that this assassin 
 had for four years been living with prostitutes in the most 
 unrestrained debauchery.* 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 guardian- 
 ship, or disciplinary regimen, is exercised over students, apart 
 • Assize Court of the Seine, sitting of February 4, 1866. 
 
45 
 
 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 enume- 
 rating ? 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 youthg, 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 con- 
 nection 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 
 
46 
 
 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 supe- 
 rior to a code which, topreserve 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."* 
 
 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 de- 
 serted 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 con- 
 sider 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 mar- 
 
 * When we reflect that foreign youths learn such manners in France, we are 
 no longer surprised that the profligate, and, too often, the governing portion of 
 Europe, should consider the investigation to discover the father of disowned 
 children inconvenient. 
 
47 
 
 rying — 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 profli- 
 gacy. The lower-class girl is no longer anything but 
 the sport of his passions. It is all over with him. He pro- 
 ceeds 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 prpmised 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 legiti- 
 mation 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 Tholomyis and 
 of Marius familiar to ma,ny. The former personifies the 
 
48 
 
 student with base passions, the hero of the day, whpse morals 
 I have sketched — who becomes an important personage, a 
 member of parhament, all the while he is continuing to he, 
 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 Tholomyis 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 Miseralles our Tholomyis of 
 the quartier latin were making sport of their mistresses by 
 styling them Pauline ? 
 
 If we wish to leave the domain of fiction, let a careful in- 
 quiry 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 Tholomyis Seduce Paulines, 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 
 
49 
 
 pleasures, which, by corrupting the individual, destroy all 
 social-ties. It is young men like these -who, baptised in luxu- 
 riousness, 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 main- 
 tenance 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 im- 
 pose 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 rela- 
 tives who must decide about them. The marriage is, neverthe- 
 
 D 
 
60 
 
 less, arranged without their being consulted ; everything around 
 them is going forward for the nuptials ; nothing is wanting 
 hut 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 uupolite, 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. 
 Kestrained 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.* 
 
 To get at the origin of these immoralities, so widely spread 
 in the present day, we must put royalty itself upon the cul- 
 prit'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 vene- 
 ration of subjects. When the dynasty of the Merovingians was 
 implanted in our soil, a conquest to Rome, civilization, and 
 Christianity, the Galilean 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 suflBciently developed to understand the purity of prac- 
 tice, the holiness of the Christian teaching. The Church 
 tolerated in these barbarous kings and their enervated sons, 
 the Koman 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 custo- 
 
 • One of our well-known courtesans, in her memoirs, brings to mind one of 
 her former supporters, who was then a public official in a provincial town, and 
 who is sending her stolen expressions of regret, and looking upon his appoint- 
 ment as a post of insupportable banishment, far from the social circle in which 
 he lived with her. 
 
51 
 
 mary abuses in its train if, in the Church, it had not found a 
 moderator invested with the noble mission of giving a sanc- 
 tion 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 fulmina- 
 tions which hovered constantly over the head of royal culprits 
 from the moment they had taken their passions as their rule 
 of conduct.* 
 
 But restraint irritated these kings, these princes and great 
 ones, senseless enough not to understand that they were ruin^ 
 ing themselves, together with respect for authority, .by teach- 
 ing the people contempt for the moral law. The age of the 
 " Eenaissance" was, from this point of view, perhaps the most 
 fatal era^of our old monarchy. Paganism, when it left Con- 
 stantinople, 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 debauch- 
 ery. Borne lost her empire over the souls of men; the Refor- 
 mation 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 Brantome, 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, wal- 
 lowed with impunity in the most monstrous debauchery. 
 Sending to execution those who reproved them^t they 
 
 • Bishops asserted the Church's right of deposing adulterous princes, fomi- 
 eators, &c., and of ahsolving their subjects from every oath of fidelity to them. 
 (See M. Guizot, " History of Civilization in Europe.") 
 
 + Then (under Henri II) Anne du Bourg thus expresses herself: — But 
 what 1 crimes worthy of death, blasphemies, adulteries, horrible debauches, per- 
 juries are committed, with impunity, in the face of heaven, and every day new 
 punishments are invented against men whose only crime is having made, owing 
 to the teachings of Holy Scripture, the discovery of the Boman baseness, and 
 having called for its wholesome reform." The Councillor du Four, in his turn, 
 exclaims : " We must understand well who they are that trouble the Church, lest 
 that should happen that Elijah told king Ahab, ' It is you who trouble Israel.' " 
 
63 p 
 
 paid honour to their morganatic queens (queen-mistresses^) s 
 Prom this period, moreover, every principle of respect was 
 destroj-ed 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 hy 
 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 cour- 
 tiers 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 gratifica- 
 tion 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.* 
 
 • Saint Simon, endeavouring to have an illicit intimacy of the Duke of Orieaua 
 broken off, showed him the opinion existing against him. " There is," said he, 
 " a general estrangement, which has the complexion of rage, because no one can 
 endure in a grandson of France, at the age of 35, an outrage upon good morals 
 which the magistrate and the police would long ago have punished in any one 
 who might not have been high enough in rank to be shielded from censure." 
 He puts before him the distinction and honours Ihat attach to the moral men 
 from amongst whom Louis XIV has chosen his generals and advisers, whilst 
 noblemen of high birth are deprived of the distinctions of their class, debased 
 in their profligate habits, unknown or despised at court, left to their own shame 
 and to wretchedness, expelled from the meanest societies, objects of the public 
 blame and contempt, and reduced to find themselves too despicable for the 
 blows people disdain to inflict upon them. Elsewhere, St. Simon further caused 
 the reception of Villars by the parliament to be looked upon as an enormity, 
 because, he said, " against the most common practice, no peer was taken as a 
 witness of his life and manners, which will afford cause for public dissertation; 
 had he so acted from respect or from shame, or from a fear of being rejected? 
 I was pained," he adds, " to find myself at so humiliating a ceremonial." 
 
53 
 
 It is not useless to compare this period of decline with our 
 present morals. Then the debauchee infringed the laws — 
 he keei)s 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." 
 
 " Obsour, on I'eflt fl6tri d'une mort legitime, 
 II eat puissant, les lois ont ignoiS son crime : " • 
 
 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 whole- 
 some restraint, in this direction, upon the governing class. 
 
 Every dehauchee is an ahsolute sovereign, not after the 
 manner of our former monarchs who robhed G-od 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 
 
 cousider 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. 
 
 • Freely rendered thus : — 
 
 " The crime that rightly costs the hind his blood, 
 For peers condoned, by partial justice viewed," 
 
54 
 
 Let us speik at least of one of these men whose mprals 
 are no longei* under the protection of the law. — Eeycaud who, 
 in 1861, came up before the Tsire Assize Court* 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. 
 Eeynaud, the murderer of his daughter in a fit of jealous 
 anger against the Eegistrar, whose mistress she was, was con- 
 victed 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 Eeynaud, 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. Eeynaud had, 
 moreover, seduced an idiot, and cruelly left her in great desti- 
 tution 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 under- 
 stood 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 
 
 • Sittings of March 22, 83, and 24. 
 
55 
 
 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 delin- 
 quency, 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 Eeynaud had 
 bought for five sous or five fi:ancs. Let these female domes- 
 tics 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 deal- 
 ings with Keynand : 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 
 Eeynand, as necessary to the proceedings as the women who 
 figured at them ; inviolability, the protectress of their profli- 
 gacy, prevented justice from summoning them, and even 
 uttering their names ; their " honorabilite," kept safe by the 
 letter " h," sufi'ers 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 pro- 
 
56 
 
 fligate man can do, we must refer to our multitudes of 
 Eeynauds who have neither Isilled nor stolen, but who, sub- 
 mitting like himself to the yoke of unbridled passions, sow 
 death wherever they go without being punished for it.* 
 
 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 tliat with our dissolate 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 " Volyeucte"'i 
 
 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 he 
 able to contract inconvenient marriages, susceptible of alter- 
 ing 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 con- 
 
 • Madlle. DaubiS in a private letter elsewhere, points out the terrible social 
 results which attend the absence of laws against seducers in England, which, if 
 joined with a system of regulated prostitution, must bring us as low as France. 
 
57 
 
 sist in the settling the minimum of the marriage portion ; hut, 
 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 legislatif" 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 hononrable 
 livlihood by working; if a marriage' contract with her is 
 signed, the minister of war intervenes to punish the delin- 
 quent and the notary guilty of this (so-considered) discredit- 
 able transaction.* 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 Frangois Regis, 
 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 particu- 
 lar leading military men, it has been noticed that illegitimate 
 births increase, in towns, in direct proportion to the presence 
 
 • Moiiiteur de rarm£e, NoTember, 1863, 
 
68 
 
 and increase of garrisons, which have also carried prostitution 
 into out-townships till then preserved from this pest. 
 
 Of this, an opinion may he 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 he 
 met with on the field of honour, even serves to enahle soldiers 
 to ohtain a reduction of one half the payment in hrothels. 
 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 oi 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 antomaton-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 com- 
 plicity of the commanders in breaches of morals, become 
 incomprehensible if they are contrasted with the rigid disci- 
 pline 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. 
 
59 
 
 Just minds are expressing the opinion that France will only 
 escape ruin by a more healthy recognition of social obliga- 
 tions, 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 gar- 
 rison 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 kfeid 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' 
 "cafes." 
 
 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 ];eference to the case of L6andri.* 
 
 • Criminal Justice, First Oourt-Martial of Paris, Sittings of the 1 5th to the 
 20th April, 1867. 
 
60 
 
 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. L6andri's counsel 
 went so far as to make his frequenting the " quartier Breda" 
 meritorious in him : "He has mistresses," said he, "is not 
 that the common yractice 1 " 
 
 The imperial commissioner interfered, in his turn, to re- 
 proach 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 Prance per- 
 mitted him to protect us by his gogd 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 Vin- 
 cennes 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.* 
 
 These rakes, returning again to their native district, after 
 being liberated, spread corruption even to our smallest vil- 
 lages, 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 
 
 • Second Court-Mgrtial of Paris, October 1868. 
 
61 
 
 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 respecta- 
 bility of morals, and even degrades from official honour the 
 courageous man who sets himself determinedly to practise 
 natural morality in despite of social.* 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 rob- 
 bers, 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 advan- 
 tages of a robber who, sure of impunity, should see patrols 
 
 * The applications of the law which forbids the marrying a victim of seduc- 
 tion are sometimes grevious. Thns, an officer lost his post for making the offer 
 of reparation to a young girl, whom moral tortures and the pangs of child-birth 
 were putting in danger. This noble deserter from an infamous military honour, 
 hastened to tell her of the military disgrace which would attend his marrying, 
 and led her to the nuptial altar, where she died heart-broken with emotion. 
 
68 
 
 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 pro- 
 moters. 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, Jias 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 esta- 
 blished the link of connection between the two hemispheres, 
 and exact that their wives should adopt the courtesan's man- 
 ners, 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 conse- 
 quences, 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 profli- 
 gacy, 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 
 
63 
 
 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 evjl 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 over- 
 come by drunkenness, into the courtesan's arms; the impuri- 
 ties displayed in our monuments, in our public squares, is the 
 result of a like cause. 
 
 In literature, the corruption of particular authors in- 
 spiring 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, claim- 
 ing 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 observa- 
 tion ? Why should our numerous " Messieurs aux cam61ias " 
 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 see- 
 ing an abandoned woman attain to their own nobleness of senti- 
 ment ? Why should not the stage have the right to exhibit 
 
64 
 
 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 them- 
 selves 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. 
 
65 
 
 " In short, the truth must be spoken. Woe to those who speak 
 " it not, aud woe to you if you are not worthy of bearing it." 
 
 Letter from Fenelon to Louis XIV. 
 
 The investigation of this melancholy subject has placed 
 before us the progress of the evil, through the destitution 
 and dependence of the young women of the lower classes ; 
 and the impunity, and even the protection, of the agents and 
 accomplices of profligacy. This too clear and a thousand 
 times attested degradation of the woman by discomfort and 
 poverty, this glut in the supply of prostitution on the market 
 in seasons of dearth of employment, enables us to understand 
 the error of certain anti-economical doctrines representing 
 that the man, who is the bread-winner for four, is ever his 
 wife's and mother's and child's protector at his fireside.* 
 
 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, co;nsequently, 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 im- 
 moral 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 
 
 * Man, the sole support of his family, assuming an average of tat two children 
 by marriage, should always earn enough for fonr and spend for one ; whioh 
 assumes that there would he no one counting for nothing — no bachelor among 
 men : moreover the logic of this system would be either marriage or death- 
 fidelity in marriage or death ; the certainty for the husband and the father of 
 never having any sickness, and of assuredly surviving his wife and his children 
 under age, d^e. logicianE of the abstud I 
 
 E 
 
66 
 
 happiness, much less those vulgar, coarse, and fatal pleasures 
 ■which, hy 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 he 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 oi 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 prosti- 
 tution, 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 re- 
 pressive measures subordinate to the efibrt 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 ig- 
 norant 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 
 
67 
 
 have, on the contrary, fallen to an unspeakable degree of 
 degradation.* 
 
 What deep-seated corruption does the unrestricted haunt- 
 ing 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, legisla- 
 tion, 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 expe- 
 rience, that the certainty, the hope merely, of escaping punish- 
 ment, 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, dis- 
 grace, maladies and mental incapacityit entails — allying 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 
 
 * The United States, Sweden, Prassia, England, Switzerland, <fec., reject this 
 organization : Austria, Belgium, and Italy imitate it. Let us see in which 
 direction the path of the future lies. 
 
68 
 
 ashamed to haunt places which, if left unptotected in thei¥ 
 infamy, would no longer he looked upon as necessary institu- 
 tions. Let us then deplore the infatuation of those communi- 
 ties 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 had consequences of 
 human action to he apparent; as if moralists could hare 
 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 he a 
 folly to preserve certain men from the natural contagion con- 
 sequent 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, 
 
69 
 
 in these human flesh-markets, the suspension of God's laws, 
 which is the cause of ruin for thousands of young men who 
 would never have become acquainted with profligacy if it had 
 not been oiFered to them daily with such persistency, and who 
 are unable to take a step, in our towns, without meeting 
 with it.* 
 
 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 suflBeient 
 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. con- 
 vinced, 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 ofience of walking 
 out "unprotected" is no longer marriageable. 
 
 • Among a group of college students who were treating for a girl in the public 
 ihorough&re, one of twelve years old at most was noticed. 
 
70 
 
 Debauchery, driven from the street, would also he driven 
 from caffes, 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 keepersj tavern-keepers, 
 coffee-house proprietors, &o., who, by the greediest complicity, 
 make vice a matter of trade. But, alas ! the law promul- 
 gated 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 efBciently 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. 
 
71 
 
 A community which sanctions the family-principle should, 
 farther, 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 gratui- 
 tous 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 appli- 
 cable, thereby punishing every individual who incites to 
 profligacy hy 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 protec- 
 tion — 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 
 ofiBcials, judges, magistrates perhaps, are not capable, at the 
 age of 1 9 and 20 years, of a greater moral responsibility than 
 the infant in long-clothes ? Cancel their debts, if you like ; 
 hut at least brand them for their cynical attacks on the funda- 
 mental laws of public propriety. 
 
78 
 
 We must get rid of our confusion of principles with respect 
 to those young people who, separated from their family by 
 their profession, are entrusted to society. In the first place, 
 in what has reference to the soldier, patriotism and a feeling 
 of true honour, would not give him up to be corrupted by 
 long years of inaction in garrison, and would not permit any 
 man to lead the life of a pig under cover of the flag of France. 
 Now that we are threatened with the corporal-instructor, we 
 ought, I think, to be permitted to know that his certificate of 
 good conduct has not compelled him to disavow his illegiti- 
 mate 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 autho- 
 
73 
 
 rize us in a rebellion against our administrative toleration 
 of vice ; all men of courage, claiming the emancipation 
 of destitution sold to profligacy, must likewise denounce the 
 shamelessness of those men v?ho 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 legis- 
 lative 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 pro- 
 fligate 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 develop- 
 ment 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 ques- 
 tion, 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 in- 
 
74 
 
 struction, and the -woman of an honourable income, does not 
 at all contribute to her ruin. This Senate, the guardian, of 
 morals, refrained from looking round within its own precincts,' 
 to see if it were not, in any way, harbouring members whose 
 example might weaken the authority of its precepts ; it did 
 not seem to suspect that a courtesan is the effect of a debauchee 
 who pays for her, and it did not at all wish to know if its 
 sons were contributing to the evil : laying it wholly upon the 
 luxuriousness of women, it contented itself with some 
 pleasantries, afid, far from opposing strong means of resist- 
 ance to profligacy, declared that Art. 484 of our Criminal 
 Code sufficed for putting down yice.* Almost immedi- 
 atfely after this discussion, the Asiatic pest, raging around 
 us, threatened our physical existence. Oh ! then we becaine 
 the champions of progress ; we knew hOw to attack the etil 
 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 a,uthorities 
 established to put it down continue to protect it. The mea- 
 sures I am proposing, if they are exaiHined by the prismatic 
 ^lass of history, reason, national a:nd personal rights, are the 
 conditions of liberty and public decency. They will confine 
 the evil to the dregs of society. 
 
 • The sole measure of a serious character proposed by the Senate was the 
 prohibition of provocation in a public thoroughfare ; the Government, it appears, 
 has not even condescended to take notice of this vote. As to Article 484 of the 
 Code, it declares, we khow, that it did not regulate this matter. 
 
75 
 
 When we are governed hj a nloral Code, the Family institu- 
 tion grounded on morality and labour, will be able, without 
 aid, to tread down the hydra of debauchery, wallowing in the 
 mire of idleness and licentiousness. But, if justice and 
 honour do not come out victorious from the present struggle, 
 woe, a thousand times woe, to the vanquished ! 
 
 T. BBAKEII, PBINTEE, LIVEBPOOL. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 HQ 125.F8D23 
 
 French morality,under the r^^^^^^^^ 
 
 3 1924 021 845 502 -