( 1 866.)
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in the heat of the moment. Casual intimacy has never had complete recognition; it has always been concealed, just as marriage has been a subject of boasting. All attempts at the official regulation of brothels, although aiming at their restriction, are offensive to the moral sense of society, which in organisation sees acceptance. The scheme of a gentleman in Paris, in the days of the Directorate, for establishing privileged brothels with their own hierarchy and so on, was even in those days received with hisses and overwhelmed by a story of laughter and contempt.
The healthy, normal life of man avoids the monastery just as much as the cattle-yard; the sexlessness of the monk, which the Church esteems above marriage, as much as the childless gratification of the passions . . . .
Marriage is for Christianity a concession, an inconsistency, a weakness. Christianity regards marriage as society regards concubinage.
The monk and the Catholic priest are condemned to perpetual celibacy by way of reward for their foolish triumph over human nature.
Christian marriage on the whole is sombre and unjust; it establishes inequality, which the Gospel preaches against, and delivers the wife into slavery to the husband. The wife is sacrificed, love (hateful to the Church) is sacrificed ; after the Church ceremony it becomes a superfluity, and is replaced by duty and obligation. Of the brightest and most joyous of feelings Christianity has made a pain, a weariness, and a sin. The human race had either to die out or be inconsistent. Outraged nature protested.
It protested not only by acts followed by repentance and the gnawing of conscience, but by sympathy, by rehabilitation. The protest began in the very heyday of Catholicism and chivalry.
The threatening husband, Raoul, the Bluebeard in armour with the sword, tyrannical, jealous, and merciless; the barefoot monk, sullen, senseless, superstitious, ready to avenge himself for his privations, for his unnecessary struggle; jailers, hangmen, spies, . . . and in some cellar or turret a sobbing woman, a page in chains, for whom no one will intercede. All is darkness, savagery, blood, bigotry, violence, and Latin prayers chanted through the nose.
But behind the monk, the confessor and the jailer who, with the threatening husband, the father and the brother stand guard over the marriage, the folk-legend is forming in the stillness, the ballad is heard and is carried from place to place, from castle to
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castle, by troubadour and minnesinger-it champions the unhappy woman. The court smites, the song emancipates. The Church hurls its anathema at love outside marriage, the ballad curses marriage without love. It defends the love-sick page, the fallen wife, the oppressed daughter, not by reasoning but with sympathy, with pity, vdth tears, lamentation. The song is for the people its secular prayer, i ts other escape from the cold and hunger of life, from suffocating misery and heavy toil.
On holidays the litanies to the Madonna were replaced by the mournful strains, des eomplaintes, which did not abandon an unfortunate woman to infamy, but wept for her, and set above all the Virgin of Sorrows, beseeching Her intercession and forgiveness.
From ballads and legends the protest grows into the novel and the drama. In the drama it becomes a force. In the theatre outraged love and the gloomy secrets of family injustice found their tribunal, their public hearing. Their case has shakf'n thousands of hearts, wringing tears and cries of indignation against the serfdom of marriage and the fetters of the family riveted on by force. The jury of the stalls and the boxes have over and over again pronounced the acquittal of individuals and the guilt of institutions.
Meanwhile, in the period of political reconstructions and secular tendencies in thought, one of the two strong props of marriage has begun to break down. As it becomes less and less of a sacrament-that is, loses its ultimate basis-it has leaned more and more on the police. Only by the mystic intervention of a higher power can Christian marriage be justified. Here there is a certain logic-senseless, but still logic. The police-officer, putting on his tricolour scarf and celebrating the wedding with the civil code in his hand, is a far more absurd figure than the priest in his vestments, surrounded by the fumes of incense, holy images a nd miracles. Even the First Consul, Napoleon, the most prosaic bourgeois in matters of love and family, perceived that marriage at the police station was a mighty poor affair, and tried to persuade Cambaceres4 to add some obligatory phrase, some moral sentence, particularly one that would impress upon the bride her duty to be faithful to her husband (not a word about him) and to obey him.
As soon as marriage £'merges from the sphere of mysticism, it 4 Cambac�res, Jean-Jacqups ( 1 753-1824 ). one of the nearest advisers of Napoleon, and compiler of the Code Civil. He attempted to dissuade Napoleon from the invasion of Russia. (Tr. )
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becomes expedient, an external course of action. It was introduced by the frightened 'Bluebeards' (shaven nowadays, and changed into 'blue-chins') in judges' wigs, and academic tailcoats, popular representatives and liberals, the priests of the civil code. Civil marriage is simply a measure of state economy, freeing the state from responsibi lity for the children and attaching people more closely to property. Marriage without the intervention of the Church became a contract for the bodily enslavement of each to the other for life. The legislator has nothing to_ do with faith, with mystic ravings, so long as the contract is fulfilled, and if it is not he will find means of punishment and enforcement. And why not punish it? In England, the traditional country of juridical development, a boy of sixteen, made drunk by ales and gin and enrolled in a regiment by an old recruiting sergeant with ribbons on his hat, is subjected to the most fearful tortures. Why not punish a girl? Why not punish with shame, ruin, and forcible restoration to her master the girl who, with no clear understanding of what she is about, has contracted to love for l ife, and has admitted an extra, forgetting that the 'season-ticket' is not transferable. But these 'blue-chins'
too have been attacked by the trouvercs and novelists. Against the marriage of legal contract a psychiatrical, physiological dogma has been set up, the dogma of the absolute infallibility of the passions and the incapacity of man to struggle against them.
Those who were yesterday the slaves of marriage are now becoming the slaves of love. There is no law for love, there is no strength that can resist it.
After this, all rational control, all responsibility, every form of self-restraint is effaced. That man is in subjection to irresistible and ungovernable forces is a theory utterly opposed to that freedom of reason and by reason, to that formation of the character of a free man which all social theories aim at attaining by different paths.
Imaginary forces, if men take them for real, are just as powerful as real ones; and this is so because the substance generated by a human being is the same whatever the force that acts upon him. The man who is afraid of ghosts is afraid in exactly the same way as the man who is afraid of mad dogs, and may as easily die of fright. The difference is that in one case the man can be shown that his fears are nonsensical, and in the other he cannot.