Part 5 — Appendix (To Chapter 41)

I

... On the one hand we have the Proudhon family, irrevocably welded together and nailed down, indissoluble marriage, the absolute power of the father—a family in which for the sake of society all the persons except one are brought to misery, the savage marriage in which unchanging feeling, the magic power of a vow, are assumed; on the other hand, the theories that are coming into vogue, in which marriage and the family are no longer binding, the irresistible force of passion is assumed, the past is thought to lay no obligations, and the complete independence of the individual is asserted.

On the one hand we have woman almost stoned for faithlessness; on the other, jealousy itself put hors la loi as a morbid, abnormal feeling of egoism and ownership and the romantic distortion of healthy and natural ideas.

Where is the truth ... where is the middle line? Twenty-three years ago I was already seeking a way out of this forest of contradictions.

We are bold in denial and always ready to fling any of our idols into the river, but the gods of home and family are somehow ‘waterproof’—they always rise again. Perhaps there is no sense left in them, but there is still life in them; it seems as though the weapons used against them have simply glided over their snaky scales, felled them, stunned them ... but have not killed them.

Jealousy ... Fidelity ... Infidelity ... Chastity ... Dark forces, menacing words, thanks to which rivers of tears, rivers of blood have flowed—words that set us shuddering like the memory of the Inquisition, of torture, of the plague ... and yet they are the words under the shadow of which, as under the sword of Damocles, the family has lived and is living.

There is no turning them out of doors by abuse or by denial. They remain round the corner, slumbering, ready at the slightest call to ruin everything near and far, to ruin us ourselves....

It seems as though we must abandon the excellent intention of extinguishing these smouldering embers and confine ourselves humbly to mitigating and humanely directing the destructive fire. You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law-courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.

Moreover, jealousy has always enjoyed special privileges. In itself a strong absolutely natural passion, it has hitherto only been encouraged instead of being restrained and softened. The Christian doctrine making, through hatred of the body, everything fleshly of extraordinary value, and the aristocratic worship of blood, of purity of race, have developed to the point of absurdity the conception of insulted honour, of a blot that cannot be effaced. Jealousy has received the jus gladii, the right of judgment and revenge. It has become a duty of honour, almost a virtue. All that will not stand a moment’s criticism—but yet there still remains at the bottom of the heart a very real insurmountable feeling of pain, of unhappiness called jealousy, a feeling as elementary as the feeling of love itself, resisting every effort to deny it, an ‘irreducible’ feeling.

... Here again are the everlasting limits, the Caudine Forks into which history drives us. On both sides there is truth, on both there is falsehood. The bold asking for a clear alternative will lead you nowhere. At the moment of complete denial of one of the terms, it comes back—just as after the last quarter of the moon the first appears on the other side.

Hegel removed the boundary-posts of human reason, by rising to the absolute spirit; in it they did not vanish but were transformed—fulfilled, as the German theological philosophy expresses it: this is mysticism, philosophical theodicy, allegory, and reality purposely mixed up. All religious reconciliations of the irreconcilable are won by means of redemption—that is, by sacred transmutation, a sacred deception, a solution which solves nothing but rests on faith. Can anything be more opposite to free-will than necessity?—but by faith they are easily reconciled. Man will accept without a murmur the justice of punishment for an action which was pre-ordained.

Proudhon himself, in a different range of questions, was far more humane than German philosophy. From economic contradictions he escapes by the recognition of both sides under the restraint of a higher principle. Property as a right and property as a theft are set side by side in everlasting balance, everlastingly complementary, under the ever-growing dominance of justice. It is clear that the argument and the contradictions are transferred to another sphere, and that it is the conception of justice we have to criticise rather than the rights of property.

The simpler, the less mystic, and the less one-sided, the more real and practically applicable the higher principle is, the more completely it brings the contradictory terms to their lowest denomination.

The absolute, ‘all-embracing’ spirit of Hegel is replaced in Proudhon by the menacing idea of justice. But the problem of the passions is not likely to be solved by that either. Passion is intrinsically unjust; justice is remote from the personal, it is impersonal—passion is only individual.

The solution here lies not in the law-courts but in the humane development of individual character, in its escape from lyrical self-centredness into the light of day, in the development of common human interests.

The radical elimination of jealousy implies eliminating love for the individual, replacing it by love for woman or for man, by love of the sex in general. But it is just the personal, the individual, that is attractive; it is just that which gives colour, tone, intensity to the whole of our life. Our emotion is personal, our happiness and unhappiness are personal happiness and unhappiness.

Rationalism with all its logic is as little comfort in personal sorrow as the consolations of the Romans with their rhetoric. Neither the tears of loss nor the tears of jealousy can be wiped away, nor should they be, but it is right and possible that they should flow humanely ... and that they should be equally free from monastic poison, the ferocity of the beast, and the wail of the man robbed of his property.⁠[86]⁠

II

To reduce the relations of man and woman to a casual sexual connection is just as impossible as to exalt and distort them into marriage indissoluble to the grave. The one and the other may be met at the extreme of sexual and marriage relations, as a special case, as an exception but not as a general rule. The casual relation will be broken off or will continually tend to a closer and firmer union, just as the indissoluble marriage will tend to grow more and more free from external bonds.

People have continually protested against both extremes. Indissoluble marriage has been accepted by them hypocritically, or in the heat of the moment. Casual relations never have had complete recognition; they have 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 sees in organisation, recognition. The scheme elaborated by a gentleman in Paris, in the days of the Directorate, of establishing privileged brothels with their own hierarchy and to on, was even in those days received with hisses and overwhelmed by a storm of laughter and contempt.

The normal life of man is as remote from the monastery as from the cattle-yard; from the sexlessness of the monk, which the Church esteems above marriage, as from the childless gratification of passion....

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 in general is gloomy and unjust; it establishes inequality against the teaching of the Gospel, 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 penitence and stings of conscience, but by sympathy, by rehabilitation. The protest began in the very heyday of Catholicism and chivalry. The terrible husband, 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 useless struggle; jailers, torturers, spies, ... and in some cellar or turret a sobbing woman, a page in chains, for whom no one intercedes. 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 terrible husband, the father, and the brother, guard the sanctity of marriage, the folk-legend is forming in the stillness, the ballad is heard carried from place to place, from castle to castle, by troubadour and minnesinger—it champions the unhappy woman. The judge condemns, and the song absolves. The Church hurls its anathema at love outside marriage, the ballad curses marriage without love. It champions the love-sick page, the fallen wife, the oppressed daughter, not by argument but by sympathy, by pity, by lamentation. The song is for the people its secular prayer, its other escape from the cold and hunger of life, from spiritual misery and heavy toil.

On holidays the litanies to the Madonna were replaced by the mournful strains des complaintes, which did not heap shame on the unhappy woman, but wept for her, and set above all the Virgin of Sorrows, beseeching Her intervention 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, the gloomy secrets of family injustice, find their tribune, their court of appeal. The hearing of their case has moved thousands of hearts, wringing tears and cries of indignation against the serfdom of marriage and the forcible bondage of the family. The jury of the stalls and the boxes have over and over again acquitted individuals and found institutions guilty.

Meanwhile, in the period of political reconstructions and secular tendencies in thought, one of the two strong props of marriage is beginning to break down. As it becomes less and less of a sacrament—that is, loses its ultimate foundation—it has leaned more and more on the police. Only by the mystic intervention of a higher power can Christian marriage be justified. There is a certain logic in that, senseless, but still logic. The police-officer, putting on his tricolor 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 incense, holy images, and miracles. Even the First Consul, Napoleon, the most bourgeois politician in matters of love and the family, perceived that marriage at the police-station was a poor affair, and tried to persuade Cambacérès⁠[87] 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 his) and to obey him.

As soon as marriage emerges from the sphere of mysticism, it becomes expédient, an external arrangement. It was introduced by the panic-stricken ‘Bluebeards’ (shaven nowadays, and changed into ‘blue-chins’) in judges’ wigs, and academic coats, popular representatives and liberals, the priests of the civil code. Civil marriage is simply a state measure of economy, freeing the state from responsibility for the children and binding men 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 fantasies, so long as the contract is fulfilled, and if 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 with ale and gin and enrolled in a regiment by an old recruiting sergeant with red ribbons on his hat, is subjected to the most horrible 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 life, and has permitted something extra, forgetting that the season-ticket is not transferable. But these new Bluebeards too have been attacked by the troubadours and novelists. Against the marriage of legal contract, a pathological, 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.

With that, all rational control, all responsibility, every form of self-restraint is effaced. That man is in subjection to irresistible and overwhelming forces is a theory utterly opposed to rational freedom and to 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 accept them as real, have as much power as real ones, and that is because man’s power of response is the same whatever force acts on 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 may be shown that his fears are groundless, and in the other he cannot.

I refuse to admit the sovereign position given to love in life, I deny its autocratic power and protest against the pusillanimous excuse of having been carried away by it.

Surely we have not freed ourselves from every restraint on earth, from God and the devil, from the Roman and the criminal law, and proclaimed reason as our sole guide and standard, in order to lie down humbly, like Hercules at the feet of Omphale, or to fall asleep in the lap of Delilah? Surely woman has not sought to be free from the yoke of the family, from perpetual tutelage and the tyranny of father, husband, or brother, has not striven for her rights to independent work, to learning and the position of a citizen, only to begin over again cooing like a dove all her life and pining for a dozen Leone Leonis⁠[88] instead of one.

Yes, it is for woman that I am most of all sorry in this question; she is hopelessly torn and destroyed by the all-devouring Moloch of love. She puts more faith in it, she suffers more from it. She is more concentrated on the sexual relation, more driven to love.... She is both intellectually more unstable and intellectually less trained than we.

I am sorry for her.

III

Has any one made a serious and honest attempt to break down conventional prejudices in female education? They are only broken down by experience, and so it is life and not convention that suffers.

People go round the questions we are discussing, as old women and children go round a graveyard or a place where a crime has been committed. Some are afraid of impure spirits, others of the pure truth, and are left in fantastic disorder and inconsistent chaos. There is as little serious consistency in our view of sexual relations as in practical spheres. We are still haunted by the possibility of combining Christian morality, which starts from negation of the flesh and leads towards the other world, with the realistic earthly morality of this world. People are annoyed at the two moralities not harmonising, and, to avoid spending time in worrying over the solution of the problem, pick out according to their tastes and retain what they like of the Church teaching, and reject what they do not care for; just as those who do not keep the fasts will zealously eat pancakes, and avoid dull religious services, whilst still observing religious festivities. Yet I should have thought it was high time to bring more harmony and manliness into conduct. Let him who respects the law remain under the law and not break it, but let him who does not accept it show himself openly and consciously independent of it.

A sober view of human relations is far more difficult for women than for us—of that there can be no doubt; they are more deceived by education, and know less of life, and so they more often stumble and break their heads and hearts than free themselves. They are always in revolt, and remain in slavery, strive for revolution, while most frequently they are propping up the existing regime. From childhood the girl is frightened of the sexual relation as of some fearful unclean secret from which she is guarded and scared off as though it were a sin that had some magical power; and afterwards this same monstrous thing, this same magnum ignotum which leaves an ineffaceable stain, the remotest hint at which is shameful and sets her blushing, is made the object of her life. As soon as a boy can walk, he is given a toy sword to train him to murder, he is promised an hussar’s uniform and epaulettes; while the girl is lulled to sleep with the hope of a rich and handsome bridegroom, and she dreams of epaulettes not on her own shoulders but on the shoulders of her predestined husband.

One must marvel at the fine human nature which is not ruined by such an education—we might have expected that all the little girls so lulled for fifteen years would set to work speedily to replace those slain by the boys who have been trained from childhood with weapons of slaughter.

The Christian teaching imposes the terror of the ‘flesh’ before the creature is conscious of its sex; it awakens the dreadful question in the child, instils terror into the adolescent soul, and when the time to answer it is come—another doctrine, as we have said, raises her sexual calling to the sought-for ideal for the girl: the schoolgirl becomes the bride, and the same mystery, the same sin but purified and sanctified, becomes the crown of her education, the hope of her relations, the goal of all her efforts, almost a social duty. Accomplishments, learning, education, intelligence, beauty, wealth, grace, all are devoted to her sanctioned fall ... to the very same sin, the thought of which was looked on as a crime but which has now changed its essential nature by a miracle like that by which the Pope, when held up on a journey, changed a meat dish into a Lenten dish by his blessing.

In short, the whole training—negative and positive—of a woman remains a training for sexual relations; round them all her subsequent life turns. From them she runs, towards them she runs, by them is disgraced, by them is made proud.... To-day she preserves the negative holiness of sexlessness, to-day she can only whisper, blushing, of love to her bosom friend; to-morrow, in the face of the crowd, in glare and noise, in the light of chandeliers and strains of music, she is flung into the arms of a man.

Bride, wife, mother, only in old age as grandmother a woman is set free from sexual life, and then becomes an independent creature, especially if the grandfather is dead. Woman, struck down by love, does not soon escape.... Pregnancy, suckling, child-rearing are all the development of the same mystery, the same act of love; in woman it persists not in the memory only, but in blood and body, in her it ferments and matures and rends without breaking its tie.

Christianity breathed with its feverish monastic asceticism, with its romantic nonsense, upon this physiologically strong, deep relation, and blew it into the frenzied and destructive flames of jealousy, revenge, punishment, and insult.

For a woman to extricate herself from this chaos is an heroic feat—only rare and exceptional natures accomplish it; other women are tortured, and if they do not go out of their minds it is only thanks to the frivolity with which we all live without over-subtlety in the face of terrible catastrophes and misfortunes, senselessly passing from day to day, from one chance event to another and from one contradiction to another.

What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the fences, all the barriers, within which she is held captive!

I have seen one such struggle and one such victory....