The Family and the Individual: A French View

I

IT is always interesting to know what our passing guests think of us. Undoubtedly Americans have made a point of reading with keen interest — if only for the sake of disputing them — the observations which M. Paul Bourget published in Outre-Mer on his return from the United States. Among the distinguished Americans whom France has had the honor of receiving within the past few years, two have formulated their opinions, one in poetic form, the other in a book of travel. Both were particularly well qualified as observers: having come in an official capacity to lecture at the Sorbonne, they had spent considerable time in France, and had penetrated within the French society so charmed to welcome them. They were Dr. Henry van Dyke and Professor Barrett Wendell.

Dr. van Dyke, professor at Princeton University and minister at The Hague, turned poet once more on the boat which took him back to his native land. He paid homage to old Europe, thanking her for her hospitality and extolling her ancient and exquisite civilization, her thousand graces and charms, and her artistic treasures; but at the same time his tone was critical, as if the air which he breathed there had been a little close; France seemed to him too much attached to the past, too dependent upon it. According to his notion, life demands that one look ahead, not behind. And he added, with glowing eloquence, ‘The glory of the present is to make the future free,’ — a bold formula which contradicts absolutely the famous declaration of Auguste Comte, ‘Humanity is composed more of the dead than of the living,’ and which slurs at one and the same time historical tradition, racial continuity, and the interdependence of the generations of man.

Professor Barrett Wendell, less lyrical, spent his sojourn in France in listening, watching, studying; and, after having stored up facts and faces and conversations, and having mentally photographed the life of the time, he gave us the result of his observations in a pleasantly readable book entitled The France of To-day. Now what perhaps struck him most in this France of to-day, whose general characteristics he describes, is the firm foundation of the family. He confides to us his surprise, his amazement even, when he saw what united and permanent little societies the families are; he expresses his gratitude for the courtesy with which they welcomed him as a friend, and sets down the reflections, the comparisons, even the social lessons which he deduced from them. The Englishman and the American, he says, have their home, of course; but the Frenchman has his foyer, which strangers do not know as they should.

‘ It is the chimney, the hearthstone, — the core of domestic life, where the family gathers, complete in itself, distinct from any other group in this confused and bustling world, at one with each other, free for a while from all the rest of humanity.’ The foyer is the symbol of all the vigorous, profound, complex power of the family spirit which amongst this people is the strongest of all individual and national emotions. Putting together little significant facts, Professor Wendell shows that in France the family spirit is the most spontaneous of all instincts. Elsewhere the strongest tie is the bond between husband and wife; here it is that which unites parents and children. This assured fact gives him the key to many social customs for which he used to have no explanation. The insistence upon the dot, for instance, no longer implies to him a vulgar and despicable selfishness, but rather an affectionate prudence which makes careful provision for the new home to be established. The French marriage, which used to strike him as an exceedingly complicated affair, with its rites, its ceremonies, its authorizations, he looks at no longer as a purely individual question, but as one which affects the entire family.

For the same reason, a man’s choice of career is a matter of concern to the family, since its effect will be either to consolidate or to weaken the family. The domestic duties — those of direction, of administration, and of the father’s position in the household — are considered to be at least as important as the duties of husband and wife. An inheritance is guaranteed to the children. All these facts are the mark of an advanced civilization which has bowed to natural exigencies and has laid emphasis on the family rather than on the individual.

And to cap this chapter upon the French family, Professor Wendell concludes: ‘In brief, as one grows familiar with the French, one realizes with growing amazement how their whole conception of the family, with all the consecrated emotional sanction of the foyer, makes them look upon themselves primarily, not as individuals, but rather as members each of his own little society. The family is a partnership, if you will, — a corporation, or a clan. It is something more than the sum of the individuals whom it comprises in all their human and fallible complexity; it has a dominant, supreme claim to devotion for its own sake. The human beings who compose it, like those who at any given time may compose a nation, must pass into oblivion; but the family itself can outlive them perennially. The first of human duties thus becomes not individual but rather selfabnegating and social. To this ideal of duty the French are deeply loyal. If they had not followed it throughout the generations with eager, unselfish, persistent fidelity, their society could not exist in the form which it has inherited from their past and is transmitting to their future.’

In the last analysis, Professor Wendell, like Dr. van Dyke, emphasizes the force of the past in the construction of French society. But instead of denouncing it in the name of liberty, Professor Wendell justly recognizes it as the fruit of the experience of the ages, — experience which has tried various forms of society and has retained but one, as that at once most likely to endure and best qualified for the development of the nation. Nevertheless, neither of the two distinguished travelers has seen — or could see during his attentive and judicious but limited visit — the profound changes which, drawing their inspiration from the Revolution, have manifested themselves during the past thirty years in this compact French family. Both gentlemen spent most of their time in middle-class circles in which respect for family life has been longer maintained; whereas, among the rich bourgeoisie and laboring classes, it has already vastly diminished. The truth is that, since the Revolution, a veritable battle has been going on in France between the old form of society, wherein the family occupied the foreground, and the new, where the individual claims precedence. This battle is what I want my American readers to understand. By its results they shall judge of the importance of its cause, and perhaps these results will invite them to some personal reflections.

II

Speaking of marriage, M. Demolombe, the well-known jurist, has said: ‘This contract, the most ancient and most universal of all, was not invented by human legislators. Its origin goes back to God himself. . . . Among all peoples, marriage has been a religious act placed under the tutelage of the Divinity.’ Marriage is not created by law, like other contracts. The law, finding it already in existence, recognizes it, establishes it, strengthens it. In all the ancient forms of society, this sacred origin of marriage was so clearly understood that it was placed under the protection of religion. Such was its position in the social systems of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as Fustel de Coulanges shows in his admirable Cite antique. Christianity, which in its turn inherited the institution of marriage, made it a sacrament, so as to put upon it clearly the stamp of religion; this sacrament the husband and wife administered to each other as they exchanged their eternal promises in the presence of the priest, God’s witness and representative. Its sacramental character made it clearly indissoluble. Its aim was not the happiness of the contracting parties, but the creation of a new family from which the union of heart and of flesh, of will and of deed, would allow no turning back.

The family was in itself a society, a little hierarchy, with its responsible chief and its obligations. Somebody had to be the leader of the group; this direction was entrusted to the husband and father. His marital and paternal power arose to complete the order established by the marriage.

This order established in the family was about to have its effect on the early national life of France. In the dark ages, when the barbarian tempest swept down from the north and the Saracens came from the south, the family was the only institution already organized and prepared to come to the rescue. To save themselves from extermination, these little societies — the families — sought out one another and united together. The first combination, the mesnie, was merely the family enlarged. The mesnie became the fief. And from the authority exercised by the father of the family, grew, like a flower blossoming upon its stem, the white lily of royal authority. ‘The king,’ said Hugues de Fleuri in the eleventh century, ‘represents in the kingdom the idea of the father.’ And later, in the sixteenth century, when the legists wished to define the State, the jurisconsult, Jean Bodin, contented himself with this comparison: ‘All the households taken together form what we call the people. It is only by the succession of families that the people is rendered immortal. . . . The republic cannot possibly stand fast if the families which are its pillars have weak foundations.’

The family is thus considered as the foundation of society and the symbol of government itself. And this is not merely a theory for philosophers to wag their heads over, but a fact proved by experience in the course of those many perilous and glorious centuries throughout which the might of France was revealed.

How did the economic development of the family come about? The family settled permanently in one place, taking root there through inheritance. Its wealth consisted only of real estate. The land conquered by the labor of one generation was transmitted to the next, the father appointing an heir. This heir varied according to the different provinces and their customs: sometimes the eldest son was chosen, this being the prevailing plan; sometimes the head of the family was allowed to select his heir from among his sons; sometimes, as in the Basque province, even the eldest daughter was made heir. In certain districts the written law allowed a partition of the estate, but then the brothers and sisters agreed to keep it intact. Thus the property was handed down with the name, and became the visible image of the family’s continuity, sometimes even to the point of becoming confused with it. A whole series of circumstances, economic and social, were favorable to this condition of things: custom, law, the peace and quiet of life on the farms, and the difficulty of communication. The right of inheritance brought with it heavy burdens, too. It implied the subordination of the individual’s life to the existence and continuance of the family; and it imposed upon the heir the maintenance of the parents, of the unmarried sisters, of the unsuccessful or infirm or invalid brothers; the continuation of the works of mercy and charity (for a congeries of duties clusters about every family of any importance); and the administration of the property, — not merely to enjoy it, but, at the very least, to maintain it, and, if possible, to increase it. Under this system, the brothers who were, so to speak, disinherited, had the advantage of liberty and could embark upon any careers they pleased — in the army, the navy, the colonies, or what not — with the certainty of being succored in case of need.

The family of ancient France has left the written evidence of its vitality in the livres de raison. These livres de raison were originally simple account books wherein were enumerated the details of the division of the property. Little by little, the habit grew of writing in them the dates which were of importance to the family, — dates of marriages, of births, of deaths. Later these dates were accompanied by commentaries. With the aid of these commentaries alone, it has been possible to reconstruct the past existence of the family. Moreover, we find in them evidence of a double creed, — which perhaps can be considered as but a single one, — faith in God and faith in life. The fathers, bowed down though they be with burdens, invariably hail with joy the arrival of a new-born child, even if they already have nine or ten or more. A birth is always regarded as a blessing. They thank God, who will know how to help them feed this full nest of children. They exert every energy for the future of the house and of their race, for its name and honor.

There are shadows in this picture of the French family. Indeed, the history of nations, as of individuals, offers very few examples of powers which, if put to the test, have not been abused. The husband and father, with the double authority, marital and paternal, has not always had the sense to use it justly. Cases arose where the wife and children were reduced to slavery, and where their most legitimate aspirations were throttled. Although the family is not composed of a series of individual happinesses, still it cannot, without danger to itself, rob its members of those rights which the human conscience holds most sacred; and the right to the pursuit of happiness is one of these. Compulsory vocations and forced marriages are the result of a wrong attitude toward the individual.

The church came to the rescue of the victims. Not that she ranged herself against the family — she was herself a hierarchy standing for authority. But she condemned the encroachments which destroyed human liberty in its intangible foundations.

The family retained this established form practically without change until the Revolution. Retif de la Bretonne, in his Life of my Father, draws a picture of it which would have been as true in the eleventh or twelfth century as it was in the eighteenth. He calls his father his ‘visible God,’and no one could underline more distinctly the almost sacred character which the children attributed to the paternal power. This dieu visible himself obeys a preceding god (his own father). And Retif’s narrative takes us to the wedding of his father, who was coerced by his father into a marriage repugnant to every natural inclination of his heart. For these founders of dynasties, these responsible leaders, love does not count or individual happiness, — nothing counts but their race. This is where they make their mistake; for intimate happiness and legitimate affection play their part in sustaining the family. And to reduce marriage to a mere social form, and do without the consent of the contracting parties, is to alter its character. In those days, children did not oppose their father’s commands; hence Edme obeyed, and married a good housewife instead of the woman of his choice. At the end of his life, we see him like a patriarch, surrounded by his fourteen children and all the servants of his household; after they have taken supper together, he reads from the Holy Scriptures, adding some brief observations of his own. It takes one back to Biblical times, except that this family, instead of being nomadic, is bound to the soil.

III

The Revolution did not come like a bolt from the blue, but like a bolt from a sky gradually overcast by clouds. The first cloud on the family horizon was caused by the Reformation, which opened the door of the home to individualism. Wiping out the eternal promises, it substituted the possibility of divorce for the principle of indissoluble union. Here was the first alteration of marriage. Until the Reformation there was no doubt of its permanence; now there came a new doctrine, which struck at marriage in its essential principle as a definitive engagement entered into in the presence of God. It is true that after a stubborn struggle, the Reformation was rejected in France and Catholicism triumphed. But the very foundations of the family had become a subject of argument; and the idea of impermanence was destined to gain ground. It gained ground throughout the whole of the eighteenth century and became involved with a more general doctrine, that of the rights of the individual. According to the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the individual was to be unshackled. Then how could he bear the burdens of the family, which were the oldest and heaviest burdens ? He was to be born with rights, not with duties. He was to be dependent on neither his father nor his mother; the State was there to receive him. It was to the State that the famous theorist assigned the paternal power. As for marriage, how could two persons pledge themselves for the future when they were not sure of their own hearts? Feelings may change; liberty alone does not change. Meanwhile, Voltaire and the Encyclopædists placed the social problems on a secular basis, claiming to set them apart from all thought of religion.

Economic conditions and customs were beginning to accelerate the march of ideas. The family lived on its estate and set the neighborhood the example of its character and its continuity. The higher the source of this example, the more it provoked imitation. But now, in the seventeenth century, the great landed families began their exodus to present their petitions at Versailles. As the lords of the soil became courtiers, their local influence diminished. The close bond between the family and the soil was broken. Another blow was dealt at the hitherto sacred rights of the family, on the day when Louis XIV compelled Parliament to legitimize his bastards. Lastly, from the time of the Regency, high society made fashionable the estrangement of husband and wife. ‘For heaven’s sake, leave me alone!’ said a wife to her husband, when he asked her to descend to the familiar thee and thou. Another, who claimed a separation because her husband had given her a box on the ear, en tete-a-tete, and who was not able to obtain her divorce, went back to the brute in his study, and slapping him in turn, exclaimed by way of explanation, ‘There, monsieur! there’s your box on the ear back again; it’s of no use to me!’¹ What had become of the respect for the head of the family? Marriage was no longer a constraining force; it was nothing but a worldly association of selfishness and caprice. Thus the anarchy of manners played its part in spreading an anarchy of ideas.

Economic conditions, freedom of manners, and new ideas — coming in this order — paved the way, then, for the Revolution, which is to be considered here only as it altered the constitution of the family. Neither these new ideas, nor these manners, nor these economic conditions touched the majority of the French people, those vast masses which are the reservoir of the national strength and life. This is the reason why the Revolution, in making family institutions over from top to bottom, did not really reach beyond the cities. The country districts escaped it; and after the storm was over, life began again, hardly different from the life of former days. The overthrow of the family in 1792 was merely the work of doctrinaires and theorists, disciples of Jean-Jacques and of the Encyclopaedists, who were persuaded that they were unshackling the individual. This overthrow did not produce its complete results until many years later.

Hitherto, marriage, since it was a sacrament, had been bound up with religion. That bond was snapped by the Revolution. The law of September 20, 1792, made of marriage a purely civil contract, which the institution of divorce terminated. This law established three kinds of divorce: divorce by mutual consent, divorce pronounced at the demand of one of the conjoined, — merely on account of incompatibility of temper or of character, — and divorce for fixed causes. The effects made themselves felt immediately, but only in Paris and in some large cities. In the first three months of 1794, the number of divorces in Paris matched the number of marriages. The proclamation equalizing the rights in inheritance of the legitimate child and the natural child, and the suppression of marital authority and paternal power, completed this new legislation about the family. ‘At Paris in the year IX,’ said the tribune, Carion-Nisas, a short time afterwards, ‘there were about four thousand marriages and seven hundred divorces; in the year X, there were only about three thousand marriages, but nine hundred divorces. Both the decrease in marriages and the increase in divorces are terrifying; and they prove that divorce, far from being a remedy, is but one evil the more, and that instead of calling citizens to marriage, as has been pretended, it causes them to detest and shun it. People thought to facilitate marriage by ridding it of its indissolubility, imagining that they were strengthening it; and they destroyed it.’

IV

The authors of the Civil Code did not entirely forget this experience. In the preliminary discussion, indeed, one finds this earliest opinion of the First Consul upon divorce: ‘What shall we say of a family broken up by divorce? What sort of husbands and wives are those who, after having been bound together by the closest ties that nature and law can form between rational beings, become all at once strangers to one another, without being able to forget one another? What sort of children are those who have no longer a father, who can no longer mingle in the same embrace the disunited authors of their days; who, in duty bound to cherish and respect them equally, are, so to say, forced to take sides against them; who dare not recall in their presence the deplorable marriage of which they are the fruit? Oh, take care how you encourage divorce! It would be a great misfortune if it became customary with us!’

He himself belonged to a closely united, clanlike family, and he remembered it. And if, as general and head of the State, in his rugged campaigns and his rapid reorganization of a broken-down social system, he had found about him as many people as he needed who were ready and fitted to help him, he could not have attributed that abundance of power and talent, sprung from the land, to anything but the latent vigor of Old France. And whence came this vigor, if not from the constitution of the family, which had stood by the kingdom in all its vicissitudes throughout the centuries? One might have feared lest the constraint imposed by the authority of the head of the family, and the subjection of the other members, might keep youthful energies from developing, might crush those children who had been too strictly brought up, might sap their youthful wills. But discipline revealed once more that it is an incomparable school for developing the sort of character which gives itself to a cause even to the limit of self-sacrifice.

The Civil Code, then, was a compromise between the ancient constitution of the family and revolutionary authority. In appearance, it sustained the traditional family founded upon marriage, the marital power, the paternal power,² and inheritance. But it altered those essential principles. From the very first, it secularized marriage, which ceased to be a religious act and became a civil contract. The husband and wife might appear before a priest, if they wished — the law took no account of that. And inasmuch as religion immediately regained its popularity after the Concordat, and couples preferred to be married in church rather than in the town hall, a law was enacted that forbade the celebration of the religious ceremony before the civil marriage. Ancient custom gave way to this law; but the practice survived of introducing all the ceremonial into the religious marriage and of treating the civil marriage as it itself insisted upon being treated — that is to say, as a contract which needed neither dress, nor flowers, nor music, nor solemnity, nor emotion, nor holy witness, — a contract, moreover, which had no fixed duration, and which might cancel itself like a lease. For divorce was sustained in the new laws, notwithstanding the eloquent words of the First Consul, who promptly changed his mind, thinking already, perhaps, of the personal use which he could some day make of it. Divorce upon the simple demand of one of the parties was by no means allowed—this form being equivalent to repudiation in Roman law; but divorce for fixed causes, and even that by mutual consent, — with certain limitations, — was sustained. Some years later, the law of May 8, 1816, abolished divorce, it is true, no strong objections being raised. The Napoleonic wars had left many ruins to repair; the work of restoration demanded that the constitution of the family be strong.

Finally, in the Civil Code, the marital power and the paternal power were indeed sustained, but both of them changed their nature. The first belonged to the husband only by right of marriage, ceasing to be his perquisite in his capacity as head and director of the community; the second was established in the interest of the child, ceasing to be a sort of divine right accompanying paternity. Both, in fine, became dependent on law, instead of being simply recognized and protected by it. This fact shows how the new spirit was making itself felt. It made itself felt still more plainly in the succession by title, wherein the principle of equality prevailed decidedly over that of liberty. Under this dispensation parents were allowed to transmit to any single heir only an inconsiderable fragment of their patrimony. Thus the estate, broken up, pulverized, systematically submitted to division, — which meant that it was bound sooner or later to fall into strangers’ hands, — could no longer serve as the family’s hereditary prop.

V

’During the three quarters of a century which followed the promulgation of the Civil Code,’ justly observes Louis Delzons, in his treatise on The French Family and its Evolution, ‘ there were, practically speaking, no changes.’ French society continued to exist — to use the words of Professor Barrett Wendell — in the form which it had inherited from the past. Divorce having disappeared from the Civil Code, marriage had its full effect. The father and husband used their paternal and marital power with a moderation which — although they did not realize the fact — was the result of the new manners much more than of the law. Altogether one might believe, judging from appearances, that family life had not been altered by the turmoil of the Revolution, and that the experiment of individualism had completely failed in France; either because individualism was not workable, or else — supposing that the social life of the nation could take other forms than that form of collectivite familiale put to the proof by so many centuries — because it was simply premature.

There remained, to be sure, the ruinous method of succession by title. This method, as it made partition obligatory, little by little cut up the estates; in addition, it divided the family against itself by constantly introducing questions of interest in the property, and it destroyed the symbol of the continuity, union, and permanence of the family. But this very partition of the property, in days when the land was not particularly crowded and was often badly exploited, permitted a more intensive cultivation of the soil; so the Code might be considered as causing a better exploitation of the country. A little later, when people began to see at last how dangerous this legislation was to the love of the land, to the feeling for the past, and to patriotism, its unlucky results were destined to be forgotten in the economic revolution which, caused by the application of new methods of transportation, soon began to spread throughout the country a feeling of restlessness and a desire for travel, and which finally precipitated the country upon the town.

Apparently it was still possible to believe that family life had undergone no change. But only apparently; for the battle continued, and the campaign for individualism set in again as early as the end of the Restoration. It was directed from the first by the literature of the romantic movement, which had scarcely any ideal other than to champion the rights of the individual and to deify passion. And indissoluble marriage hampered the rights of the individual, and set duty over against passion.

Nobody expressed the romanticist hatred of all social barriers better than George Sand. In Jacques, one of her most celebrated romances, a young man, Jacques, writes to Fernande, his fiancee, on the eve of their marriage, ‘Society is going to dictate to you the formula of an oath; you are going to swear to be faithful to me and to submit to me, — in other words, never to love any one but me, and to obey only me in all things. One of these vows is an absurdity; the other is a villainy. You cannot answer for your heart, even though I should be the greatest and most perfect of men; you ought not to promise to obey me, for that would be to debase us both.' Thus warned, George Sand’s heroine hastens to prove that the husband so well informed concerning the conduct of life is right. She takes a lover, or rather, she ‘fulfills her destiny.' Jacques, in this novel and somewhat delicate situation, remains logical; he neither complains nor is astonished.

Classic literature had depicted a morally and socially reasonable man who could prefer passion to duty, but classic literature had recognized that this preference was wrong, and had not sacrificed reason, or religion, or society to it. Romantic literature represented a man of defective brain as well as defective heart and senses, — a man enslaved by his passions, who, by a new sophistry, called this servitude liberty! But what happens to our Jacques, the indulgent and comprehending husband? To save everybody from embarrassment, he goes on a walking-tour in the Tyrolese mountains, and falls, as if by accident, into a crevasse. Thus must a thoughtful husband prove that he has sense enough to renounce his wife in favor of her lover, since the door of marriage is closed to any escape!

There was an effort to break down this door at any cost. George Sand’s successor, Alexandre Dumas fils, tried to burst it open in his plays appealing for divorce. But the conflict was not confined to literature. It extended to the political and social fields; and one can follow the phases of it in the history of nineteenth-century thought. On one side were the followers of JeanJacques Rousseau, who continued to work for the enfranchisement of the people and of the individual, and who shook the world in the name of liberty: Victor Hugo, Michelet, Edgar Quinet. On the other side were the followers of the tradition which maintained that the forms of society are eternal and not subject to fluctuations of ideas, of sentiments, or of economic conditions; and that without authority and the hierarchical form of the family and of religion, there can be nothing but riot and anarchy. These men were Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, Balzac, Le Play, — who, after having toured the world and written a monograph about the workingmen of Europe, undertook the restoration of the family, — and Auguste Comte, the founder of the philosophy of positivism. Building upon a rational study of facts, Comte reached this conclusion about marriage: that any society, if it would endure, must strengthen the order which Catholicism so successfully set up when it sanctioned the fundamental indissolubility of marriage. ‘The obligation to conform one’s life to an insurmountable law,’ he wrote in his Cours de Philosophic Positive, ‘ far from being a source of unhappiness, is one of the most indispensable conditions of life, since it steadies our wavering ideas and our half-hearted intentions.’ And explicitly condemning divorce, he added, ‘One needs only to understand the chief purpose of the conjugal tie to see its necessary conditions. This fundamental union cannot gain its essential end except by being both exclusive and indissoluble. These two characteristics are so indispensable to any union that even illegal liaisons tend to manifest them. We cannot, without assuming an entire lack of all moral and social principles, understand how anybody can dogmatically set up inconstancy and frivolity of affection as essential guaranties of human happiness. No love can be profound if it is not undivided and perpetual; for the mere idea of change disturbs its course. Is our short life longer than two people need — two beings so different as man and woman — to enable them to know each other well and love each other worthily? And yet, hearts are usually so fickle that society has to intervene in order to do away with irresolution and inconstancy, which ilf given free scope would tend to reduce human existence to a deplorable succession of experiments without issue and without dignity.’

Positivism, then, agreed with Catholicism that indissoluble marriage is the safeguard of individual dignity and of social life.

The partisans of individualism finally triumphed. On the twenty-seventh of July, 1884, divorce was put back into the body of French law, at the instigation of M. Naquet. True, they called it a necessary evil, and they did not allow divorce by mutual consent or at the wish of one of the parties. They allowed it only for fixed causes: adultery; the condemnation of one or the other to undergo degrading punishment; and, finally, ill-treatment, cruelty, and serious abuse. But it began at once to produce its disintegrating effect upon the family.

VI

An eminent professor of law, M. Glasson, has laid down this experimental rule: wherever divorce exists, it tends to increase. Statistics show us its rapid progress. In 1885, immediately after the promulgation of the law, there were in France 4227 divorces. ‘These are the unhappy households accepting their freedom,’ proclaimed the partisans of divorce; ‘wait and you will soon see a halt.’

But the halt has not yet made itself manifest. The number of divorces has steadily increased: 5427 in 1890; 6750 in 1895; 7157 in 1900; 10,017 in 1905; nearly 13,000 in 1911.

In the first months of marriage, even when the deepest love is present, patience is often necessary. People used to be patient in the days of indissoluble marriage. To-day they will not tolerate the slightest provocation. At the least quarrel they appeal for divorce. The prospect of remarriage plays too real a part in these ruptures. Divorce, then, insinuates itself as a corrupting element in married life, and even in life before marriage. People think of it when they marry, and ascribe less importance to a union which can be broken. Statistics tell us, again, that the households of not even a year’s existence are those among which divorce makes proportionately the most progress. The young people will not submit to even a year of patience and of mutual concessions before declaring their common life impossible. But a social system cannot be sustained on pity for such unfortunate individuals.

Marriage is the keystone of the family arch. That is why its character is of so much importance in any social system. We now find its character in France modified for the second time. The first time was in 1792, and we have seen what were the consequences. These consequences were already comparable with the results obtained by centuries of the traditional family which had built up the power of France.

Between 1816 and 1884 the country bound up its wounds and recovered its strength. One could see the national vigor in the way it endured a disaster like that of 1870, and in the rapidity with which it repaired its losses in men and money. Since 1884, thirty years have passed. A second test, longer and more decisive, is being added to the first. Once more the adversaries of the family are trying to drive home their victory. They incessantly demand the facilitation of divorce: they want divorce for mental derangement of one of the parties, divorce for absence, divorce for infirmities, divorce for religious disagreements. They have not yet succeeded in putting these things into the law of the land; but in equity they have succeeded by means of a legal fiction in introducing divorce by mutual consent, which the tribunals constantly grant. They pretend that human beings are their own masters, and that this is a principle inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But to say that human beings are their own masters is really to say nothing at all; or else it means the suppression of every form of agreement. There is no agreement in which future liberty is not renounced by present liberty. Every contract is an agreement which encroaches upon one’s future. Why should a perpetual agreement be immoral? If an agreement is immoral it certainly does not become so on account of its duration. The character of a lease remains the same whether it lasts one year or twenty years. It is the object of an agreement which may make it immoral, and make it just as immoral if it is for a year as if it is perpetual. If, then, an engagement for a season is moral, it will remain so forever.³

It is the doctrine of individualism which inspires the partisans of divorce. They consider only the happiness of the husband and wife, and substitute the pleasure-marriage for the dutymarriage. One of them, Novicow, has expressed it frankly: ‘The sexual bond is contracted only for the direct happiness of the contracting parties.’ If the parties do not find this happiness, they separate; or if one of them fails to find it, he leaves the other, to look for it elsewhere. Under these simple conditions, marriage is entirely set apart from the family, — as if it did not create the family, as if it had nothing to do with the family, which Taine has called the only remedy man has found for death.

A state is composed of an enduring race; that is to say, it is composed of families; that is to say, of marriages producing children. To consider marriage without the child, and merely as the satisfaction of the desires of the husband and wife, is to take away from it all social character; and if this is done, why should society bother with it?

Now, how many years are required to complete the child’s education? Is a boy or girl of ten years ready to be taken from its parents? Or even of fifteen years? So long as the child’s education continues, it will demand their effective cooperation. After fifteen or twenty years, then, the father and mother, grown old and weary, are going to take up a new life, to create a new home! ‘The work for which the husband and wife associate themselves,’ says M. Fonsegrive again,’cannot come to anything unless their union is for their whole life. So they make their vows for life. He who wishes to reach the goal must make up his mind to take the only road to that goal. Indissoluble marriage is necessary for a normal upbringing of the child; it is the only kind of marriage which allows the child complete moral development. The law of indissolubility, far from being contrary to nature, is demanded by nature.’ That is what the positivist Comte meant when he said that without indissoluble marriage human existence amounts in most cases only to ’a deplorable succession of experiments without issue and without dignity.’

Still another objection is made: that the situation of the children is less cruel in divorce than in legal separation. This is not true. Legal separation, through its very sadness, will never be anything but an exception; while divorce, giving as it does the power to begin life again indefinitely, runs the risk of becoming customary. Legal separation relaxes but does not break the family tie. Even when disunited, the father and mother cannot look into the future without thinking of what it holds for their children. These children remain an ideal; while in divorce, which authorizes new ties, they will never be anything but a curse.

But what is the use of starting here a debate upon the philosophy of divorce? I have shown that the motive idea of marriage has altered since the day when it lost its religious character to become a simple civil contract. The consequences of this alteration have been fatal. The divorce law is the most striking sign of the changes which, from that time on, have taken place in the French family. It is not the only sign. We must add other less important laws providing for the diminution of paternal power and for the reconciliation of legitimate and illegitimate children in the succession to property. A parallel might even be drawn between some of these laws and certain interpolations made by the church in the ancient common law, which it considered too rigid in its affirmation of paternal and marital power and too antagonistic to the rights of the individual, — unless one somehow twists the meaning of the word rights. Here, then, we have a whole group of phenomena which testify to a voluntary overthrow of traditions. The intention is to pass systematically from a form of society based on the family to a form of society based on the individual. The individual takes the place of the family, which is thus thrust into the background.

If Professor Barrett Wendell has not seen the change, it is because a social order which has lasted for centuries leaves its impress for a long time upon people’s minds and hearts, and continues for a long time to struggle against the order which is to succeed it; it is also because his acquaintance lay chiefly among that middle-class society in which the family ideals are still honored; and finally, because the new order finds itself face to face with forces little disposed to give way to it, — the forces, namely, of Catholicism, of a whole hidebound literature, and of a new sectionalism which has lately come into fashion again.

The distinguished traveler should, however, have noticed several things which would have revealed to him, under the old surface of French life, the thrust of a new world: a high society which lives as it pleases, believing implicitly that it has not a single tie with the land or the people; a bourgeoisie which, active and well-established and honorable as it is, is nevertheless not so thrifty as it used to be, and regulates its expenses and its future to its present profit; a rural population which, in too many cases, tires of the fields and descends upon the cities; and a working class crowded into insufficient lodgings, — a class for which the day-labor of the women has been the death of the home. I admit that the dark picture is brightened by the survival of the old French traits. Energy, gayety, courage in the face of difficulties, love of home, and the tenderness of parents toward their children continue to fill our houses with an atmosphere of comfort and hope which reassures us for the future.

Nevertheless, when one sees individualism trying to acclimatize itself in France, after the French family has for centuries borne such beautiful fruit, one has an uneasy fear for the population of the country. United, strengthened, defended by laws, the family guaranteed long life to the nation. Reduced to a precarious condition, it gives no more children. Voluntary sterility increases. It is sufficient to consult the statistics. The total number of births fell from 937,544 in 1883 to 774,000 in 1907, and in 1911 the total number of deaths exceeded it by 34,889.

‘The nation,’ said Joseph de Maistre, ‘is an association of the living with the dead and those still unborn.’ That is to say, the nation is a collection of families. The family alone honors its dead and sustains life. In the Latin countries there is no doubt that the fortunes of the nation and the status of the family are closely related. Even if experience in other countries points less decisively to this conclusion, it is still to be feared that the search for individual life leads sooner or later to that disparagement of the nation’s life which manifests itself in the decreasing birth-rate and the refusal to undergo sacrifices and struggles.