Part 2
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 proceeds 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. The horror of this condition has many a time been the cause of mental aberration and suicide.[12] The consciousness of their degraded condition has been apparent even in the queens of fashion who have become famous in backstairs society. Théroigne de Méricourt 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 forgiveness!” 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?”[13] Théroigne 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.[14]
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; councils granted a dispensation from canonical penance to those who gave up their evil ways, and granted forgiveness of their sins to the men who should marry them.[15] 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 dotation (endowment), enormous for the age, was higher than that of the “Quinze-Vingts,” which received only 300 livres.[16][17] 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 recommended that they should be admitted into them who were willing to resolve (_fere contenance_) to live in chastity.”
The Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis XII., 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 parisis_ 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, and to Sainte Pélagie, the work of Madame de Miramion. Paris built, in the 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 compared 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 impoverishment, 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 consideration 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.
III.—LAWS FOR REPRESSION.
“He was convinced that good could only flow, in a State, through the channel of the laws; that the way to make a benefit lasting was by practising the virtue of following them; that the way to make an evil lasting was by practising the vice of hindering 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 Isménie._
“The liberty which shows favour to the passions and licentiousness is a fatal license, a fresh yoke, a shameful slavery; and the rule of good morals is the leading principle of the happiness of empires.”—_Massillon._
If woman too frequently acquiesces in depravity, man makes choice of it; it is against this active agent of corruption, 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 common 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, 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 branded 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 harbourer and accomplice of a prostitute was condemned to the same punishment as herself. This wise legislation did not survive the ruin of liberty, and 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.[18] 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 confiscation 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. likewise contributed to the moral amelioration of the nation; but, in the following reign, the precarious position of women, the effect of the war, and the excesses of the troops, again plunged France into serious profligacy.
The totality of our old legislation exhibits everywhere a considerable degree of severity against procurers and libertines; the decrees of our parliaments, and the proclamations of the provosts of Paris, often branded the former with disgrace, 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 brooms_ 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; afterwards 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_ sufficiently respected and sufficiently respectable to find husbands, and legionaries for sons-in-law! Oh, honour! Oh, my country!
These vile creatures, the objects of the just severity of laws, were marked out for public contempt by infamous designations; we may judge of that by the vehement indignation of old authors against this disgusting traffic, 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, betrayers 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.[19] 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 15th 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 _blancs_ a day, were willingly letting themselves out for two, and living on them.”
This sad picture sufficiently resembles that of the _fifth 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.”[20]
This brutality is ever in the direct ratio to social profligacy. When the French people, wallowing at a later period in the unchastity of royalty and nobility, had caused the goddess of love to be enthroned on its altars, it offered, on the revolutionary scaffold, the innocence, beauty, and attractions of women who were slaughtered by hecatombs; then the guillotine 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 Revolution, 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 Salpétrière, and at Bicêtre; severe penalties were also attached to the prostituting of modest girls. In order the better to appreciate our decline since that period, let us recall the enactment of 6th November, 1778, which prohibits provoking to debauchery in the public street,[21] and enjoins upon tavern and lodging-house proprietors, under the penalty of a fine of 200 to 500 livres, to keep a register of the names of all the persons they admit. The police, who made a strict inspection 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 Revolution abolished the old regulations, and expressed a formal purpose of establishing 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 Republic and the Empire, greatly restricted, in the beginning of the century, prostitution, which Napoleon I. regarded with horror.[22] M. M. Pasquier and D’Anglés subsequently made a demand, but vainly, for effectual measures for extirpating this social canker; in presence of its rapid progress, honest magistrates and upright counsellors felt the necessity of having the old enactments 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 condemned to a fine, by the application to them of the enactment of 6th November, 1778. The Court of Cassation had quashed these verdicts but 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 471, No. 15, of the Penal Code.[23] 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.
Far from keeping the young man at a distance from the sin by a threefold 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 safeguard 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 prostitutes 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.[24] 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 appeasing 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 imprisoned 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 the police. Our unsavoury raids upon the haunts of debauchery 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 walking 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.