DIVORCE IN FRANCE.
THE large majority by which the French Senate on Friday week accepted the principle of divorce greatly per- plows observes of French society, and with some reason. The easy explanation, of which Englishmen are so fond, that morals in France are becoming more relaxed under a Republic, is hardly any explanation at all. The great cities do not elect the Senate ; and outside the great cities, especially Paris, the mar- riage tie is as highly regarded in France as in England, while both paternal and filial feeling are definitely stronger and better recognised. All close observers, from Mr. Hamerton dovrnwards, are clear upon the former point ; and the latter has never been disputed. It is not the dissolute classes who have passed the vote, any more than it was the dissolute classes who passed a similar vote in England, and it is very doubtful if they approve it even. French profligates are by no means anxious to marry the women they have led astray, and will regard the concession of divorce as rather the destruction of a protection than as a change favouring their schemes. Nothing would have alarmed the Duo de Richelieu more than the knowledge that his victims were free to marry him, and might, when they were of his own rank, make such a marriage a social obligation. The vote must have been carried by the respectables, and why they should have carried it by 160 to 118 is a perplexing question. Whole classes must be opposed to it. The Catholic Church throughout France will be utterly enraged. Among Protestants, most Churches have held—not quite all—that while marriage should be indissoluble, Christ did allow divorce by. reason of adultery; but the Catholic Church, which gives a different interpretation to Christ's words, has through all ages been upon this question immovably firm. She has from time to time, no doubt, allowed marriages to be invalidated; but it has invariably beeti on the ground—or, if you will, on the pretext .—that in the special cases concerned, either from the consan- guinity of the parties, or the previous betrothal of one of them, or some other cause, there never had been any true marriage at all. Rome has annulled many unions as invalid; but in the laxest ages she has never either annulled or claimed the right to annul a marriage which she herself regarded as originally good. Clement's reason for not annulling the marriage of Henry VIII. was not only the opposition of the Emperor. The Papacy, in fact, regards a law of divorce as a violent attack upon dogmatic truth ; and Catholic Bishops have resisted such laws with a determination which even their opponents respected as inflexible. Pins VII. refused divorce even to Napoleon till his scruples were set at rest by a fraud. The whole Church, therefore, in France and all its friends must have resisted the change, and one would think they would this time have found some strong allies. The question concerns all women, bad and good ; and in France an immense majority of women are either Catholics or under the influence of those ideas of right and wrong which the Catholic system begets. They should have been powerful with the Senate, and they were by no means the strongest class which, one would have thought, would be opposed to a change in the law. The respectable classes all over France base the whole system of their lives upon the indissolubility of marriage. Their notion is that both parents, whether personally bad or good, are bound to their children by indissoluble ties, are to protect them, to guide them, and to control them so long as life endures. So strong is this feeling, that parents in France have asked for and have obtained an entire system of laws which would in England be considered insupportable tyrannies, and have in return submitted to obligations, especially in pecuniary affairs, of which we never dream. The parents can peremptorily forbid a marriage, even when the children are grown up, the single loophole—the right of the children, by a formal application to a judge, to compel the father to produce sufficient reason—being so rarely used as to be considered discreditable. To put the law in motion for "a respectful summons" is of itself to put the applicant out of the pale of the better society. The law, indeed, allows the parents in extreme cases to use positive restraint, through the intervention of a Court; and though this is rarely resorted to, the rule registers and confirms the French theory of the relation between the parents and their children. Even when the husband and wife are separated by decree, they act together as regards their children, and are together liable, if they are madly extravagant, to family intervention on the children's behalf. In return, all property in France is subjected tUperpetnal entail for the benefit of the children, who are ex- empted as regards inheritance by law from parental caprice. Neither father nor mother can will away property, even if self-acquired, at their own discretion.
These laws—which, be it remembered, have survived periods when all other laws were swept away—are, moreover, true ex- pressions both of the national feeling and the national manners. French parents pass their lives in " managing " for their children's benefit. They save for years that the daughter may have a dowry fitting for her condition in life, and that
the son may have an education qualifying him to rise at least one step above that condition. While exemptions were still possible, they made sacrifices to keep their sons from the barracks which disorganised the whole Army of France ; and they still press upon the Deputies petitions for places so determined, that Gambetta quoted them as sufficient justification for his proposed &rutin de Liste. It was impos- sible, he declared, to govern properly while Deputies were compelled to secure patronage for their constituents, and must therefore form groups and threaten recalcitrant Ministers with vengeance. On the other hand, the children submit all their lives to their parents, and regard them with a feeling which in England, especially among the poor, is comparatively unknown, or considered slightly sentimental and ridiculous. No excuse whatever short of treachery on her part is held by French opinion to justify a son, whatever his age, in "impiety "—that is, in insolence—towards his mother. He is in the last resort to obey her, whatever happens. We once witnessed an almost comic instance of the different tone of the two countries in this respect. The French actor Fechter was playing some adaptation from the French, in which he had to say, "It was for this I quitted my friends, my country, my mother," and naturally raised his voice to a sort of scream at the last word, and waited for applause. The house did. not respond, and a rough man in the gallery, following the actor with "and my grandmother," produced a roar of laughter which visibly appalled the tragedian. He could not even conceive what there was in his speech that should seem ridiculous, and evidently fancied that he had made unconsciously some absurd mistake in his pronunciation, for he changed it immediately afterwards, until the word " mother " was hardly recognisable. The whole of this social system, which, although it is not ours, and has for the English mind too much of the artificial in it, still develops many virtues, rests upon that indissolubility of marriage which the Senate has voted away. Why have they done if? It is not even alleged that the French are tired of their social system, or have the least intention of altering it; yet the body which claims specially to represent the respectables has just knocked out its keystone, and accepted a principle which it is understood—though it will not be applied as in Protestant Germany—will justify divorce for reasons wholly un- known in England. Indeed, it is said not to be cer- tain that the Senate will persist in refusing divorce by mutual consent, if the Chamber insists on it; and, though we disbelieve this, they will undoubtedly introduce an element of uncertainty into arrangements upon which all social life in France has hitherto been based. The French idea has been that if the wife went wrong, the husband might kill her paramour, or in extreme cases even her, but that the fact of marriage could no more be abolished than the fact of sonship or maternity, and Was, in fact, a relation, like kinship, as independent of conduct as of circumstance.
The Senate has gone right athwart this sentiment ; and we confess to great curiosity as to the force it has obeyed. What has made the peasantry all at once so anxious for liberty of divorce that they have forgotten the immense blow such a right will give to the social system which they not only respect, but intend to keep intact P They are not, we may be certain hungering after their neighbours' wives, or, if they are, have no desire to marry them. They are not, we may be still more certain, moved by that pity for women with bad husbands which is said to have such effect in carrying the evilly lax laws of some States of the American Union. And we may be most certain of all that they are not acting on any " advanced " notion of Women's Rights, such as has led a few women in Sweden, Germany, and even France, to denounce marriage altogether. We doubt if they approve strongly at 911; for we cannot forget that after the Restoration, when the new rulers found themselves compelled to accept all the other democratic laws, they repealed the law of divorce without disturbance, and almost without opposition. The Nobles, who really ruled, could not repeal the laws ensuring the distribution of property at death, which were fatal to their Order ; but they could and did repeal the law of divorce. We cannot help imagining that the predominant motive has been to give the Church a slap in the face, and teach her that wherever she directly regulates human action she shall henceforth be powerless. She calls marriage a sacra- ment, and therefore it shall be a dissoluble contract. This was evidently M. Jules Simon's idea, who resisted the Bill avowedly
from the religious point of view, and who pointed out that for any man or woman to take advantage of it would be a definite and final abjuration of Catholicism. His speech, we strongly suspect, helped to carry the Bill, the Senators liable to re-elec- tion being afraid of the accusation of "clericalisme." If that is true, it is the most curious evidence we have yet seen of that wave of emotion against religion which so many signs convince us is passing over French society.
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