From LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR

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[Part of La Philosophie dans le Boudoir ( 1795) consists of an interpolated pamphlet which Dolmancé reads aloud to enlighten Eugénie and Madame de Saint-Ange. It is entitled: Frenchmen! A further effort is needed if you would be republicans!, and it is a résumé of Sade's philosophical, moral, and political ideas. The following is from the second part, “Les Moeurs.”]

Frenchmen! You are too enlightened not to feel that a new government will necessitate a new way of living; it is impossible for the citizen of a free state to behave as the slave of a despotic monarch; these differences in interests, duties, and relationships in themselves determine an entirely different fashion of behavior in society; a mass of minor faults and social transgressions deemed essential under the rule of kings, who had to be more and more demanding as they needed the restraints that would make them lofty and unapproachable to their subjects—all these will become meaningless. Other crimes, known by the names of regicide and sacrilege, under a government that knows neither kings nor religions, must equally wither away in a republican state. In granting freedom of belief and freedom of the press, realize, Citizens, that at one remove from that you must accord freedom of action; that, excepting those things that bear directly against the government, there remain an uncounted number of crimes no longer punishable, for in reality there are very few actions that are criminal in a society based on freedom and equality, and if we scrupulously judge and examine matters, there is nothing truly criminal but what the law itself forbids. For Nature teaches us both vice and virtue in our constitution, or, in yet more philosophical terms, by reason of Nature's need for both vice and virtue, her promptings would become a true guide to the precise determinations of what is good or bad. In order the better to develop my ideas upon such an essential subject, let us classify the various actions of man's life which up to now have been named criminal, and we will then measure them against the true duties of a republican.

First, those which his conscience and his credulity impose on him towards the Supreme Being; Second, those which he must fulfill towards his fellow men; Third, and finally, those which relate only to himself.

The assurance we should feel that no god has ever had a hand in our existence and that we are here because it could not be otherwise, inevitable creatures of Nature like plants and animals—this assurance without doubt quite demolishes, as one can see, the first group of duties, those which we falsely believe we have towards divinity; and with them disappear all the religious transgressions, all those known under the vague and intangible names of impiety, sacrilege, blasphemy, atheism, etc.: the transgressions, in fact, which Athens punished so unjustly in Alcibiades, and France in the unfortunate Labarre. If there is one thing in the world grotesque beyond others, it is to see men, with only their own circumscribed ideas of their god and what this god demands, wish nevertheless to determine the nature of what pleases or angers this ridiculous phantom of their imagination. I would not stop at allowing all the sects an equal liberty; I should like a man to be free to ridicule and scoff at anything; I should like men gathered in this temple or the other and invoking the eternal, each in his own fashion, to look like comedians in a theater whom anyone is free to go and laugh at. If you do not look at religions in this light, they will regain the seriousness that makes them seem of consequence; soon they will start to defend their views, and then it will not be a question of disputing religions but of fighting for them; 1 equality, destroyed by the preference or protection accorded to one religion, will soon vanish from the government, and out of theocracy reborn will spring aristocracy.

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Every people claims to have the best religion and bases it upon an infinity of proofs which are not only at odds with each other but almost entirely contradictory. In our present profound ignorance of what might please God (supposing that there is one), the wise course is either to protect all equally or forbid all equally; now, forbid them is assuredly the wisest, since we have the moral certainty that all are farces equally indifferent to a god who does not exist.

I cannot say this too often: no more gods, Frenchmen, no more gods, unless you wish their mournful rule to plunge you once more into all the horrors of despotism! Only you, by ridiculing them, can destroy them; all the dangers they bring with them will revive at once if you allow them scope and importance. Do not dash down their idols in anger; crush them in play, and prejudice will die out of itself.

This suffices, I hope, to prove that no law should be passed against religious crimes—for he who offends against a myth offends no one—and that it is the utmost frivolity to punish those who outrage or despise a sect which has no apparent superiority over any other; that would perforce mean taking sides and would at once influence the balance of equality, which is the prime law of your new government.

Let us pass to the second class of the duties of man, those which connect him with his fellows; this class is the most extensive of all.

Christian morality, far too vague on the subject of man's relation to his fellows, proposes axioms so full of sophistry that we cannot admit them; for if one wishes to erect principles one must take care not to base them on sophistries. This absurd morality tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Nothing indeed could be more sublime, if only falsity did not often have the appearance of beauty. There is no question of loving one's neighbor as oneself, for that is against all the laws of Nature, and Nature should be the sole guide of our life; it is only a question of loving our fellow men as brothers, as friends given to us by Nature and with whom we will be able to live far better in a republican state, when distances between us are abolished and ties made closer.

Let humanity, fraternity, benevolence so prescribe our mutual duties, and let each one individually fulfill them with the amount of energy with which Nature has endowed him, without blaming and above all without punishing the phlegmatic or the melancholy who do not feel the same delight as others in these tender bonds; for, let us agree, it would be a palpable absurdity to wish to prescribe universal laws; it would be like the ludicrous procedure of a general who dressed all his soldiers in uniforms of the same size; it is a fearful injustice to expect men of different temperament to bow to the same laws; what suits one man does not suit all.

I agree that one could not make as many laws as there are men; but the laws could be so mild, so few, that all men, whatever their character, might easily obey them. Again, I would insist that these few laws be of a kind that could easily adapt themselves to different characters; and their administrator should be prepared to strike more or less severely according to the individual in question. It has been proved that such and such a virtue is impossible to certain men just as such and such a medicine cannot agree with a certain constitution. Therefore, what a consummation of injustice would it be to use the law to punish a man incapable of obeying that law! Would it not be an iniquity equal to forcing a blind man to distinguish colors?

From these first principles develops the necessity for making benevolent laws, and above all for abolishing forever the death penalty, for a law that strikes at a man's life is impracticable, unjust, inadmissible. It is not—as I shall state—that there are not numberless cases when, without outraging Nature (and that is what I shall prove), men are given entire liberty by this common mother to attempt the life of other men, but that it is not possible for the law to have the same privilege, for cold-blooded law by itself cannot be subject to the passions that legitimize in man the cruel action of murder; man receives sensations from Nature that may make that action pardonable, while the law, on the contrary, always in opposition to Nature and receiving nothing from her, cannot be permitted the same licence; not having the same motives, it cannot have the same rights. These are knowing and subtle distinctions that escape many people, for there are few people who reflect; but they will be accepted by the thinking men to whom they are addressed, and they will, I hope, influence the new code that is being prepared for us.

The second reason for which the death penalty should be abolished is that it has never restrained crime, for crime is committed every day at the very foot of the scaffold.

This penalty must be abolished, in a word, because there can be no worse logic than to execute one man for having killed another, since the obvious result of this procedure is that two men are now dead instead of one, and only rascals and imbeciles are familiar with such arithmetic.

In sum, there are only four major crimes against our fellows: calumny, theft, offences caused by uncleanness which have a harmful effect on others, and murder.

Are all these actions, which are considered capital offences under a monarchal government, equally serious in a republican state? That is what we shall examine by the torch of reason, for it is by this light alone that we can conduct our enquiry. Let no one tax me with being a dangerous innovator; let no one say that there is a danger in awakening remorse in the souls of criminals, as these writings may do, that the leniency of my moral system will increase the criminals' leanings to crime; I formally testify that I have none of these perverse opinions; I am revealing the ideas I have held since I attained the age of reason, ideas opposed by the infamous despotism of tyrants for centuries; so much the worse for those who could be corrupted by these noble thoughts, who can only grasp evil from philosophic ideas and would be corrupted by anything. Perhaps they would be poisoned even by reading Seneca or Charon! It is not to them that I speak; I speak to those who are capable of understanding me, and they will be able to read me without danger.

I confess with complete frankness that I have never believed calumny to be an evil, especially under a government like our own, where all men are more united, more approachable, and therefore have more need to know each other well. Two things may result: either the calumny falls upon a man who is in fact wicked, or it falls on a virtuous man. You will agree that in the first case it makes very little difference whether evil is spoken of a man already known to do wrong; perhaps the falsely imputed crime will bring to light the true ones and make his villainy known.

If, let us suppose, there is an unhealthy climate at Hanover, but which would only expose me to an attack of fever, should I bear a grudge against a man who told me, to prevent me from going, that I should die on arriving there? Undoubtedly not; for by frightening me with a great danger he has saved me from a small one.

Should the calumny fall, on the contrary, on a virtuous man, let him have no fear; let him reveal himself frankly, and all the venom of the calumniator will recoil upon himself. For such men, calumny is only a purifying test from which their virtue emerges even brighter. The sum of virtue in the republic can even profit by this; for this virtuous and sensitive man, annoyed at the injustice he has experienced, will attempt to live better still; he will wish to overcome this attack from which he had thought himself safe, and his good deeds will acquire an extra degree of effort. Thus, in the first case, the calumniator will have brought about good results by exaggerating the vices of the dangerous man; in the second, he will produce even better results by forcing virtue to dedicate itself entirely to us.

Now, I ask you in what respect the calumniator can seem to you dangerous, especially in a society where it is essential to expose the vicious and increase the efforts of the virtuous? Let us take care then to establish no penalties for calumniation; rather, let us consider it as a searchlight or as an incentive, and as useful as either. The legislator, whose ideas must be as lofty as his task, should never study the effect of a crime which strikes only at individuals; he must study its effect on the mass of people, and when he thus observes the results of calumniation I defy him to discover anything punishable; on the contrary, he would be a truly just and sincere man if he were to favor and reward it.

Theft is the second of the moral offences which we propose to scrutinize.

If we scan antiquity, we find that theft was permitted and rewarded in all the Greek republics; Sparta and Lacedaemon openly favored it; other peoples regarded it as a wartime virtue; certainly it maintains courage, strength, skill, all the virtues, in fact, which are useful to a republican government and thus to our government. I might venture to ask without prejudice whether theft, which tends to redistribute wealth, is really a great evil in a society whose whole aim is equality? No, undoubtedly not; for as it encourages equality on the one hand, on the other it makes people more watchful over their property. There was once a nation which punished, not the thief, but he who was robbed, in order to teach him to guard his property. This brings us to more detailed considerations.

Far be it from me to attack or overthrow the oath on the respect of property which the nation has just taken; but may I be allowed a few words on the injustice of this oath? What is the spirit of a vow made by all the individuals of a nation? Is it not to maintain a complete equality among the citizens, to place them all equally under the law protecting all property? Now, I ask whether a law which commands the man possessing nothing to respect the man who has everything is indeed just? What are the essentials of the social contract? Does it not consist in giving up a small amount of freedom and property in order to preserve both of them?

These principles underlie all laws; they motivate the punishment of those who abuse their liberty; they authorize taxes. When a citizen is asked to pay taxes, he does not complain because he knows that what he gives is used to preserve what remains with him; but, once again, why should the man with nothing associate himself with a pact that protects only the man who has everything? If you are committing a just act in respecting, by your agreement, the properties of the rich, are you not committing an injustice in forcing the man who respects it, and yet has nothing, to submit to your agreement? What interest can he have in your agreement? And why do you expect him to make a promise that benefits only the man who differs so much from him by reason of his riches? There certainly could be nothing more unjust; an agreement should have the same effect for all the parties who subscribe to it; a man who has no interest in maintaining it cannot really be bound by it, for then it is no longer the pact of a free people; it becomes the law of the strong against the weak, who would then be in constant revolt against it. This then is what has taken place in the agreement on the respect of property which the nation has just passed; it is the rich man who binds the poor man to it; it is the rich man who gains from the promise made so unwillingly by the poor man, which he sees as a promise extorted from him in his good faith, and under which he agrees to do something that could never in fact be done to him.

Now that you are convinced, as you must be, of this barbarous inequality, do not aggravate the injustice of it by punishing the poor man for daring to rob the rich: your unfair agreement gives him a stronger right than ever. By forcing him to perjure himself through this meaningless agreement, you legitimize all the crimes which his perjury will bring about; thus it is not for you to punish what you yourself have caused. I will say no more to make you realize the horrible cruelty of punishing thieves. Imitate the wise law of the nation I mentioned; punish the man negligent enough to let himself be robbed, but inflict no penalty on the robber; reflect that it was your agreement that authorized him to do this, and that in giving in to it he is only following the first and most sacred impulse of Nature, that of preserving one's own existence at the expense of others.

The crimes which we now come to examine, in this second class of man's duties to his fellows, consist of the actions performed by libertinism, the most noteworthy of which are prostitution, incest, rape, and sodomy. We should have no doubt that everything which goes under the name of moral crime, that is to say all the actions of the types we have just mentioned, are quite indifferent to a government whose sole duty is to maintain by one means or another a state of affairs that guarantees its existence—that is the only morality of a republican government.

Now, since this is always opposed by the tyrants who surround the country, one could scarcely imagine reasonably that its means of defending this state could be moral means: for it can only defend itself by war, and nothing is less moral than war.

Now, I should like to ask how it could be proved that in a state that is obliged to be immoral, the individuals should be moral ? I go further; I say it is better that they should not be. The legislators of ancient Greece fully realized the important necessity of corrupting the limbs of the state so that their moral dissolution influenced the vital parts of the body and resulted in insurrection, which is indispensable to a society that is as perfectly happy as is a republican society, a condition which is bound to excite the hatred and jealousy of surrounding states. Insurrection, these wise legislators believed, is certainly not a moral state; and yet it must be the permanent state of a republic; it would therefore be as absurd as it would be dangerous to demand that men who had to maintain a perpetual immoral disturbance of the machinery of state should themselves be very moral beings, for the moral state is one of peace and tranquillity, while the immoral state is one of perpetual movement, equivalent to the necessary state of insurrection into which the republican must guide his government.

Let us go into more detail now, and begin by analyzing modesty, that pusillanimous impulse that is hostile to all impure affections. If it were Nature's intention that man should be modest, she certainly would not have had him born naked; an infinite number of peoples, less degraded by civilization than we, go naked and feel no shame at it; there is no doubt that the custom of clothing oneself is simply caused by the inclemency of the climate, and by the coquetry of women; women felt that they would soon lose the effects of desire if they anticipated it;... thus modesty, far from being a virtue, was no more than one of the first effects of corruption, than one of the first means of female coquetry.

Lycurgus and Solon, who well understood that the results of immodesty held the citizen in the immoral state essential to the laws of republican government, required young girls to show themselves nude in the theaters. 2 Rome imitated this example: they danced nude in the fete of Flora; the majority of pagan rites were celebrated thus; nudity even passed for virtue with some peoples. Be that as it may, lewd propensities arise from immodesty; and the results of these propensities make up the socalled crimes that we are analyzing, and of them the first result is prostitution.

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It has been said that the intention of these legislators, in dulling the passion that men experience for a nude woman, was to render more active that which men experience now and then for their own sex. These sages required to be shown that which they wished to breed disgust for, and they hid that which they believed inspired the softest desires; in any case, did they work for any other end than that we have just described? They sensed, one realizes, the need for immorality in republican mores.

Now that we are freed of all that pack of religious errors that formerly held us captive, and now that we are closer to Nature by reason of having demolished a quantity of prejudices, be assured that if there be a crime, it is rather to resist the desires that Nature has inspired in us (as well as to combat them); and, persuaded that desire was a result of these propentities, [be assured] that, rather than extinguish this passion in us, it is better to arrange the means for satisfying it in peace. We must then attempt to establish order here and to guarantee the necessary security to the citizen with a need to approach the objects of his desire, free to vent on these objects all those passions prescribed in him, without ever being restrained by anything; because there is no passion in man that needs so total an extension of liberty as this. Various health establishments, vast and suitably furnished, and secure in all points, will be erected in the city; there, all sexes, all ages, all creatures possible will be offered to the caprices of the libertines who wish pleasure; and the most complete subordination will be the rule for the individuals offered; the lightest refusal will be punished immediately and arbitrarily by him who has met with it. I must explain this further—the regulation of republican mores; I have promised the same logic in everything, and I will keep my word.

If, as I have just said, there is no passion that so needs every possible extension of liberty as this one, there is also none that is so tyrannical; in this, man loves to command, to be obeyed, to surround himself with slaves constrained to satisfy him; now whenever you deny a man a secret means of expelling the deposit of tyranny that Nature has put into his heart, he will turn and vent it upon his surroundings; he will agitate against the government. If you wish to avoid this danger, allow a free scope to these tyrannical desires, which will torment a man in spite of himself; then, content at having wielded his petty sovereignty among the harem of Oriental servants and wives offered him by your money and organization, he will issue forth satisfied and with no desire to disturb a government that secures so willingly for him every object of his lusts; but should you, on the other hand, take different action and impose upon these objects of public lusts the ridiculous restraints formerly invented by ministerial tyranny and the lubricity of our Sardanapalus: 3 then each man will quickly become embittered against your government, jealous of the despotism that he sees you alone exercising, and will throw off the yoke with which you burden him and, tired of your fashion of ruling, will change it as he has just done.

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It is known that the infamous and rascally Sartine furnished a means of lust to Louis XV by having La Dubarry read to him three times a week the intimate details, embellished by himself, of all that happened in the low quarters of Paris. That particular libertinism of the French Nero cost the state three millions!

Notice how the Greek legislators, thoroughly imbued with these ideas, treated debauchery in Lacedaemon and Athens; they intoxicated the citizen with it, far from forbidding it; no form of lechery was denied him; and Socrates, called by the oracle the wisest philosopher on earth, passed from the arms of Aspasia to those of Alcibiades and was not any less the glory of Greece. I will go further, and however opposed my ideas may seem to our present customs—since my object is to prove that we must hasten to change these customs if we wish to preserve our chosen government—I will try to convince you that prostitution for so-called decent women is no more dangerous than it is for men, and that we should not only involve them in the orgies in the brothels I would establish, but should even build some for them where their whims and the needs of their temperament, so differently passionate from ours, could be satisfied in the same way with all sexes.

By what right do you claim, first, that women should be exempted from the blind submission to men's whims that Nature ordains for them; and second, by what right do you claim to enslave them to continence, which is foreign to their nature and absolutely unnecessary to their honor?

I will treat these two questions separately.

It is certain that in a state of Nature women were born vulvovaginal, enjoying, that is to say, the advantages of other female animals, and like them belonging without exception to all males; such, doubtless, were the first laws of Nature and the only rules of the first societies made by men. Self-seeking, egoism, and love degraded these first simple and natural ideas; men believed they were adding to their wealth by taking a wife and her family inheritance; that is how the first two emotions I have mentioned came into being; yet more often men carried off their women and grew attached to them; that is how the other motive was born; and with it in every case went injustice.

Never can an act of possession be carried out upon a free being; it is as unjust to possess a woman exclusively as to possess slaves; all men are born free, all are equal in law; let us never lose sight of these principles; for this reason the right can never be given to one sex to take possession of the other; and never can one of the sexes or classes have an arbitrary right over the other. In the pure state of Nature's laws, a woman cannot even allege in refusal of one who desires her that she loves another, for this becomes a reason for exclusion; and no man can be excluded from the enjoyment of a woman when it becomes clear that she belongs to all men. The act of possession can only be exercised upon a piece of furniture or an animal; it can never be used upon a human being of our own kind; and any tie you may imagine which can bind a woman to a man is as unjust as it is fantastic.

If, then, it appears beyond contradiction that Nature has given us the right to carry out our wishes upon all women indifferently, it appears equally that we have the right to force her to submit to our wishes, not in exclusivity, for then I would contradict myself, but momentarily. 4 It is beyond question that we have the right to establish laws which will force woman to yield to the ardors of him who desires her; violence itself being one of the results of this right, we can legally employ it. Has not Nature proved to us that we have this right, by allotting us the strength necessary to force them to our desires?

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Let no one say at this point that I am contradicting myself, and that having established above that we have no right to bind a woman to ourselves, I now destroy this principle by saying that we have the right to force her; I repeat that it is not a question of property but of enjoyment; I have no right to the ownership of the fountain that lies in my path, but I certainly have the right to make use of it; I have the right to enjoy the limpid water offered up to my thirst; in the same way I have no actual claim to the possession of such and such a woman, but I have an incontestable one to the enjoyment of her; and I have the right to force her to this enjoyment if she refuses me for any motive whatsoever.

In vain may women protest modesty or attachment to other men in their defence; these chimerical reasons count for nothing; we have already seen that modesty is an artificial and despicable emotion. Neither has love, which might be called madness of the soul, any right to justify their fidelity: it satisfies only two individuals, the beloved and the lover, and cannot therefore increase the happiness of others; but women were given to us for the general happiness, not for an egotistical and privileged enjoyment. All men, then, have an equal right to the enjoyment of all women; and there is no man, according to Nature's laws, who can institute a unique and personal claim to any woman. The law which will oblige them to prostitute themselves in the brothels I have spoken of, which will force them if they evade it, is therefore the most equitable of laws and one against which no legitimate excuse can be urged.

A man who wishes to enjoy any woman or girl may thus, if you pass just laws, summon her to appear in one of the houses I have described; and there, safeguarded by the matrons of this temple of Venus, she will be offered in complete meekness and submission to satisfy all the caprices he wishes to indulge with her, however strange and irregular they may be, for there is none that is not inspired by Nature, none that she can refuse. It would only remain then to fix the age; but I claim that that cannot be done without hampering the freedom of whoever desires a girl of such and such an age.

Whoever has the right to eat the fruit off a tree may assuredly pluck it either ripe or green according to his taste. But it will be objected that at this age the interference of a man will have a decisively bad effect on the health of the child. That consideration is meaningless: once you have accorded me the right to enjoyment, this right is independent of the effects of the enjoyment; from that moment on, it makes no difference whether the act of enjoyment is beneficial or harmful to the object submitting to it. Have I not already proved that it would be legal to force a woman, and that as soon as she kindles a desire to enjoy her, she must submit to being enjoyed without any egotistical considerations?

It is the same with her health. The moment that the enjoyment of him who desires and has the right to take possession is spoiled or weakened by such considerations, the question of age must be forgotten; for we are not concerned with the sensations of the object condemned by Nature and the law to assuage momentarily another's desires; we are only concerned in this analysis with what pleases the one who desires. We shall redress the balance.

Yes, it shall be redressed, it undoubtedly must be; these women that we have served so cruelly must certainly be recompensed; and this is going to form the reply to the second question I asked.

If we admit, as we have just done, that all women should submit to our desires, surely we should also allow them fully to satisfy their own; our laws should in this respect look favorably upon their ardent natures; and it is absurd that we have assigned both their honor and their virtue to the unnatural strength they must use to resist the inclinations with which they have been far more profusely endowed than we. This social injustice is even more glaring since we agree both to weaken them by our seduction and then to punish them when they yield to all our efforts to make them fall. The whole absurdity of our morals, it seems to me, is contained in that atrocious injustice, and the revelation of that alone should be enough to make us realize the absolute necessity of changing it for a purer morality.

I claim that women, who have far more violent desires than we for the pleasures of lust, should be able to express them as much as they wish, free from the bonds of marriage, from all the false prejudices of modesty, completely returned to the state of Nature. I want the law to permit them to enjoy as many men as they like; I want the enjoyment of both sexes and all parts of their bodies to be allowed to them as to men; and under the ruling that they suffer themselves to be enjoyed by whoever wants them, they must also be allowed the freedom to enjoy whoever they think is capable of satisfying them.

What, I ask you, are the dangers of such license? Children without a father? What does this matter in a republic, where citizens should have no mother but their country, where all infants are born children of their country! How much greater will be their love for their country when they have known no other mother, when they know they must look to their country for everything! Do not imagine you can make good republicans by isolating children in their families when they should belong only to the republic. By giving their affection to a few individuals instead of to all their fellow men, they inevitably adopt the often dangerous prejudices of these individuals; their ideas and opinions isolate them, characterize them, and all the virtues of a citizen escape them completely. They give their whole heart to those who brought them into the world and have no affection left for the country that teaches them to live, to understand themselves, and make their name—as though these latter benefits were not more important that the formed! If it is to our great disadvantage to let infants imbibe the interests of the family and not the very different ones of the mother country, then it is indeed to our advantage to separate them from the family; and this would happen naturally under the conditions I have outlined; for by completely destroying the bonds of marriage, the fruit of pleasure in women would be children forbidden any knowledge of their fathers and thus prevented from belonging to a family, instead of being, as they should, children of their country alone.

We will, then, have brothels destined for the concupiscence of women; and like those for men, they will be under the protection of the government; there, all the individuals of either sex that they might desire will be supplied, and the more they frequent these houses the more they will be respected. Nothing is so barbarous and ridiculous as the fact that we have identified woman's virtue and honor with the resistance she employs against the desires she has received from Nature and which burn continually in those who have the barbarity to condemn her for submitting to them. From the most tender age, 5 therefore, a young girl who is free from a father's care, having no need to save herself for marriage—completely abolished by the wise laws I advocate, free from the prejudice that has enslaved her sex, will be able to surrender herself to all that her temperament commands, in places devoted to this subject; there she will be received with respect, satisfied in profusion, and on her return to society she can speak as publicly of the pleasure she has tasted as today she speaks of a ball or an excursion. Fair sex, you will be free; you will enjoy, as men do, all the pleasures that are your duty to Nature; you will stop at nothing. Must one half of humanity chain the diviner half? Oh, break the chains, Nature commands it; know no other curb but your preferences, no other laws but your desires, no other morality but Nature's; no longer languish beneath those savage prejudices that wither your charms, fetter the divine impulses of your hearts; 6 you are as free as we are, and the career of Venus' battles is open to you as to us; no longer fear absurd reproaches; pedantry and superstition are overthrown; we will never again see you blush at your charming excesses; crowned with myrtle and roses, our esteem for you will be the greater as you give these excesses yet wider scope.

 

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Babylonian females did not wait till the age of seven to bring their first fruits to the temple of Venus. The first stirring of desire that a girl feels is the moment that Nature means her to prostitute herself, and with no other consideration in mind, she should obey Nature's voice; she outrages her laws if she resists them.

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Women do not realize how much their sensualities embellish them. Compare two women of about the same age and beauty, one of whom lives in celibacy and the other in libertinism; you will see how the latter takes the prize for brilliance and bloom; any transgression against Nature is more aging than an excess of pleasures; and everyone knows that confinements make a woman more beautiful.

Our foregoing analysis obviously makes it unnecessary to discuss adultery; let us glance at it, nevertheless, however meaningless it becomes after the laws I have established. How ridiculous it was to consider it a crime under our former institutions! If there was one thing in the world particularly absurd it was the eternal duration of the marriage bond; one had surely only to observe or experience the weight of these chains to cease to consider any alleviating action a crime; and Nature, as we have remarked, having endowed women with a more passionate temperament and greater sensibility than the other sex, the marriage bond was undoubtedly more stifling for them.

Ardent women, on fire with the flames of love, recompense yourselves now without fear; realize that there cannot be any harm in following Nature's impulses, that she did not create you for one man but for the delight of all. Let nothing restrain you. Imitate the Greek republicans; their legislators never dreamed of making adultery a crime, and they nearly all authorized women's excesses. Thomas More in his Utopia proves that it is advantageous to a woman to give herself up to debauchery, and this great man's ideas were not always mere fantasy. 7

Among the Tartars, the more a woman prostituted herself the more she was honored; she showed the marks of her immodesty openly on her neck; and a woman with none of these decorations was considered worthless. In Pegu, wives and daughters are lent by the family to passing travelers; they are hired out at so much a day like horses or carriages! Volumes could be written to prove that sexual indulgence was never considered criminal among any of the wiser nations. Every philosopher realizes that we have only the Christian impostors to thank for making it a crime. The priests had a good reason for forbidding us indulgence; this command, by keeping the knowledge and absolution of these secret sins for them alone, gave them unbelievable power over women and opened the way to a life of unlimited lust. We know how they profited by it and how they would still if they had not irretrievably lost their credit.

7


He also suggested that betrothed couples should see each other naked before marrying. How many marriages would not take place if this law were enforced! It will be admitted that otherwise it is a case of what we call buying a pig in a poke.

Is incest more dangerous? Undoubtedly not; it extends the family ties and consequently makes the citizen's love of his country more active; it is commanded us by Nature's first laws; we feel the necessity of it; and it makes the enjoyment of objects that belong to us seem yet more delicious. The earliest institutions favored incest; it is found in primitive societies; it has been consecrated by all religions, and favored by all laws. If we survey the whole world we see that incest has been established everywhere. The Negroes of the Pepper Coast and the Gaboon pimp for their wives to their own children; the eldest son of Judah had to marry his father's wife; the peoples of Chile sleep with sisters or daughters indifferently and marry mother and daughter at the same time. To put it briefly, I dare affirm that incest should be the rule under any government based on fraternity. How could reasonable men go to the absurd lengths of thinking that the enjoyment of mother, sister, or daughter could ever be a crime? I ask you, is it not abominably prejudiced to make a man a criminal if he enhances his appreciation of the object closest to him by ties of Nature! It is like saying that we are forbidden to love too much just those individuals whom Nature teaches us to love the most, and that the more she inclines us towards an object, the more she also bids us keep our distance. These contridictions are absurd; only races debased by superstitition could believe in them or adopt them. Since the communal state of women that I propose would necessarily involve incest, there is little more to say about this supposed crime that is so obviously a fallacy; and we will pass to rape, which seems at first sight to be the most clearly injurious of all forms of libertinism because of its apparent outrage. It is nevertheless certain that rape, so rare and hard to prove, does less harm than robbery, for the latter appropriates the property, while the former only spoils it. And how could you answer a violator if he objected that in fact he had done but slight harm, since he had only made a certain alteration in an object which would soon have been made in any case through marriage or desire?

But sodomy, then, this so-called crime which brought the wrath of heaven upon the cities given over to it, is this not a monstrous perversion that cannot be too severely punished? It is undoubtedly painful for us to have to reproach our ancestors with the legal murders which they permitted for this cause. Is it possible to be so uncivilized as to condemn an unfortunate individual to death because he has different tastes from ours? It makes one shudder to realize that our legislators were still at that point less than forty years ago. Have no fear, Citizens; such absurdities will not happen again; the wisdom of your legislators will see to that. Now that we are enlightened on this subject of the weakness of certain men, we realize today that such a weakness cannot be criminal, and that Nature could not attach enough importance to the fluid in our loins to be angry over which channel we choose to direct it into.

What is the only crime that can exist here? It is assuredly not in placing oneself in one particular place or another, unless one tries to maintain that the different parts of the body are not really all exactly the same and that some are pure and some filthy; but since it is impossible to put forward such absurdities, the only so-called crime in this case must be the actual loss of semen. Now I ask you, is it likely that that semen is so precious in Nature's eyes that in releasing it one commits a crime? Would she permit this release every day if that were so? Does she not authorize it by permitting the semen to escape during dreams or during the enjoyment of a pregnant woman? Is it conceivable that Nature would enable us to commit a crime that outraged her? Could she consent to men destroying her pleasures and so becoming stronger than she? We fall into an endless gulf of absurdities if we thus abandon the light of reason in our arguments. Let us rest assured, therefore, that it is as natural to have a woman in one way as in another, that it is absolutely indifferent whether we enjoy a boy or a girl, and that once it is agreed that no other desires can exist in us but those received from Nature, Nature herself is too wise and too logical to implant in us anything that could offend her.

The taste for sodomy is the result of our constitution, which we do not foster in vain. Children show this preference from a tender age and never swerve from it. Sometimes it is the fruit of satiety; but even then, is it not still a part of Nature? From every point of view, it is Nature's handiwork, and all that she inspires must be viewed with respect. If it could be proved, by taking an exact census, that this taste is infinitely more widespread than the other, that its pleasures as far keener, and that for this reason its supporters are far more numerous than its enemies, might it not be possible to conclude that this vice, far from outraging Nature, accords with her purposes, and that she is far less concerned with reproduction than we foolishly believe. If we take the whole world into consideration, how many peoples do we see who despise women! Some of them will have nothing to do with women except to get a child to succeed them. In a republic the custom of men living side by side always makes this vice more frequent, but it is not dangerous. Would the legislators of Greece have introduced it into their republic if they had thought so? Far from it, they thought it necessary in a fighting nation. Plutarch tells us with enthusiasm of the battalion of the lovers and the beloved: they alone continued to defend the liberty of Greece. This vice reigned in a society of brothers in arms; it strengthened it. The greatest men have been interested in it. The whole of America, when it was discovered, was peopled with men with these inclinations. Among the Illinois in Louisiana, men dressed as women prostituted themselves like courtesans. The Negroes of Bengela openly had relations with men; in Algeria, nearly all the seraglios today are wholly populated by young boys. In Thebes, the love of boys was not only tolerated but recommended; the Cheronean philosopher advised it to sweeten the love of young men.

We know to what extent it held sway in Rome; there were public places where young boys prostituted themselves in the disguise of women, and girls in the dress of boys. Martial, Catullus, Tibullus, Horace, and Virgil wrote to men in the terms used to a mistress; and we read in Plutarch 8 that women should have no part in the love of men. The Amasians on the island of Crete used to carry off young boys with unusual ceremonies. When someone was attracted by a boy, the parents were informed of the day the seducer intended to take him away; the youth put up some resistance if he did not like his lover; otherwise he went off with him, and the seducer sent him back to his family as soon as he had had enough; for with this passion as with the love of women, to have enough is to have too much.

8


Moralia, treatise on love.

Strabo tells us that on the same island the seraglios contained only boys; they were publicly prostituted.

Is another authority needed to prove how useful this vice is in a republic? Listen to Jerome the Peripatetic: the love of boys, he says, spread throughout Greece, for it gave us courage and strength and helped to expel the tyrants. Pacts were formed among the lovers, and they would rather be tortured than reveal their accomplices; thus patriotism sacrificed everything for the good of the state; it was certain that these bonds srengthened the republic; women were inveighed against, and it became a weakness characteristic of tyrants to attach oneself to such creatures.

Homosexuality was always the vice of warlike nations. Caesar tells us that the Gauls were very much given to it. The wars which a republic had to undertake encouraged this vice by separating the sexes; and when it was realized that this result was so useful to the state, religion soon blessed it. It is known that the Romans consecrated the love of Jupiter and Ganymede. Sextus Empiricus assures us that this inclination was enforced among the Persians. Finally the women, jealous and despised, offered their husbands the same service that boys gave them; some tried this and returned to their former habits, finding the illusion impossible to sustain.

The Turks, greatly given to this perversion which is blessed in the Koran, assert nevertheless that a very young virgin can take the place of a boy; and their females seldom become women without having passed this ordeal. Sixtus V and Sanchez permitted this license; the latter even undertook to prove that it was advantageous to propagation and that a child conceived after this preliminary was infinitely the better for it. The women made amends among themselves. This diversion certainly has no more drawbacks than the other, for the result is only a refusal to propagate, and the power of those who have the taste for reproduction is too strong to be destroyed by its adversaries. The Greeks even supported this perversion of women for reasons of state. It had the result that women were satisfied with each other, and since their communications with men were less frequent, they meddled less in the affairs of the republic. Lucian tells us what progress was made by this license, and it is not without interest that we observe it in Sappho.

In a word, there is no danger at all in any of these manias; should they go even further, to the caresses of monsters and animals, which we notice in the history of all nations, there would not be the slightest danger in any of these whims; for corrupt habits, often very useful to a government, cannot injure it in any way; and we must expect enough wisdom and prudence from our legislators to be sure that they will issue no law repressing these peculiarities, which are an inextricable part of the individual constitution and could no more be laid to the guilt of the owner than a congenital deformity.There remains only murder to be examined under the second group of crimes against our fellow men, and then we will pass to man's obligations to himself. Of all man's offenses against his fellow man, murder is without contradiction the cruelest, for it deprives him of the one gift he has received from Nature, the only one whose loss is irreparable. Nevertheless several questions arise at this point, apart from the wrong which murder does to its victim.

1.
Considering Nature's laws only, is it really criminal?

2.
Is it criminal in relation to the laws of politics?

3.
Is it harmful to society?

4.
How should it be considered in a republican state?

5.
Finally, should murder be punished by murder?

We will examine each of these questions separately; the object is important enough to allow us to linger; our ideas will perhaps be found somewhat strong, but what matter? Have we not gained the right to say all we wish? Let us reveal great truths to men; they expect them from us; error must be dissipated, its blindfold must fall beside that of kings. Is murder a crime in Nature's eyes? Such is the first question.

We are doubtless now going to humiliate man's pride by reducing him to the stature of all the other productions of Nature; but the philosopher does not pander to trivial human vanities; ardent in the pursuit of truth, he extricates it from the crass prejudices of self-love, grasps it, develops it, and bravely shows it to the astonished world.

What is man, and what difference is there between him and the other plants, the other animals of the earth? None, certainly. Fortuitously situated, like them, on this earth, he is born like them, propagates, grows, withers like them; like them he reaches old age, and like them falls into nothingness after the span assigned to each species by Nature according to its physical characteristics. If these similarities are such that the scrutinizing eye of the philosopher can perceive no difference, then there is just as much harm in killing an animal as a man, or just as little, and the difference arises solely from the prejudices of our vanity; unfortunately nothing is more absurd than the prejudices of vanity. But let us take the question further. You cannot disagree that it is the same to kill a man or an animal; but is not the destruction of any living creature wrong, as the Pythagoreans believed and as some dwellers on the banks of the Ganges still believe? Before replying let us remind the reader that we are only examining the question in relation to Nature; we will consider it later with regard to men.

Now I ask you how valuable can creatures be to Nature that cost her neither trouble nor care? The workman only values his handiwork because of the work he put into it, because of the time spent in creating it. Does man cost Nature anything? And if he does cost her something, is it more than a monkey or an elephant? I will go further; what are the regenerative materials of Nature? What are newborn creatures created from? Do not the three elements of which they are made come originally from the destruction of other bodies? If every individual were eternal, would it not become impossible for Nature to create new ones? If eternal life is impossible for living things, their destruction is one of Nature's laws.

If this destruction is so necessary to Nature that it is impossible for her to do without it, and if she cannot create without drawing on the mass of dead matter prepared for her by death, then the idea of annihilation which we associate with death becomes meaningless; there will be no more simple annihilation; what we call the end of a living creature will no longer be the actual end but a mere transmutation of matter, which is accepted by all modern thinkers as one of the first laws. Death, according to these irrefutable principles, is only a change of form, an imperceptible transition from one existence to another, which is what Pythagoras called metempsychosis.

Once these truths are admitted, can one possibly maintain that destruction is a crime? Do you dare to say, for the sake of preserving your absurd prejudices, that transmutation is the same as destruction? Certainly not, for you would have to prove that matter underwent a moment of inaction, a time of quiescence. This you will never discover. Small animals come into being the moment a large animal breathes its last, and the life of these tiny creatures is only a necessary and inevitable result of the temporary sleep of the greater. Can you venture to say at this time that one is more pleasing to Nature than the other? You would have to prove an impossibility-that a long or square shape is more pleasing or useful to Nature than an oblong or triangular one; you would have to prove that even in view of Nature's sublime plans, a sluggard who grows fat in idleness and inaction is more useful to Nature than the horse, whose service is so essential, or the ox, whose body is so precious that every part of it can be used; you would have to prove that the venomous serpent is more necessary than the faithful dog.

Now, since all these propositions are untenable, we must agree to admit the impossibility of destroying any of Nature's works; that given the assurance that the only thing we are doing in allowing ourselves to destroy is to make a change in the forms of things, but without extinguishing life, then it is beyond human power to prove that there is any crime in the so-called destruction of a creature, of any age, sex, or species you can imagine. To follow the train of consequences yet further, and linking one event to another, we see that the action of altering the forms of Nature is beneficial to her, since it produces the material for her reconstructions which would be impossible for her if nothing were destroyed.

Well, let her do it herself! you will be told. Certainly let her do it, but it is at her inspiration that man gives way to murder; it is Nature that prompts him, and the man who destroys his fellow is to Nature what a plague or famine is, sent by her hand in the same way, for she uses all possible means to obtain the raw material of destruction so essential to her work. Let us vouchsafe for a moment to illumine our minds with the holy light of philosophy; what other voice but Nature's suggests to us the personal hatreds, vengeances, wars, in fact all the eternal motives for murder? Then if she prompts them, it is because she needs them. How, in that case, can we imagine that we are guilty towards her, when we are only following her wishes?

This is already more than sufficient to convince any enlightened reader that murder could never be an offense against Nature.

Is it a political crime? Let us frankly admit that it is, on the contrary, one of the greatest powers in politics. Was it not through murders that Rome became mistress of the world? Is it not by means of murders that France has freed herself today? It is useless to say that we are now speaking of murders caused by war and not of atrocities committed by the seditious and rebellious; the former was worthy of public execration and need only be remembered to excite general horror and indignation. What human science most needs to be maintained by massacre? Only one that sets out to deceive itself, which aims at the aggrandizement of one nation at the expense of another. Are wars, the sole fruit of this uncivilized policy, anything but the means of fostering, defending, and supporting it? And what is war but the science of destruction? What a strange lack of insight we show by publicly teaching the art of killing, rewarding the most successful, and then punishing whoever is revenged on his enemy in a personal matter. Is it not time to change such barbarous errors?

Is murder, then, a crime against society? Who could seriously imagine so! What does it matter to a populous society whether there is one member more or less in its midst? Are its laws, morals, or customs thereby weakened? Can the death of an individual ever have any influence on the mass of people? And after the losses of a great battle— or I may as well say after the extinction of half the population, of the whole of it, if you like—would the few beings left alive experience the slightest material alteration? Alas, no; nor would the whole of Nature experience any alteration; and the stupid pride of mankind, that believes that everything was created for itself, would be astonished to realize that after the total destruction of the human race nothing in Nature was changed nor the stars slowed down in their courses. But let us proceed.

How should murder be viewed in a martial republican state?

It would undoubtedly be thoroughly dangerous either to look unfavorably on this action or to punish it. The pride of the republican demands a certain amount of ferocity: if he becomes soft and loses his power, he will soon be subjugated. A strange idea becomes apparent at this point; but since it is true as well as daring, I will voice it. A nation that starts as a republic can only maintain itself by the virtues, for to arrive at the greater, one must start with the lesser; but a nation that is already old and corrupt, and bravely throws off the yoke of monarchist government to adopt the republican rule, can only maintain itself by crimes; for it is already criminal; and to pass from crime to virtue, from a violent state to a quiet one, would be to fall into an inertia which would quickly result in ruin. What would become of a tree transplanted from fertile ground to a dry sandy soil? All intellectual ideas are so subordinated to physical nature that a comparison with growing things will always provide a moral guide.

Savages, the most independent of men and the nearest to Nature, every day indulge in murder with impunity. In Sparta and Lacedaemon they hunted slaves as we hunt partridges. The freest peoples are those who look on this with most favor. In Mindanao, the boy who wishes to commit a murder is elevated to the ranks of the brave, and he is decorated with a turban; among the Caraguos, seven men must be killed before obtaining this headdress; the natives of Borneo believe that those they put to death will have to serve them when they are dead themselves; even the pious Spaniards made a vow to Saint James of Galicia to kill twelve American natives a day; in the kingdom of Tangut, a strong and vigorous young man is chosen and permitted on certain days of the year to kill everyone he meets! Was there ever a race more sympathetic to murder than the Jews? It appears in all forms on every page of their history.

The emperor and mandarins of China occasionally take measures to make the people revolt, so that they can have an excuse for effecting a dreadful slaughter. Should this meek and effeminate nation free itself from the yoke of its tyrants, it will slaughter them in turn, with better cause, and murder, once again found necessary and adopted, will only have changed its victims; it was first the enjoyment of one side and it will become the pastime of the other.

An infinite number of nations tolerate public assassination; it is openly allowed in Genoa, Venice, Naples, and the whole of Albania; at Kachao, on the San Domingo River, assassins dressed in a well-known and recognized uniform, will butcher according to orders, before your very eyes, whatever individual you name. The Indians take opium to spur themselves on to murder, then rush into the streets and massacre everyone they meet; English travelers have observed this mania in Batavia.

What other nation has ever been both as great and as cruel as the Romans, and what other nation has kept its splendor and freedom for so long? The gladiatorial shows sustained their courage: they became warlike through the custom of making a game of killing. Twelve or fifteen hundred victims filled the circus arena every day; and there the women, more cruel than the men, dared to demand that the dying men fall gracefully and strike an attitude even in the throes of death. The Romans went from this to the pleasures of watching dwarfs slaughter each other; and when the Christian cult infected the earth and persuaded men that killing was an evil, the Romans were at once enslaved by tyrants, and the heroes of the world soon became its playthings.

All over the world, in fact, it has been rightly believed that the murderer, that is to say, the man who stifles his sensibility to the point of killing his fellow man and defying public or private vengeance, must be very brave and therefore very valuable to a warlike or republican society. If we glance at nations who are fiercer still and do not stop at sacrificing children, often their own, we see that these actions are universally adopted, sometimes even embodied in the laws. Many savage tribes kill their children as soon as they are born. On the banks of the Orinoco River, mothers used to sacrifice female children as soon as they had brought them into the world, for they were convinced their daughters were only born to be unhappy, destined to be married in a region where women were scarcely tolerated. In Trapobania and the kingdom of Sopit, all deformed children were killed by their own parents.

The women of Madagascar exposed all children born on certain days of the week to the attacks of wild animals. In the Greek republics all newborn children were carefully examined, and if they were not found to be formed well enough to defend their republic some day, they were immediately destroyed; it was not considered necessary to erect lavishly endowed institutions to preserve this vile scum of human nature. Up until the removal of the seat of empire, all Romans who did not want to bring up their children threw them into the sewer. The legislators of the ancient world did not scruple to condemn infants to death, and none of their codes put any check on the rights which a father considered he held over his family. Aristotle advised abortion; and these republicans of the old days, filled with enthusiasm and ardor for their country, did not know the individual sympathy found in modern nations: they loved their children less, but they loved their country more. In every town in China an incredible number of abandoned children are found in the streets every day; a cart collects them at dawn, and they are thrown into a ditch; often the midwives themselves rid the mothers of them by immediately suffocating their offspring in tubs of boiling water or by throwing them into a stream.

9

It is hoped that the nation will do away with this expense, the most unnecessary one of all; any individual born without the necessary qualities to serve the republic later on has no right to life; and the best thing to do is to take it from him as soon as he receives it.

At Peking they are put into little rush baskets and left on the canals; these canals are scoured every day, and the famous traveler Duhalde estimates the number picked up each day at more than thirty thousand. It cannot be denied that it would be very necessary and extremely useful to put a limit to the population in a republican state; from an opposite point of view, the population should be encouraged in a monarchy: there the tyrants, rich only in proportion to the number of their slaves, certainly need more men; but an overabundant population, make no mistake about it, is a real evil in a republican state; nevertheless there is no need to slaughter in order to reduce it, as some of our modern decemvirs would; it is only a question of not allowing it to spread beyond the bounds that well-being prescribes. Take care not to multiply a population where every man is a king; and realize that revolutions are always the natural result of too large a population.

If, for the glory of the state, you give your soldiers the right to destroy men, then for the preservation of this same state, give each individual an equal right to destroy, wherever he can without outraging Nature, children that he cannot bring up, or who will bring no support to the country; allow him also to rid himself at his own risk of all the enemies who might injure him; for the result of all these actions, meaningless in themselves, will be to keep the population in check, and never numerous enough to overthrow your government. Let monarchists say that a state is only great according to the size of its population: the state will always be poor if its population exceeds its means of supporting life, and it will always flourish if it is kept within limits and can trade its superfluous goods. Do you not prune a tree when it has too many branches? Do you not clip the branches to preserve the trunk? Any system that departs from these principles is an extravagance and a source of abuses that will soon lead to the total overthrow of the structure we have erected with so much labor; but it is not the full-grown man we should destroy in order to decrease the population. It is unfair to cut short the life of a fully formed individual; but it is not so, I maintain, to prevent a creature who is certain to have no use in life from growing up. The human race should be thinned out from the cradle; the being that you realize can never be useful to society is the one whose life should be cut short at the breast; these are the only reasonable ways of diminishing a population whose increase would, as I have proved, become a most dangerous abuse.

Now let us resume our argument.

Should murder be punished by murder? Certainly not. Let us impose no punishment on the murderer but the risk he incurs from the vengeance of the friends or relatives of the murdered man. I give you my pardon, said Louis XV to Charolais, who had killed a man for amusement, but I also give it to the man who kills you. The whole foundation of the law against murderers is contained in that sublime saying. 10

10


The Salic law punished murder only by a fine; and since the guilty man could easily find a means of avoiding it, Childebert, King of Austrasia, decreed in a ruling made at Cologne a punishment of death, not against murderers, but against anyone who evaded a fine imposed on a murderer. The Ripuarian law also imposed only a fine for this action, graded according to the individual who had been killed. It was very expensive for a priest: a leaden tunic was made to fit the assassin, and he had to pay in gold an equivalent of the weight of the tunic, otherwise he and his family became slaves of the Church.

To sum up, murder is a horror, but often a necessary horror and never a criminal one, and it must be tolerated in a republican state. I have shown that the whole universe gives us examples of this; but must it be considered an action punishable by death?

Those who can solve the following problem will have answered the question:

Is crime a crime or not?

If it is not, why make laws to punish it?

If it is, by what barbarous and idiotic illogicality do you punish it by a similar crime?

It now remains to discuss man's duties towards himself. Since the philosopher only adopts such duties inasmuch as they minister to his pleasure or self-preservation, it is useless to recommend their adoption or to impose penalties if they are not observed.

The only crime of this type that a man could commit would be suicide. I shall not amuse myself here by pointing out the imbecility of people who make that action into a crime; I shall send anyone with doubts on the matter to Rousseau's famous letter. Almost all the governments of the ancient world authorized suicide on political or religious grounds. The Athenians disclosed to the Areopagus their reasons for killing themselves; then they stabbed themselves. All the Greek republics tolerated suicide; it was a part of the scheme of the ancient legislators; people killed themselves in public and made a formal ceremony of death.

The republic of Rome encouraged suicide; the famous sacrifices for the motherland were simply suicides. When Rome was taken by the Gauls, the most illustrious senators vowed themselves to death; by adopting the same attitude we shall acquire the same virtues. A soldier killed himself, during the campaign of '92, for sheer grief at not being able to follow his comrades at Jemappes. If we are constantly measured against these proud republicans, we shall soon surpass their virtues: the government makes the man. The agelong habit of despotism has sapped our courage completely; our ways have become depraved; but we are being born again; soon it will be seen what sublime actions the French genius and character are capable of when they are free; let us maintain, at the cost of our fortunes and our lives, that liberty that has already cost us so many victims, let us not regret one of them if we reach our goal: they gave themselves to it voluntarily; let us not allow that blood to have been spilt in vain; but let us unite... unite, or we will lose the fruit of all our labors; let us now try to make fine laws after the victories we have won; our first legislators, still enslaved to the despot we have laid low, have given us laws worthy of the tyrant whom they still flatter: let us refashion their work and remember that we are working for republicans now; let our laws be as mild as the people they govern.

In disclosing here, as I have done, the nullity, the indifference of an infinite number of actions that our ancestors, misled by a false religion, believed to be criminal, I am reducing our task to a very simple one. Let us make few laws, but good ones—it is not a question of multiplying restraints but of making those we do employ quite indestructible—let the laws that we promulgate have no other object than the peace and happiness of the citizen and the glory of the republic; but after expelling the enemy from your soil, Frenchmen, I hope that your ardor to propagate your ideas will not take you any further; you can take them to the ends of the earth only by fire and sword. Before carrying out such resolutions, think of the failure of the crusades. When the enemy is on the other side of the Rhine, then, believe me, you must protect your frontiers and stay at home; reorganize your commerce, put energy into manufacturing, and find markets for your goods; let your arts flourish once again; encourage agriculture, which is necessary to a government such as yours and which should provide enough for everyone without the help of anyone else; leave the thrones of Europe to crumble away by themselves; your example and prosperity will soon overthrow them without the need for you to interfere.

Unassailable in your domestic policy, and a model among nations for your police and your wise laws, there will be no government that does not strive to imitate you, none that will not be honored by alliance with you; but if, for the useless honor of spreading your principles abroad, you abandon the study of your own prosperity, then despotism will wake again from its halfsleep, internal dissensions will rend you apart, you will exhaust your finances and your soldiers, and all that only to go back to kissing the chains that will be laid on you again by tyrants during your absence; all that you want can be done without leaving your homes: let other nations see that you are happy, and they will hasten to happiness by the trail that you have blazed for them.

2

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: Well, my dear love, to reward you today for your exquisite kindness, I am handing over to your ardent attentions a young virgin, more beautiful than Venus.

THE CHEVALIER: What! With Dolmancé! You bring a woman to your place?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: It is a question of education; it's a girl I knew at the covent last autumn while my husband was at the spa. We could do nothing there, as too many eyes were on us, but we promised to meet as soon as it became possible; and wholly taken up with this desire, I made the acquaintance of her family to satisfy it. Her father is a rake... I won him. At last the beautiful girl came, and I was waiting. We spent two days together, two delightful days, and for the better part of this time I was engaged in educating this young person. Dolmancé and I placed all the wildest principles of libertinism in this head. We burned her with our fires, we fed her with our philosophy, and as I wanted to add something practical to our theorizing, I have appointed you, brother, to gather the myrtles of Cytherea, and Dolmancé the roses of Sodom. I shall have two pleasures at once, that of enjoying these criminal pleasures, and that of giving instruction, of inspiring such tastes in the agreeable innocent I have lured into our nets. Well, Chevalier, is this a plan worthy of my imagination?

THE CHEVALIER: It alone could conceive it; it is divine, sister, and I promise to fill the charming role you have allotted me most wonderfully well. Ah, you rogue! The pleasures you are going to enjoy in educating this child! What delights for you, corrupting her, stifling in that young heart every seed of virtue and religion her teachers have planted! Really, this far too roué for me.

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: It is very certain that I will spare nothing to pervert her, degrade her, and overthrow in her all the false moral principles which may have already numbed her. In two lessons I will make her as vicious as I am, as impious, and as debauched. Warn Dolmancé, tell him all the moment he arrives, so that the poison of his immoralities, circulating with mine in that young heart, will quickly uproot the seed of virtue, which might germinate without us.

THE CHEVALIER: You would never find a better man for your plan; irreligion, godlessness, inhumanity, libertinism, all flow from Dolmancé's lips, as in other times mystical unction from the lips of the famous Archbishop of Cambrai. He is the soundest seducer, the most corrupted of men, the most dangerous.... Ah, my dear friend, if your pupil but responds to her teacher, I can guarantee her lost.

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: It will certainly not be long with the gifts I know him to have.

THE CHEVALIER: But tell, dear sister, do you fear nothing from her parents? Suppose the girl talked when she returned home?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: Fear nothing, I have seduced her father.... He is mine. Must I confess? I abandoned myself to him so that he would close his eyes; he is unaware of my schemes, but he would never dare get to the core of them... I have him.

THE CHEVALIER: Your methods are horrifying!

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: That is how they must be to be infallible.

THE CHEVALIER: But tell me: who is this young person?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: She is called Eugénie; she is the daughter of one Mistival, one of the richest tax collectors of the capital, about thirty-six years old. Her mother is thirty-two at the most, and the daughter fifteen. Mistival is as rakish as his wife is religious. As for Eugénie, my friend, it would be wasted effort to try and depict her for you. She is far beyond my powers; let it be sufficient to say that neither you nor I have seen anything so delightful in this world. Her hair is chestnut... and descends to the base of her rump, her skin is dazzling white, her nose rather aquiline, her eyes ebony black and of such fire! Oh, my friend, it is impossible to hold such eyes! You cannot imagine all the follies they have driven me to.... If you saw the fine brows that crown them.... Her mouth is small, her teeth surpassing, and all so fresh! One of her beauties is the elegant way her lovely head rises from her shoulders, and the noble air she has in turning it.... Eugénie is big for her age; you would say she was seventeen. Her waist is a model of elegance and slenderness, her bosom delicious.... They are certainly the two prettiest little breasts! Scarcely enough to fill the hand, but so soft, so fresh, so white!... and if only you had seen how excited she grew in my caress... how her big eyes told me the state of her soul! My friend, I do not know what more there is. Ah, but if it is to be judged by what I do know, Olympia never knew a goddess to compare.... But I hear her.... Leave us, go out through the garden to avoid meeting her, and be punctual at the rendezvous.

THE CHEVALIER: The picture you have just painted will answer for my being precise. Oh heavens, to go, to leave you in the state I am in! Farewell! A kiss, a single kiss, my dear sister, just to satisfy me so far. (She kisses him and the young man leaves hurriedly.)

3

EUGÉNIE: One thing disturbs me, dear friend, in what you have just told me. Please explain it to me, as I do not understand it at all. Your husband, you say, does not go about enjoying himself in a way that would result in children. Please, what does he do to you?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: My husband was already an old man when I married him. On the very first night of our wedding festivities, he warned me of his eccentricities, assuring me that for his part he would never interfere with mine. I swore I would obey him, and since then we have both lived in the most delicious freedom from restraint. My husbands preference consiste à se faire sucer, et voici le très singulier épisode qu'il y joint: pendant que, courbée sur lui, mes fesses d'aplomb sur son visage, je pompe avec ardeur le foutre de ses couilles, il faut que je lui chic dans la bouchel Il avale!

EUGÉNIE: What an extraordinary taste!

DOLMANCÉ: No taste should be so qualfied, my dear. All are in Nature; it pleased her, in creating mankind, to vary their tastes as their faces, and we should no more be astonished at the variety she has put into our deeds than at the range she has placed in our affections. The caprice your friend has just spoken of is very much à la mode; countless men, principally those of a certain age, are prodigiously given to it. Would you refuse, Eugénie, if someone asked it of you?

EUGÉNIE: (blushing): If I follow the maxims instilled into me here, could I refuse such a thing? I only cry mercy for my surprise; it is the first time I have heard of such lasciviousness, and first I must form an idea of it.... But however that may be, my dear, did you gain your freedom by consenting to this kindness?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: Wholly, Eugénie. I on my side did all I wished, and he placed no obstacles in my way. But I did not take a lover; I loved pleasure too much for that. Woe to the woman who clings: one lover is enough to ruin her, while ten acts of libertinism, rehearsed every day, will vanish into the night of silence so soon as they have been consummated. I was rich; I paid young people who had me without knowing who I was; I surrounded myself with delightful valets, who were certain to taste the most exquisite pleasures with me if they were discreet, and sure to be dismissed if they breathed a word. Dear angel, you have no idea of the flood of pleasures I plunged into in this way. That is the conduct I would always prescribe to all women who would follow in my steps. In the twelve years I have been married, I have been had by perhaps ten or twelve thousand individuals... and I am thought to be judicious in my choice of company! Another woman would have had lovers; the second one would have ruined her.

EUGÉNIE: This is the most reliable of maxims, and I have made up my mind that it shall be mine. Like you, I must marry a rich man, a man, above all, of eccentricities.... But my dear, your husband, being strictly bound to his tastes, does he never demand anything else of you?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: Never once in twelve years has he gone back on his word, except when I have a period. Then a very attractive girl replaces me, and things could never be better.

EUGÉNIE: But doubtless he does not confine himself to this. Do not other things converge from outside to vary his pleasures?

DOLMANCÉ: You may be sure of that, Eugénie; madame's husband is one of the greatest rakes of his century. He spends more than a hundred thousand crowns a year on the obscenities your friend has just depicted.

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: To tell the truth, I doubt it myself; but then what are his excesses to me, since their number gives both authority and cover to mine?

4

EUGÉNIE: Tell me, my dear, who was the happy man you made master of your virginity?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: My brother. He had worshiped me from childhood, and from our youngest days, we had often amused one another without reaching the end. I promised him I would surrender myself to him as soon as I was married. I kept my word, and as my husband had fortunately done no damage, he gathered all. We continued to indulge in this intrigue, but without putting either of us to a disadvantage; we nonetheless plunged, each on his own, into the divine welter of lewdness. We even did each other services: I procured him women, he introduced me to men.

EUGÉNIE: What a delightful arrangement! But is not incest a crime?

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE: Can the sweetest liaisons Nature knows be so regarded, those she lays down for us, those she most advises! Let us reason for a moment, Eugénie: how, after the vast misfortunes our earth has undergone, could the human species reproduce itself other than by incest? Do we not find both example and proof in books honored by Christianity? The families of Adam and Noah—could they perpetuate themselves other than by this means? Search, examine the ways of the universe: you will see incest permitted everywhere, and regarded as a wise rule made to cement family ties. In a word, if love is born of affinity, where could it be more perfect than between brother and sister, between father and daughter? Mistaken politics, the product of fearing to make certain families too powerful, forbids it in our moral code; but let us not delude ourselves to such an extent that we take the law away from Nature, which would be following the dictates of self-interest or ambition; rather let us sound our hearts, to which I always refer our moral pedants; let us enquire of this sacred organ, and we will realize that there is nothing more refined than the carnal liaison of families. Let us stop blinding ourselves to the feelings of a brother for his sister, or a father for his daughter. One and the other are vainly disguised beneath the veil of legitimate fondness; the most violent love is the only feeling that kindles in them, for that is the only one Nature has put in our hearts. So let us double and triple these delightful incests and fear nothing, and believe that the closer the object of our desires, the more charms we shall enjoy in it.

Un de mes amis vit habituellement avec la fille qu'il a eue de sa propre mère; il n'y a pas huit jours qu'il dépucela un garçon de treize ans, fruit de son commerce avec cette fille; dans quelques années ce même jeune homme épousera sa mere. Such are my friend's wishes, and he has in store a fate for them similar to that of his other projects; his intentions, as I know, are to enjoy still more fruits that shall be born of this wedding; he is young and has reason to hope. You see, dearest Eugénie, with what a heap of incests and crimes this good friend of mine would defile himself if there were any truth in the prejudice that makes us see evil in these liaisons. In a word, in such matters I always have one principle as starting point: if Nature forbade sodomitic indulgences, incestuous practices, pollutions, and so on, would she allow us to find so much pleasure in them? It is impossible that she would tolerate what really outrages her.

EUGÉNIE: Oh, heavenly teachers, how well I see that according to your principles, there are very few crimes on earth, and that we can peacefully abandon ourselves to all our desires, however strange they may appear to the fools who, taking offense and alarm at all things, are stupid enough to mistake social institutions for the divine laws of Nature.

5

EUGÉNIE: Now, sir, how does your philosophy explain this kind of misdemeanor: is it not frightful?

DOLMANCÉ: Begin with this starting point, Eugénie: that in licentiousness nothing is frightful, for all that is inspired by libertinism, is equally so by Nature. The most extraordinary, the most curious acts, those that most obviously offend all the laws and all human institutions (for I cannot speak of heaven), well, Eugénie, even they are not frightful, and there is not one of them that cannot be pointed to in Nature. It is certain that the one of which you speak is the same as is found in a curious story in the tedious romance of Holy Scripture (the tiresome compilation of an ignorant Jew during the captivity of Babylon); but it is false, beyond all probability, that these towns, or rather these villages, perished by fire in punishment for these deviations. Situated on the crater of a number of former volcanoes, Sodom and Gomorrah perished like those Italian towns engulfed in the lava of Vesuvius: there is your miracle; and yet from this quite ordinary event they went on to the barbarous invention of punishment by fire for those unfortunate humans who, in parts of Europe, took to this natural fancy.

EUGÉNIE: Natural! Oh!

DOLMANCÉ: Yes, natural, I insist: Nature has not two voices, one that is daily employed in condemning what the other prompts to do.... Those who would forbid or condemn this taste claim that it is injurious to the population. What shallow fools they are whose heads are filled with this idea of population, and who see nothing but crime in all that departs from this idea! Has it then been proved that Nature has as great a need of this population as they would lead us to suppose? Is it established that each deviation from this senseless propagation is an outrage? Let us examine its progress and its laws to convince ourselves. If Nature did nothing but create, and if she never destroyed, I might believe with these dull sophists that the most noble of all acts would be to work unceasingly at what produces; and I would agree with them that, this being so, refusal to produce would necessarily be a crime; but the merest glance at Nature—does not this prove that destruction is as necessary to her scheme of things as creation, that these operations, one and the other, are so intimately bound and interlinked that it is impossible for one to take place without the other, that nothing would be born, that there would be no regeneration without destruction? Therefore destruction, like creation, is one of the laws of Nature.

Once this principle is admitted, how can I offend this Nature by refusing to create? Which, supposing this action evil, is no doubt one infinitely less so than destroying, which is nevertheless part of her laws, as I have just proved. If then, on the one hand, I admit the taste Nature gives me for this loss, and see, on the other, that it is necessary to her, and that by indulging it I only share her outlook, where then, I ask you, is the crime? But fools and populators, who are synonymous, claim that this productive sperm is not put in your guts for any other purpose than that of propagation and that to deviate from it is an offense. I have just proved that this is not so, since this waste is not even the equivalent of a destruction, which, far more important than waste, is itself no crime.

In the second place it is not true that Nature destines this spermatic liquid exclusively and entirely to reproduction; if this were so, she would prohibit its discharge under any other circumstance—a fact contrary to our experience, for we lose it where and when we will—and she would oppose such losses outside of coitus, such as do happen both in our dreams and our recollections. Miserly with so precious a liquid, she would only permit discharge in the vase of propagation; she would certainly never permit us to know that pleasure with which she crowns us when we do deviate from our homage, for it would not be reasonable to suppose that she would consent to give us pleasure at the very moment we heap insults on her. Let us go further; if women were born only to bear, which would surely be so if Nature held production so dear, would the longest female life have no more than seven years, all deductions made, in which she was in a condition to give birth to her like?... [Man] finds the same pleasure in this loss as in its useful employment, and never the least disadvantage!...

Far from outraging Nature, let us believe the contrary, that the sodomite and tribade serve Nature in stubbornly refusing a conjunction that results only in irksome offspring. Let us make no mistake: such propagation was never one of her laws, but was at the very most something tolerated.... What matter to her the extinction or destruction of mankind on earth!

Do you believe that there are not already extinct species? Buffon reckons several... and the whole race might be annihilated, and the air would be not a whit less pure, the sun less brilliant, the course of the world less true.

But what idiocy it takes to believe that our race is so useful to the world that whoever does not labor to increase it or who disturbs such increase must thereby be a criminal! Let us stop blinding ourselves on this score, and let the example of the most reasonable of peoples persuade us of our errors. There is not a corner of the earth where this supposed crime of sodomy has not had temples and votaries. The Greeks, who, so to speak, made a virtue of it, erected it a statue under the name of Venus Callipyge; Rome went looking for laws at Athens and brought back this divine taste. What progress was made under the emperors! Sheltered by Roman eagles, it ranged from one end of the earth to the other; on the destruction of the empire, it took refuge close to the papacy; it followed the arts in Italy, and came down to us as we became civilized. Whenever we discover a hemisphere, we find sodomy there. Cook drops anchor in a new world, and there it reigns. If our balloons had reached the moon, they would have found it there just the same. Delicious inclination! Child of Nature and of pleasure, you should be everywhere men are, and everywhere you are known, they will raise you altars!