ABSTRACT
Before the present revolution, divorce in France, allowed to some by their religious law, was forbidden to all by the civil law; but the civil law allowed spouses separation, examples of which, unheard of formerly, became more common in proportion as morals became weaker. This condescension of the legislator, or rather of the magistrates, who were not restrained by certain conditions necessary to prevent its abuse, had borne bitter fruit for fifty years; and legal separations, or merely de facto ones, lightly pronounced by the courts, or indiscreetly tolerated by the police, had disposed men’s minds to accept the faculty of divorce as a necessary remedy, while at the same time other principles, widespread in all classes of society, had prepared the citizens to receive popular institutions without horror, and as philosophical conceptions. But divorce and democracy, introduced after such a long experience of natural constitution of family and State, in what was, through the habit of several centuries of reason and nature, the most enlightened and indeed the strongest society in Europe, presumed a prodigious obscuring of enlightenment, an extreme weakness in souls, and were bound to produce far more unhappy effects than they had at a more distant time among far less constituted peoples. That is what happened; and without speaking here of the public disorders in laws and morals at a certain time in our revolution, which exceed anything imaginable, the number of divorces in the first three months of 1793, though only in Paris, was equal to one-third the number of marriages. Divorce is perhaps less frequent today in one locale, 106but it is more widespread, and already it is reaching the countryside. At first it was an object of horror there, soon it will no longer even be a subject of attention. One must not forget to observe that most divorces are provoked by women; which proves that they are weaker or more impassioned, not that they are more unhappy.
