(60) Dusaulx, De la Passion du Jeu, 1779.
Gaming houses in Paris were first licensed in 1775, by the lieutenant of police, Sartines, who, to diminish the odium of such establishments, decreed that the profit resulting from them should be applied to the foundation of hospitals. Their number soon amounted to twelve; and women were allowed to resort to them two days in the week. Besides the licensed establishments, several illegal ones were tolerated, and especially styled enfers, or 'hells.'
Gaming having been found prolific in misfortunes and crimes, was prohibited in 1778; but it was still practised at the court and in the hotels of ambassadors, where police-officers could not enter. By degrees the public establishments resumed their wonted activity, and extended their pernicious effects. The numerous suicides and bankruptcies which they occasioned attracted the attention of the Parlement, who drew up regulations for their observance, and threatened those who violated them with the pillory and whipping. The licensed houses, as well as those recognized, however, still continued their former practices, and breaches of the regulations were merely visited with trivial punishment.
At length, the passion for play prevailing in the societies established in the Palais Royal, under the title of clubs or salons, a police ordinance was issued in 1785, prohibiting them from gaming. In 1786, fresh disorder having arisen in the unlicensed establishments, additional prohibiting measures were enforced. During the Revolution the gaming-houses were frequently prosecuted, and licenses withheld; but notwithstanding the rigour of the laws and the vigilance of the police, they still contrived to exist.
LOUIS XVI. TILL THE PRESENT TIME.—In the general corruption of morals, which rose to its height during the reign of Louis XVI., gambling kept pace with, if it did not outstrip, every other licentiousness of that dismal epoch.(61) Indeed, the universal excitement of the nation naturally tended to develope every desperate passion of our nature; and that the revolutionary troubles and agitation of the empire helped to increase the gambling propensity of the French, is evident from the magnitude of the results on record.
(61) It will be seen in the sequel that gambling was vastly increased in England by the French 'emigres' who sought refuge among us, bringing with them all their vices, unchastened by misfortune.
Fouche, the minister of police, derived an income of L128,000 a year for licensing or 'privileging' gaming houses, to which cards of address were regularly furnished.
Besides what the 'farmers' of the gaming houses paid to Fouche, they were compelled to hire and pay 120,000 persons, employed in those houses as croupiers or attendants at the gaming table, from half-a-crown to half-a-guinea a day; and all these 120,000 persons were SPIES OF FOUCHE! A very clever idea no doubt it was, thus to draw a revenue from the proceeds of a vice, and use the institution for the purposes of government; but, perhaps, as Rousseau remarks, 'it is a great error in domestic as well as civil economy to wish to combat one vice by another, or to form between them a sort of equilibrium, as if that which saps the foundations of order can ever serve to establish it.'(62) A minister of the Emperor Theodosius II., in the year 431, the virtuous Florentius, in order to teach his master that it was wrong to make the vices contribute to the State, because such a procedure authorizes them, gave to the public treasury one of his lands the revenue of which equalled the product of the annual tax levied on prostitution.(63)
(62) Nouv. Heloise, t. iv.
(63) Novel. Theodos. 18.