The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Present state of the law does not sufficiently protect parents against ingratitude.

Rearing children being a considerable trouble and expense it is necessary that it should be made profitable, that it should be converted into a species of loan for a long term of years. The law can bring this about in various ways. French legislation has protected children by a provision that their fathers cannot completely disinherit them; it should also have protected fathers against children’s ingratitude. It often happens, in the country especially, that after an aged couple have reared a numerous generation they find themselves dependent upon their sons or upon their sons-in-law and are ill-fed and greeted with abuse. The law provides that children must maintain their parents, no doubt, but maintenance may be supplied in a manner which renders it little better than assassination. The law which has endeavoured to establish the moral independence of the son as against the father might well endeavour to establish on a firm basis the moral independence of the parents themselves. If a father to-day cannot disinherit his son, is it not shocking that a son should be able, in a sense, to disinherit his father—to accept life, nourishment, education from him and to give derision, abusive language, and sometimes blows in return? Observers who have lived among the people, in especial in country districts, uniformly bear witness to the deplorable situation of certain old men who are obliged to beg on the highroad, or of their neighbours, for means of support which are refused them in their own houses. The present French law is helpless in the presence of filial ingratitude which takes the form, not of overt act, but of abusive language and disrespectful conduct. It annuls a donation made to an ungrateful child, but it cannot annul the donation of life, and ungrateful children benefit by the inability. A father should be able to count at least on a certain minimum of revenue from his children, whoever they may be.[102]

The state owes parents a debt.

If, as is probable, the principle of social insurance is ultimately to prevail, and if a certain amount of the regular income of every labourer is to be retained and laid by to form a provision for his old age, which his employer or the state will increase in certain proportions, we believe that it would be equitable to increase the provision laid by for the father of a family in a larger ratio than the provision laid by for a celibate. The father of a family having done more for the state than the celibate—having contributed to the state his time and trouble and expense in rearing certain members of the new generation—it would be legitimate for the state to make a restitution to him of some small portion of the money he has laid out in a disinterested manner; in a manner which did not benefit him and has benefited the state.

Tax on celibacy.

Meanwhile this consummation is somewhat distant, and there is a reform immediately practicable: a tax on celibacy. Whenever this tax has been mentioned it has been made the subject of universal ridicule; it has been represented, as M. Ch. Richet remarked, as a sort of penalty, a fine for not being willing or not being able to marry. This is a very unfair statement of the case; the measure would be simply strict justice. With anything like an equality in the matter of fortune a celibate pays smaller taxes (indirect taxes, taxes on doors and windows, etc.); and the tax of rearing a family, by which the married man serves the state in a number of ways at once, the celibate avoids altogether. The celibate therefore is an altogether privileged person, he avoids almost everything in the way of social duties. In regard to all taxes, direct and indirect, he enjoys dispensations which are not without analogy to those formerly admitted to priests and nobles. The same thing holds good of married people who do not have children; they are, so to speak, encouraged by the law: it is a state of things which should not and cannot last.

In principle identical with certain provisions at time of Revolution.

By a tax on celibacy one would simply be reverting to the ideas of the French Revolution. The Revolution took care, by a number of laws, to favour the married man at the expense of the unmarried. Thus every celibate was ranked, for purposes of taxation, in a higher class than that to which, according to his income, he would have been placed had he been married. If he demanded assistance for some of the causes for which assistance was granted, he would be given but half the amount that a married man in his situation would have received; if he was more than thirty years old the laws obliged him to pay twenty-five per cent. additional to all ground tax; the taxable value of his property was estimated at fifty per cent. higher than it would otherwise have been. A manufacturer was obliged to declare whether he was celibate or married. The law considered every man a celibate who was thirty years old and was not married, or a widower.[103]

Parents should be taxed inversely to number of children.

Over and above the special tax on celibacy, a more equitable distribution of the tax on families might be realized. As M. Richet remarks, if the father of a family cannot be assisted by indirect taxes, the direct tax on him should at least be inversely proportional to the number of his children.[104] Not only so, but compulsory road labour—this unpopular tax, which constitutes the last vestige of the corvée—might well be suppressed entirely for the fathers of more than four or even of more than three children.[105]