"Divorce is a great misfortune, not only to the parties concerned, but to religion; notwithstanding, in the kingdom of Cæsar in which pure justice is the question, it is the lesser evil, when the individuals are determined on a separation in fact, and are lusting after other ties. They do evil clandestinely; they are the cause or the occasion of the temptation or the fall of others. Do what they will, the scandal is known; so that neither society, nor the spouses, nor the children, nor morality derive benefit from the consecration of absolute perpetuity.
"It is not charitable, it is impious to force two beings to remain together, one of which, to say the least, maltreats, detests, takes advantage of, or domineers over the other. It is equally wrong to grant them a separation from bed and board without at the same time permitting them to yield to chaste affections when they acknowledge these in purity and liberty."
So then, to the Philadelphians, expounded by M. Pecqueur, marriage is monogamous, indissoluble by intention; divorce is a sad necessity of the existing state of society, whilst separation is immorality. In short, woman is free and the equal of man.
Another communist sect, that of the Icarians, takes no notice either of the nature or the rights of women. Its chief, M. Cabet, an ex-attorney-general, was too fully imbued with the doctrines of the Civil Code, that inelegant paraphrase of the Apostle Paul, not to be persuaded that woman ought to remain outside the pale of political right, and that she ought to be subordinate to man in general, and to her husband, good or bad, in particular.
Let us do justice however to M. Cabet's disciples; I have never found a single one of them of his opinion on this great question.
One evening in 1848, as M. Cabet was presiding over a well attended club, he was requested by a woman to put the question: Is woman the equal of man before social and political rights? Almost every hand was raised in the affirmative; in the negative, not a hand was raised, not a man protested against the affirmation. A round of applause followed from the galleries filled with women; and M. Cabet was somewhat disconcerted by the result. He seemed to be ignorant that the people, always eminently logical, are never guilty of quibbling to elude or to limit the principles that they have adopted.
This vote of the Cabet club was repeated in three others, in my presence. The men in paletots laughed at the demands of brave Jeanne Deroin; the men in blouses did not even smile at them.
M. Dezamy representing another shade of communism, thus expresses himself in the code of the Community; "Away with marital dominion! Freedom of alliance! perfect equality of both sexes! Freedom of divorce!"
He adds, under the heading; Laws for the union of the sexes, designed to prevent all discord and debauchery, page 266:
"Art. I. Mutual love, inmost sympathy, purity of heart between two beings, form and legalize their union.