Indeed, such freedom in choosing love is impossible in bourgeois society – the evidence presented thus far culminates in this observation. But place the whole community under social conditions similar to those enjoyed by the material and intellectual elite and you will have the opportunity for equal rights and freedom for all. In “Jacques,” George Sand depicts a husband who judges his wife’s adulterous relationship with these words: “No human being can command love; and none is guilty if he feels it, or goes without it. What degrades the woman is the lie: what constitutes her adultery is not the hour that she grants to her lover, but the night that she spends with her husband thereafter.” On account of this view of the matter, Jacques feels obliged to give way to his romantic rival, Borel, and he proceeds to philosophize: “Borel, in my place, would have quietly beaten his wife, and perhaps would not have blushed to receive her, however debased by his blows and kisses, into his bed immediately thereafter. There are men who cut the throat of an unfaithful wife without ceremony, in the fashion of the Orientals, because they consider her to be legal property. Others fight with their rival, kill him or drive him away, and afterwards seek the kisses of the woman they pretend to love, who then shrinks from them with horror or gives herself up in despair. In cases of conjugal love, this is the most common way of acting, and I say that the love of hogs is less vile and gross than that of these men.” Commenting on these passages, Brandes observes: “These truths, which are considered elemental within our educated classes, were ‘sophisms that cried to heaven’ only fifty years ago.”* To this day, however, the “propertied and cultured world” dare not openly avow the principles of George Sand, although, in point of fact, it lives by them in the main. As in morality and religion, the bourgeois class is also hypocritical in marriage.
Today, thousands of people who cannot compare with Goethe and George Sand are doing exactly what they did, without losing the least bit of social esteem. All that is needed is a respectable position, the rest comes naturally. Nevertheless, judged from the standpoint of bourgeois morality, the liberties of Goethe and George Sand are improper since they violate society’s moral laws and contradict the nature of our social state. Compulsory marriage is the normal form of marriage within bourgeois society: it is the only “moral” union of the sexes: any other sexual union is immoral. It has been proven beyond refute that bourgeois marriage is the result of bourgeois property relations. Closely related to private ownership and the right of succession, these marriages are forged to acquire “legitimate” children as heirs. Under the pressure of social conditions, marriage is even forced upon those who have nothing to bequeath. It becomes a social law, the violation of which the State punishes by imprisoning for a term of years the men or women who live in adultery and have been divorced.
* George Brandes, Die Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts [The Literature of the Nineteenth Century], 5th volume. Leipzig: Veit & Co., 1883.
print version
return to list
previous document