incomplete as the laws which
governed them; they were considered by some as a being midway between
man and the lower animals, as a malignant beast which the laws could not
too closely fetter, and which nature had destined, with so many other
things, to serve the pleasure of men; while others held woman to be an
angel in exile, a source of happiness and love, the only creature who
responded to the highest feelings of man, while her miseries were to be
recompensed by the idolatry of every heart. How could the consistency,
which was wanting in a political system, be expected in the general
manners of the nation?

And so woman became what circumstances and men made her, instead of
being what the climate and native institutions should have made
her; sold, married against her taste, in accordance with the _Patria
potestas_ of the Romans, at the same time that she fell under the
marital despotism which desired her seclusion, she found herself tempted
to take the only reprisals which were within her power. Then she became
a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased to be intently occupied in
intestine war, for the same reason that she was a virtuous woman in
the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill in this
outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and not the
poetic suggestion which they yield.

The Revolution was too entirely occupied in breaking down and building
up, had too many enemies, or followed perhaps too closely on the
deplorable times witnessed under the regency and under Louis XV, to pay
any attention to the position which women should occupy in the social
order.

The remarkable men who raised the immortal monument which our codes
present were almost all old-fashioned students of law deeply imbued with
a spirit of Roman jurisprudence; and moreover they were not the founders
of any political institutions. Sons of the Revolution, they believed, in
accordance with that movement, that the law of divorce wisely restricted
and the bond of dutiful submission were sufficient ameliorations of the
previous marriage law. When that former order of things was remembered,
the change made by the new legislation seemed immense.

At the present day the question as to which of these two principles
shall triumph rests entirely in the hands of our wise legislators. The
past has teaching which should bear fruit in the future. Have we lost
all sense of the eloquence of fact?

The principles of t