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Title: Authority Kills Love
Author: Émile Pouget
Date: 1898
Language: en
Topics: syndicalist 
Source: Retrieved on 2016-10-28 from http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/pouget/1898/authority.htm
Notes: Source: L’Almanach du Père Peinard, Paris 1898; Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

Émile Pouget

Authority Kills Love

Wherever authority shows its ugly mug it causes problems.

The family is no exception to this rule. How many parents, for wanting

to throw around their weight, have their kid’s deaths on their

conscience?

The old figure that because they’re withered, because they’ve racked up

what is called “experience,” that they’re full of wisdom and can treat

their offspring – who are approaching twenty – like they were still

sucking on a bottle.

Course, in the projects of the old the biggest place is given over to

the matter of dough – as for love that they just neglect. But for young

people it’s exactly the opposite that matters. No need to say that

they’re the ones that are right!

As soon as they learn in the house that the girl or boy is spending time

with someone who is screwing up their carefully laid plans, a life from

hell begins; Mommy brays, makes a scene, daddy storms around and flashes

his fists...it all ends in a formal order: it’s forbidden to see him or

her!

What happens then? Usually the lover doesn’t give a damn about the

familial prohibition and goes necking anyway...these ones understand

life: they love each other and prove it to each other. They’re doing the

right thing!

If later love cools off well, then they each go their own way: hello...

goodbye... They’ll still have had the good fortune of having profited by

the occasion.

Isn’t this better than selling yourself for money – in keeping with the

fashion of modern marriage?

Shit, yes! Modern marriage is filthy – especially among the rich. They

talk about cash as soon as it’s a question of coupling a male and a

female. As for the sympathies or antipathies the boy and girl feels

towards each other – who cares a rat’s ass?

From this come some pretty unions.

In order for love to be a good and beautiful thing it shouldn’t be mixed

up with anything else – and it should blow where it wills.

And this is what will be when anarchist society will have arrived. We’ll

never see another drame passionel.

Anyway, it’s not these drama that will be generated in a world without

laws, nor cops, not lawyers, since it’s already the case that judgers

have taken up the habit of not condemning – or condemning to very little

– those who commit them.

But that just shows that when the Social will arrive even these hitches

will disappear.

These dramas are of two kinds: unrequited love and jealousy.

There are Ostrogoths who go crazy because the object of their flame

doesn’t give a shit.

As if everyone wasn’t free to love whoever they wanted!

“You want me but I don’t want you. Too bad for you, but you better get

used to it.”

Things shouldn’t go any further than this, and they wouldn’t if we

practiced freedom even a little bit.

As for jealous maniacs, their case is even simpler.

Really, why does a man whose better half put horns on him get carried

away?

It’s mainly because, plunged into a society where everything is

someone’s property he considers his wife as his property. Like a utensil

belonging to him alone.

If someone lays a finger on her it that rubs against his feeling as an

owner; he grinds his teeth and sees red...

Well then, everything can be summed up by saying that some have to learn

the meaning of liberty and others have to be cleansed of the mania for

ownership. It’s not all that tough.

Then and only then will we be rid of the ridiculous scenes of murderous

lovers and tragic cuckolds.