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Title: The Family Does Not Exist Author: Maximilienne Date: December 1929 Language: en Topics: family, free love Source: Retrieved on 10th September 2021 from https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/the-family-does-not-exist-by-maximilienne/ Notes: Published in La Revue Anarchiste 1 (Dec. 1929) This article was kindly translated by Jesse Cohn.
“The Family,” “The French Family”…
These are so many cliché words, ready-made phrases, that serve the solid
citizens when their spirits feel the need of some good, solid prop to
lean on…
“The Family”; “The Fatherland”; “Morality”; so many beautiful mannequins
draped in their formal attire of prejudice, ignorance, stock opinions…
Today, I would like to strip a few rags off of the “Family” mannequin…
Although the idea of family has changed profoundly in modern times, the
remnants of all the hypocritical conceptions heaped upon it still give
it quite a glamorous aura.
“The Family,” it is said, “is the foundation of Society.” Perhaps that’s
so.
And perhaps it’s even because society has a poor foundation that it has
become so sick!
However, it has so far found nothing better on which to found itself.
No doubt these are the considerations of public order that have cast an
almost mystical aura around this famous institution.
But what remains of this respect when we analyze it? What can remain of
it?
For some time, curiosity led me to collect news items under the heading
of what are commonly called “family stories.”
The ugly, the painful list!
Let us revisit them…
Yesterday, there was a girl from a good family, who, faking a robbery,
stole jewelry from her mother to deliver to her lover.
The day before, the Assize Court of Cher sentenced to 5 years in prison
a person who, after raping his stepdaughter, a child of fourteen, had
forced his wife to take part in their sad antics.
At Onecourt, a drunken son seriously wounded his father with a gunshot;
at Nancy, a husband stabbed his wife to death, and near PĂ©rigueux, a
father saw his barn and crops burned down by his own offspring.
On October 19, in Montpellier, a divorcée stripped of her maternal
rights obtained permission to see her child, a little boy of nine, whom
the father had placed in a sanatorium.
Taking him for a walk, she threw him to the ground, and trampled him
savagely…
In Bordeaux, meanwhile an unfortunate deserter was tried, a man who had
disappeared so successfully that his name was listed on the monument to
the dead. The poor fellow gave as the reason for his disappearance the
terror he felt… of his wife, and and he made his case so convincingly
that the judges, moved, inflicted a paltry sentence on him.
On the same day, the Chamber of Indictments in Limousin made a dismissal
in favor of a son who, with the help of his mother, had done his father
to death.
On the 18^(th), the criminal court of Bordeaux condemned a couple of
farmers who left their children, ages five, seven, two years, and six
months, without care or food.
Also on the 18^(th), a day-laborer from Saint-Denis cracked the head of
his sleeping wife with an axe.
A day or two before the Assize Court of La Charente-Infèrieure sentenced
a milkmaid to five years in prison for drowning her child in the river –
because her husband had criticized him for having won a trial selling
adulterated milk!
A woman struck her husband with an axe; an alcoholic wounded his sick
wife with a revolver for refusing to get out of bed, then blew his own
brains out. A 19-year-old Italian threw himself under a train after
having, in the course of a squabble, severely injured his sister and
killed his brother-in-law, an excellent worker and father of three
infant children.
This was around the time of the trial of Marcel Lobjois, a poor little
orphan, who killed the brute who had married the sister who had so
tenderly raised him, and whom he adored. We recall that Lobjois was
acquitted.
The day before, parents who hid in their house the skeletal remains of a
six-month-old baby who had been starved to death were arrested in
Perpignan.
In Paris itself, a young man of twenty-seven killed himself by jumping
out of the window in despair over the death of his youngest son. He had
never been able to get his young wife to stop going out shopping in
order to take care of their two children, and he took into the void with
him the heartbreaking certainty that if the little one, who had been
ill, had died, it was because her mother had not wanted to bother to
care for him.
To top it all off, here is the story that one of our colleagues told us:
A girl of 18, having been “seduced,” had two children.
The “seducer,” moreover, wished only to provide his partner and children
with all the guarantees offered by the Civil Code: he was ready to marry
her.
However, the wedding could not take place, and the girl remained
disgraced, the bastards remained bastards…
Why?
Because the father of the poor girl stubbornly refused his consent. Now
this father, an inveterate alcoholic, was serving a prison sentence for
raping another of his daughters …
The courts had forgotten to rule on his deprivation of paternal rights
over her, or deemed it unnecessary.
In just ten days, so much blood, so many tears on the dress of this
beautiful symbolic figure, the Family!
And I have deliberately overlooked all the “crimes of passion,” all the
dramas of jealousy, all the shootings between spouses, fiancés, lovers…
What a dark mass of hatred and grief this proliferation of murders
suggests in the countless families where things have not quite risen to
the level of crime!
Households disunited; brothers made enemies; children morally or
physically tortured; parents the victims of their sons and ungrateful or
unnatural daughters; alas, haven’t these all been common currency ever
since the Greek legend of the Atreides established the frightful
prototype of the Family?
The Family! But it does not yet exist, it cannot yet exist …
Obviously, not all familial associations are like those that we see in
the police blotters, and chance, which presides over marriages as well
as births, sometimes creates charming and perfect households…
But why must this, to such a large extent, be left up to chance?
The Family, the true family, worthy of respect and envy, will only exist
when enough men and women are sufficiently advanced to make an honest
and thoughtful pact in which friendship and esteem will will share that
love, in which considerations of interest and caste will be hunted. None
will need laws then: convicts are chained to one another, but we do not
chain friends.
When a couple thus formed has – voluntarily – given birth to a child,
all the more loved for having been expected, they will form a family,
and when these couples become numerous, Society will have a chance to
take shape.
But until then, for a family, what ugly couplings, what shoddy
compromises! Let us try, at least, to destroy the hypocrisy that would
have us take them for the beautiful, noble reality. And let us find the
strength to look the meanness and wretchedness in the face today, so
that tomorrow may be more beautiful …