It rested upon a very fragile equilibrium and was destroyed, paradoxically (in a dialectical manner) by an exacerbation of the individualistic principles of the bourgeoisie itself. The bourgeois family was like a subtle balance between the individual rights and impulses of its members on the one part, and a collective family discipline on the other. But the idea of the family was held sacred (hence the opprobrium cast on divorce) in the children’s interest. By virtue of this interest, adultery was considered less grave than divorce. This is why a necessary hypocrisy camouflaged cases of adultery — an inevitable eventuality (for psycho-sexual reasons in most couples), especially in the case of men.
The social forms which have replaced the bourgeois family (the reconstituted family, the single parent pseudo-family, the return of the archaic tribal family by means of immigration, Islam, and so on) belong to a regression, a neo-primitivism, a loss of structure in the architecture of human relations. Nevertheless, might it be possible to return to this model of the bourgeois family? It is unlikely, for history cannot be rewound and replayed. The bourgeois family will still exist, but as unusual and lonely cases within an ocean of chaos.
In any case, despite all that its brilliant but ignorant detractors like André Gide[31] (‘families, I hate you!’) were able to say, the bourgeois family was a much more fulfilling social experience for the individual, all-in-all positive not only if one compares it with what came before, but also when one compares it with what followed.
Older societies understood this perfectly: the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice as well as of Tristan and Yseult teach quite simply that a couple founded exclusively on romantic attraction cannot function.
* * *
Among Europeans, conjugality (although not necessarily total sexual monogamy) is natural; it is inscribed in our genes. This is not the case with Africans, where the tribe or extended family replaces the couple. Hence the psychological weakening of single people, man or woman, and their lower life expectation. Is there not a somewhat genetic dimension when it comes to the formation of the couple and the family unit, regardless of what the dominant ideology — which propagates the model of the atomic individual in search of pleasure — may say to the contrary? Observe the impressive number of women who become depressed once they reach a certain age, after having lived a happy single life with lovers and friends who have come and gone, and who find themselves living in frightful solitude. Ageing bachelors also become depressed, obviously, but it is less serious in their case. Perhaps it is because a woman who reaches a mature age, single and without children, has an unconscious feeling that her body has been useless to her, that she has been useless.
Polyamory, Polygamy, Polyfidelity: Toward Involution
Taking up an increasingly current ideology and diagnosis in a book entitled Amours,[32] Jacques Attali[33] and Stéphanie Bonvicini[34] foresee the continuation of the decomposition of the stable, two-parent bourgeois family and an even greater explosion in the number of reconstituted families. Armed with an exceptionally smug optimism (common to the Parisian intelligentsia, which lives in a bubble, ignorant of real society and human behaviour, and prone to project onto others its own protected bliss), they attribute this evolution not to increasing chaos but to a sort of triumph of ‘love’ and the birth of a new social and sexual order. It is a fine example of the errors to which utopian, abstract intellectualism leads.
According to this forecast, which is already starting to be realised, ‘the right to love several persons simultaneously, as already happens in secret’ will be added to serial monogamy with successive partners or spouses and regular divorces and separations — and, of course, the right to have children with each one. The thesis they defend is that ‘the twenty-first century will be that of polyamory, polygamy and polyfidelity.’ There will be ‘love networks’ in which one is connected to ‘several sexual and sentimental partners’, not to mention all the bisexual possibilities. First we may note that ‘polyfidelity’ is a serious contradiction in terms, for, by definition, fidelity must be exclusive.
This new form of organisation which our authors, with a striking otherworldliness, believe both possible and desirable, will of course be progressive, supermodern and even more emancipating than the sexual revolution. They write that ‘the generalisation of the right to love will be the death sentence of monogamous marriage, whose historical triumph was doomed from the beginning.’ We are still swimming in post-‘68 fads and whimsies.
* * *
So let us imagine a man who, after two divorces, is disentangling himself from a reconstituted family. Well, after his third union with a woman, he can fall in love with one or two more (who themselves have children). And, tempted by the possibility of homosexual experimentation, he also takes a male lover. Why not?
Society will thus gradually come to resemble romantic networks, a model analogous to Facebook. (This is also the thesis of the repetitious sociologist Michel Maffesoli,[35] who is just as disconnected from social reality as Jacques Attali.) This would obviously mean the end not only of monogamy but also of any serious family unit, marking the end of any patrilineal or matrilineal inheritance. It would not at all mean a return to primitive polygamy or polyandry (for these latter were strictly organised, disciplined, and hierarchical), but rather a fall into socio-sexual chaos such as has probably never existed in any civilisation.
Unfortunately, this disquieting pattern is starting to be put into place today, especially among the Western middle classes. And would the intellectuals who pusillanimously applaud this evolution accept it for themselves and their own family? If their wife had just announced that she was ‘polyfaithful’, and had entered into a relationship with a second partner, latchkey children and all, how would they react?
In fact, the consequences of this model of multiple love would be even more dramatic for children than reconstituted families. Their education and psychological equilibrium would deteriorate further. The consequence (unforeseen by our libertarian emancipators) would be, among other things, a strengthening of State structures to substitute for decomposing (and not reconstituting) families.
This model of instability and chaotic immaturity, of socio-sexual outburst is, at the very heart of contemporary Western psychology, displaying every symptom of decadence: worship of the present, contempt for lineage, emotional immaturity, the libertarian cult of ‘as I damn well please’, lofty selfishness — the worst possible ‘romantic disorder’. A human society which was thus founded on the resolute abandonment of family inheritance for the sake of behaviour which is most closely comparable to that of insects or rodents (beyond even regression to tribalism) would not be viable for very long.
Unfortunately, this devolution is being established in several classes of society, especially with the de facto disappearance of the institution of marriage and its collapse into concubinage. The result is not happiness or fulfillment, but unhappiness and psychological chaos — a goldmine for shrinks and pharmaceutical laboratories.
But such a situation cannot last, quite simply because it is pathological; its disruption of education, the transmission of knowledge, and psychological stability is unendurable. Far from bringing people closer together, by bursting all durable social units this socio-sexual model will isolate and distance individuals from one another, making human relations ephemeral and superficial, substituting for order a field of devastation. The ‘right to love’ is asinine, for love is not a right but an affect.
A balanced monogamous society knows perfectly well how to reconcile the romantic or libidinal needs of men and women with the imperative that the couple be stable and lasting. Thanks to social hypocrisy, this is indeed much more viable than the transparent polyamory model which can only result in a multitude of micro-tragedies and, finally, in the solitude and isolation of everyone, culminating in social despair.
This is why one must expect in the course of the twenty
-first century the collapse of the libertarian model after its dominance and a forcible return (an inevitable swing of the pendulum) of the traditional disciplined (indeed, rigid) family in one form or another. ‘Sexual liberation’ and the right to love and pleasure will certainly run their course to the end, no doubt about it; they will run right into the abyss.
The last remark we must make on this point is that all the intellectuals who eagerly herald the arrival of this supposedly happy and even paradisiacal model of broken families, reconstituted families, multiple fidelity, and so on belong to the dishonest utopian species. For whether one is speaking of Jacques Attali or Michel Maffesoli, they do not for a moment believe in the model they preach. They do not live their daily lives according to what they espouse, but submit to the charms of the bourgeois family. It is a classic trait of French intellectuals not to practice one’s own ideas, because one knows that, clever as they are, they are impractical. The farting of scribes.
Spoiled Child, Sick Child
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
— English proverb
Children’s health and hygiene has greatly improved since the mid-twentieth century, but new pathologies have been appearing that sometimes find their root in the loss of family structure; children are taking longer to begin walking and speaking, they are developing sleep and eating disorders (including obesity), they are losing their emotional balance (they are becoming tyrannical, for one), their level of cultural and intellectual development is decreasing, they suffer from behavioural pathologies, and so on.
Until recently, children were often unwanted; they were a by-product — sometimes inopportune — of their parents’ sexual conduct. Since the introduction of contraception among the middle classes, the child is desired and thus tends to be considered a consumer product, a living toy.[36] The parents then feel overwhelmed with responsibility and treat the child as a little prince, refusing to exercise any serious discipline upon it. When children were not necessarily desired, they were not the object of any adulation but were submitted to rigorous training, which was obviously better for their development.
Today, infantolatry[37] reigns supreme, which is the fault not only of parents but of all public institutions (public education, the legal system, and so forth). According to this way of thinking, children (and often even minors) cannot be punished (or, in some cases, only to a very limited extent) and must not be subject to significant restraints; all their caprices must be respected. The central dogma is that their education cannot be authoritarian: the anti-spanking syndrome. This prejudice extends all the way to adolescence, or further still, with what is called the ‘youth cult’. The adolescent becomes a little god to whom everything is due and all is forgiven. As such, we are faced with the massive problem of spoilt children — in both senses of the word spoilt (over-rewarded and corrupted) — and the English proverb cited as epigraph is marvelously appropriate. Children and adolescents are thought to essentially possess all good qualities, and even the smallest degree of discipline would amount to bullying; the slap or the spank equivalent to torture.
The child is sacralised and no longer subject to parental or institutional hierarchy; on the contrary: he becomes the little boss, the little tyrant. His parents are reduced to wanting to be loved by him, a catastrophic inversion of roles. They employ strategies to seduce him when, normally, it is the child who should make efforts to please his parents, his family, and the social hierarchy in order to raise himself in their estimation.
* * *
But this abdication of all authority, this abnegation and giving way to the child (or adolescent) has the perverse and dreadful effect of abasing and weakening him (that is to say, the child). Without discipline, punishments and rewards, and the ethic of obedience, he is left to his own devices and his development (emotional, ethical, and intellectual) is compromised. Whole generations have been sacrificed by this benevolent but perverse utopian infantolotry. The consequences of doing so include various psychopathologies, drug addiction, increased suicide, cultural degeneration, a loss of direction, and a difficult adulthood. For we always forget, in this society of the eternal present, of carpe diem, that time passes and that children are adults and even old men in posse.
To this we may add another cause, one not very grave among the elites and the affluent but one which is devastating for the middle and working classes: the ruination of the linear family and rise of the single parent and of reconstituted families. The end of parenthood, the weakening of the paternal side, the division of children between two parents (not necessarily married and constantly in conflict), the disappearance of the traditional bonds between cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents — all this contributes to disturbing and unravelling the spirit of the child and adolescent at precisely the time when his brain is in the process of formation and he needs clear points of reference from role models.
Add to this the collapse of discipline at school and of the authoritarian model of education (thanks to the calamitous progressive dogmas inherited from Rousseauism) and what you get is the present situation: a population of spoilt but anxious children, on the whole less happy than their elders were at their age, beset by existential troubles, disorientated in life since they are bereft of norms, deracinated, their average cultural and linguistic level significantly in decline, obsessed with consumption (the maternal principle), incapable of self-discipline, disturbed in their development and sexual behaviour. In short, a neo-primitivist youth for which the twenty-first century will certainly not be a cakewalk.
All of this because of humanist (or pseudo-humanist) ideologies, and all those good intentions with which the road to hell is paved, with love as the centerpiece of this museum of horrors.
* * *
‘I play with my baby and my baby is my plaything.’
One cause of the declining birthrate among indigenous Europeans is the transformation in the status of the child. In societies with high birth rates, which renew and increase themselves across the generations, the child was not considered an object of adoration but another link in the family line, a future worker and insurance for his parents’ old age. This is still the case in Muslim families living in Europe as colonisers.
Alas, among Europeans the child is no longer considered a natural, biological continuation of the family lineage, but a plaything, almost a doll, a pet. Hence the rise in adoptions (even in cases where the wife is fertile, and often indeed to avoid the trouble of a pregnancy) usually of children from far away, toy children from the third world. Any consideration for biological lineage has entirely disappeared. Once they become adults, these children are ungrateful toward their adoptive parents. But adopting African or Asiatic children gives one a good conscience, like a badge of humanitarianism and anti-racism.
Dr Marcel Rufo, director of a child psychiatry clinic in Marseille, speaks of adopted children as ‘puppy children’.[38] Among the consumerist middle classes, the number of children to be had is calculated (and generally does not exceed two) based on desire and individual comfort but not at all with any strategy for prolonging and reinforcing the family. Parents want a living toy that they can smother with ‘love’ and upon which they impose the lowest possible amount of discipline. This fake parental love is the worst egoism.
People now say ‘I want a baby’ and not ‘I want a son’. They want the little human they can pamper, without stopping to think that it will become a man or woman. They no longer have a child so that it can become a son or daughter, an adult who will be a new pillar of and link in the family; they have a baby for its own sake, purely in order to pamper it.
In fertile societies where values are transmitted down the lineage, all adulation of the infant and prepubescent child is avoided and the child considered as an unfinished being that has yet to be educated. In declining societies, the child is something rare and idolised. It is no longer the ‘son of’ or ‘d
aughter of’, but a beloved little animal who can come, in cases of adoption or mixed-race unions, from any part of the world.
[1] The ontological concept of ‘becoming’ traces back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who stipulated that the world is in a perpetual flux, with the only constant being change and eternal becoming. –Ed.
[2] 63,881 in 2004 and 91,850 in 2005 out of a total of over 150,000 divorces.
[3] Le Figaro, 25 September 2007.
[4] Many of Molière’s comedies, most notably L’école des femmes, deal with the question of the arranged marriage versus the marriage of love or inclination, with Molière championing the latter and the woman’s freedom to choose a husband. The ‘marriage of inclination’ took off among the urban bourgeoisie in France during the seventeenth century. It reached its equilibrium point and extension to all orders of society in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, reconciling the durable couple, the maintenance of the family lineage, affection between spouses, and discreet management of sexual irregularities. Come the 1960s, this equilibrium was broken: divorces rose and this family model declined and then collapsed in the 1980s.
[5] In internal family deliberation — though not in the eyes of the law — adultery was only considered as such if the husband had a regular mistress (a second wife in short), not if he indulged in ephemeral liaisons or consorted with ‘ladies’ who received remuneration. On the other hand, a passing liaison or consorting with gigolos was not pardoned in the case of wives. But divorces were extremely rare, firstly in order to avoid the scandal of family breakup, secondly in consideration of the children, and finally because most women were not financially autonomous (even if they held the purse strings within the household, i.e., the expenses; for payments generally depended only upon the husband).
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