Marriage and Revolution

Here’s a brief history lesson on divorce and revolution in the United States and France from Andrew Cherlin’s The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today:

“It’s true that divorce was difficult to obtain, seen as shameful, and never granted merely because the spouses wanted to end their marriage. Nevertheless, the seed of divorce was planted in the northern colonies. Connecticut had the most liberal laws of any colony or state in the 1700s, and divorce petitions appeared to increase in the aftermath of the Revolution. Even though the numbers were tiny by modern standards – perhaps fifteen to twenty divorces per year in the second half of the eighteenth century – the rise caused concern among prominent clergy and academics. The middle colonies were more restrictive, while the southern colonies that followed Anglican law did not allow divorce until after the Revolution.

No colony or state, however, went as far as the French National Assembly in 1792, three years after the start of the French Revolution. It passed a law, influenced by the individualistic spirit of the revolution, allowing divorce by mutual consent or at the request of only one spouse on the grounds of incompatibility of temperament and on specific grounds including cruelty and ill treatment and desertion for at least two years. This breathtaking statue introduced principles that would not be seen in Western divorce law for nearly two hundred years. It set off a wave of divorce and a round of opposition from conservatives, especially to the ground of incompatibility. After Napoleon seized power, the law was significantly restricted and the ground of incompatibility was dropped. (Napoleon retained other grounds and divorced Josephine in 1809.) In 1816, after the fall of Napoleon, King Louis XVIII abolished divorce altogether, returning France to the Catholic position. Over the next half century, several attempts to legalize divorce were unsuccessful. Opponents had merely to refer to the excesses of the revolutionary period to beat back divorce legislation. Only in 1884 did France finally legalize divorce.”

This book is interesting because it is more data driven and relies on a comparative perspective. In the United States, 1 out of every 20 marriages ended in divorce in the 1850s, but by 1900 it was 1 out of every 10 marriages. By 1950, it was 1 out of every 4 marriages and now it is roughly 1 out of every 2 marriages.

There’s a long term trend in divorce that long predates the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. The same is true of European and American birthrates, the spread of contraceptive knowledge, forms of birth control other than the pill, and premarital sex. The legal authority of the husband over his wife and children had also been steadily eroding since 1850. By 1900, it had become commonplace for courts to award legal custody of children to the mother over the father, which was a reversal of the traditional custom.

The French Revolution introduced many of these innovations, but was beaten back by reactionaries in later decades. This is true not only of the divorce laws under Napoleon, but also of slavery, racial equality, and black citizenship in the French Empire.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

51 Comments

  1. Lol, how about that. Divorce: Illegal. How would you like to be permanently welded at government gunpoint to some chick or vise [sic] versa for females, who turns into a total psycho 10 years down the road. More proof that government ought to be kept on a short leash and given little to no meaningful powers at all.

  2. “Lol, how about that. Divorce: Illegal. How would you like to be permanently welded at government gunpoint to some chick or vise [sic] versa for females, who turns into a total psycho 10 years down the road. More proof that government ought to be kept on a short leash and given little to no meaningful powers at all.”

    What are you babbling about? The thing that made divorce difficult among whites was the Church’s gaining control of marriage. Yes–what made divorce difficult among whites was the Christianization of Europe. If you love the freedom to divorce, thank the Yankees and other liberals, who brought marriage back within the purview of government, as opposed to priests.

  3. No one in America lives in a social context in which they can live out “traditional marriage.” By that I mean marriage in the US is now a purely voluntary civil contract between two consenting individuals – what used to be called the utopian ideal of “free marriage” – that either party can opt out of at anytime.

  4. As for my own marriage, I would say that we cling to traditionalist beliefs. We see marriage as being first and foremost a religious duty that is fundamentally about procreation rather than a disposable relationship that is about “finding your true self.” We don’t think about marriage in the way that most Americans do, but our beliefs run against the grain of American law and popular culture.

  5. John B’s priests are a bunch of faggots. Why should they have anything to say about marriage between a man and a woman?

  6. “John B’s priests are a bunch of faggots. Why should they have anything to say about marriage between a man and a woman?”

    Take Me Liberty–are you suggesting I said anything to the contrary? I didn’t offer an opinion. I just stated the historical fact.

  7. It wasn’t clear. I interpreted you as possibly prescribing that society go back to yielding authority to the fags in this sphere. The christian church devised their notion of celibacy for priests based on the feudal system. To keep dividing property would have undermined the feudalist system and promoted a middle class, which the head holy fags didn’t want. So the church simply dispatched of too many sons with the notion of celibate priests who didn’t inherit what the first born son mainly did, since they had no wives or children. I suspect many priests spirited off to monasteries had sex anyway, but they bequeathed no property to the offspring from whatever elicit coupling became their accepted outlet. This way landowning families maintained their position and wealth.

    The catholic church is founded on pure evil, greed and corruption, at least its hierarchy.

  8. John, you just can’t seem to agree to disagree. My views are not compatible with yours, Period. When marriage was properly in the spiritual/religious community institution, being arranged between families and communities (and not government) divorce was frowned upon and not illegal by definition. I’m not going to further dignify your idiotic comment with a response.

  9. I AM Catholic (traditionalist, opposed to current leadership and direction) and my statement is about government more so than marriage. I strongly disapprove of divorce, but legislating (e.g. applying government force) on who can or can not marry, or if one can even get out of a marriage is ridiculous.

  10. Several things here.

    1)From a religious standpoint, one can only arrive at the unavoidable conclusion, that demonic forces have been in play. Mainly Jews seem to be the agents of the Devil, but there are Whites aplenty as well.

    There is a somewhat inconvenient issue that has to be adressed here, and it is the reality of the Devil. He is real.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la4NyfyEYm0
    The quality is crappy, but the message is golden.

    2) The spiritual emptying out of America largely thanks to the hollywood filth (again: jews) is the most direct reason of the debauchery and spiritual rottenness we see today. See E. Michael Jones on this subject:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwhFLdSqqv0

    Religion has been retreating in the last 50 years. The effects of this are seen everywhere.

    America has to have a spiritual revival, which entails sweeping aside the mass sewage media, porn industry, and a good part of newspapers, radio- and tv-stations.

    Running away, retreating further and further doesnt work. Gay marriage and other stuff are shoved down on the States’ throats. There has to be a religious counteracting force, that unites people against the media-combine.

    The last such thing was the Catholic boycott of hollywood in the 1920’s, which enabled America to remain fairly traditional up until the 1960’s, when several factors coalesced to open the floodgates. It seems that Catholics are in general the most effective force against the forces of the evil, not just in number, but also in spiritual doctrine. That was true to pre-Vatican II times at least. The doctrine is still powerful, but there are fewer and fewer people to apply it.

    Where religion fades, it gives way to politcal correctness. And politcal corectness is wholly, totally defined by the jews. what the jews deem proper (immigration, gay marriage etc), that is “good” (->politically correct), and if you are against it, you can be rightfully bashed, ostracized, excommunicated, sometimes thrown to jail. Extreme leftism has become a religion, a false religion. in fact, It is the mockery of the Christian faith, as all of Satan’s tricks are. jewish talking heads (Dershowitz, Foxman, TV-anchors etc) are the high priests of this Satanic religion.

    This has to be stopped. It begins with the identification of the enemy. Now that we know who the enemy is, we must take action.

    the first practical step would be sending a letter to all the jew-worshipping evangelical pastors, one of Dr. David Duke’s videos:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNMFZZOOZLg
    (Reverend Ted Pike has good vids as well.)

    This would wake up hundreds of thousands, if all the pastors receceive this.
    Too bad I dont have the evangelical pastors’ email adresses. I bet someone has.
    You can do it on a local level. Send this to all the neigbourhood preachers for starters.

    Just do it.

  11. Hunter: There was a common European plant that was an effective means of birth control. By late antiquity it had disappeared because it was over harvested. Come across it abnd its use in your readings…

  12. For centuries, we legislated who can and cannot marry. Even after England broke away from the Catholic Church, we were still in the business of legislating who can and cannot marry.

    If memory serves, even Henry VIII didn’t get a divorce. His marriage was annulled by the Anglican Church which forbid divorce. In the UK, divorce required the approval of Parliament until well into the 19th century.

  13. What’s ridiculous?

    How about lesbians using artificial insemination to produce children? How about 1 out of every 2 marriages ending in divorce? How about open relationships or extreme sexual promiscuity? What about abortion, interracial marriage, and gay marriage?

    How about 40 percent of births being out of wedlock? What about recombined families where new partners are constantly coming in and out of the household like a carousel in an amusement park?

  14. They are cultural problems requiring cultural solutions. I don’t condone any of those things, but I also don’t look to government as duct tape. They are going to happen anyway.

  15. Regarding interracial marrage, I condone an all-white living space so in the future I see that one as irrelevant. They shouldn’t be here to begin with,

  16. The problem is puritanism and the alien influences on our society. The ongoing abandonment of traditional [christian] culture and morals in America, along with continued balkanization and debasement of it is promoted by our popular media AND the government itself.

    For what it’s worth the first marriage licenses were issued in the united states nearly a century after it’s formal incorporation in 1776. These licenses ironically, were granted specifically to enable black and white interracial unions.

    http://www.mercyseat.net/marriagelicense.html

  17. That’s a stretch.

    The Puritans were certainly against any number of things that are now commonplace in America: cohabitation, no fault divorce, abortion, premarital sex, interracial marriage, career women, homosexuality, bastards, children born out of wedlock, and single households to name a few.

  18. The difference between now and then is mainly due to the fact that rights based claims of “equality” and “individual liberty” are now thought to take precedence over social stability.

  19. I think you’re confusing libertarianism (small ‘L’) with liberalism or libertinism. Gentile liberalism in this country essentially derives from Puritanism, which was a self-destructive nature-hating form of Christianity. The modus operandi of liberalism (Marxism in disguise), like Puritanism then, is in fabricating an alternative touchy-feely moral universe by which they then judge themselves and others and assign social status to obtain political ends (which are then enforced by government). Did you ever notice how liberals frame their arguments in moral terms, mimicking Christianity, even though most of them are atheists or members of hijacked christian denominations?

    It’s a non-sequitur to say that individual liberty is the “cause” of said decline. It’s what you do with it that matters and “liberty” was not a problem in this country until the 1960’s when Marxists (lead/financed by Jews) completed their wholesale cultural take over. The things we are opposed to were rare prior to the 1960s, we were 95% of the population and blacks were a stable but irrelevant minority. Fortunately, since we both oppose the Feds and and support state’s rights (hopefully), if you’re interested in maintaining a slave/subject relationship with the state, you can have that in Alabama and I can stay in Tennessee.

  20. In the 19th century, individualism was constrained by both law and culture which held the interests of society to be paramount.

    That’s why Mormon polygamy was crushed in Utah, why the Comstock laws censored the mail of birth control information, why courts refused to liberalize the divorce laws, why the states passed all kinds of anti-abortion laws, why “free love” never spread beyond utopian communes like Oneida, etc

    In the 20th century, this was reversed: individual rights trumped the claims of society to maintain tradition and preserve social order. When the rights of the individual were declared paramount, abortion was legalized, birth control laws were nullified, homosexuality was mainstreamed, interracial marriage was declared a right, etc.

  21. Marxists don’t give a shit about individual rights and you’re about to find this out in spades.

    • Liberalism has invaded the family.

      How was “traditional marriage” supposed to survive after individual “freedom” and “equality” were made into sacrosanct values that take precedence over the claims of society?

      We shouldn’t expect marriage to survive when it is seen by both culture and law as a purely voluntary civil contract between two free and equal parties that can be abrogated on the whim of any rights bearing individualist.

      Who has authority in such marriages? Certainly not the husband. Who has authority over children? Not their parents. Eliminate authority, and the predictable result is anarchy and social collapse, the decoupling of sex and marriage, and the proliferation of hundreds of deviant lifestyles.

  22. “When marriage was properly in the spiritual/religious community institution, being arranged between families and communities (and not government) divorce was frowned upon and not illegal by definition.”

    Yes–wherever and whenever marriage has been merely a custom, as opposed to a legal institution, divorce, or the lack of it, has probably not been a legal institution either. And? In any polity in which marriage is a legal institution, divorce–or the lack of it–will be a legal institution, too.

    What’s your point, TJ? Marriage shouldn’t be a legal institution? That’s your proposal? In some future all-white polity, marriage will not be a legal institution? Any reason why? How about inheritance? Will that be a legal institution? Anything else you feel compelled to strike from the laws?

    “How would you like to be permanently welded at government gunpoint to some chick or vise [sic] versa for females, who turns into a total psycho 10 years down the road.”

    How would I like it? I probably wouldn’t like it at all. How would I like it if a man married to a sister of mine just took off some day and left her with young children to raise? I probably wouldn’t like that either. I’d hope the law is arranged for a fair dealing with either of those very-unpleasant eventualities.

    “My views are not compatible with yours, Period.”

    No, TJ, you don’t have a view. You’re just blathering. At some point–maybe at the very beginning of law itself–marriage became a legal institution. You haven’t provided any reason why it shouldn’t be one.

  23. Until the mid-twentieth century, liberalism steered clear of the household: a man’s home was thought to be his castle, and what went on there was not felt to be the business of anyone else, except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

  24. I should add here that society established clear parameters:

    1.) Bigamy

    2.) Interracial marriage (in the South)

    3.) Polygamy

    4.) Adultery

    5.) Extreme cruelty

    6.) Abandonment

    Those were just a few of the established boundaries.

  25. I’d hate to live in the society you envision, Hunter Wallace. It doesn’t seem to attract many southerners either.

  26. “I’d hate to live in the society you envision, Hunter Wallace. It doesn’t seem to attract many southerners either.”

    Gee–it sounds pretty good to me.

  27. Well, John B, only you and a very few seem to think so judging by the numbers who show up at events Hunter Wallace organizes and/or attends.

    HW’s contention that the Puritans didn’t believe in ‘career women’ is just one example of distorted thinking and projections onto the past. There was no concept of ‘career women’ historically. Most women who weren’t married to wealthy men worked. Before modern machinery women spent their days washing clothes and dishes and cooking and sewing etc. etc. etc. They ‘worked’ fairly constantly. It wasn’t some ‘choice.’ It was wholly determined by her class. Even during the feminist era most middle class women worked at least part time.

    Maybe it’s not just that most don’t want to live in the society HW imagines, but that his fantasy of some ideal one never wholly existed anyway.

  28. Nope, less than 6 percent of married women worked outside the home in 1900. That’s not to say they didn’t work inside the home. Even in 1950, it was only about 1/4 to 1/3 of married women who worked outside the home.

  29. Men have total authority, or most of it, in the household in sandnigger countries, HW. Do you want to go live in one? Does male tyranny somehow equate to ‘stability?’ The happiest couples I’ve known or known of have been those where both partners fully respected the other and viewed marriage as a compromise.

  30. I wasn’t defining work as ‘outside’ the home was my point. This notion of work only being outside the home was a product of industrialization.

    The 1950’s were a very brief era that afforded a broad middle class to live on one adult’s salary. It was a short lived period that did not represent some historical norm but instead, a specific economic phase.

    What was so great about the 1950’s?

  31. And what was so desirable about that, praytell?

    The way you talk, HW, doesn’t augur well for a successful marriage. But then, women who marry guys like you usually have their indirect manipulative power trips to parry your overt ones, I suppose.

    Why can’t you be happy playing out your own roles in your own marriage? Why do you have to impose your values onto everyone else? What do you care about others’ sex lives or conjugal arrangements and conditions?

    I really don’t get this need to tell other people what to do if your’e so happy with your own situation.

  32. Nope, married white women weren’t working outside the home in large numbers in 1900 or 1850 either. Black women, however, commonly worked as domestics.

  33. If our present system sucks so bad, why are all these other more happily arranged races invading ours?

  34. I’ll reiterate once again that I’m not limiting ‘work for women to ‘outside’ the home pre-industrialization. Men didn’t work outside the home that often, either, if you consider their land and property their home.

  35. Ok, I will.

    How about a short list?

    1.) In the 1950s, the following things were taboo: sexual promiscuity, free love, adultery, childlessness, single parent households, singleness in general, career women, divorce, cohabitation, gender dysphoria (treated as a mental illness), illegitimate births, interracial marriage, homosexuality, and open relationships/polyamory.

    2.) In the 1950s, the following things were illegal: interracial marriage (in the South), sodomy, polygamy, bigamy, gay marriage (the concept didn’t exist), abortion, no fault divorce.

    Sounds like a real hell on earth, amirite?

  36. How do any of #1 impact your personal life? If I’m single how am I somehow hurting you or the general welfare? Etc. etc.

    Maybe the inertia encountered by you and your League group stems from an inability to celebrate that which you love about your people, as opposed to that which you seek to repress or anathematize.

    I love my people for positive things, one of which is the grace to allow personal freedom and expression that doesn’t hurt others. I truly love them for that and always will. No sandnigger country could even conceive of such a thing as individual dignity or uniqueness.

  37. If you are saying that in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era that men and women both worked in the household or in common fields, then sure, I agree. That in no way implies that gender roles were not sharply differentiated at the time.

  38. If you are wondering why I started researching the topic, it is because of those debates at The Daily Stormer. It has nothing to do with my personal life. I was just curious to learn how and why the traditional family and marriage had become so unglued.

  39. Gender roles were a function, largely, of the work people did, which was a function of what their bodies were best at. Men worked the farm more because their upper body strength, etc., made them more efficient at it. Women did more indoor stuff because they lacked the upper body physical strength that men have.

    It wasn’t that much more complex than that. Roles based on physical work don’t apply so much in the modern era.

  40. Until the 1960s, the self expression of the individual wasn’t seen as THE priority in the eyes of the law. Throughout all of American history, the interests of society as a whole, namely the preservation of order, took precedence.

  41. In the 1950s, perpetual bachelors and spinsters were stigmatized as selfish, immoral, and immature, and they were assigned a low social status. A younger married woman could address a much older spinster as if she were an adolescent.

  42. How do you figure ‘men’s authority’ fits into ‘the interests of society’ or ‘the preservation of order?’ Again, sandnigger countries don’t have stable middle classes that maintain much of an order beyond despotism.

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