Under this energetic title:

Let's eliminate divorce, Mr. Lepelletier, professor at the Free Faculty of Law in Paris, publishes in the Nouvelles Religieuses a remarkable study on the ravages of divorce in the field of birth rates. Here are the essential conclusions of the eminent sociologist:

It is only too obvious that divorce, if it is not very nearly the sole cause of the reduction in births, is certainly one of the aggravating circumstances of the state of things which so rightly concerns all minds concerned about the future of France... As Mr. Fernand Auburtin very rightly remarks, in his beautiful book on the Natality, "the departments with a low birth rate present cases of divorce much more frequent than those where the birth rate still persists. religious faith and relative fertility.

Those which, in 1913, had proportionally the most are the Seine, the Oise, the Eure, the Aisne and the Aube; those who counted the least were Côtes-du-Nord, Lozère, Finistère, Basses-Pyrénées, Aveyron, Morbihan and Vendée.” Furthermore, it should also be noted that it is since the legislation of 1884 came into force that the phenomenon of declining birth rates has constantly increased.

Why, if not, as Professor Cuche points out in a remarkable lesson given at the Grenoble Social Week, "because, on the one hand, for forty years contraceptive practices, increasingly entered into morals, have singularly facilitated trial marriage, and that, on the other hand, the possibility of divorce has suggested, so to speak, a new use of these practices to young spouses wishing to remove any obstacle in fact to the possible breakdown of the marital bond”

Under these conditions, we cannot be surprised to see an official body like the High Birth Council, which certainly does not obey denominational tendencies, conclude, as it did recently, that there is a need to provide far-reaching changes to existing legislation to thereby stem the increasingly threatening scourge of depopulation.

It would be excellent, in fact, if we prohibited and punished advertising relating to quick divorces, fixed price divorces, on credit, etc... that no divorce request be admissible before two years of marriage and that if a spouse divorced enters into a new union, he is prohibited from requesting a divorce before five years; that above all we reestablish the old article 298 of the civil code which prohibited the marriage of the divorced man or woman with his mistress or with his lover, when the divorce was pronounced on the grounds of adultery; that spouses who are divorced for the first time and then remarried are no longer authorized to divorce a second time, and that ultimately the spouse against whom the separation has been declared is deprived of the right to have this legal separation transformed into a divorce at the after three years.

But still, however useful and desirable they may be, these modifications cannot be enough to annihilate the power of the seeds of death sown by divorce as it is currently practiced. If we want to be logical and draw the lessons from the facts, we must go even further and resolutely conclude that it is necessary to cut the evil at its roots by removing divorce from our laws. Let no one tell us that this is an impossible reform because it infringes on the freedom of spouses.

In reality, we must understand the idea that marriage, even civil marriage, is not an ordinary contract in the dissolution of which the autonomy of the will of the parties must be respected. As Mr. Ambroise Colin, honorary professor at the Faculty of Law of Paris, very rightly said in his Elementary Course in Civil Law, "marriage is an exceptional contract in which, following Portalis' remark, Society is always party alongside the spouses", so that the legislator has the right to impose indissoluble marriage if this rule appears to him to be consistent with the interests of Society.

It is, as Mr. Paul Cuche demonstrates in a luminous argument, in the aforementioned lesson, a contract which we must use socially, without being free to abuse it, Because it is indeed a social function that a man fulfills and a woman who unites through marriage, and this social function, “from the moment they have assumed it, they have the obligation to fulfill it, even at the cost of their individual happiness”.

And didn't Mr. Durkheim himself write as early as 1906, in an article in the Revue Bleue, the following lines that supporters of divorce would do well to meditate on: "At the moment when children are born, the physiognomy of marriage completely changes appearance. The marital couple then ceases to be its own end and becomes a means towards an end which is superior to itself; This end is the family that he founded and for which he is now responsible. Each spouse has become an official of domestic society, responsible as such for ensuring its proper functioning. However, this duty , neither the husband nor the wife can no longer free themselves as they wish for the sole reason that marriage does not provide them or no longer provides them with the satisfaction they expected from it. They owe it to beings other than themselves.

This is indeed the truth that we must proclaim without tiring and striving. to make it triumph.

F. LEPELLETIER,
professor at the Catholic University of Paris.