O Vénus ! ô mere de l’Amour ! ............................................................................
Dès le premier beau jour que ton astre ramène,
Les zéphirs font sentir leur amoureuse haleine ;
La terre orne son sein de brillantes couleurs,
Et l’air est parfumé du doux esprit (…)
The father’s natural obligation to feed his children brought about the institution of marriage, which designates who must fulfill that obligation. The peoples of whom Pomponius Mela speaks determined it only by resemblance.
Among organized polities, the father is the man whom the laws, through (…)
It is reason that dictates that when there is a marriage, the children follow the father’s station ; and when there is none, they can only concern the mother. [1]
It is accepted almost everywhere that the wife passes into the husband’s family. The reverse is established without any disadvantage in Formosa, where the husband goes to form the wife’s family.
This law that fixes the family in a succession of persons of the same sex contributes greatly, (…)
Sometimes the laws and the religion have instituted several kinds of civil conjunctions, and that is the case among the Mohammedans, where there are various orders of wives, whose children are recognized by being born in the home, or by civil contracts, or even by the mother’s slavery and (…)
In republics, where it is essential that morals be pure, bastards must be more stigmatized than in monarchies.
The provisions made against them in Rome were perhaps too harsh. But with the ancient institutions making it mandatory for all citizens to marry, marriages being moreover tempered by (…)
The consent of fathers is based on their authority, in other words on their right of property ; it is further based on their love, their reason, and on the uncertainty of their children’s reason, whom age keeps in a state of ignorance, and passions in a state of euphoria.
In small republics, (…)
In England, young women often abuse the law to marry as they wish without consulting their parents. This custom could perhaps be better tolerated there than elsewhere, for the reason that, monastic celibacy not having been instituted there by law, the only condition young women can assume is (…)
Young women who are led only through marriage to pleasures and freedom, who have a mind that dares not think, a heart that dares not feel, eyes that dare not see, ears that dare not hear, who appear only to prove themselves dull, condemned without interruption to trifles and precepts, are rather (…)
Wherever there is a place where two persons can live comfortably, a marriage takes place. Nature provides enough motivation when she is not countered by the difficulty of subsistence.
Rising peoples multiply and grow quickly. For them it would be a great constraint to live in celibacy ; it is (…)
Montesquieu
Unité Mixte de Recherche 5317, CNRS