Читать книгу Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; Or, War on the White Slave Trade - Various - Страница 12

The Latin writers, conspicuously Tacitus, represent the Germans, Franks and Gauls as very virtuous, and very severe in their punishment of offenders. The earliest known legislation in the northern kingdoms is in the Capitularies of Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in St. Peter's at Rome on Christmas day in the year 800. Early in his reign in his northern dominions Charlemagne enacted that all who kept houses of shame or lent their aid to vice were to be scourged. He would spare neither bad women nor vile men.

But succeeding kings of France, very many of them, were themselves models not of virtue and kingliness, but of dishonor and debauch. Many of the clergy also were very immoral, and the whole nation became corrupt.

Louis IX. made the first earnest effort to check the evil. He issued an extreme edict, in 1254, that all immoral woman and all keepers and procurers should be at once exiled from France. After a reaction Louis renewed his efforts to extirpate the iniquity, and his son Philip continued to inflict severe penalties. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries several notorious procurers were burned alive at Paris. In the sixteenth century in cities of the south of France sometimes a woman of this detestable class was thrust into an iron cage and thrown into the river. When almost dead from drowning she was drawn out, and after a little the punishment was repeated. Many of the women who were burnt as witches were really condemned because they were procuresses or otherwise odiously immoral.

The rise of Chivalry greatly increased the safety of good women and diminished immorality among men. A higher moral tone was imparted to society everywhere. Faithful preachers cried out against the traffic in shame, the snaring of young girls and the immodesty and immorality which were found in convents, and even in churches. In the reign of Louis XI., about 1475, Father Maillard, a bold preacher of the time, excoriated the whole company of traffickers in girls, especially procuresses and citizens who let their property for houses of shame. The procuresses, he said, ought to be burned at the stake, and for women who corrupted the clergy he had no mercy, but invoked the wrath of God upon them. Louis XI. was himself extremely immoral, like so many of the kings of France.

Catharine de Medicis, who became queen of France when her husband Henry II. ascended the throne in 1547, exercised a baneful influence during three reigns. Her court of two hundred ladies introduced from Italy worse vices than had before been known in France. She did, however, try to diminish prostitution in Paris.

An ordinance of 1635 condemned all men engaged in what we now call the white slave trade to the galleys for life.

Louis XV. at fifteen years of age married Maria, daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned king of Poland. The whole life of Louis was one of idle sensuality. When he was old he established a seraglio of fifteen-year-old girls, the most beautiful that could be bought or kidnapped. On this harem he spent a hundred million francs, or twenty million dollars. It was he who, when warned of the impending ruin of his nation, said "After me the deluge." He died, detested by all, in 1774.