Communist Manifesto," the work that made Marx and Engels famous among Socialists the world over, thus answers the charge made against the Revolutionists regarding their opposition to monogamy:
"What the communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women."
Jules Guesde, a French Socialist, affirms in "Le Catéchisme Socialiste" that "the family is now only an odious form of property and must be transformed or abolished."
The French Socialist leader, Jaurés, in a parliamentary speech said that "They [i.e., married men and women] were free to make the marriage and should in the same way be free to unmake it. In fact, just as the will of one of the parties could have prevented the marriage, so the will of one should be able to end it. The power to annul should, of course, be all the stronger when both parties desire it." It need scarcely be added that free-love would in most cases begin with the voluntary dissolution of the marriage ties.
While the program of the French Socialist Party, adopted at Tours in 1902, does not explicitly advocate free-love, still it calls for "the most liberal legislation on divorce." Ernest Belfort Bax, a prominent English Socialist, in "Outlooks From a New Standpoint," affirms that "a man may justly reject the dominant sexual morality; he may condemn the monogamic marriage system which obtains today; he may claim the right of free union between men and women; he may contend he is perfectly at liberty to join himself, either temporarily or permanently with a woman; and that the mere legal form of marriage has no binding force with him." ["Outlooks From a New Standpoint," by Ernest Belfort Bax, page 114 of the 1891 edition.]