Immorality and the Law

In many respects France and Germany present a remarkable contrast in their respective methods of dealing with immorality. The contrast has only existed since the sweeping legal reforms which followed the Revolution in France. In old France the laws against sexual and religious offences were extremely severe, involving in some cases death at the stake, and even during the eighteenth century this extreme penalty of the law was sometimes carried out. The police were active, their methods of investigation elaborate and thorough, yet the rigour of the law and the energy of the police signally failed to suppress irreligion and immorality in eighteenth-century France. The Revolution, by popularizing the opinions of the more enlightened men of the time, and by giving to the popular voice an authority it had never possessed before, remoulded the antiquated ecclesiastical laws in accordance with the ideas of the average modern man. In 1791 nearly all the ancient laws against immorality, which had proved so ineffectual, were flung away, and when in 1810 Napoleon established the great penal code which bears his name, he was careful to limit to a minimum the moral offences of which the law was empowered to take