Emile Pouget (Père Peinard) 1898

Authority Kills Love

Source: L’Almanach du Père Peinard, Paris 1898;

Translated: by Mitchell Abidor for marxists.org;

CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

Wherever authority shows its ugly mug it causes problems.

The family is no exception to this rule. How many parents, for wanting to throw around their weight, have their kid’s deaths on their conscience?

The old figure that because they’re withered, because they’ve racked up what is called “experience,” that they’re full of wisdom and can treat their offspring – who are approaching twenty – like they were still sucking on a bottle.

Course, in the projects of the old the biggest place is given over to the matter of dough – as for love that they just neglect. But for young people it’s exactly the opposite that matters. No need to say that they’re the ones that are right!

As soon as they learn in the house that the girl or boy is spending time with someone who is screwing up their carefully laid plans, a life from hell begins; Mommy brays, makes a scene, daddy storms around and flashes his fists...it all ends in a formal order: it’s forbidden to see him or her!

What happens then? Usually the lover doesn’t give a damn about the familial prohibition and goes necking anyway...these ones understand life: they love each other and prove it to each other. They’re doing the right thing!

If later love cools off well, then they each go their own way: hello... goodbye... They’ll still have had the good fortune of having profited by the occasion.

Isn’t this better than selling yourself for money – in keeping with the fashion of modern marriage?

Shit, yes! Modern marriage is filthy – especially among the rich. They talk about cash as soon as it’s a question of coupling a male and a female. As for the sympathies or antipathies the boy and girl feels towards each other – who cares a rat’s ass?

From this come some pretty unions.

In order for love to be a good and beautiful thing it shouldn’t be mixed up with anything else – and it should blow where it wills.

And this is what will be when anarchist society will have arrived. We’ll never see another drame passionel.

Anyway, it’s not these drama that will be generated in a world without laws, nor cops, not lawyers, since it’s already the case that judgers have taken up the habit of not condemning – or condemning to very little – those who commit them.

But that just shows that when the Social will arrive even these hitches will disappear.

These dramas are of two kinds: unrequited love and jealousy.

There are Ostrogoths who go crazy because the object of their flame doesn’t give a shit.

As if everyone wasn’t free to love whoever they wanted!

“You want me but I don’t want you. Too bad for you, but you better get used to it.”

Things shouldn’t go any further than this, and they wouldn’t if we practiced freedom even a little bit.

As for jealous maniacs, their case is even simpler.

Really, why does a man whose better half put horns on him get carried away?

It’s mainly because, plunged into a society where everything is someone’s property he considers his wife as his property. Like a utensil belonging to him alone.

If someone lays a finger on her it that rubs against his feeling as an owner; he grinds his teeth and sees red...

Well then, everything can be summed up by saying that some have to learn the meaning of liberty and others have to be cleansed of the mania for ownership. It’s not all that tough.

Then and only then will we be rid of the ridiculous scenes of murderous lovers and tragic cuckolds.