Part 2

The whip has this undeniable superiority—before its omnipotence both gentle and simple have bowed. That we have already demonstrated. Since Henry IV, there is a long list of kings and princes who have been flogged. No-one thought that strange: it was the custom of the times. It required free spirits such as Montaigne or Rabelais to protest. Most people remembered that they had been through the mill themselves and had come out little the worse: their children must go through the same. There is plenty of evidence in existence, both written and illustrated.

When evoking her memories of childhood, Madame de Maintenon relates that, when she was ten years old, she was brought up by her aunt Mme. de Villette. Little girls were not then punished for slander or lying, or even worse offences—no, the greatest crime in their governess’s eyes was to mess one’s apron or get it splashed with ink. For one thing, one was sure to be whipped, for the governess had to wash and iron the apron. Lie as much as you like, no notice was taken of that—there was nothing to wash and iron!

We must not lose sight of the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a quite different view was held of idle and intractable children than the present one. Our ideas would have seemed ridiculous to our fathers: they wouldn’t have understood them. Not that discipline was always as rigorous as it was, according to Rabelais, in the Montagu College, where the pupils were treated worse than Moorish slaves, condemned murderers, dogs even! Such excesses, however, were not allowed in other schools, and cases are reported where teachers were charged in the courts for having ill-treated their pupils; others were dismissed for punching the boys. Still, although cruelty was generally reproved, no one complained or was shocked at the use of the birch; in case of need, parents would ask the teachers not to spare their children, and these latter accepted the punishment with the resignation born of the knowledge that they were being treated as children always had been treated. They even went so far as to joke about it.

It was exceptional for them to protest in a body against a too severe punishment administered to a boy who had been unruly or had played truant. They generally accepted the punishment—even if they didn’t understand the motive.

Thus, in the little town of Die, only the pupils of the four highest classes were expected to speak Latin; but all are expressly forbidden to speak dialect; as for French, a boy would only be punished for speaking it if he were caught in the act, and after having been previously warned. And what is done at Die is done, more or less, everywhere.

There are also forbidden games, for playing which one gets it ‘on the back’ as the scholastic euphemism has it. Games which do not exercise the body are forbidden; also those played for money or other gain, such as games with cards or dice. Books, bags, belts, etc., must not be lost or sold, and no trading carried on in the school. Those who play about in the privies, or who stay longer than is necessary, are to be flogged.

Flogging was used in all educational establishments, whether at Port Royal or under the jesuits. There was, however, a Jansenist named Varet who was not afraid to write that ‘the severity recommended by Holy Writ is much better exercised and more in accordance with the spirit of God, by the refusal of a kiss or caress, rather than by the use of a rod.’ It wasn’t that he wished to spare them pain, for he adds: ‘If they have some infirmity or sickness, although in secret you spare no effort to cure them, try however to teach them to bear their pains with resignation.’

It would appear that the rigour of the pedagogical rules of the jesuits has been exaggerated. A number of stories, and some of them only stories, have contributed to establish this reputation: this one, for instance, from the _Memoirs of the Count de Bonneval_. ‘The Marquis de C..., a cavalry captain, had been stationed for a year or two in the outskirts of Strasburg. He often visited the town and had a mistress there. He abandoned her in a rather shameful way, and she resolved to be avenged and as cruelly as possible.

‘She conceived the plan of writing to the rector of the jesuits, in the name of the Marquis of Louvois. The letter stated that a certain cavalry officer would call on him, that the king desired that he should be given twenty-five lashes by the corrector of his college in the presence of three or four of most respectable monks. The letter further stated that the victim should lean on the table and cross his thumbs during the punishment, and that he should give ten louis to the corrector and thank him for the correction given. It ended by an order to the rector that he should give a detailed account of all that happened.

‘While this ridiculous letter was being read by the jesuits and they were rejoicing that they had the confidence of M. de Louvois, the captain received one by the same hand ordering him to go on Friday to the jesuit corrector, who would give him the king’s commands. He impatiently awaited the day, and went to the college at the indicated hour, 8 p.m. He was first shown into an inner room and there told the orders which concerned him. These imbecile monks, who were unable to understand that these orders, accompanied with so many ridiculous circumstances, could not possibly have come from the court, pleaded earnestly with the captain to submit. He was fool enough to believe them, and indeed prepared himself for the flogging, which was soundly administered. The treatment was accompanied with a reprimand which his young lady had dictated. He gave ten louis to the corrector and thanked him, and the jesuits promised to keep the affair secret.’

To understand better the educational methods of the jesuits, it is preferable to consult their _Ratio studiorum_, published in 1599. This _Ratio_ states that a punishment should only be given in a last extremity. ‘Let not the master be in haste to punish: let him not push his inquisition too far: let him pretend that he does not see all the faults committed, if he can do so without compromising the interests of the pupils.’

In another passage they are recommended to avoid corporal punishment as much as possible, and in any case they are not to use the rod themselves. A special corrector, attached to the establishment but not a member of the order, was detailed for flogging. The corrector was a servant, either the cook or the doorman; sometimes recourse was had to a penniless workman of the district, who was given a few coppers for fulfilling the office.

In the Toulouse province, at Rodez College for example, another plan was used. The jesuits picked out a hefty scholar and educated him gratis, on condition that he flogged his fellow-pupils when necessary. The victim was fastened to the back of a chair, and the punishment took place before the teacher and all the class. The number of strokes given was usually from seventy to eighty, never less than forty; sometimes as many as three hundred were given.

The victim was forbidden to cry out, and the flogger was ordered to pause for a few seconds between each stroke so that the pain might be greater.

During the reign of Louis XIV, public opinion pronounced in favour of corporal punishment so vigorously that elected bodies thought it not beneath their dignity to pick up the rods which had fallen from the hands of too-indulgent teachers. And yet as a general thing, there was little consideration shown for either age or condition, as the following episode related by Saint Simon of the oldest son of the Marquis de Boufflers will show.

This boy was fourteen years old, almost a young man, handsome, well-built, clever, and very promising. He was a boarder with the jesuits, along with the two sons of d’Argenson.

The fathers wished to show that they feared and favoured nobody, so they flogged the boy, though as a matter of fact they had nothing to fear from the Marquis. They were careful however not to touch the other two, for they were liable to be called to account any day by d’Argenson, lieutenant of police. Boufflers was so dismayed and oppressed that he fell sick, and died in four days. There was a universal outcry, but nothing happened.

In a society where the birch was looked on as an indispensable teaching aid, indignation was unlikely to be long-lived, and so it was freely used in town and country. We will mention one case, because it recalls the name of a famous novelist. The grandfather of Restif de la Bretonne gave his son, aged eighteen, three strokes with a whip which fetched blood through his shirt, because he had spoken several times to a girl without permission. This same son, now a father of fourteen children, flogged them with more circumspection: in case of a serious punishment he simply threatened them with the whip at first, and allowed a week to pass between the threat and the flogging, so that it should impress the child more.

This authority of the father over his children is still existent in rural districts. The Goncourts relate in their _Journal_ that an old friend of theirs, a doctor, had just married off his daughter. She quarrelled with her husband. Her father caught her up under his arm, turned up her skirts and unfastened her drawers, and soundly smacked her. Then, turning to his dumbfounded son-in-law, he calmly said: ‘There, that’ll quieten her down a bit.’

In a list of the personnel of the Mazarin College, dating from the eighteenth century, there appears this item: _Chevallier, floor-polisher and corrector_. This humble official represented an institution which had been preserved intact throughout the centuries.

‘How changed the times are!’ exclaimed Caraccioli, under Louis XVI. ‘Flogging is almost abandoned; conduct is governed more by honour than punishment, though the indecent and barbarous method of flogging is not yet entirely abolished.’

The rod was still a part of school equipment in the second half of the eighteenth century. Besnard reports that the head of the college where he studied always appeared in class armed with a flat strip of whale-bone which had a silver ferrule at each end. He would use this on the knuckles of inattentive pupils without any warning. He also kept a rod and whip handy, and freely used them.

The cry of Erasmus’s student: _Væ nostris natibus_, was heard up to and beyond the revolutionary epoch. One of the institutions which no-one thought of attacking in the years preceding the cataclysm was this one of fustigation. The Abbé Morellet states that he was flogged by the jesuits every Saturday. Voltaire had a painful memory of blows received. Marmontel, a student of philosophy, escaped a flogging only by causing the whole college to revolt. La Reveillère-Lepeaux, a day-boarder at a priest’s, attributed his deformity to the blows he was always getting on his back. Lastly, G. de Pixérécourt the dramatist, even goes so far as to say that his liability to gout was contracted in early youth by his having to kneel on the threshold of the school to receive the floggings he was always getting.

At Troyes College, a few years before the Revolution, the teacher of rhetoric wanted to cane one of his pupils; the others were indignant and cried out—a student of rhetoric, eighteen years old, to be punished like a child! One voice was raised which thundered out above all the rest. This young orator, whose first triumph this was, was no other than Danton. The student whose part he had taken was Paré; the Minister of Justice of 1792 made him Home Secretary in 1793. College friendships are useful sometimes.

There are two countries, neighbours of ours, where the rod still has a place of honour—we mean England and Germany. In America, flogging has received the development we should expect in the land of Edison. Some years ago the Chicago papers reported that the staff of the Denver Industrial School for Girls had installed an electric flogging machine. The apparatus consisted of a chair with an open seat on which the victim, suitably unclothed, was placed. The chair was high enough to allow four beaters, which were fixed under the seat, to revolve, more or less rapidly, according to the wish of the operator, who had only to press a button to set the machine in motion. The advantage of the beaters was that the action was regular and imposed no fatigue on the operator. Ingenious, but hardly likely to be used outside of America.

A correspondent relates in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, March, 1883, that he saw a young man, six feet tall, flogged at an English college. This man had bought a commission in a cavalry regiment and was to leave in a few days to join up. Having copiously feted Bacchus to celebrate the occasion, he was brought in dead-drunk, and for this breach of the rules he was condemned to be flogged. Resigned to his fate, he was given twelve strokes, and then quitted the college on the best of terms with everyone.

The head of this college, Dr. Goodford, was convinced that the whip was the best of teachers, and it was no kindness to youth to spare it. A tale is related bearing on this point which, if not very credible, is based on fact.

A pupil who had refused to be flogged had been sent down. Sometime afterward, attacked by remorse, he went from Yorkshire to Eton to undergo his punishment. Dr. Goodford had just gone to Switzerland, and the young man asked where he could find him.

He bought the regulation birch, packed it in his trunk, and set out to find his head-master. He missed him at Geneva, then at Lucerne, but at last caught him up at St. Bernard’s. There Goodford, touched by the recital of his odyssey, resolved to reward such praiseworthy perseverance. And it was in the refectory of the monastery, in presence of the monks who stood round gaping with wonder and admiration, that he flogged him soundly. That done, and with lips pursed up, he gave him a copy of Murray’s Guide as a present. Quite English, you know!

There is very little caning or flogging in the elementary schools in England, whereas in the secondary schools corporal punishment is common. It is the opposite in Germany. Children from six to fourteen may be caned or whipped. Teachers are warned not to abuse this punishment, which must be behind closed doors and in the presence of another teacher and the head-master. If the pupil is a girl, the regulation states that nothing should be done to offend modesty. Only sick and delicate children are exempted. This mixture of sentimentalism and brutality is very characteristic of prudish Germany.

EXPERIENCES OF FLAGELLATION

_A Series of Remarkable Instances of Whipping Inflicted on Both Sexes._

COMPILED BY

AN AMATEUR FLAGELLANT

EXPERIENCES OF FLAGELLATION

FLOGGING GIRLS

Discursive readers of weekly and monthly journals, and especially of those organs which are addressed to the fair sex, are aware that correspondence is among their leading features. Women’s papers are usually half made up of questions and answers. One may say of their patrons, as of the people in the days of Noah, that in these free and frank columns they buy and sell, eat and drink, marry and are given in marriage—for there barter-markets are established, whereby the gentle merchants exchange old music for ostrich feathers and the like; there cookery recipes by the score are asked for; while the love affairs avowed and consulted upon are endless. We trust that we may be permitted, for the edification of the general public, to draw upon the treasures of a remarkable interchange of opinion appearing in this way in our amiable contemporary _The Englishwoman’s Domestic Journal_. It seems that the question had arisen whether or not it was desirable or proper to flog children generally, and growing girls in particular. We are not able to state the origin of the epistolary quarrel: our attention has been arrested by the hot battle with which it closes, and from it we shall glean the amazing views which certain English parents seem to entertain respecting home discipline.

As far as we can gather, _A Perplexed Mamma_ began the controversy by asking what she should do with her unruly girls; and, upon this, _Pro-Rod, A Lover of Obedience_, and certain other enthusiasts for domestic flogging, warmly recommended the birch. At the point of the contest where we come in, this view is ardently sustained by a phalanx of terrible mammas, sternly brandishing slippers, canes, or birch twigs. _A Teacher of Troublesome Girls_ writes: ‘I should strongly recommend _A Perplexed Mamma_ to try the effect of a smart whipping, and I think if administered to the eldest it will very likely be beneficial to the younger ones. I do not think the slipper of much use as an instrument of punishment, unless for quite young children.’ _A Schoolmistress_ takes the same view of the slipper as an instrument of virtue, and advocates ‘uncovering the victim, and applying the punishment to a portion of the frame morally most sensitive.’ These connoisseurs in justice are backed by _Pater_, who appears to be both father and mother to his hapless offspring. He says: ‘Two years ago I lost my wife, having two daughters, aged twelve and fourteen years, and found them completely defying control. I consulted with their aunts on the mother’s side, and with several medical men, upon the punishment of refractory girls and women in reformatories; all agreed that whipping in the usual manner was the best mode to adopt, and that, however severely the rod was applied, no personal injury would result, nor would the health suffer. I therefore adopted this punishment, but privately in my bedroom.’

To these awful aunts on the mother’s side and this reformatory _Pater_, succeeds an unabashed _Lover of the Rod_, whose heart is sad because she has observed of late years a tendency to go to a perfect idolatry of children. This gentle creature applauds Solomon’s precept—forgetting, apparently, that Rehoboam turned out a particularly bad boy—and ‘heartily believes in the good old birch.’ She gives her advice thus: ‘On the first occasion on which the girls show signs of disobedience, order all three up to the mother’s bedroom, to wait until she comes. I would keep them all three in suspense, as not comprehending your intentions. Then I would provide myself either with a good birchrod or cane (a cane is very severe), go upstairs, shut the doors, at once tell the oldest one you are going to give her a flogging. Doubtless she will feel much astonished and very indignant; but if you are firm, and threaten to call in the servant to help you, she will submit. There must be shame as well as pain in this; but she has deserved them, in my opinion; and one such punishment, in the presence of her two sisters, will do everything.’ But rod and slipper are despised by _Another Lover of Obedience_. His method is: ‘When children commit an offence, I do not punish them at the time, but order them to my bedroom some few hours after. The effect of my discipline is such that they never fail to do so. When there they are laid across the bed, their clothes removed, and from fifteen to fifty smart strokes administered, the amount varying with the offence. After this I can assure you they are perfectly docile for some time to come. I have tried many systems, but find this to be the best. I should advise all to follow this same plan; they will find it answer remarkably well. Even at the age of eighteen, should my children require it, I will administer corporal punishment.’ After such an inventive enthusiast for obedience, who dexterously combines suspense with agony, we must hold most reasonable the plea of another fond parent, who thinks that there is nothing wrong in slapping baby ‘with a satin slipper, to let it know there is a will superior to its own.’ This would seem to be the _elegantiæ_ of the Art, the very esthetics of corporal punishment—were it not for the same mamma’s declaration that she ‘detests the moral system.’ Should the baby grow up unimproved by slipper, a resource is offered her, and those like her, by yet another _Lover of Obedience_ who writes: ‘the editor has my address, and I hope will be kind enough to give it any mother who may wish to send her daughters to me for a few months; I will return them obedient and good. I have never yet taken charge of young ladies, but would willingly do so to prove my theory correct.’

With this ogress, panting for the screams and blood of victims whom she offers to manufacture into slaves, we close our quotations on one side. We owe it to the _Englishwoman’s Journal_ and Englishwomen generally, that we should set off against these abominable letters a few of the indignant protests which happily appear on the other side. Honour to the _Lady of Title_ who hears with shame and a shock ‘the scenes that seem to go on in some houses.’ Several _English Mothers_ express their deep indignation and shame at the correspondence on the pro-rod side.

_Gentleness_ believes that such mothers and fathers ‘must have nigger blood in them,’ and ‘have learned in suffering what they teach in shame.’ _Martha_ ‘trusts that if a _Perplexed Mother_ attempts to flog her eldest daughter the tables will be turned, and she may suffer herself; then she will know whether corporal punishment is effectual or not.’ _A Christian Parent_ says very rightly: ‘As for the _English Mamma_ who has stated that she inflicts twenty strokes with a birch upon her luckless offspring, she herself, by this admission, most requires correction, and a sound scourging would be a fitting punishment for such unwomanly brutality. Patience, gentleness, and firmness are the qualities required in dealing with children and all young people; but like produces like, and in each of the above cases the violent and evil passions of the child are but inherited from the father or mother. On the parents, therefore, the chief blame should rest, and to discipline _themselves_ is my advice.’ _S. T. R._ concludes that some mothers are literally brute beasts, and does not wonder that girls arriving at womanhood escape from such dens at any cost of self-respect.

There are a few female professors of the art of domestic education who advocate a little, just a little of the stick. _Trophime_ for example would always leave the clothes on if the girl be sixteen; and _Experience_ uses the rod only as a last resort. But the overwhelming number of mothers, we are glad to say, hurl contempt and anathemas at these cold-blooded _Lovers of Obedience_ who thus hate their own flesh; and the preponderance of opinion is entirely with the moral system which the lady who beats her baby with a slipper so naturally detests.