Then, after showing the position of rich women, he continues: "And thus, slaves everywhere, slaves of want, slaves of wealth, slaves of ignorance, they can only maintain themselves great and pure by force of native nobleness and almost superhuman virtue. Can such domination endure? Evidently not. It necessarily falls before the principle of natural equity; and the moment has come to claim for women their share of rights and, above all, of duties; to demonstrate what subjection takes away from them, and what true liberty will restore to them; to show, in short, the good that they do not and the good they might do." The history of the past shows us woman more and more oppressed in proportion as we trace back the course of centuries. "The French Revolution (itself), which renewed the whole order of things in order to affranchise men, did nothing, we may say, for the affranchisement of women.... '91 respected almost all of the feminine disabilities of '88, and the Consulate confirmed them in the civil code." This, in Legouvé's opinion was the fault of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, for "woman is, according to Diderot, a courtesan; according to Montesquieu, an attractive child; according to Rousseau, an object of pleasure to man; according to Voltaire, nothing.... Condorcet and Sieyès demanded even the political emancipation of woman; but their protests were stifled by the powerful voices of the three great continuers of the eighteenth century, Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre." Under the Consulate, "feminine liberty had no more decided enemy (than Bonaparte:) a southerner, the spirituality of woman was lost on him; a warrior, he saw in the family a camp, and there required, before all else, discipline; a despot, he saw in it a state, and there required, before all else, obedience. He it was who concluded a discussion in council with these words: _There is one thing that is not French; that a woman can do as she pleases_.... Always man (in the thought of Bonaparte), always the honor of man! As to the happiness of woman, it is not a single time in question (in the civil code.)" It is in behalf of the weakness of women, it is in behalf of tradition which shows them constantly subordinate, it is in behalf of their household functions, that the adversaries of the emancipation of women oppose it. "To educate them is to deform them; and they do not want their playthings spoiled," says M. Legouvé, ironically. He then continues in a serious strain: "What matters tradition to us? What matters history to us? There is an authority more powerful than the consent of the human race: _it is the Right_. Though a thousand more centuries of servitude should be added to those which have already passed, their accord could not banish the primordial right which rules over everything, the absolute right of perfecting one's self which every being has received from the sole fact that he has been created."