SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I must take issue with your casual dismissal in the entry on the British TV series “Downton Abbey” of employers exploiting their female house maids with the line “But sexual abuse of young women today is rampant among those who grow up with their mother’s boyfriends.” I don’t think the analogy holds. There is a difference between something happening occasionally as a consequence of another phenomenon and something that is institutionalized and ritualized. Let me explain. 

In his ancien regime and the revolution, Tocqueville includes an appendix (or the editor to my French edition includes them, I don’t recall) quoting from some of the Cahiers de Doléances. These were the detailed grievances of the peasantry and provincial shopkeepers against the aristocracy. One of the main complaints is that the aristocratic men routinely helped themselves to the prettiest French peasant girls, usually raping them, sometimes simply kidnapping them. This is so entrenched in French culture that by the 1970’s there were a number of soft-core porn movies centered on this theme. Even non-Marxists historians of the revolution like Francois Furet (who was my own professor at Chicago) have written that the sexual tension created by the presence of young male aristocrats in the countryside contributed to igniting the terror. 

Secondly, I lived in Mexico City for seven years as a child in the mid to late Seventies. We all had live-in maids and chauffeurs, even if we were not that rich by American standards. I can tell you unequivocally that rape through threat and humiliation was very common among the upper classes – many of whom, by the way, are entirely Caucasian in Mexico. What saved the virtue of many a Mexican girl was their relative ugliness compared to their masters. But in Brasil, where people are objectively better looking and highly sexed, I have had friends and clients explain that the most common way for boys (and I mean 14-15) to lose their virginity is to sleep with one of the maids or her daughters. This is expected of the female servants and, as far as I can tell, is not always pleasant for the boy. Different cultures you say? Not really.

Jeffrey Epstein is a vulgar NY billionaire. He recently celebrated his release from prison by giving a lavish dinner party with Prince Andrew. As the NY Post reports: “At one point, Epstein was facing 10 years to life on multiple counts of statutory rape, according to investigators. Court documents in that case claimed he routinely sought out girls as young as 14 and paid them $200 to $1,000 for sexual massages in his homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Manhattan. He also molested girls he had brought in from South America and Europe and once was given three 12-year-old girls from France as a “birthday gift,” the documents alleged.”

Those 12 year-old French girls were not from the French ruling classes, I can assure you. My point is that the relationship between female sexuality, power and money is very complicated and very dark. Women do “marry up” and openly talk of finding their “prince charming.” Being kidnapped and taken to a French castle was not only a nightmare but also a fantasy. All the spoiled rich boys alive today know this. The ancien regime made no qualms about allowing young aristocrats to have their way with peasant girls. This put the men from those social classes in a terrible situation which, in my humble opinion, had much to do with the rise of socialism at an emotional level.

The present regime is not ideal for all the reasons you document. But it has in fact given the poor a certain dignity vis-à-vis the rich. It attempts, clumsily and sometimes overbearingly, to treat each person, as Kant said, as an end in themselves. Poor girls can go on pining for the attention of a prince, but the prince cannot simply rape her if she resists. This is quantifiable progress.

Let me add that the molestation of girls by their welfare mother’s boyfriends is much worse in the U.K. and America than in continental Europe. There is some kind of pathogen or disease plaguing the English speaking nations. For whatever reasons (perhaps residual aristocratic forms, perhaps pop culture and TV), continental Europeans are much better behaved – as the very Theodore Dalrymple you quote often says. He lives in France.

Anyway, I hope I was able to explain my somewhat subtle point.

Thanks for all your work.

Laura writes:

In my response to A.N. Wilson’s criticism of “Downton Abbey,” I was not arguing that that era  was in all ways better than this one or that the demise of the grand aristocratic household was a bad thing. My point was, this TV drama was not meant as an exhaustive, historical look at that period or at the British aristocracy. If it was, the problem you describe would have to be given serious examination.

It is well that the practice of young women working as servants is much less common for the reasons you describe. It is all too easy for men in the positions of authority and higher rank to take advantage of young women when living in close quarters with them and, in the past, there were rarely serious consequences if they did. In Britain, many girls went into service at a very young age, as young as 14. Away from their families, without the protection of relatives, some of them were exploited. This was a great injustice and, as you say, it still occurs in some places.

I agree. This was not the same kind of phenomenon as the abuse girls sustain at the hands of their mother’s boyfriends. For one, there is social recognition that the latter is a serious problem whereas the abuse of servants was often totally ignored. Today’s problem is serious in a different way, complicated by the fact that a girl may be raped by a man who is involved with her mother. I assume it is hard to quantify the former practice of girls being exploited by their employers, but as you say it was common practice in some places and assumed to be – in some households – the unspoken privilege of the nobility. It is difficult to compare the two phenomena.

You write:

The ancien regime made no qualms about allowing young aristocrats to have their way with peasant girls. This put the men from those social classes in a terrible situation which, in my humble opinion, had much to do with the rise of socialism at an emotional level.

Excellent point. 

                                                 — Comments —

John P. writes:

I have two thoughts regarding Sebastian C.’s comment. First, it’s important for traditionalists to remember that traditionalism is a philosophical ideal and to be wary of pointing to any known previous era as a Utopia of Traditionalism: there never was one. In fact, I believe one of the reasons traditionalism has come under so much attack is that too many people grew weary of the many abuses of power and stupidities of the “old days” and decided there had to be something better.

Second, while the abuses that went on in France during the Ancien Regime are well documented (Marquis de Sade, anyone?) I’m not sure at all that service in the Victorian era was anywhere close to being so bad. The Victorian elites were a much more sober and upright group of people than the drunken and rakish elites of pre-revolutionary France. I don’t know for certain and it would be interesting to investigate the question but I suspect the Victorians would have been considerably more respectful in their treatment of the serving class.

Laura writes:

In Downton Abbey, the Crawleys are sympathetic employers. It is impossible to believe that all who were in that position were as conscientious but it is also impossible to believe that some were not. I don’t know how widespread the problem Sebastian discusses was in England.

I believe it is common today to object to nostalgia not because of the real abuses of our predecessors, though that is often the stated reason, but out of an abhorrence of their duties. And while it is foolish and wrong to romanticize the past it is also wrong not to recognize what was good in it. There seems to be an inability to make distinctions. A person who praises the Victorians is automatically believed to be praising the deaths of children as chimney sweeps. This sort of absolutism about the past renders discussion of it almost paralysing.

There is no such thing as utopia. There is such a thing as social decline. All those who lament decline can only look back on deeply imperfect ages, risking the charge that they approve of those imperfections.

John responds:

Quite so. This is how I would frame the past as well. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that one shouldn’t look to the past at all. And you’re right, we are living in a time of social decline. I find it difficult to understand how anyone can believe our times are better than the 1950’s even if some quality of life indicators have improved. Overall, things are worse. But oh, the howls if you say so.

Downton Abbey is an idealised image of the past as was ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ (great series) or ‘Ponderosa’ in American terms. There is much value in such idealisations and they are no more false than idealised futures, let alone the much more popular dystopian futures we usually see today.

Laura writes:

Perhaps all works of art should be reduced to statistics. Instead of fictional reenactments of the past, producers could just scroll numbers across the screen: rates of suicide, divorce, abuse, rape, deaths by war, deaths by disease, deaths by famine, etc. People could sit and watch.” “Oh, isn’t that interesting, honey. Look in 1905, 300 people were struck by lightning. That was an awful year.” Then no one could accuse the producers of favoritism toward any time period. Of course, statistics are sparse for certain ages, but there are ways of estimating.

By the way, I am not making light of Sebastian’s point, which concerned the general attitude toward that time.

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