ABSTRACT
Abrupt changes in sexual attitudes and behaviour surged through Central Europe around 1800. The notion of a sexual revolution taking place in modern Western society is a fascinating one. In traditional German society parental discipline, which was normally stern and at times brutal, probably acted as a restraint to sexual indulgence. The inheritor's inclination to marry and satisfy the sexual drive was a threat to the patriarch that had to be contained. As a person matured, his or her sexual drives mired down in the family's economic designs. Through the marriage contract the family often sacrificed their nubile members in profitable deals. Not the heart but the purse determined who had intercourse with whom in pre-modern Central Europe. The secularisation of sex was an abrupt and colossal change in sexual attitudes brought on by the liberal reforms of the Napoleonic era in Central Europe, which left the rural proletariat without any effective restraints to sexual permissiveness.
