ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Munich, the royal residential city of Bavaria, found itself deluged with illegitimate children. To demonstrate sexual licence is one thing; to assert that it constitutes a revolutionary change, another. Documenting sexual licence is a simple matter of tracing the simultaneous diversification of social class and sexual behaviour in rural Germany as close as possible to the moment of their inception. It is difficult to imagine that affective relationships, like those of the Zurich Highlanders, were not involved in leading these working-class people to marry. Yet the astonishingly low bastardy ratio attests to the fact that romantic love was not indiscriminate. The Sauderlander, thrifty, practical, business-minded people, took care not to become entangled in relationships that could become financially draining, such as caring for an illegitimate child. Bavaria and Westphalia prove that sexual behaviour became varied in Central Europe around 1800.
