ABSTRACT
By a process which historians of institutions have called the Secularisation enormous tracts of property in Western and Central Europe changed from ecclesiastical to capitalistic ownership in the course of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. People began to exercise greater individual control over their lives and they began to distinguish between the various activities of life which transpired in their midst. The social effects of a secularisation, that was in fact both gradual and partial, played an important and unique role in the process of modernisation. While releasing proletarian sexuality from communal and cosmic control, it allowed religion to provide the lower classes with a safe harbour until such time as they felt prepared to stand alone. Independent and pluralistic in their families and private lives, the proletariat still felt the need of security and protection that the local community had always offered and which neither state nor class could provide during the first half of the nineteenth century.
