ABSTRACT
The opening decades of the nineteenth century, according to many historians, constituted a critical transition period as far as the function and role of the Western European family was concerned. Edward Shorter, for example, in attempting to compress the transformation of the family and family relations within the framework of modernisation theory, has argued that the beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed the end of ‘traditional society’.1 This view has been accepted by other historians. This period coincided with the end of a formerly static village society and was characterised, even in rural Bavaria, by ‘an immense dynamic of social, economic and cultural change’.2 The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of ‘partial’ but nevertheless significant change in the daily life of rural society.3 Indeed superficial evidence of radical social change prior to any industrial take-off in Germany is relatively easy to find. The dramatic rise in illegitimacy rates, particularly in many areas of South Germany, has been taken as signifying the onset of a sexual revolution which was ultimately to transform sexual attitudes and family roles in general.4 The breakdown of traditional social standards and the trend to ‘anomie’5 was widespread and constituted a severe threat to the existing social order. In the torrent of sexual permissiveness in Central Europe after 1800, business and inheritance considerations which had previously been paramount in regulating family affairs, were ‘soon dissolved’.6 Even before the onset of industrialisation, secularisation and agrarian reform had fostered the ‘breakdown of authority in traditional rural society’.7 But if the extension of the capitalist mode of production to German agriculture had undermined traditional values in rural society, the process of social change was reinforced by the increasing manipulative power of the State over most aspects of peasant life. As a result of the interplay of these factors rural society was characterised by a ‘changed self-awareness and heightened self-consciousness’,8 although the increasing apathy, fear and deviance evident in the early nineteenth
century eventually culminated in a collective reorientation to the conditions of a modernising society.9 The belief in the essential unity of the medieval world picture, which had still been evident in the late eighteenth century, was now finally shattered.10
