ABSTRACT
Marriage became the prophylactic against all alternative forms of sexuality; not just fornication, but masturbation and homosexuality. Changing attitudes towards sexual morality constitute a central strand in the history of modernizing societies. Historians have only recently grasped the need to give as much attention to such moral change as to economic, social, and political. An equally awkward and altogether more personal problematic is one of stance on issues of sexual morality. Maybe more in protestantism than in catholicism, and this is a theme that must be elaborated in exploring attitudes towards sexual morality in catholic France, such prohibitions become functional not simply through their frequent assertion by priests but by their internalization through the mechanisms of guilt. S. Freud brilliantly forecast the risks to civilization should the destructive forces of the super-ego or conscience overstep manageable limits and so plunge whole cultures into self-destruction.
