THE MODERNIZATION OF FAMILY LAW: THE POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY OF FAMILY REFORM IN THIRD REPUBLIC FRANCE

In the period 1870-1914 France and several other Western European nations passed a variety of laws affecting the family. In addition to such famous laws as that of 1882 making primary schooling compulsory and that of 1884 legalizing divorce, the Third Republic passed laws facilitating civil marriage, freeing a wife's income from her husband's control, regulating the conditions of child labor, depriving parents of control over their children in cases of abuse or neglect, and allocating subsidies to pregnant women and large families. There were more than forty laws which affected the family in the pre-war years of the Third Republic. These laws modernized the legal structure of the French family by emphasizing the nuclear group at the expense of the extended family, by liberating wives and children from the control of the husband/father, and by increasing the involvement of the state in family life.;Although the family reforms were conditioned by urbanization and industrialization, legislators were also influenced by categories of social understanding rooted in the Restoration. It was Catholic conservatives in the aftermath of the French revolution who first elaborated the ideas that the French family was declining, that in the countryside family life was more stable, and that the home was essential to a strong family. These traditional beliefs molded the modernizing legislation of the late nineteenth century.;The modernization of family law must be placed in the context of social and economic developments that occurred during the nineteenth century. While industrialization proceeded more slowly in France than among her northern neighbors, France did have several textile, metal-working, and mining towns. The growth of cities was also a factor that influenced French society and the French family. Wage labor in factories and workshops sent fathers, mothers, and children to work long hours in mines and factories, generating the impression among political leaders that family life was declining among French workers. The migration from countryside to the cities caused overcrowding in slums, and created the idea that cities were centers of disease and crime. While French politicians of the left and right disagreed about the role religion should play in society, and about the proper form of government for France, there was a consensus that the French family was declining and needed legislative stimulation. The politics of the family laws belie the standard description that French politicians were divided into two irreconcilable blocs.