By exploring how children and their families became unprecedented
objects of governmental policy in the early decades of France's Third
Republic, Sylvia Schafer offers a fresh perspective on the
self-fashioning of a new governmental order. In the aftermath of the
Franco-Prussian War, social reformers claimed that children were
increasingly the victims of their parents' immorality. Schafer examines
how government officials codified these claims in the period between
1871 and 1914 and made the moral status of the family the focus of new
kinds of legislative, juridical, and administrative action. Although the
debate on moral danger in the family helped to articulate the young
republic's claim to moral authority in the metaphors of parenthood, the
definition of "moral endangerment" remained ambiguous. Schafer shows how
public authorities reshaped their agenda and varied their remedies as
their schemes for protecting morally endangered children broke down
under the enduring weight of this ambiguity.
Drawing on insights from feminist theory, literary studies, and the work
of Michel Foucault, Schafer reveals the cultural complexity of civil
justice and social administration in both their formal and everyday
incarnations. In demonstrating the centrality of ambivalence as a
condition of liberal government and governmental representations, she
fundamentally recasts the history of the early Third Republic and, more
widely, issues a powerful challenge to conventional views of the modern
state and its history.
Originally published in 1997.
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