Title: Children in moral danger and the problem of government in Third Republic France
First published: 1997
Description: 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 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.
Subjects: History, Politics and government, Family policy, Paternalism, Moral conditions, Child welfare, France, moral conditions, France, politics and government, 1870-1940
Places: France
Time periods: 19th century, 1870-1940
LC classification: HV761.A6 S33 1997