Page 154 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Sandro Guzzi-Heeb

and that it was supported in this by the Church authorities. In Valais, the
Swiss Alpine region we are going to deal with in this paper, the official posi-
tion of the Church consisted in avoiding any ‘scandals’ in local confraterni-
ties, and this did not change in the eighteenth century. In a pastoral letter
of 1802, the Bishop of Sion decreed on the subject of people exhibiting a
scandalous conduct that ‘if they are present in some confraternities, they
will be removed and excluded from these pious societies that they dishon-
our’ (aes, vol. 326, Litterae pastorales, N54: Constitutio contra impudicos,
1802).
Some parish priests tried, in fact, to implement a collective moral disci-
pline among their villagers by way of concrete measures. Jean-Maurice Clé-
ment, for example, recounted a dispute with the confraternities of Mase
over a female member he had reprimanded for her behaviour. According
to the parish priest’s diary, he expelled Marie Madeleine Torrent from the
confraternity in 1769 because of her ‘scandalous behaviour’ (de la conduite
scandaleuse de la susdite fille) which was ‘notable and very public,’ despite
protests and open resistance by her two brothers (Favre 2024). The priest
Laurent Murith took some very unpopular measures in Liddes in the 1770s
in order to control dances among young men and women and fined some
young dancers whom he accused of having broken the rules – which did
not increase his popularity in the parish (Guzzi-Heeb 2023).
Clergymen did their best to enforce the ideal of a Christian society.
But did these attempts to control the behaviour of local men and wom-
en achieve their goals? What was the reality like in the local parishes? The
debate about the implementation of social discipline is nothing new. It
was at the core of the researches of the 1980s and 1990s, inspired by the
concept of ‘confessionalization.’ For most historians of this school, begin-
ning with its spiritual fathers, Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhart, it
was clear that confessionalization had succeeded in changing the social
behaviour of Catholic and Protestant populations and had enhanced a cer-
tain degree of social discipline (Schilling 1986; Reinhardt 1981; Oestreich
1969). This view was later challenged by several historians, prominently
by Heinrich Richard Schmidt, who studied the actual conditions of life in
small communities of Central Switzerland (Schmidt 1995). Several stud-
ies on eighteenth century sexuality seemed to largely confirm Schmidt’s
thesis, according to which local communities followed the dogmas of the
Protestant church only if they were in line with the social rules and the ex-
pectations of the local populations. According to this view, local social life
was to a large extent organized and regulated by the communities them-

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