Page 163 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Catholic Confraternities, Kinship and Social Discipline

were the sisters of Joseph-Louis Bourgeois, another radical militant. Of-
ten the wives of radical activists are also found among the members of the
brotherhoods – especially in the popular Confraternity of the Rosary: the
gender divide was therefore very deep, indeed dividing couples and fami-
lies.
InLiddessimilartendenciescanbenoted:theMassard/1kingroup,from
which there came a number of activists and leaders of Young Switzerland,
had no male members in the local brotherhoods between 1830 and 1860:
only women appeared during this period. As in the Pays de Vaud, women
often made different choices than their brothers or cousins, sometimes
also different from those of their husbands and fathers (Johner 2022).
This is a very interesting observation. On the one hand, as suggested
above, political orientations as well as sexual attitudes are presented as
manifestations of specific family cultures in the context of which partic-
ular values were transmitted to children over several generations (Guzzi-
Heeb 2014, 55–101). On the other hand, for women, more liberal sexual
attitudes, or adherence to the values of a dissenting milieu, did not always
mean a break with the clergy and the Church: from this point of view, wives
and daughters seem to have built bridges between the different political
factions and diverse milieus.
One can suppose that Catholic women, through confraternities, ensured
a certain political and social discipline within their community. According
to the statutes of the brotherhoods known to us, members vowed to lead a
pious life, avoiding sin. Verifying this hypothesis for Catholic populations
is complicated, however, since the visible sexual discipline appears to be
quite different in the communities: whereas in a populous parish such as
Liddes the figures concerning illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions sug-
gest that a certain degree of control seems to have been effective until the
mid-nineteenth century, in the small parish of Bovernier the situation is
more complex. In this little spirited village, sexual indiscipline attained a
sensibly higher degree from the end of the eighteenth century. As we will
see, it is probably no coincidence that Bovernier was to become a radical
and anticlerical hotbed in the mid-nineteenth century.

Confraternities and Sexual Indiscipline
In the eighteenth century, Church representatives were faced with increas-
ing sexual and moral indiscipline in Western Valais, as in other Catholic
regions. The Bishops of Sion were quite explicit on this subject in their pas-
toral letters at the end of the century, lamenting the shamelessness of the

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