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The Politics of the Family in Twentieth-Century Europe

This article aims to offer a first overview of family politics in twentieth-century Europe. The term ‘family politics’ is here taken to imply not just family policies – what states do for, or to, families – but, more broadly, the relations between individuals, families, civil society and the state. Four different visions of family politics, at different moments of the century, are analysed in detail: that of the Bolsheviks in the early years of the Russian Revolution; that of the great dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco) from the 1920s to the 1940s; that of Catholicism in the central decades of the century; and finally that of democracy, from 1945 onwards. It is argued that in each of these instances there emerges a strikingly different configuration of the relations in question (individual–family–civil society–state). For many of the Bolsheviks the family itself was the target of attack, while the individual was to be subsumed into a collectivised society. For the great dictators civil society was swiftly eliminated and the family was formally exalted, but the crucial relationships became those between the authoritarian state and regimented individuals. For the Catholic Church of Pius XII the principal menace to the Christian family was seen to come from the state on the one hand and individualism on the other; the family and an integrist society were to be the principal links of his chain. Democracy alone, albeit imperfectly, has held fast to all four elements, trying in different ways in different countries to strike a balance between them.