Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (review)

Isabel Hull’s superb new book analyzes the varied crosscurrents of social thought and state legislation about sexual behavior in Central Europe during the eighteenth century, a subject, region, and period about which we know far too little. Hull guides the reader with care and wit through a complex series of state interventions and customary popular attitudes about sex. She lays bare a variety of social meanings and uses of sex at the “birth of modernity,” when absolutist states and enlightenment officials vied with an increasingly independent civil society to define society’s sexual system. Hull focuses on the changing ways that sexual behavior was judged relevant to the public good from 1700–1815. But as the reader quickly learns, this question cannot be investigated simply by tracing changes in the public discussion of sex over time. The very notion of the public itself changed radically during her period, as did the agents and instruments of regulation. From the outset, Hull rejects the social disciplinary view that would have absolutist states imposing centralizing norms on local society, preferring a more mutually dependent model of state and society when it came to matters sexual. More often than not, the central state could do little more than enforce local norms. Hull also rejects the notion that absolutist codes violated the private sphere or were harder on women than on men. In fact, she argues that absolutist interventions, when they occurred, tended to establish gender equality in treatment and punishment due to the administrative dynamic of interchangeability that underlay bureaucratic rule.

A growing gap between harsh older codes and changing judicial practice at the local level created the perceived need to reconsider sexual codes in the early eighteenth century. Cameralists, who preferred to think in terms of raising consumption and production, rather than in more traditional terms of local subsistence, theorized desire as a generally positive characteristic shared universally, regardless of Stand. For these thinkers, the challenge to the state was to channel sexual desire (nature) in the direction of marriage (culture). Marriage itself traditionally constituted a privileged estate which only those who had obtained the requisite economic means might enter. The cameralists reconceived it in universalist terms. As a result, sexual behavior, previously a subject for state regulation only, was increasingly discussed in pedagogical terms. In addition to cameralist thinking and enlightenment legal reform efforts, Hull documents a third critical transformation: the rise of an independent civil society. What Hull calls the “practitioners of civil society,” the middle-class male activists who joined eighteenth-century voluntary associations and stimulated public discussion, increasingly viewed sexual behavior in terms primarily of the individual citizen and not the public good. Laying bare the veiled sexual and gender content of the new belief in equality among the practitioners of civil society (later “citizens”), Hull shows how the sexual drive became understood and celebrated as the mark of the independent, adult male citizen, and the veritable motor of society. Marriage alone could transform this potentially destructive drive into a civilizing force (love) to benefit family and society. If in the past economic maturity had been a condition of marriage, now male sexual maturity required marriage.

Hull deftly analyzes the public discussions of the major sexual concerns in the late eighteenth century: infanticide, masturbation, and marriage. She shows how both infanticide and masturbation symbolized the potentially bad consequences of a society increasingly organized around desire and consumerism. Masturbation was thought to produce every possible ailment associated with the supposed immoderation of the decadent aristocracy, including, of course, gender confusion. Ultimately it might prevent perfectly normal people from joining in marriage. Masturbation stood as a powerful warning against confusing legitimate consumerism with sybaritic behavior. In quite a similar way, the late eighteenth-century fascination with infanticide constituted a warning about unrestrained male sexual behavior. According to popular belief, infanticide involved the seduction and later abandonment of poor country maidens by rich or noble men. Unlike earlier discussions of infanticide which placed considerable blame...