Introduction
In 1941, the state of Geneva considered integrating into its public services an educational facility for delinquent teenagers, founded four years earlier by a private association, and that was running a huge deficit.1 The director of the facility was strongly opposed to the idea:
we must fight this decision because it would be the ruin of [our facility] forevermore and would drag it down into the depths of materialism. […] We will only be able to play our social role if we remain outside all officialdom which kills the Spirit and place our organization above parties, influences, and labels.2
These words were uttered at a time when the state was increasingly intervening in matters of economy and welfare in connection with the mobilization (e.g., organizing a system of loss-of-income allowances for the families of called-up troops and creating the Wahlen Plan aimed at ensuring the country’s agricultural self-sufficiency). Great Britain’s Beveridge Plan would soon be published, fuelling debates in Switzerland about the future of welfare policy and prompting the charitable sector to question its role following this extension of state action. Like the director quoted above, many actors responded defensively, claiming to be championing Christian values in the face of what they considered the public sector’s rampant materialism. However, they also sometimes took a more pugnacious stance, arguing that they had greater latitude and could therefore be more creative in how they tackled contemporary social issues.
This chapter examines these claims about the place and role of private charity in dealing with issues of welfare in the Swiss context. It does so by focusing on a specific area, namely the protection of illegitimate children. Now that equality between children has been established irrespective of their parents’ marital status, this issue has been forgotten, but for a long time it remained sensitive. Many countries began tackling it at the end of the nineteenth century, seeing this stigmatized group’s vulnerability as a justification for state intervention.3 Switzerland was no exception and the issue was debated there from the 1890s onwards, in connection with plans to unify the country’s Civil Code.4
Studying these questions in the Swiss context is particularly productive given the country’s federal structure. By focusing on the interactions between private and public actors in debates and institutional creations relating to illegitimacy, this chapter shows, first, the pivotal role played by private actors in connecting the different levels at which public policy was organized (local, cantonal, regional – reflecting the different linguistic blocks – and federal). Second, it offers an understanding of the processes that allowed policy to evolve through an interplay between private and public actors managing, disseminating, testing and negotiating systems for care provision, whilst ensuring the reproduction of the dominant system of values.
These issues are examined here over a 70-year span, starting with the preliminary discussions on the draft Civil Code, which set out a general framework that would remain in place until legal reforms in the 1970s normalized the status of children born out of wedlock. Looking closely at the actors on the ground in French-speaking Switzerland, the chapter identifies the various positions taken by private initiatives, compared to public action, and does so in five parts. In the first part, the relevant provisions of the draft Code are discussed showing how its underlying principles were received by public opinion and especially among private actors. Private initiatives in care provision are examined in the second part, showing that these fell in line with the main principles of the Civil Code even before it had been adopted. In the third part, particular attention is given to the mechanisms which were put in place in the strongly decentralized Swiss context to help spread and promote both models of action and their underlying principles, looking at the role played by the Pro Juventute association, at the intersection of state welfare and private charity. Focusing on the local level, the fourth part shows that during the interwar years, there were particularly involved interactions between networks of private actors and public services, resulting in a division of labour when it came to managing the populations in question. Far from remaining limited to applying the federal framework alone, this ecosystem created by private-public collaboration even led to new and unprecedented forms of care provision. The fifth part concentrates on one particular example: the practice of adopting illegitimate children, which was based on one of the provisions of the Civil Code, albeit diverted from its original purpose when applied to the issue of illegitimacy. The implementation of this solution gave rise, in turn, to new mechanisms for intervention and regulation, lending legitimacy to the expertise of private actors in setting national welfare policy in this area.
Illegitimate children and their mothers: the era of legal reforms
From the Ancien Régime onwards, situations of illegitimacy posed legal, economic and moral problems for state authorities. The existence of ‘bastards’ called into question the sacred institution of marriage and led to delicate situations when it came to transmitting family wealth and determining who was responsible for providing for these children.5 A multitude of regulations determined how illegitimacy was handled, resulting in extremely diverse local practices as evidenced by the Swiss case.6 Certain cantons tended to force fathers to support their illegitimate children financially by allowing paternity searches. This procedure was intended to allow mothers to demand maintenance from the supposed fathers. Other cantons, however, did not go down this path. These discrepancies led to complicated legal conflicts when the parents of the child came from regions that regulated illegitimacy differently.7 For a while, a more unified approach was established in the revolutionary era, with all the territories attached to France at that time adopting the French Civil Code (1804). This Code prohibited paternity searches and, when illegitimate children were not recognized by their fathers, rendered the mother solely responsible for providing for them.8 Most French-speaking cantons retained these provisions after the Restoration. As for the German-speaking cantons, they returned to their legal tradition that allowed for paternity proceedings. These diverse regimes for establishing filiation continued until the end of the nineteenth century.
Throughout the nineteenth century, illegitimate births – a phenomenon viewed as one variant of the social question – attracted the attention of moral and political authorities in various countries. At the very time when illegitimacy was in fact beginning to decline, its demographic and social effects became the focus of concern.9 In Switzerland, as elsewhere, a child welfare movement brought together a range of social actors, whether to ensure better legal protection for children in danger (abandoned or delinquent) or to fight against their mortality.10 In this regard, the revelation of mortality rates for children born outside of marriage caused a genuine wave of shock.11 Some doctors sounded the alarm publicly: whereas illegitimate births only made up 5% of the country’s births, the mortality rate in the first year of life was 28% for these children against 18% for their legitimate counterparts.12 What’s more, these statistics did not take into account infanticide, abortion or the abandonment of children resulting from pregnancies out of wedlock. The growing awareness of these indirect effects of illegitimacy caused important changes in social attitudes to gather pace in a number of countries: the judges and juries charged with sanctioning these crimes and offences increasingly shied away from applying the full force of the law to mothers who had either killed their children or tried to abort them, when they were persuaded that these mothers had been deceived and abandoned by the father.13 Many women’s associations analysed the situation in similar terms, protesting against the effects of the double moral standard that tolerated men’s indiscretions but repudiated their ‘victims’ (women they seduced and children they abandoned).14
Under the influence of these contestations, many countries were gripped by debates about the situation of illegitimate children.15 As discussions evolved, different proposals were produced to reduce the legal, social or health consequences of illegitimacy (e.g. regimes for establishing filiation, systems for providing support to single mothers and/or their illegitimate children, inheritance rights). These proposals were often inspired by reforms implemented in other national contexts, prompting a form of international harmonization in social responses to this issue. Thus, the reforms enacted in Sweden, Norway and Switzerland were influenced by German legislation.16 In the Swiss case, the question of illegitimate children drew the attention of the public sphere when the first unified Civil Code was being drawn up between 1896 and 1907.17 The initial draft, written by the professor of law Eugen Huber (1849–1923), contained several proposals for reforms in this regard.18 He suggested, in particular, making paternity searches mandatory for children born out of wedlock, for the whole country (they were already well established in German-speaking Switzerland but almost unheard of in the French-speaking part of the country). So as not to leave single mothers to deal with this weighty procedure on their own, the Swiss draft law provided for the mandatory declaration of all illegitimate births followed by a curatelle measure.19 The curateur appointed by the guardianship authorities had to start a paternity search within three months20: the aim was to identify the father and then attempt to exact from him either legitimacy for the child by marriage21 or legal recognition of that child and a commitment to contribute to the cost of his or her upbringing.
Civil society was favourably disposed to this new system. Throughout the debates in parliament, the measures relating to illegitimacy were reported in numerous French-language press articles and were fairly positively received, for example by those jurists who welcomed them in the name of ‘the equity [that] requires considerable improvements in the condition of natural children, the poorest of the poor’.22 The same satisfaction was expressed by women’s movements, who hailed the fact that
paternity searches were petitioned for by the state before the competent tribunal without the fille-mère23 [unwed mother] needing to apply, that is to say automatically and if necessary against her wishes.24
This provision was seen as limiting the risk of fathers avoiding their obligations by taking advantage of the mothers’ weakness. Politicians were also in agreement, including figures as conservative as the Fribourg Conseiller d’Etat (State councillor), catholic Georges Python (1856–1927), who saw it as ‘a very equitable reform’.25
All these different people conceived of this issue in the same way, reducing the situation of single mothers to that of filles-mères abandoned by the men who had seduced them. It lent further credence to the idea that the only way of supporting both mother and child was to place them under the guardianship of an authority with sufficient power to extract contributions from neglectful fathers. However, the impoverished situation of many single mothers was in fact far more varied. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, single mothers were not all young, inexperienced or naïve.26 Some lived in consensual unions [concubinage] as they were unable to marry their partner either because it was too expensive or because it was impossible (e.g. when one or other was still married and had not divorced, a procedure that was also costly). Births outside marriage were thus not necessarily the reflection of sexual exploitation; they were often testament to the numerous difficulties that could prevent a legitimate union.27 Whatever the reality of these contrasting situations, at the time, pregnancy out of wedlock continued to be analysed in terms of a stereotypical profile of female vulnerability, that is to say the young girl who had been deceived and abandoned, victim of male selfishness. The tutelle provisions laid out in the draft of the Swiss Civil Code therefore only responded to this specific situation. The system was designed to support those mothers and, by extension their children, left dealing with the financial consequences of a lack of paternal support. For the main part, then, this was a solution that shored up the gender roles i...
