La scelta del coniuge : Torino 1782-1865

From 1782 to 1865, in Turin, a judicial instrument, originally conceived for the purpose of reinforcing paternal authority over offspring, was transformed, by the French experi-ence and especially after 1848, into a legal device to obtain the opposite: to force, that is, the recalcitrant fathers to accept, willingly or unwillingly, the affective choices of a genera-tion influenced by romanticism and no longer willing to submit to the logic of arranged marriages. [Publisher's text]