It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of "free love" comes into the foreground', wrote Frederich Engels in 1883. 1 Indeed, the English, the French, and the Bolshevik Revolutions all took marriage out of the Church and made it a civil contract. In the French Revolution, there was controversy over Albert-Joseph Hennet's Du Divorce (1789); the French National Assembly established new institutions to deal with family disputes; provisions were made for divorce, marriage without parental consent, rights for illegitimate children, women's property rights; and marriage laws for non-Catholics were clarified. 2 In the Russian Revolution, marriage reform was radical: legislative programmes like the Bolshevik 1918 Family Code created civil marriages; provided for equal access to simple divorce; legalised abortion; and made universal provision for alimony and childcare. 3 In the English revolutionary period, the Ranters promoted ideas of sexual liberty, Milton advocated divorce, and Parliament passed Acts on Adultery and for the Registering of Marriages. 4 These revolutionaries -all anti-monarchical, many republican-focused on marriage not simply because they all did away with royal, hereditary succession. Indeed, there were issues from small to large, involving economic, ethical, political and legal relationships that were under scrutiny in those heady times of radical change. Marriage reform, and the discussions that it provoked, raised questions not simply about love and personal happiness, but also matters of prime importance to the State: issues about the nature of equality and individual liberty; the role of the State or Church (and their institutions of administration, judicature and governance) in personal comportment and affiliation; the nature of the household and of property transfer; duties of individuals to each other; citizenship rights; population increase; the meaning of care and obedience.' Marriage is, therefore, a significant legitimation strategy in revolutionary discourse. What did English republicanism contribute to this?Apparently, very little. While there has been much scholarly interest recently in the history of the family in Reformation culture, and even in the 240 Downloaded by [Bangor University] at 16:32 27 December 2014 SAINTS OR CITIZENS?gendered aspects of English republican thought, marriage within English republicanism has lacked attention. 6 It has been left to social historians, religious historians, or to scholars in the history of liberal political thought to explore marriage, whether in its actual social conditions or in its metaphors and consequences after the great changes of the Reformations. Studies on post-Reformation families
