Un divieto a metà. Le indagini di paternità nella Torino risorgimentale (1838-1865)

The 1837 Savoy Civil Code, in force until 1865, forbade the paternity suits in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Nevertheless, as elsewhere in 19th-century Europe, Turin’s ecclesiastical tribunal continued to accept the requests of single mothers and to sanction their “seducers”, mediating between the parties in view of compensation. For women, this procedure represented only an extreme remedy, in a wider panorama of actors – institutional or not (community, philanthropy, police forces, maternity hospitals) –, who considered themselves involved in the issue; each with different logics and strategies, but all united by a slow narrowing both of the notion of “honest” woman and of the implications of paternal responsibility.