Page - 65 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

64 | Arno Haldemann www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 55–66 mance. Collective economic and material resources, including eligible men and women, were essential to the agrarian community. They had to be preserved internally and protected against threats. Rituals of consensus provided a key means by which such threats were held at bay. Charivaris were the audio-visual means for the society to communicate shared values in- and outwardly. People contravening local norms in the agrarian realm of scarce resources chose petitioning to avoid the publicity and extravagant festivities of a big event. Whether undertaken for material calculations or for the historically rela- tively recent notion of pure and unique romantic love, these deviant marriages represented a fundamental threat to the agrarian collective society. As the pe- titions illuminated, the precarious bridal couple feared becoming victims of a charivari, which raised the risk of noise, physical violence, mockery, defamation, and loss of honour. According to Luhmann, “it is common sociological knowledge that the com - munal living conditions of past social orders left little leeway for intimate rela- tionships”.38 The generalization of love as code of communication39 found its respec tive expression in the performance of intimate relationships in big events like extravagant wedding rituals. The broader diffusion of the emotional luxury of love matches was bound to capitalistic preconditions, which were a shared bourgeois wealth that came from trade, speculation, bureaucracy, science, art, or inheritance and that could provide relief from the hard, collective, and exis- tential context of agrarian labour in fields, woods, and stables. At least for Swit- zerland, the respective structural preconditions for love based individualistic marriages were not available to the masses until the end of the 19th century. Finally, an interesting detail should not be left unmentioned. In 1790, in a single breath the Bernese ancien régime renewed the obligation for the three- time publication of the banns for non-patricians and confirmed the old patri- cian exemption from publication of the banns. Right after the short republican intermezzo known as the Helvetik (1798–1803), the old patrician elites, again in power after the end of the French occupation, reinstated the obligation in the form of one of the first laws with the following words: Although as martial law required, these dispensations were only allowed in emergencies, because of the extensive and hardly observable limits they were often the cause of misrule. Hence, the orderly proclamation seems to be in- creasingly necessary now, partly because of the increasingly immorality, partly because of the many foreigners and partly, finally, because of the remaining abolition of local patrician privileges.40 38 Luhmann 1986, 15. 39 Luhmann 1986, 18–33. 40 “Auch war diese Nachlassung zufolge der Ehegerichtssatzung […] nur in Nothfällen […] erlaubt, hat aber bey den ausgedehnten schwer zu beobachtenden Schranken öftere Unordnungen veranlasst.