Abstract

This essay reconstructs, in the social and political context of postwar Italy, the debate on the family that took place at the Constituent Assembly from October 1946 until April 1947 among all the parties represented in the first republican legislative body. The article analyzes in particular the troubled discussion on the indissolubility of marriage after the voting on article 7, approved also with the aid of communist votes, which recognized the Concordat between Church and State, and in particular the civil effects of religious marriage. The groundwork for the long, hard, parliamentary battle over divorce began with the tortured exclusion of the adjective «indissoluble» modifying the word «marriage».