But at a time when the West European state was embarking on a much enhanced role as the spiritual and material guardian of its citizens, the distinction between church and state as arbiters of public manners and morals became rather blurred. The late forties and early fifties thus appear as a transitional age, in which conventions of social deference and claims of rank and authority still held sway, but where the modern state was beginning to displace church and even class as the arbiter of collective behavior.
