Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France
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Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France
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Overview
Gager bases her work on documents ranging from previously unexplored notarized contracts of adoption to court cases, theological treatises, and literary texts. She examines two main patterns of adoption: those privately arranged between households and those of destitute children from the Parisian foundling hospice and the Hôtel-Dieu. Gager argues that although customary law rejected adoption and promoted an exclusively biological model of the family, there existed an alternative domestic culture based on a variety of "fictive" ties. Gager connects her arguments to current debates about adoption and the nature of the family in Europe and the United States.
Originally published in 1996.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691630489 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #336 |
| Pages: | 212 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Blood Ties and Fictive Ties
Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France
By Kristin Elizabeth Gager
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1996 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-02984-9
CHAPTER 1
The Many Families of Early Modern Paris
Before proceeding to explore the role of adoption practices in shaping the nature of family life, we must first address the various meanings assigned to the term "the family" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. A standard definition of the family from the modern period, offered by the Grand Laromse of 1878, characterizes it as "the assemblage of persons living under the same roof who are united by blood—especially the father, the mother and the children." In the earlier centuries, however, research has shown that the family was understood in a twofold sense, referring both to the household community (composed of kin and non-kin), as well as to extended kin networks. Jean-Louis Flandrin explains that "in former times, the word 'family' ... referred to a set of kinsfolk who did not live together, while it also designated an assemblage of co-residents who were not necessarily linked by ties of blood and marriage." On the one hand, then, the construction of the family derived from co-residence encompassing all of the individuals, both kin and non-kin such as servants and apprentices, living in a single household. The primary definition of the family found in dictionaries of the ancien régime, in fact, characterized it as a locus of co-residence. Thus the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française of 1694 defines the family as "all of the persons who live in the same house, under the same head." By these terms, the family group included not only parents and their birth children, but additionally servants and others living in the same household. In early modern France the family was also understood to represent the extended lineage, including those individuals bound by marriage as well as those descended from a common biological ancestor. Hence the secondary definition of the family found in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie speaks of "all those who descend from one and the same stock and who are, consequently, of the same blood." The image of the genealogical family tree (arbor consanguinitatis) was the most popular way of representing the extended lineage in the early modern period.
Histories of the family have proposed that beginning in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the idea as well as the structure of the family slowly evolved into a more privatized and streamlined domestic unit, which excluded individuals such as servants from the ranks of family members, while at the same time pruning the branches of the family tree, thereby weakening ties with the extended kin. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this process of domestic streamlining culminated in an understanding of the family offered at the outset by the Grand Larousse, whereby blood ties and co-residence have collapsed in upon each other to produce a domestic group based exclusively on bonds of blood and marriage. In order to contextualize these changes in the domestic sphere, historians have looked in part to the effects of the process of state building in early modern France. Whereas in the Middle Ages, powerful noble families came close to ruling the provinces of France as minikingdoms, by the end of the sixteenth century the French Crown had succeeded in imposing a degree of central royal control. The state benefited from the waning of large, lineage-based family factions and, accordingly, encouraged the streamlined, tightly controlled domestic group. In political treatises of the day, the authority of the French monarch was coupled with calls for fathers to fashion themselves as domestic monarchs, ruling wives and children with an iron hand. The sixteenth-century jurist and political theorist Jean Bodin, for one, referred to families as "seminaries" of the state, envisioning a "natural" link between the familial and political realms. As one of the first theorists of absolute monarchy, Bodin argued that, to construct a sound and strong republic, it was necessary to "return to the fathers the power of life and death, a law that God and Nature gave to them."
Lawrence Stone and others have emphasized changes in the religious sphere as key to understanding modifications of the family group in England in this period. Stone suggests that Puritanism succeeded in displacing competing forms of socialization (such as confraternities, parish solidarities, and festivals), in the process creating a new, sentimental, and inward-looking domestic group. The Puritans' stress on individual access to biblical texts, moreover, positioned the household as the center of the individual's spiritual life and the father as its "domestic priest." Jean-Louis Flandrin, among others, points not so much to the Protestants as to the Catholic Counter-Reformation as the primary initiator of changes within the familial sphere in France. Flandrin's examination of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century confession manuals, reveals an ever increasing interest on the part of the church in domestic affairs. Much like the Protestants, the Counter-Reformation church privileged the family as a locus of religious indoctrination. The Milanese archbishop Charles Borromeo, for example, proposed that fathers of families convene monthly with parish curés to collaborate on the proper running of the domestic sphere.
Alongside the political and religious changes affecting the domestic realm, Natalie Zemon Davis has stressed the role that families themselves played in shaping historical developments. While external institutions, such as church and state, had an undeniable stake in fostering the development of particular domestic configurations, families had their own reasons for acting in certain ways. Davis sees as characteristic of most families above the level of the indigent a heightened sense of "family planning" for future generations:
What we see here, however, is historical change flowing from the decisions of myriad small groups, some rich and powerful, but many of only middling affluence in provincial towns and smaller rural centers. Their push toward planning, toward manipulation of property and persons for private goals, and their blending of beliefs in virtue with beliefs in stock were assisted by the growth of the state and of commercial capitalism and the professions, but were also in defiance of some of the forces of their time, both demographic and social.
Davis cites two overriding factors guiding the trend toward a more concentrated and focused family planning in this period. The waning influence of collateral kin in certain matters of inheritance allowed the family more freedom in deciding the fate of the patrimony. Second, changes in the urban economy resulted in a greater overall mobility among the population and in expanded possibilities regarding such critical family matters as career paths and marriage for the children. Davis proposes that one result of this new emphasis on family planning was a redrawing of boundaries around the immediate domestic group of parents and children. This privatization of the domestic group grew hand in hand with a renewed emphasis on notions of familial "stock," or, we might say, on the lineage now restricted to the nuclear core. Manifested in the growing popularity of family journals (livres de raison), which harbored each family's story and fostered its sense of uniqueness, as well as by the appearance in literary and legal texts of a new accent on the physical resemblance of parents and children, notions of family "stock" brought biology to the fore in the domestic realm, causing a redrawing of its boundaries.
What role, if any, were adoptive ties assigned in the shifting definitions of "the family"? When we consider the history of the family from the perspective of official dictionaries and law codes, it becomes clear that beginning in the sixteenth century "Active" family ties, such as those forged through adoption, were steadily excluded from definitions of the family. In other words, as the notion of the family became increasingly based on the dual criteria of blood and marriage, the adopted child—tied to the family through a legal fiction rather than through biological ties—threatened to violate the sanctioned ordering of the domestic sphere.
Histories of the family have, for the most part, interpreted the rejection of adoptive ties from official definitions of the family as correlating with the actual demise of adoption practices. The historian Marcel Garaud suggests that "the institution of adoption, seldom practiced though still in force in the both customary and written law regions of France in the fourteenth century, declined rapidly and finally disappeared in all areas in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries." The legal historian P. C. Timbal, in his comparative study of Roman and French law, attributes the disappearance of adoption in sixteenth-century France to "the triumph of a familial structure which had always only begrudgingly accepted the intrusion of foreign elements." Along similar lines, in his study of medieval adoptions in the Roman law region of Provence, the legal historian René Aubenas attributes the waning of adoptions in southern France beginning in the sixteenth century to "the individualist spirit engendered by the era of the Renaissance and Reformation." Aubenas concludes that, after the mid-sixteenth century, "we no longer find any trace of the communitarian practices that had been so common in the Middle Ages."
THE TALE OF YOUNG JACQUES
An exploration of the contours of daily household life in early modern Paris reveals that even in a cultural context where blood and marriage represented the cornerstones of the domestic sphere, family life continued, particularly for the laboring and artisan sectors of society, to be shaped by myriad "Active" ties of affiliation. An intriguing court case involving an adopted child from 1654 serves as an introduction to popular attitudes regarding blood ties and Active ties. This compelling case of abandonment and adoption is described by a lawyer involved in the case as a story of "a mother, to whom they want to give a child who is not hers; a father, from whom they want to take away a child who is his, and a child whose true identity is suspended between the artifice of lies and the truth of his birth." Although the story did not unfold in Paris, but in the town of Vernon, the case was frequently cited and discussed by Parisian jurists, who used it to develop arguments in support of adoption or to muster material underscoring its inadequacies. The tale centers on a young boy named Jacques who was abandoned in infancy by his mother at the Hôtel-Dieu in Vernon and subsequently "adopted" by an itinerant beggar named Monrousseau. Years later, this same Monrousseau and Jacques passed through the town of Vernon, seeking alms. The judges of Vernon, sparked by statements of villagers who took the young boy to be the son of a local widow named Jeanne Vacherot, initiated an inquiry into the child's identity. Monrousseau was charged with the crime of abduction and was placed in prison to await the court's decision. A lawyer was appointed to plead the case of each individual involved, and witnesses from Vernon, who had known the young boy in his infancy, were called to testify. The inquiry was complicated by the fact that Vacherot denied that Jacques was her son, while Monrousseau claimed not to have abducted the boy from his natal mother, as the royal prosecutor claimed, but to have adopted him from the hospice where his mother had abandoned him in his infancy. Jacques, then only eight years old, appeared as confused as everyone else about his familial status.
In an attempt to resolve the question of Jacques's parentage, the judicial pleadings draw on both ancient and contemporary discussions of the relative merits of biological and Active family ties. The central issue in this case turned around whether Monrousseau and Jacques constituted a family, given that they held no biological ties to one another. The royal prosecutor pleading the case for the lieutenant general of Vernon argued that adoptive ties possessed no legal validity, claiming instead that only blood ties could create a family. In his pleading the prosecutor accredits lineal blood with supernatural powers, possessing the ability to unite (or, in this case, divide) individuals according to membership in the same biological family group. According to the prosecutor, the fact that Monrousseau was in jail, and thus separated from Jacques, reflected the illegitimacy of the bond that linked them:
St. John Chrysostom remarks that the love based on blood resembles a fire, which always separates bodies of different sorts and brings together those who are of the same substance. If, Messieurs, Jean Monrousseau and this child were of the same blood line, love would have brought them together; they must be of different bloodlines because they are now separated.
The prosecutor contends, then, that familial love could only emanate from ties of blood.
The lawyer for Jeanne Vacherot, de Montauban, also held blood capable of determining true lines of filiation. Vacherot's disavowal of the boy must be taken as truth, he concludes, as a mother would be compelled "by nature" to recognize her son if the same blood ran through their veins:
My party does not recognize these marks (of Nature); she remains silent as the mother of Ulysses. If this were her child, she surely would have spoken as the common blood running through their veins would have compelled her to recognize him as her son.
Popular tales indicate that the belief in the mystical powers of lineal blood had strong roots in early modern French culture. Studies of late medieval narratives have shown that in cases of loss or abandonment, even if a child spends considerable time in the care of others, in most instances the ties of blood ultimately triumph, almost supernaturally reuniting separated kin. The tale of Tristan, reprinted often in sixteenth-century France, depicts Tristan and King Mark as drawn to each other immediately upon Tristan's arrival at court; only later does it emerge that Tristan is Mark's nephew. Similarly, Barbara Estrin has shown that in Renaissance English foundling tales, even when abandoned children undergo a positive "adoptive interlude" with foster parents, they are almost always reunited with their natal kin in the end.
The Vernon case reveals, however, that even in a culture that placed biology as the cornerstone of the family, the kinship categories of "parent" and "child" could also be defined by the criteria of nurturing and mutual affection. In this regard the lawyer for Monrousseau, Du Fourcroy, situated "nurture" above "nature" in determining lines of filiation:
The jurists are of this inclination, when speaking about the ownership of a plant, not to consider who planted it, but instead to consider to whom the ground belongs on which it was nourished and preserved.... in the end, between all the causes of filiation, there has never been a stronger argument to justify filiation than that which derives from education, nurturing, and preservation.... this is exactly why nurturing forms a second birth.
Pleading for his client, Du Fourcroy employs the criterion of nurturing (a process that he terms a "second birth") to substantiate Monrousseau's claim to be Jacques's father; although Monrousseau was not Jacques's biological father, his claim to be Jacques's father was valid as it was he, and not the natal parents, who nourished and raised Jacques from infancy. Du Fourcroy offers as additional proof of the bonds linking the two the fact that when the young Jacques was asked whether he preferred to stay with Monrousseau, he answered that "he very well should do so, considering that he was his father and that he did not wish to renounce his father."
Du Fourcroy did not stand alone in emphasizing the merits of "Active" ties in early modern France. For the essayist Michel de Montaigne, friendship competed with ties of blood, often superseding them in endurance and sincerity. In his essay, "On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children," Montaigne appears characteristically skeptical about the existence of a natural basis for affection between blood kin: "It seems from experience that this natural affection, on which we place such a great deal of weight, in reality has very weak roots." Montaigne continues:
Let us consider this simple proposition that we love our children simply because we engendered them.... it seems to me that some of our other "products" merit just as much, if not greater, attention: I speak of that which we engender from the soul, give birth to from our spirit and our courage, all of which emanate from a more noble part of ourselves than the corporal, and, in the end, form more a part of ourselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood Ties and Fictive Ties by Kristin Elizabeth Gager. Copyright © 1996 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction 3
Ch. 1 The Many Families of Early Modern Paris 16
Ch. 2 Adoption Laws from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period 37
Ch. 3 The Family and the Neighborhood: Adoptions of Children between Two Households 71
Ch. 4 Parisian Charity Hospices and the Care of Orphans and Foundlings 105
Ch. 5 The Adoption of Children from the Couche of the Poor Foundlings and the Hotel-Dieu 124
Epilogue: Revolutionary Visions of Blood Ties and Adoptive Ties 157
Appendix A: Transcriptions of Selected Adoption Contracts 165
Appendix B: Information on the Adoptive Parents and Adoptees 170
Bibliography 173
Index 191