Servants and Masters in 18th-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty

by Sarah C. Maza

Overview

Here is the first major study of domestic service in France from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, describing its transformation from a male-oriented occupation, aristocratic in style and often geared to public display, to one that was female, middle-class, and centered on the household.

Originally published in 1984.

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:	9780691613048
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #745
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.90(d)

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Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France

The Uses of Loyalty

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By Sarah C. Maza

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05394-3

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CHAPTER 1

Jobs of Necessity

Domestic servants were conspicuous and familiar figures in the towns of France under the Old Regime. If one were to travel back in time into one of the streets of eighteenth-century Paris, Lyon, or Bordeaux, or even a smaller town such as Aix or Bayeux, one could not fail to notice them: young lackeys dressed in colorful liveries adorned with gold braid and shoulder knots, playing, idling, and taunting one another; chambermaids decked out in ill-fitting and faded hand-me-downs from their mistresses, chatting in the street; doormen and sedan-chair carriers assembled at the doorsteps of wealthy houses; and the more numerous cooks, scullery maids, and maids-of-all-work of bourgeois households, dressed in the coarse garments of the laboring poor, ambling endlessly to and fro on errands. The visibility of domestic workers derived in part from the conspicuousness of their clothing and in part, as we shall see, from the nature of an occupation that put many of them in constant contact with the urban public. But it had mostly to do with the sheer weight of their numbers.

In many of the towns of eighteenth-century France, and in fact of other European countries as well, household workers made up a full tenth of the urban population and as much as one-fifth of the adult workforce. On this point the estimates of contemporaries and the work of recent historians corroborate each other. The size of the group nationwide is difficult to determine precisely, because contemporaries usually included live-in workers, apprentices, and farmhands in the category of domestiques. But their calculations do indicate that a substantial proportion of the population of Ancien-Régime France engaged in "service" of one sort or another. In his Projet d'une dîme royale, published in 1707, Vauban claimed that there were one and a half million domestics in the realm, 7.5 percent of a population of about twenty million. A century later, the Abbé Grégoire advanced exactly the same proportion, one-thirteenth of the total population. The great French demographers of the later eighteenth century, Expilly, Messance, and Moheau, estimated the servant population at around 8 percent in the small provincial towns of Auvergne and Normandy, 6 to 12 percent in Provence, and 9 or 10 percent in larger towns such as Rouen, Tours, Lyon, and Paris.

Recent estimates based on sources such as tax rolls and parish registers do confirm that on the whole the proportion of servants was most substantial in the largest and wealthiest towns in the realm. But the size of the servant population also varied according to the nature of the local economy and social structure. In small towns and villages, servants made up only 5 to 7 percent of the population. They were also less conspicuous as a group in large commercial or manufacturing centers such as Caen, Lyon, or Marseille. In Caen, the largest textile center in Normandy, 2,300 persons out of a total of 32,000 were listed as household employees at mid-century, or 7 percent of the population. The much larger textile-manufacturing town of Lyon numbered some 6,000 domestic servants in 1791, making up about 6 percent of the population. The ratio of servants to population was smaller still in the busy seaport of Marseille, where they added up to a mere 4 percent of the population at century's end.

Larger proportions of servants were usually found in those towns typical of provincial urban society under the Old Regime — administrative and residential centers where aristocrats, clergymen, and rentiers rather than merchants and manufacturers made up the core of high society. Some towns, of course, combined both sorts of functions. The Atlantic seaport of Bordeaux was about the same size as Marseille, yet the proportion of servants there amounted to a full tenth of the population because the town combined the activity of an increasingly wealthy commercial center with its traditional role as an aristocratic residential center and as the seat of one of France's thirteen courts of high justice, the Parlements. In the south of France two other such courts were located in Aix-en-Provence and Toulouse, both of them important residential and administrative centers. In Aix a servant population of about 2,000 staffed mainly the elegant townhouses of the old Provençal aristocracy, many of whom were members of the Parlement of Provence or the Cour des Comptes. Servants in Aix accounted for 8 percent of a population of 27,000 in 1695, and the proportion rose to 12 percent in the course of the next century. In Toulouse, several hundred miles west of Aix, many of the town's 4,400 domestics were also in the employ of officers of the Parlement. Elsewhere in the realm substantial numbers of servants could be found even in sleepy provincial centers like Bayeux, where they numbered 700 among a population of 9,200 in 1768.

It was in Paris, of course, that the largest number of servants in the country was concentrated, but the continual flow of migrants in and out of the capital city made it very difficult to determine their numbers. The demographer Messance cited a figure of 37,400 on the basis of a 1754 tax roll, but added that the servant population of Paris was in fact much larger than this, at least 50,000 out of a total population of nearly half a million. One Parisian family in four, he claimed, employed some sort of domestic help. If Parisian servants cannot be numbered with precision, at least their visibility is beyond doubt. In 1749, 16 percent of all marriage contracts settled before Parisian notaries were drawn up by male servants. Even during the Revolution, when one might expect their numbers to have been depleted by the emigration of wealthy masters, menservants still accounted for one-third to nearly half of the adult male population of elegant districts such as the Place des Vosges or the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

For all of these variations in the size of the servant population, there can be no doubt that in every large town in France domestics made up a substantial proportion of the population. And yet despite a recent proliferation of monographs dealing with urban society under the Old Regime, we know very little about them beyond the numbers recorded in tax rolls.

One of the reasons for our ignorance is that the most obvious sources for the study of urban society reflect the prejudices of contemporaries for whom domestic servants did not legally "exist" as a group. As Pierre Goubert has pointed out, up to the end of the Old Regime urban society still defined itself within the framework of the traditional corporate bodies — guilds, associations, confraternities — which provided the legal basis for social recognition in town. Servants were never legally integrated into urban society for there was never any such corporate framework to their occupation. Numerous as they were, domestic servants did not really "belong" in the towns where they worked, for a vast majority of them came from the countryside and were immigrants drawn from pure rural stock. Even they themselves, perhaps, sought no such integration, for many viewed their occupation as a temporary necessity rather than a lifelong career.

In the late eighteenth century, the author of a Parisian police handbook summed up the motives behind migration and service in these unflattering terms:

Hatred of work, the desire to enjoy the pleasures of the cities, a taste for laziness, the habit of vice, indifference to the ties most dear to the heart of men, the hope of getting rich, and lastly, the most decided and most shocking egotism, are the motives which cause domestic work to be cherished; it is they which cause men to prefer the baseness of this state to the honorable and useful fatigue of the farmer. One may thus correctly conclude that the class of servants is composed exclusively of the scum of the countryside.

Our man obviously had an axe to grind, as would presumably anyone saddled with the unrewarding task of maintaining order among bands of boisterous Parisian lackeys. In assuming that it was the glamor of service that lured peasants out of their villages and that this occupation was especially attractive to the riff-raff of rural society, he was echoing mostly the prejudices of his contemporaries. But he was not at all unjustified in associating servants with immigrants: in every large town in France, the bulk of domestic workers was supplied by traditional patterns of migration from the countryside.

In Aix and Marseille, eight or nine out of ten female servants who came before notaries in the eighteenth century were of rural origin (see table 1.1). Not all of these rural-born women came from purely agricultural families. Notarial documents in Toulouse and illegitimate pregnancy records in Aix show that only one-half to two-thirds of them were the offspring of farmers and agricultural laborers. Many others were daughters of village weavers or rural artisans. But most of them came from the world beyond the city walls. Only a tenth of the servants who reported pregnancies in Aix between 1695 and 1765 were native Aixoises. The others had come from as close as a few miles away, or as far as the northernmost Alpine regions. In Bayeux a mere 7 percent of the maidservants listed in the census of 1796 had been born in that town, and over a third of them had migrated there within the preceding five years.

The social and geographic origins of menservants, while more varied, were similar. In the first half of the century, 35 percent in Toulouse, 45 percent in Paris, and 75 percent in Lyon were from peasant families. Whether or not they were sons of peasants, a large majority had left their native fields, vineyards, or villages to try their luck or wits out in town. In Paris, at least eight out of ten menservants had converged to the capital from the provinces (see appendix 1.b). Only 6 percent in Lyon were natives of the town in which they worked. From whatever occupational group they were drawn, a majority of servants were sons and daughters of the countryside. Even when their origins were not purely rural, most servants did come from impoverished backgrounds. Outside of the rural world, one-fifth or more of the women, both in Toulouse and in Aix, were daughters of wage laborers or petty craftsmen, and a small percentage had fathers in service (see appendix 1.a).

The most wretched of these women, without doubt, were those for whom service was an unavoidable fate, those who had been illegitimate and abandoned children. By a sad irony, they were likely to be the offspring of ill-fated unions between masters and servants, and thus perpetuated the vicious cycle that had linked illegitimate sex and domestic service for centuries. Throughout the eighteenth century, an estimated 4 percent of all servants in Aix and Marseille were recruited among the girls whose mothers had left them on the steps of the Hôtel-Dieu, sometimes attaching a ribbon, Bible, or small trinket around their children's necks in the hopes of recognizing them some day. In 1749 and 1750, four of these girls came to sign marriage contracts before notaries in Marseille. All of them bore the same surname, and none could sign her name: Marie Blanc, Catherine Blanc, Louise Blanc, and Jeanne-Marie Blanc. All four had been in service, and all four married peasants — strangers to Marseille — who must have seen in the meager dowry allotted by the Hôtel-Dieu some sort of compensation for the disreputable backgrounds of their fiancées. And these, of course, were the lucky ones. Most of those who managed to survive past age fifteen remained in service, turned to prostitution, or returned to the hospital as paupers.

The picture of servants' origins is, overall, a bleak one, and one may well wonder where novelists and playwrights found models for those dapper valets and chambermaids who could, on occasion, masquerade as their masters and mistresses as the twists and turns of the plot demanded. These fictional servants were perhaps modeled on the small minority of domestics who did in fact come from more prosperous families. In Aix, 7 to 10 percent of the women, and still a smaller proportion in Toulouse, had come into domestic service from apparently comfortable backgrounds (see appendix 1.a). The fathers of these women belonged to those ambiguous groups which, in the social taxonomy of the Old Regime, implied a modicum of status but not necessarily a great deal of wealth: bourgeois, merchants, master-surgeons, and so on. Sudden turns of fate no doubt accounted for their presence among the ranks of the destitute. The Abbé Collet, in a handbook for masters published in 1764, specifically asked employers to show consideration for those girls who had been "reduced into service by one of those sudden blows of fate that changes the fortune of an honest family." Some women of middling background were compelled to spend a few years gathering or supplementing a dowry in order to regain some sort of status through marriage. Sometimes they entered the service of a relative or a friend in order to mitigate the dishonor attached to their occupation.

The ambiguities, tensions, and animosities inherent in such an arrangement are well illustrated in the case which in 1751 opposed one Agnès Monoyer to her employer and former friend, Thérèse Laborel. In the course of the trial, Monoyer bitterly asked her mistress whether she would have accepted insults in lieu of wages when she was in service, before she inherited her brother's money:

She is therefore ill-advised in refusing, under false and frivolous pretexts, the wages owed to mistress Monoyer, who, though her father is a bourgeois, is forced to work in order to feed and keep herself. And it behooves mistress Laborel less than any other to make light of the subject because, although her family is one of the most distinguished in these parts, it has not been very long since she herself was in the same condition as mistress Monoyer, and forced to go work for others.

No doubt, members of the upper classes would prefer to choose their closest personal servants among these unfortunate victims of fate.

The social origins of male servants, while also heavily skewed toward the lower end of the social scale, were more varied than those of women. Outside of the rural world, the scope of social strata from which they were drawn was surprisingly wide, or so it appears from the figures we have on Paris and Toulouse. Some allowances must be made for the specificity of the capital city, for in other towns servants were probably of a less varied and humbler extraction. In Paris a full quarter of the male servants who came before notaries in 1749 were sons of skilled workers, master artisans, and merchants, another 5 percent were of middleclass origin, and the rest were drawn from a wide range of other social strata. Surprisingly, though, the unskilled urban working classes are underrepresented, with sons of workers and journeymen adding up to only 3.6 percent. Paris, of course, was an atypical city, and one can easily guess that the high quality of skills demanded and the level of wages offered made service in the richest Parisian households attractive to men of good social standing. But a similar pattern of recruitment has been found in Toulouse. At the beginning of the century, 12.8 percent of Toulousain menservants came from the petite bourgeoisie, while only 2.6 percent were sons of textile workers and wage laborers. This disparity in recruitment no doubt reflects different attitudes toward service among different sorts of men who engaged in the occupation. Furet and Daumard, whose work on Paris I have been quoting, suggest that this curious pattern speaks to a disparity between popular rural and urban mentalities. Large numbers of rural youths were driven into service by necessity or tradition, and may have found it easy to enter a situation of personal bondage if they came from areas where strong seigneurial ties still conditioned social relations. But the urban working classes may have balked at the idea of jeopardizing their independence and looked down on workers, even secretaries and clerks, who eked out their living as parasites. Finally, for a minority of young men from middling backgrounds whose families had hit upon hard times, a spell of time as a well-paid valet in a wealthy household was no doubt the best choice. The ranks of Parisian domesticity comprised many provincial déclassés whose lack of training and wealth drove them to the capital and into service.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables and Figures, pg. ix
• List of lllustrations, pg. xi
• Abbreviations and Note on Translations, pg. xii
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 1. Jobs of Necessity, pg. 25
• CHAPTER 2. Love and Money, pg. 58
• CHAPTER 3. Life on the Threshold, pg. 107
• CHAPTER 4. Life in the Household, pg. 157
• CHAPTER 5. The Uses of Loyalty, pg. 199
• CHAPTER 6. Aristocratic Service in the Age of Enlightenment, pg. 247
• CHAPTER 7. The Domestication of Service, pg. 299
• Conclusion, pg. 331
• APPENDIXES, pg. 337
• SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 343
• Index, pg. 361