Parental authority, legal practice, and state building in early modern France
Abstract
Set within the contexts of legal culture and the growth of the absolutist state, this study of early modern Burgundy reveals a more complex picture of family authority than has previously been acknowledged by historians. Implicitly, family disorder threatened the basis of political authority in early modern France. While the father was idealized, families and government officials wrestled with instances where that order was explicitly threatened. Authority was reinforced not so much by an increased reliance upon fathers, but by a complex interweaving of civil law, royal legislation, and legal practice that made children more dependant on their family for a longer period of time. In the sixteenth century, jurists increasingly applied Roman law to their own customary law, gradually tightening inheritance practices and excluding women from prominent positions they historically held in communal property management. These changes were reinforced by the monarchy's new restrictions over children's choice of marriage partners. By the late seventeenth century, a small group of Burgundian jurists questioned the Romanist interpretive assumptions that had held sway for over a century and argued that Burgundian children could act independently of their parents after they reached an age of majority. These opinions were delegitimized in an early eighteenth-century pamphlet war and in a classic Old Regime corporate conflict between the Estates and the Parlement of Burgundy. The second part of the study examines guardianship cases and notarial contracts from 1580 to 1780. These sources reveal that legal thought on the extended dependance of children slowly reverberated among the general population through heightened interference in the child's life choices and a rise in the popular conception of an age of majority. Despite the predominant eighteenth-century philosophical currents, the average French male or female youth had less room to maneuver in the eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth century. This would begin to change only with the advent of industrialization.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Farr, Purdue University.
Subject Area
European history
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