From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris

Gender, Economy, and Law

Janine M. Lanza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317131526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Looking especially at widows of master craftsmen in early modern Paris, this study provides analysis of the social and cultural structures that shaped widows' lives as well as their day-to-day experiences. Janine Lanza examines widows in early modern Paris at every social and economic level, beginning with the late sixteenth century when changes in royal law curtailed the movement of property within families up to the time of the French Revolution. The glimpses she gives us of widows running businesses, debating remarriage, and negotiating marriage contracts offer precious insights into the daily lives of women in this period. Lanza shows that understanding widows dramatically alters our understanding of gender, not only in terms of how it was lived in this period but also how historians can use this idea as a category of analysis. Her study also engages the historiographical issue of business and entrepreneurship, particularly women's participation in the world of work; and explicitly examines the place of the law in the lived experience of the early modern period. How did widowed women use their newly acquired legal emancipation? How did they handle their emotional loss? How did their roles in their families and their communities change? How did they remain financially solvent without a man in the house? How did they make decisions that had always been made by the men around them? These questions all touch upon the experience of widows and on the ways women related to prevalent structures and ideologies in this society. Lanza's study of these women, the ways they were represented and how they experienced their widowhood, challenges many historical assumptions about women and their roles with respect to the law, the family, and economic activity.

Chapter 1
Law in Early Modern France

Introduction

In early modern France, the law provided a foundation for some of the most important acts individuals and families undertook. Most prominent among them were decisions about inheritance, marriage, and remarriage. When families decided how much and what kinds of property to include in a marriage settlement or an inheritance clause, they harkened to the provisions of civil law in making their decisions. Even determining the suitability of a prospective marriage partner could include consideration of aspects of civil law. The choice of a partner determined to a great extent a family’s ambitions for social and economic mobility. This process also served to establish a family’s financial and inheritance strategies, and the ways they would enrich the next generation in advance of an elder’s death. In all of these kinds of decisions, civil law provisions played a role.

Before examining these legally charged moments, we need to consider what law means as an analytic category. In its most basic guise, the law is an instrument that creates social structure; a body of provisions, understood as the legitimate voice of the state, that aspires to regulate and circumscribe behavior. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, “(l)aw consecrates the established order by consecrating the vision of that order which is held by the State. It grants to its actors a secure identity, a status, and above all a body of powers (or competences) that are socially recognized.”¹ Legal activity recognizes, and even creates, the social body, and hierarchy and authority within that social body. Law defines what is permissible and what is not permissible in a certain temporal and geographical context.

The law also reflects power relations within a given social structure, expressing the wishes and aspirations of varied groups.² In keeping with this function, women’s position under early modern French law was marked by ambiguity. Much of the language of the law was marked by a distrust of women. They were considered unreliable and thus did not enjoy the independence and authority granted to men, particularly married men. But in order to assess the impact of legislation on women, we must note that different women fell into different legal categories. Marital status and attainment of adulthood were key to knowing the limits of female legal agency. A wife could not sign contracts without her husband’s permission nor could she manage her money independently. A daughter was also beholden to her father, not having the ability to marry without parental permission until the age of 25, risking poverty if she did so.

Widows escaped a number of the restraints imposed on other women and legal minors for reasons that this study will explore. They could grant their children permission to marry without input from other family members. They were the preferred legal guardians for their children, and in that capacity managed all of the household’s wealth. Such freedom of behavior, while practical in some ways, also produced concerns which manifested themselves in a number of ways which this chapter will examine. The independence a widow had in managing her own household and raising her children often troubled her family and her contemporaries. But they could not rein in these prerogatives without obliging themselves to financially supporting the widow and her children. A family, and society as a whole, needed either to allow widows broad enough freedom of conduct that they could act as heads of household or they had to pledge long-term financial support to them and their families. But even given the decision to grant widows some independence, widows’ families wished to have legal mechanisms to remind them that widows’ independence had limits. In many ways, the widow’s position demonstrates the limits of the law’s control over women and the clear distinction this society drew among single, married, and widowed women.³

Understanding the various law systems that existed in France at this time requires a balancing of the words of legal codes themselves with the ways they were employed. The interpretation of law through the mechanisms of strategy and lived practice, and the place of ambiguity in creating legal categories, formed part of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu terms the habitus of this culture. Habitus is a way to join an objective to a subjective perception of the world, but in a way that rejects this binary opposition by using a theory of practice to understand how both kinds of knowledge allow the individual to navigate society. It recognizes that “responses are first defined, without any calculation, in relation to objective potentialities.”⁴ But rather than simply conditioning the behavior of individuals, objective structures also yield to the goals and wishes of the individual. Habitus, then, “is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways…(and to) generate practice, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously co-ordinated or governed by any rule.”⁵ Such an understanding of the way objective structures shape individual reactions without clearly determining either their choices or the outcome of the process is particularly apt for the field of law. As an area of knowledge that expressed the coercive power of the state, as well as the power relations within the household, law was (and is) a structure that strongly marks transactions. Yet, as we shall see, individuals had strategies to impose their wishes on the contracts they signed, even when those contracts were strongly shaped by the demands of legal necessity.

This chapter examines the ways various elements of the law shaped people’s lives and the choices they made, as well as the ways individuals used the law to achieve their own ends. By placing legal codes beside contracts, we can question the ways early modern French experienced and used law in this period. More broadly, this juxtaposition enters into the question of the relationship between theoretical norms and lived experience within the boundaries created by those norms. Did the terms of legal edicts change the ways Parisians formalized marriage? Did they shape inheritance strategies? Did they make an impact on relations within the family? How was law involved in creating ideas about gender and gender relations?

The Contours of the Law

The civil and criminal legal structure of early modern France was the product of centuries of accretion. Based in the far past on the laws of the Roman Empire, over the centuries that classical legacy had melded with Germanic legal custom, the Church’s canon law, and various local laws governing areas that came under the control of French kings. By the eighteenth-century, France enjoyed the dubious distinction of harboring more than 200 autonomous legal systems within its borders. While regions remained distinct in certain ways, these legal systems were grouped into several families.⁶ In the north, civil law was organized into regional customs (coutumes), bodies of law that had developed over time from the precedents set in legal cases as well as on communal understanding. The south of France, known as the region of written law (pays de droit écrit), used written law codes based loosely on the Justinian Code and Roman law.⁷

In addition to the plethora of legal customs, written law, the canon law of the Catholic Church, royal legislation, parliamentary decisions, and even discrete urban and corporate regulation played distinct roles in creating a regulatory structure.⁸ In theory, each of these systems had a sphere of jurisdiction although there was certainly overlap and contestation over issues of precedence. Local customary law regulated most matters of civil and criminal law. However, the body of royal legislation, which was becoming more ambitious in scope and better systematized during the early modern period, modified the provisions of regional custom. When there was a difference of opinion, royal word was supposed to prevail. But given the fluid nature of customary law, based as it was on interpretation of precedent, and the differences in ways of deciding cases that prevailed across the kingdom, there was not a clear theory of judicial precedence.⁹

Canon law enjoyed jurisdiction over matters deemed religious, a category that became narrower as French kings strengthened and centralized their domain. By the seventeenth century the Catholic Church’s sphere was reduced to authority over matters of faith, religious persons (priests, nuns, and monks), and decisions over what constituted a valid marriage. Even the Church’s jurisdiction over marriage had shrunk. Canon law laid out what constituted free consent to marriage by both partners, and Church courts could grant dispensations if spouses were related within the forbidden degrees of closeness (consanguinité).¹⁰ However, all issues of property and inheritance pertaining to the couple and their families, the meat of any marital arrangement, fell under the jurisdiction of civil law. In this arena, too, royal legislation aspired to alter the provisions of the local custom and to shape the ways property could be granted from generation to generation. However, in practice the weight of royal law was minimized in most marriage contracts and the main determinant of property agreements remained the provisions of customary law.

In this Byzantine thicket of competing laws, individuals needed some means of access. Mediation was particularly necessary given the myriad legislation that issued from the Crown, the Church, and custom, much of which offered conflicting regulations concerning the same problem.¹¹ For those not in possession of a formal legal education, the notary, with his specialized training, offered assistance in translating the wishes for a settlement into a valid legal contract.¹² The contracts themselves show that notaries used the works of commentators as well as their own knowledge to shape their interpretation of laws that often left ambiguities as to how they were to be applied. As we shall see, a contract could create nearly any kind of property arrangement, even when laws seemed to provide clear cut guidance on the matter.

In Old Regime France, the law made incursions into people’s lives at two main junctures: marriage and death. Nonetheless, while law may have been visible most clearly at those two moments, it consistently structured relations within families. It was the marriage contract itself that declared the existence of a new family. This contract did so on a basic level when it assumed that the two parties signing together would mutually abide by its terms in creating their new household. Further, it determined how wealth and property would function to enrich and support the next generation. Survivor’s benefits and children’s stakes were broadly sketched out in the marriage contract, although there was no way of foreseeing the future value of assets. The greater the amount of the widow’s dower and survivor’s allowance, the less firm hold children and other lineage members would have on the deceased’s wealth. The contract balanced all of these conflicting interests and produced a result marked by compromise.

Thus the marriage contract laid out property relations not simply for the couple signing the paper but also for their future offspring and their kin. The testament acted as a corollary to this document, determining the disposition of a certain amount of property not already claimed in the marriage contract. But ultimately it played a minor role in the disposition of wealth as the will was fundamentally an individual contract rather than a family one. In the end, these two types of legal documents served as a base and structure for the household unit.¹³

The process of creating legal documents was fairly well established. Notaries resided in cities of all sizes and constituted a well-trained corps of professionals trained to draw up contracts, frequently based on certain established formulas, that would have the force of a binding agreement.¹⁴ Members of many strata of French society, from the wealthiest to the more modest, used the services of a notary to ensure the validity of their contractual agreements. In addition, by the seventeenth-century, French civil law was established in written codes, even if the legal system of the kingdom as a whole was not regularized. Merchants in Paris who signed contracts could have faith that the system was stable enough to ensure that their agreements were legally binding.¹⁵ In addition, legal specialists themselves were becoming more aware of their professional identity and imposing stricter standards of conduct and training on themselves.¹⁶ Finally, the genre of the legal commentary, works where prominent legal scholars clarified and glossed elements of civil and criminal law, became increasingly popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although there were competing realms of legal regulation, the royal government aspired to present the law, a reflection of the King’s power, as the sole source of justice, and by bringing more and more local jurisdiction under central control to minimize and eventually eradicate local nodes of legal power. While the Ordinances of 1539, and particularly of 1670, did move toward the goal of placing the dispensation of all criminal justice in royal courts, these projects still fell short of the total regularization of the justice system that each of these monarchs had envisioned.¹⁷ In each of these reforms Francis I and Louis XIV and the Parlement of Paris hoped to carve out a more substantial and stable role in the juridical process for the central government. For example, the Ordinance of 1539 made the King’s procurator the focal point for all information pertaining to a criminal case and left the final decision about a case in his hands.¹⁸

In contrast, the Parlements envisioned using changes in the law to create a political system where the power of the monarch was constrained by a strong Parlement. And in the mid-eighteenth century a number of philosophes called for the reform of the criminal legal system, most notably the elimination of torture as an interrogation method, in hopes of shaping a more rational and humane criminal justice system and society. Each of these projects saw in the law a way to create a better, more harmonious and prosperous society. In these instances the law was not a means of coercion but a means of realizing ideals and creating a certain kind of society. And, in the domain of civil law, one of the most common ways that the law functioned to create that society was through the construction of marriage.

The Legal Conception of Marriage

While it was local custom, here the Coutume de Paris, that offered guidance for settling property issues within a marriage contract, it was royal law that defined more broadly what constituted a marriage and how a valid marriage could be created. In creating a definition of marriage, royal edicts worked in relation to, and at times in opposition to, canon law. Trad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Law in Early Modern France
• 2 Women and Religious Institutions
• 3 Women’s Place in Guilds
• 4 Widows in the Workshop
• 5 The Calculus of Remarriage
• 6 The Trap of Poverty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index