Age and Gender, Love and Sex
Such blurry class distinctions amplified the influence of age and gender. French fathers did not enjoy the right to life and death over their offspring that Jean Bodin thought was their due, but they could prevent sons under age thirty and daughters under age twenty-five from marrying someone they considered unacceptable.
They could also obtain a legal order to incarcerate their juvenile or adult children, just as the King could issue a lettre de cachet to imprison or exile anyone who, in his opinion, threatened public order.10 At Versailles, important servants, such as the King's valet, passed their jobs on to their eldest sons just as their sovereign did. Women remained under their fathers' authority until they married, at which time their husbands assumed control. A legal text published in 1770 explained that a husband should expect from his wife all the forms of submission due from an inferior to a superior.11Inferiors were entitled to something—but it was never clear exactly what. Protestants preached self-reliance and discouraged almsgiving. The French Catholic Counter-Reformation sought to ‘‘reinfuse society with a consciousness of its obligations”.12 Non-governmental assistance to the poor remained significant in France for far longer than in England, especially in the form of informal aid provided by local priests trusted to identify the deserving poor.13 Women and children who came to Mass hungry might, for instance, be sent to an affluent parishioner’s home with permission to ask for leftovers. Charitable giving, particularly private legacies and banquets for the poor designed to redeem the soul of the deceased, apparently began to decline after about 1720.14 No one knows how transfers before or after that date compared to those effected by the formal British poor laws.
Traditions of equal inheritance in some regions, along with stagnant labor productivity, created local population pressures.
Parents preferred a smaller number of prosperous children to the prospect of an overcrowded brood, and the French became adept at postponing and spacing births. Coitus interruptus and use of condoms made of animal intestines were risky for unmarried women, for whom a mistake could prove quite costly. French communities had traditionally pressured men to marry women who they impregnated, but the increased mobility associated with wage employment weakened efforts to enforce such obligations. Illegitimacy rates in France, as in England, rose throughout the eighteenth century. 15 Many children were abandoned at orphanages and churches. 16Mid-eighteenth century Paris was a cosmopolitan city, somewhat disconnected from its rural hinterland, supporting both a hereditary elite and a new generation of intellectuals able to eke a living from their pen. The philosopher Diderot’s father was a cutler, Rousseau’s a watchmaker.17 Some families chose to educate their daughters and literate men preferred literate mistresses and wives. The critique of despotism that emerged in this environment was less individualistic and more moralistic than English political theory. It was also, at least initially, more critical of gender inequalities.