Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France

6 Paternity and the Family, 1940 to the Present

chapte six Paternity and the Family, 1940 to the Present Women who filed paternity suits represented themselves as good mothers , even outside of legal marriage, regardless of the nature of the sexual relationships that had led to their pregnancy. Most men fashioned themselves as good fathers, but primarily within a conjugal family where they were material providers and where they helped rear and educate their children. Others saw themselves as fathers outside of marriage, either as adoptive parents or in concubinage. Men and women played these roles daily, exercising a good deal of agency in their private lives and in the public theater of the courtrooms. In those same public theaters, magistrates and lawyers played many roles, sometimes serving as casting directors, deciding who was allowed to appear on the stage, who received the parts of good parents, who led appropriate intimate lives and warranted a stage appearance , whom they would cast as an immoral person, and whom they would not allow on stage at all because of failure to audition properly. Magistrates and lawyers would then work along with the state authorities, who functioned as producers, directing the behavior of men and women who played their parts as lovers, mothers, and fathers. They would decide on the script that described good parenting and appropriate intimate life, one that supported the moral and social public order. In arrogating to themselves the authority of writers and directors, they limited the authority of the actors, who had once had greater individual freedom. Magistrates , also working as assistant playwrights, could modify the script the legislators, as authors, handed to them, taking into account the needs, behaviors , wishes, and self-fashioning of the actors in family dramas. Magistrates also represented the state and public policy and tried to influence individual and family intimate behavior. The heterosexual reproductive conjugal family was initially directly in the limelight on center stage, since it had served as the core of French society , but during the twentieth century, it moved off to side stage on the right, making way for other, previously marginal but now socially acceptable family forms that emerged from the wings in the interwar period and took positions front and left. Families on the public stage could be conjugal, blended, fictive, monoparental, or consist of heterosexual domestic partnerships , as long as parents provided for their children, did not neglect or abuse them, and did not engage in scandalous or publicly immoral behavior. Perceptions of such immoral behavior differed according to the gender of the actors. For women, but not for men, it consisted of having several lovers. From 1940 through the end of the century, the scenery, props, and sometimes the script changed. Scenery changes first included the wartime occupation and Vichy regime, and later the acceptance of concubinage for heterosexual and homosexual couples. Antoine Loysel’s aphorism “Boire, manger, coucher ensemble, c’est mariage ce me semble,” used by authors of legislation to justify heterosexual concubinage as grounds for paternity suits at the beginning of the twentieth century, was later written into the script at the very end of the century when groups argued for the legalization of homosexual as well as heterosexual unions. Moreover, advances in biology provided new and significant props, changing the nature of paternity searches from a complicated system that had based biological paternity on social behavior, to the use of blood and genetic tests in a determination of biological paternity. Divisibility of paternity remained in the script, however, differentiating a father’s responsibility for child support from his responsibility to provide his name and family identification to the child. A division also obtained between biological ties of paternity and behavioral aspects of social fatherhood. The desire for the protection of the patriarchal family, which had dominated much of the official discussion involving paternity, remained an important component of the rhetoric during the period from 1938 through 1945. In the post-1945 period, especially starting in the 1960s, however, the social order anchored in the patriarchal family began to erode with a sudden and rapid evolution in French society away from family structures of the past and toward a social and moral order more rooted in individual choice for both women and men, and with greater emphasis on emotional relationships. By the last quarter of the century, the social and moral order became more centered on the ungendered individual. Paternity and the Family 241 Family...