Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (review)

Until late in the twentieth century, conjugal families were idealized as the social core; legislators sought to protect them from intrusion from competition by other family forms and outside individuals. However, private passions clashed frequently with this norm. Over time the importance of family inheritance and the religious and secular sanctity of marriage as guarantors of economic and social order has waned in France and elsewhere with the result that the family is unrecognisable from eighteenth-century forms. Why was it so necessary to define paternity and how was it contested? Just how custom and practice have evolved is a highly complex story not least of which is the role assigned to fathers-in-law both in and outside formalised relationships. Medical science could not determine paternity by blood types until after the midtwentieth century: genetic testing came even later. Contesting paternity was a complex process for women and children who sought recognition and financial support depending on what was permitted by law to demand in court. Through her comprehensive study of paternity suits and the impact of banning them from 1804 and 1812, Rachel Fuchs has produced a tour de force on the history of family law in France from the eighteenth century to modern times. She has trawled through an abundance of political and judicial archives to produce a multi-layered study of attitudes to fatherhood both in and out of marriage. In doing so she has expanded the boundaries of French family history. This work is of interest to political and legal experts as well as those interested in cultural and social change in France's past and present. Central to the study is also the question of cultural and social perceptions of male and female conduct and philosophical discourse on the natural rights of children, not to mention women, that developed during the revolutionary decade of the 1790s but were largely ignored until recently, versus the Napoleonic conservative reasoning that produced the Civil Code of 1804. This associated the new secular version of family honour with bourgeois capitalist interests the desired moral stability of which proved to be even more inflexible than ecclesiastical law in setting conjugal norms. Fuchs's chronological yet thematic account of the impact of legislation on jurisdiction and on individuals' happiness explains the many factors affecting the shifting forms of the family. Tensions between individuals in courts are illustrated by rich anecdotal archival evidence: long-running battles between legislators are presented as they attempted to push through reforms to ensure the rights of mothers and children and court practices grappling with the vexed question of dysfunctional family relationships, show that magistrates and judges were not slow to ignore the letter of the law that favoured recalcitrant fathers. Fuchs's clear and articulate style makes her history of the family over three centuries in France accessible to students and researchers alike.