Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge and the Family (review)

‘A qui la succession?’ This compelling and elliptical question, taken from Balzac’s 1842 novel La Rabouilleuse, is the refrain to which Andrew Counter’s dazzling monograph consistently returns. That the subject of this question has hitherto gone unstudied as an integral concern of nineteenth-century French literature is remarkable. This important work charts new critical terrain by exploring how literary texts responded to the new legal context in nineteenth-century France (from the abolition of primogeniture to the question of rural parcelization) and the political debates about inheritance that this produced. To give a sense of the ambitious breadth of this study, it suffices to note that in Chapter 2 alone the author weaves together works by canonical writers (Flaubert, Balzac, Zola) and over a dozen little-known plays, novels, and short stories, as well as developing cross-Channel references (Jonson, Shakespeare). Such a variety of texts allows Counter to flesh out a number of the conceptual manoeuvres he makes in the Introduction and which generate much of the study’s profound insight and momentum. At the heart of these is his argument that ‘attention to avuncular figures can reveal both the contingent nature and the gaps and limit points of a patriarchal regime that consistently represents itself as the history-less ground of all things’ (p. 17). Narratives of avuncular influences — Counter coins the word ‘collateralism’ to denote these ‘oblique or horizontal’ relationships (p. 19) — set in motion what he later refers to as ‘this opening-out [. . .] of the patrilinear paradigm’ (p. 68). The author seeks, then, not only to explore the potential of the avuncular to ‘demystify patriarchy’ (p. 17), but to bring about a vital shift of focus in the ongoing critical study of the nineteenth century’s fetishized nuclear family. Here Counter is scrupulous about acknowledging his own critical inheritance: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay ‘Tales of the Avunculate’ (1994) and Eileen Cleere’s work on avuncularism and patriarchy in Victorian culture (2004) remain significant reference points throughout. In Counter’s hands, however, these models of avuncularity are made to connect with French literary texts and the specific workings of the Civil Code, providing for sustained and self-problematizing critical readings of significant originality. It is a great credit to Counter that he succeeds in reinvigorating the particulars of Revolutionary successional reform and post-Revolutionary legislation on inheritance, restoring to the (ostensibly) driest legal details their full political and ideological weight. Indeed, it is precisely this meticulous engagement with the nitty-gritty of inheritance law that allows the author to shed new light on some of the most renowned nineteenth-century narratives: Balzac’s Ursule Mirouët (Chapter 3), Maupassant’s Bel-Ami and Pierre et Jean (Chapter 4), and Zola’s La Terre (Chapter 6). Although Counter’s allusive Conclusion, in which he rethinks a tradition of ‘literary inheritance’ (p. 188) in terms of an avuncular model, might have merited a more extended discussion, this does not detract from its significant interest. Overall, this admirable study is a work of fastidious scholarship, written with brio, and captivating for the reader.