The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (review)

The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France. By Julie Hardwick (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 240 pp. $55.00 cloth $19.95 paper

In prescriptive sources, theologians, jurists, and moralists routinely compared the early modern family to the body and the country. They repeatedly declared that divine providence destined, and collective welfare required, the husband, father, and master to rule the household like the head ruled the self and the king ruled the kingdom. Polemical and judicial sources reveal that these figurative connections were more complicated and more problematic in practice than they were in principle, since they could be invoked not only to condone the exercise of authority but also to condemn the abuse of authority during both domestic and political conflicts. Given the nature and limits of these types of sources, historians of the early modern period have limited knowledge about relations within households, in different regions and of different classes, under relatively normal circumstances, and what they had to do with with the evolution of French society and the French state. Hardwick's book constitutes an important contribution to this field of inquiry.

Hardwick explores "how structures of authority and relations of power were mediated at a grassroots level in early modern society" by investigating the lives of royal notaries and their families in Nantes in the century after 1560, when the monarchy fixed their number at forty-six (ix). She consulted notarial, property, corporation, parish, police, judicial, militia, and municipal records and used this material to reconstruct legal, economic, and political roles and patterns of marriage choices, household management, property transmission, and local sociability. The second chapter ("Notaries as Artisans of Credit, Confidence and Political Culture") and the eighth chapter ("Public Life in the City"), which explain how notaries functioned as mediators between Crown and subjects, and how they involved themselves in municipal affairs, have less to do with "the practice of patriarchy" than the chapters that they frame.

Chapters 3 through 7, devoted to relatively private matters, show "how the day-to-day structures of life among non-elite families shaped power relations and authority structures as realities rather than ideals" (77). Ideals dictated that husbands should command and wives should obey, but realities indicated that wives were not simply victims of marital oppression. Their importance in decisions and connections was sometimes "disguised by practices that emphasized the bonds between men," but they made significant contributions to the couple's property and productivity, managed the bulk of household operations, developed ties of their own with servants and neighbors, and involved relatives in family affairs (193). They could take their husbands to court for separation of property or persons, and they could enjoy expanded legal rights as widows. Authority, in other words, was not just imposed monolithically from above and exercised arbitrarily by notaries. It was shared, negotiated, and contested--in households in Nantes as well as in regional and national politics during the construction of absolutism.

Hardwick concludes every chapter of this local study, and the impressive book as a whole, with reflections about her larger themes. She demonstrates that "gender and family were central constituents of early modern political culture," but she also leaves us wondering about several issues that might have been addressed more systematically (221). What does her work on the notaries and their families reveal about the meanings and workings of the cultural category of gender, as opposed to the biological fact of sex? And how did their experience of the flexibility of constructs of authority in the household affect their political consciousness as French subjects?

Jeffrey Merrick
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

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