Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France (review)

Fuchs, whose previous work focused on female poverty, pregnancy, and child welfare in nineteenth-century France, turns her attention in this book to the issue of paternity as a means of exploring changing attitudes toward the family in France. At the center of her study are contested definitions of paternity and those who fell outside the confines of the traditional family in legislative and legal debates. Through an analysis primarily of court cases and legislative debates, she illuminates changing attitudes toward parental responsibility, the family, the rights of children, and female agency from the end of the eighteenth century to the present.

The starting point for this book is an attempt to understand the 1804 Code Napoléon's ban on paternity searches (recherché de paternité), which remained in place until 1912, when the law was altered significantly. She is as much interested in legal history as she is in how the law functioned and how legal suits ultimately changed the law. Drawing from an impressive array of judicial archives, legislative debates, popular literature, and the press, Fuchs explores the origins of new ideas concerning paternity and the family throughout a 200-year period. Paternity was long considered to be a biological category, even though medical science did not have the tools to determine propinquity by blood type or genetics until the mid- to late twentieth century. Indeed, in 1883, one legislator declared that "paternity is as mysterious as the source of the Nile" (2). In the absence of verifiable proof, Fuchs shows how French men and women navigated the difficulties that questions regarding the issue presented, while seeking to understand why paternity was such a heated issue for the period that she surveys.

Fuchs clearly shows that family law as embodied in the Civil Code of 1804, and more specifically its ban on paternity suits, was motivated by an attempt to shore up paternal authority in the legally established family. The framers of the Code believed that paternity searches would result in discord in the social and legal order. Chapter 1 analyzes the establishment of this new order from the Old Regime to the beginning of the First Empire. Chapter 2 explores the continued attempts by women to seek child support and reparations from men who had allegedly seduced and abandoned them. Chapters 3 and 4 chart the growing intervention by the state and justice systems in private family matters, a trend that was, in part, encouraged by growing fears of depopulation. This trend culminated in the law of 1912, which once again permitted paternity searches and shored up children's rights.

The remaining two chapters of the book explore how the new law was played out in courtrooms and in public debate during the twentieth century, with particular attention to the kinds of proof that were required in courts, as well as how families were defined and reconstituted. Fuchs describes in poignant terms the difficulties that women faced in bringing their cases to court and traces the vagaries of the legal system. Her discussion of paternity and family life during the German occupation of France in World War II is particularly compelling. For example, the family drama surrounding the Kahan and Ponelle families, which involved a custody battle after the divorce of Léon Kahan, who was Jewish, and Arlette Ponelle, who was Catholic, revealed the effect of the occupation and antisemitism on the way in which the law was applied.

The cases that Fuchs presents are fascinating, leading to the conclusion that men in France were increasingly called upon to be good fathers. At the same time, male authority, after a brief recrudescence, declined after World War I. Furthermore, in spite of all the legal hurdles that they faced, women continued to press their claims in court. Although the law, as Fuchs suggests, lagged behind social and cultural change, by the end of the twentieth century, conceptions of the family had changed substantially to encompass consensual unions, single parenthood, reconstituted families, and...