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

Much of the cultural and political history of nineteenth-century France reflects a sense of disconnection and drift following the disruption of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras and the coming of what Baudelaire taught us to call modernity. That the century felt disinherited in this way is a truism. Andrew Counter's absorbing book makes clear the extent to which the inheritance laws of the Revolution, and more particularly of the Code Civil of 1804, were themselves at the core of this new cultural moment.

The famous law of patrilinearity—the so-called "droit d'aînesse" by which the first-born son becomes the father's inheritor, leaving the remaining children to fend for themselves—was abolished and replaced by a law requiring fathers to divide their wealth (not necessarily equally), while childless men were permitted to testate as they wished. Counter points out that the droit d'aînesse had never, in fact, been the law of the land. But the overdetermination that located a cultural sense of disinheritance in a disempowerment of the father made it easy to believe that it had been; and before long distressing phenomena from the morcellement of land to the drop in natality were being attributed to the abandonment of patrilinear succession.

Counter has gone for literary evidence to the obvious authors, notably Balzac, Maupassant and Zola. But he has also industriously explored less familiar genres such as the theatrical vaudeville and the female-authored "roman d'éducation" that indoctrinated girls to view their inheritance as subordination to men and the willing acceptance of burdensome duties. What emerges is that there was active interest, notably in the more thoughtful writing, in exploring alternative models of family, and by extension of social organization. The childless testator crops up in Balzac's misfits, as in other forms of "subversive testament" in Maupassant; Zola's La Terre is read, unexpectedly, as proposing an "ethical interrogation of the idea and value of generosity" (p. 159). Following Eve Sedgwick's lead, the myth of the avuncular—represented by the childless "oncle à succession"—is deftly reinterpreted: it proposes less an alternative to the family per se than a different, still familial, but non-genetic and elective understanding of kinship. Spectacularly new readings of novels like Ursule Mirouët, Pierre et Jean as well as La Terre, draw on clarifying parallels with archetypal figures from English literature: Hamlet, Lear, Volpone, Emma, Dombey and Son . . .

Unlike most critical writing, this book does not build an argument in linear fashion so much as it explores a somewhat heterogeneous field of writing in a kind of wayward conversation that is a little disconcerting (where exactly is the critical point?). But then, in the conclusion, Counter clarifies his book's structure by turning self-reflexively to a brief but important discussion of the idea of "literary inheritance," proposing that the bachelor uncle is a more fitting figure of "literary connection" than the paternal progenitor. As opposed to patrilinearity, literary "collateralism", therefore, offers a suitable template for grasping "a genuine nineteenth-century literary urge: namely, the creation of a family that is by definition non-genetic in composition, retroactive in construction, and elective in sensibility" (p. 190). The critical text's own collateralism is a function of the familial structure, both literary and social, that is its object.

But then, if the textual families that criticism constructs are not patrilinear but avuncular, this compelling insight also offers a very helpful model, I would add, for comprehending the always provisional, always "still-under-construction" character of literary criticism itself, as it goes about its business of putting together the inevitably open-ended families of texts that it seeks to explore. This pleasantly written, exhaustively researched and resourcefully argued book thus ends provocatively by defining itself, implicitly, as unfinished. There is always more in the literary inheritance, it seems, than any single reader is capable of gathering.