Legitimating Change: The Decrees on Bastardy during the French Revolution

CHRISTIE MC DONALD Legitimating Change: The Decrees on Bastardy during the French Revolution Concerns surrounding birth - the birth of children, the birth of societies - figure strongly in contemporary political consciousness from eastern Europe to North America. Whether it be the visible political events of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since 1989, or the less visible but equally revolutionary changes in reproductive technologies (in vitro fertilization, test-tube babies, egg and sperm banks), one has the sense that change may be one of the only constants as this century nears its close. Yet understanding what is pt stake for the future seems at best fragmentary. The question that I will address here is how the debates around maternity and birth express the malaise of society and the malaise of political change, how sociopolitical problet:ns become intelligible through images of individual struggle involving family relations, and further, how the discourse on the family and filiation transforms epistemological concerns about the basis for discovering knowledge into the performance of change. Recent advances in reproductive technologies have put into question the belief (whether implicit or explicit) that biology, as a teleological process, can hold cultural chaos in abeyance. The doors have been opened wide as the definition and status of mother, father, and child have all been deeply questioned in fissures cleaved between filiation and engenderment . And yet, at the very moment when the so-called nuclear family is endangered, i~ is the extraordinarily powerful metaphor of the family that rings insistently in social and political discourse. There is a sense that the threat to the family signals a disintegration of order/ leaving the contemporary sense of self bereft of a discourse that can. 'represent a universal order of which man land woman] is an integral part.') Contemporary novels such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Carlos Fuentes's novel Christopher Unborn show that it is indeed utopian to believe that all progress is for the better. One bleak scenario has it that, through what some label the ~iological adultery' or the socalled 'prostitution' that artificial procreation may create (anonymous sperm donors and frozen eggs), society will become heir to a new class of illegitimate children to whom civil status may be refused. What seems to be so disturbing in these new scenarios is the separation of parenthood from the sexual act, and the potential dissolution of society if the family UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1992 LE~ITIMATING CHANGE 451 breaks down altogether. It is to the eighteenth-century version of this problem that I will address myself in what follows. The symmetry of the extraordinary and rapid upheaval in eastern Europe at the very moment that France was celebrating the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 seemed to heighten the sense not only -of coincidence and drama, but also of how dizzying change can be. It brought home just how unsteady it feels to be in the midst of a social and political transformation and the urgency of a framework within which to situate it: What is change? What changes? How does one think about it? How does one act upon that understanding? In-the absence of a consensus about absolute schemes of reference on both religious and political levels, the question of how to anchor or legitimate thought on this subject takes on particular importance. One has the sense that rereading the past with an eye to the present context may indeed be one of the only ways to gain some purchase on the discourse of change: the past gives us complex fachJal models as we]] as the questions and languages through which they were represented. The French Revolution provides one of the most spectacular examples of such a model in the passage from absolute monarchy to a republic, founded on the sovereignty of the nation and expressed through the general will. Yet the work of the historian Fran This Jinconceivable doctrine/ Peuchet argued, did not simply go against but destroyed all established maxims of justice and equality. 'The laws with respect to bastards are guilty,' wrote Saint-Just; 'they persecute the poor where they should console them.1l7 Like others...