Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880 by Christopher H. Johnson (review)

Christopher Johnson's Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship, & PowerinProvincial France, 1670–1880 is an ambitious archival history of an extended kinship network of the Galles, Jollivet, and Le Ridant families during two centuries of significant political, economic, and domestic change. These intertwined families based in the Breton town of Vannes were avid correspondents who valued education and lifelong intellectual pursuits, fiscal responsibility, sibling and cousin closeness, and political engagement, all of which renders their abundant correspondence historically and culturally insightful on multiple registers. From hundreds of personal letters, along with memoirs, government documents, scholarly publications, and contemporary scholarship, Johnson effectively constructs a comprehensible narrative of a family's navigation towards prominent bourgeois status. In contrast to the abundant scholarship documenting the importance of exogamous marriage or ancestral influences in creating and safeguarding family wealth and social standing, Johnson's work demonstrates the importance of horizontal connections in class positioning. This account also stands out in its focus on culture and politics in Brittany, a region underrepresented in scholarship on both the French Revolution and the political unrest of the nineteenth century.

Johnson demonstrates that the rise of the French bourgeoisie was due to both internal familial factors (mothers' and aunts' influences, strategic marriages, births or adoptions, etc.) as well as public ones (political or military appointments, educational pedigree, or interactions with Parisian aristocracy, for example). Becoming Bourgeois compellingly insists on the centrality of the "sibling archipelago," as Johnson terms the network of siblings, cousins, and other same-generation kin who maintained ties and mutual influence across vast distances and through times of upheaval. The letters on which the book is based, however, demonstrate a different aspect of this kinship network from what previous scholarship has addressed. While strategy certainly plays a role in the establishment of kinship ties, whether through consolidating estates through the adoption of a sibling's orphaned children, via tactical interfamilial marriages, or by taking in a societally well-positioned elder, for example, Johnson shows that love was equally important, especially love between siblings and cousins that frequently crossed from affection to romantic passion. In addition, the work provides a counter history to pervasive understandings of tidy separations between gender roles and public/private domains, demonstrating that successful bourgeois men were invested in both domestic affairs as well as their careers and current events, while women wielded far more influence than generally acknowledged, exerting substantial financial, social, and political power, even if this power typically funneled through the men in their kinship networks. The correspondence amply demonstrates that central to the three families' success were mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousines who counseled men, negotiated introductions, applied pressure to succeed, imposed responsibility, and secured advantageous educational and professional backing. Johnson's painstaking care in reconstructing the webs of the entwined families, as well as their various professional and political appointments, is evident in the text, but the family trees he includes at the start of the chapters provide a convenient reminder of this genealogical mapping and serve as shortcuts for scholars more interested in the accounts of daily life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brittany.

Johnson's method of constructing this history also balances internal and external perspectives. He draws many of his conclusions about kinship networks and provincial bourgeois culture from the families' personal papers. Yet he also references substantial external scholarship that demonstrates that these theories are not limited to this particular family but contribute to larger patterns. So while Johnson sends us on an enjoyable romp through quotidian life during political unrest, revolutions, and régime changes in Vannes, Paris, and even Guadeloupe, he also situates these tales within broad political history. The author's accounts of the challenges of working with such an extensive archival corpus dot the work, in the introduction and at key moments when the available materials shift, such as after the death of a key correspondent or the decision to conduct a business inventory...