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chapte two Seduction and Courtroom Encounters in the Nineteenth Century Women went to court to try to collect child support for their children and reparations for themselves from men who had seduced and abandoned them, despite the Civil Code’s prohibition of paternity searches and the towering emotional and financial hardships they faced along the way. Women were not all passive victims who lived unhappily within the laws that attempted to govern their most intimate lives. Quite savvy about legal procedure, some acted in public, using litigation in sometimes futile attempts to redeem their honor and that of their families, but primarily to obtain some financial bene fit. Going to court illustrates women’s agency, or assertion of limited power, within the male-dominated legal system. Motivated by moral outrage and economic need, they found ways in the law to reclaim their bodies from the inflicted wounds of seduction. Although women were deeply vulnerable, some used the courts to assert a form of citizenship, claim damages as a result of an injury, and further their economic ends, with help from their fathers, lawyers, and judges. Judicial decisions helped define the fluid public and private lives of men and women and enforced unwritten codes of honor and behavior. This chapter offers glimpses into people’s complicated lives and strategies, through court proceedings, in an attempt to understand personal relations gone awry and what these meant for social constructions of paternity and the family. Missing from this view are the countless instances where the men assumed paternity, either by recognizing their children, marrying the mothers, or providing sufficient material and emotional support. In courtroom encounters over seduction and paternity, men and women depended on magistrates and lawyers, who almost immediately called into question the provisions and presuppositions of the Civil Code. Public law courts proliferated in postrevolutionary France, and jurisprudence provided elasticity to the structured codified law. This elasticity, not without considerable tension, allowed judges to [re]interpret the law and to hear women’s voices that the Code had silenced or disregarded. During the eighteenth century , laws tended to acknowledge unwed mothers’ plaintive cries identifying the father; local judges, however, generally supported the patriarchal family and tended not to hear the women. In the nineteenth century, the Civil Code supported the patriarchal family, but some local judges managed their way around it with open hearts and ears to hear women’s pleas. In general, nineteenth-century magistrates demonstrated more sensitivity to women, the community, and the culture than did the Civil Code and often took the lead in formulating legal policy. The law moves slowly, but eventually catches up to judicial rulings. In 1804, the Civil Code corresponded to late eighteenth-century judiciary practice. During the nineteenth century, jurisprudence prepared the stage for early twentieth-century revisions of articles in the Civil Code. France had a long history of judicial activism, especially on family matters .1 Starting in the late eighteenth century and accelerating in the nineteenth , with the increased publication of newspapers, legal treatises, and collections of judicial decisions, discussion of judges’ decisions occurred in the public sphere. Reports of court proceedings in the popular press often helped garner public sympathy for the seduced young woman and her poor, fatherless child. Conversely, these narrative dramas sometimes supported men who claimed to be wrongly accused. To some extent, judges played to the public and took into account prevailing attitudes. Wide publicity about trials and judges’ decisions facilitated the formation of public opinion, which led to further judicial action reflecting prevailing codes of conduct and previous decisions . Although there was no official system of precedence in French law, judges, lawyers, and litigants knew of past decisions in similar cases, often quoting them, thus forming a basis for legal precedence, although it was nonbinding .2 Resorting to precedence, even informally, leads to an evolution in ideas and law. Judges were fortified by opinions in past decisions. The law, magistrates, women, and men contested power. Judges had the power to challenge the Civil Code and change implementation of laws through their interpretation—interpretations that went to the very basis of the patriarchal order—while denying that they did so. For the first half of the century, the Code dominated in this power contest; magistrates tended to apply the letter of the law, especially adhering to article 340 forbidding paternity searches. After mid-century, however, the balance of power between the judiciary and the 60 Contested Paternity [3...

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