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chapte five Families Dismantled and Reconstituted, 1880–1940 When women went to court to obtain child support or judicially declared paternity for their children, reconstituting a family with the father was not their stated goal, and the men brought to court did not seek to form a family with the mother and child. Judges, therefore, did not reconstitute families when ascribing paternity; moreover, to have done so would have been against the law. Men and women could choose how to compose their families , either by dismantling or reconstituting them. A man could break apart a family by denying paternity of a child his wife bore. The state could also dismantle and reconstitute families by depriving fathers or mothers of their parental authority and moving those children to a related family member, to a state institution, or to foster parentage. Starting in 1923, the legalization of child adoption reconstituted families in a new and significant way, endowing the child with partial or full family membership and an inheritance. This chapter breaks from the path of paternity searches hewn in the previous chapters and uses concepts of fatherhood to treat related aspects of paternity and a variety of family formation strategies, showing how individuals had agency, not only in cases of recherche de paternité, but also in dismantling and forming family bonds more generally. The history of paternity denial, of deprivation of paternity, and of adoption complements that of recherche de paternité and provides a further glimpse into contested paternity, the evolution of the French family, the roles of the state and kinship systems, and the relationship of nonconformist families with society. This chapter continues to demonstrate how the notion of paternity was more than the relationship between a father and child; it was linked to a range of beliefs, customs, and laws concerning what did or did not constitute a family. The French cultural kinship system, one that did not usually include outsiders , functioned to preserve the family property and name. An idealized view of the family as an organic unit related to the conception of a nation as an organic unit, dependant on the family and its purity. Daily lives, even representations and constructions of the family, however, involved a type of practicality whereby families reconstituted themselves for their own immediate and long-term goals, with family purity not always requisite. Families had long included members not related by blood or marriage; in the twentieth century, through adoption and other family forms, families more freely admitted those outside the blood kinship groups. Even French nationalists came to accept some dismantling and reconstitution of families with a view to saving the children and hence the future of the nation, although the desire to preserve the idealized legal conjugal families and their lineage remained . Disavowal of Paternity Previous chapters have shown how a man might not accept responsibility for a child born to a woman with whom he had a sexual relationship outside of marriage. That refusal could also apply to children born within a legal marriage. If a married man’s wife bore a child whom he strongly suspected was not his, his honor, as well as the moral and material economy of his family , might require that he deny paternity of that child in order to preserve his lineage, property, and name. According to the Civil Code, the man married to the child’s mother at the time of conception was the father, responsible for contributing materially and morally to rearing and educating the child, acting as a father, and providing the child with a civil status and inheritance . Since the law of 6 December 1850, however, if during the legal time of conception they had been geographically far apart, if he was physically unable to have children, if she had hidden her pregnancy and the birth of the child from him, or if she had left their marital household and their community knew about it, a married man could deny paternity of a child born to his wife. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a married man went to court to disavow paternity when he could prove his wife’s adultery, usually with the help of a community of witnesses. A married man had the right to reject a child of his wife’s adultery, although he was free to commit adultery himself without having to bear responsibility. The sexual double standard Families Dismantled and Reconstituted 201 [18.119.126.80] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 21...

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