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Blood Ties and Fictive Ties: Adoption and Family Life in Early Modern France. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Katherine A. Lynch
Kristin Gager's study of adoption practices in early modem France explores a subject that is quite poorly known - in some measure because it was thought not to exist. From the medieval period onwards, Gager shows, there was a high level of prejudice against the formal adoption of children both in systems of customary law that governed northern France and within the ideology of the Roman Catholic Church. Her goal, however, is to demonstrate the persistence of practices of adoption among ordinary Frenchmen, despite these formidable sources of opposition.
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Despite the book's title, Gager's study focuses nearly exclusively on the Paris region. In chapter 1, the author describes the variety of family forms that existed in the sixteenth-century capital, starting from the top of the social structure. She uses the work of Natalie Davis and Lawrence Stone to argue that the early modem period witnessed upper class families' growing consciousness of marriage-based and lineal kin bonds, which encouraged the development of "family strategies" to ensure individual and group success. Adoption, however, does not appear to have been numbered among these strategies. Those Parisians most likely to seek out children for adoption came instead from the middling ranks of the city's population whose family lives were much more open to the creation of "fictive" kin relations through the experiences of wet nursing, apprenticeship and god parenthood.
Chapter 2 addresses issues of medieval laws on adoption and manages to make a potentially arid subject interesting. Most importantly, Gager illuminates the bases of the Church's stated antipathy to adoption, resolving the apparent contradiction between the Church's acceptance of spiritual, invented ties of god parenthood and its suspicion of actual adoption. She shows the importance of the lingering association of adoption with ancient Roman practices in which children were introduced into the family at the wishes of the paterfamilias solely to ensure family continuity. The Church's contrasting emphasis on the marital and biological elements of kinship appears more comprehensible in this light. Gager's examination also suggests that lay Christians and even clergy might accept the actual practice of adoption as long as it appeared to involve values of charity or spiritual kinship that distinguished it from the heirship model of ancient Roman adoption.
Chapter 2 also succeeds in unraveling the legal complexities surrounding the apparent paradox that although compilations of regional customary law (many of them newly compiled, edited, and published in the sixteenth century) declared full adoption to be non-existent or illegal, it nonetheless occurred.(1) Gager resolves this conundrum by clarifying the inheritance rights of adoptive children. Although adopted children had no inheritance rights under most forms of customary law, this did not mean that they could receive no property from their adoptive parents. It meant only that adoptive parents usually had to resort to a written testament and/or the transfer of property inter vivos in order to protect the child's property claims from potentially rapacious collateral kin. These terms were often dictated in the formal adoption records which provide one of the major primary sources of the book.
Gager's analysis of the practice of private adoption is based on some forty notarial contracts of adoption concluded in the capital between 1545-1690. This admittedly thin data base nonetheless allows the author to develop an initial sort of collective portrait of the adults and children involved. The duties of parenthood revealed in the contracts are familiar: adoptive parents promise to treat children as "their own"; to bring them up in the fear of God (and often, given the period under study, as good Roman Catholics), to provide them with education (often), and nearly always with apprenticeship training that will enable both girls and boys to earn their own living decently. Adoptive parents, Gager observes, are nearly all drawn from the "laboring, artisan, and minor merchant segments" of Parisian society, (p. 78) and state in the adoption contracts that they wish to adopt because they are childless, desire an heir and want someone to care for and to care for them in their old age. Gager shows that parent(s) giving up children often transferred funds to the adopting parents to help defray some of the latters' expenses, though children tended to pass from less to more affluent homes. There is no evidence that adoptive parents paid money for the children. Records also show that the two households involved often had pre-existing ties that bound them - ties of kinship, or to a lesser extent, god parenthood and neighborhood. She shows that unmarried and widowed women as well as married couples sought out children for adoption.
Chapter 4 turns to the public form of adoption which involved Parisian couples and orphaned or abandoned children who were wards of the city's foundling institution - the Maison de la Couche, and later the Hopital des Enfants Trouves. Here, Gager discusses the late medieval and early modem history of care for foundlings in the capital. Particularly interesting is her discussion of this subject in the period before the mid-seventeenth century, when royal authority struggled with the Chapter of Notre Dame and other seigneurial authorities to determine exactly who was responsible for foundlings' care. By contrast with later periods, Parisian foundlings in the seventeenth century were few in number, totaling approximately seventy per year.
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