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“In the Absence of Males”

Gender, Feudal Succession, and Nobiliary Ideology in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Sylvie Steinberg
Sylvie Steinberg*
Affiliation:
Université de Rouen-GRHis
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Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, aristocratic daughters inherited fiefs in the absence of a male heir. Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, royal decisions and jurisprudence increasingly limited this possibility, imposing masculinity as the primary—though not exclusive—criteria for inheritance. This article explores the legal debates that accompanied this evolution, highlighting a number of changes within the French nobility of this period that reveal a new conception of gender relations. The growing importance of the notion of service, changes to the procedure for proving one’s nobility, and the desire for greater exclusivity within the nobility all reveal how gender was no longer defined in relation to the place and role each individual occupied within the ancestral line or family. Instead, gender assumed an unchanging identity, which, much like nobility itself, was considered inherent to the individual.

Type
Gender Regimes
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2012 , pp. 503 - 537
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012

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References

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72. Traité de la représentation des filles en la succession des fiefs, 37.

73. Ibid., 49.

74. Ibid., 51.

75. This expression is used in anthropology to translate terms of kinship that, in certain languages, indicate sex only as it relates to an individual’s place in the kinship structure, giving the parent’s sex but not the child’s. It is used here to emphasize the fact that, although the vocabulary of Western kinship relations has no term for expressing relative sex, the orders of preference used in feudal successions required that individuals be designated sometimes in an indifferent manner (children successors), sometimes in an absolute manner (male/female), and sometimes in a relative manner (brother/sister or nephew/niece). See Alès, Catherine and Barraud, Cécile, eds., Sexe relatif ou sexe absolu ? De la distinction des sexes dans les sociétés (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 2001), especially 43-48 and 82–86 Google Scholar.

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80. Advis d’aucuns conseillers du Chastelet de Paris, 134. In fact, Numbers XXVII states the exact opposite. When the daughters of Zelophehad approach Moses to complain of being excluded from their father’s succession, he brings their case before the Lord, who says: “If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance to his brethren.” But the defenders of Salic law interpreted this passage as proof that it only applied to ordinary successions, or else, as is the case here, in total contradiction of the text’s meaning, as proof that God approved of the fact that women could not succeed. See Giesey, , Le rôle méconnu de la loi salique, especially 69-72, 155, and 162 Google Scholar.

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103. This, however, was subject to debate. A precise inventory would be worth drafting since, in certain eighteenth-century milieus, the contrary was frequently claimed, the argument being that matrilineal transmission would enable a greater expansion of the nobility. In Burgundy, a decree from the provincial states in 1605 attempted to extend the definition of nobility to include maternal nobility to the third degree. See Arbaumont, Jules d’, “Question de la noblesse maternelle,” Le Cabinet historique (June 1861): 129–132 Google Scholar. In Brittany, revolting peasants made a similar demand in 1675. See Nassiet, Noblesse et pauvreté, 293.

104. The uterine nobility of Champagne had been preserved when the new customs were written (in Troyes, Chaumont, Vitry, Sens, and Meaux), but the privileges it conferred were reduced to purely customary aspects after 1566. See Roque, Gilles de la, Le Traité de noblesse et de ses différentes espèces (Paris: Mémoires et documents, 1701; repr. 1994), 223–34 Google Scholar. The uterine nobility of Champagne provoked a fierce debate among late nineteenth-century scholars. Some of them denied that there had ever existed anything other than a sort of nobility of the second order, halfway between commoners and the genuine nobility. This was the position held by Anatole de Barthélémy, for whom the maxim “la verge anoblit, le ventre affranchit” (the penis enobles, the womb emancipates) caused confusion between the status of freed slaves and nobles. See: Anatole de Barthélémy, Recherches sur la noblesse maternelle (Paris: A. Aubry, 1861); Anatole de Barthélémy, Nouvelles observations contre la noblesse maternelle (Paris: Librairie héraldique de J.-B. Dumoulin, 1865). Conversely, Paul Guilhiermoz suggested that, during the Middle Ages, nobility had been transmitted exclusively by the mother, following the saying “le fruit suit le ventre” (the fruit succeeds the womb). See Guilhiermoz, Paul, “Un nouveau texte relatif à la noblesse maternelle en Champagne,” Bibliothèque de l’École de Chartres (1889): 509–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of the same opinion is Verriest, Léo, Questions d’histoire des institutions médiévales. Noblesse. Chevalerie. Lignages. Conditions des biens et des personnes, seigneurie, ministérialité, bourgeoisie, échevinages (Brussels: self-published, 1960), 77–98 Google Scholar.

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106. The notion of retrospection, intrinsic to any kind of genealogical research, is important here in that it reveals the varying conceptions underlying the same term, “blood,” during different historical periods. In another context, see Zuñiga, Jean-Paul, “La voix du sang. Du métis à l’idée de métissage en Amérique espagnole,” Annales HSS 54-2 (1999): 450–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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109. In Castile, the inclusion of the maternal line in calculations designed to prove nobility of blood was considered evidence of the line’s purity. See Fayard, Janine and Gerbet, Marie-Claude, “Fermeture de la noblesse et pureté de sang en Castille à travers les procès de hidalguía au XVIe siècle,” Histoire, économie et société 1-1 (1982): 51–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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111. This was the case with the families of Blacas-Carros, Blacas d’Aups, and Brun de Castellane in Provence, which was examined by Pietri, in Les Enjeux de la généalogie, 250–52 Google Scholar. In Brittany, the Chambre de la Réformation was also fooled by a commoner married to a noblewoman from a house of which the male line was extinct. See Meyer, , La noblesse bretonne au XVIIIe siècle 1:45 Google Scholar.

112. See Caumartin, Louis-François de, Procez verbal de la recherche de la noblesse de Champagne suivi des Notes secrètes sur ladite recherche (Paris: Sedopols, 1673; repr. 1982 Google Scholar).

113. The adjective “personal” seems to have had at least two meanings when attached to nobility. On the one hand, it qualified nobility acquired at birth, which did not require proof: this is the meaning intended by Robert Hubert when he referred to a woman’s nobility becoming dormant as a result of her marriage to a commoner. On the other hand, it applied to nobility acquired on a personal basis through the exercise of an office: this is, for example, what the Count d’Estaing meant when he lambasted the noblesse de robe. See d’Estaing, Joachim, Dissertation sur l’origine des fiefs (Paris: G. Martin, 1690), 27 Google Scholar.

114. An expression used, for example, by Alouëte, François de L’, Traité des nobles et des vertus dont ils sont formés : leur charge, vocation, rang et degré ... (Paris: R. Le Manier, 1577), fol. 31 Google Scholarv. Cited by Jouanna, L’idée de race 1:152.

115. La Roque, Le Traité de noblesse, 82. On the theoretical knowledge invented by La Roque and based on the legal knowledge and methods of the investigators, see Ribard, Dinah, “Livres, pouvoir et théorie. Comptabilité et noblesse en France à la fin du XVIIe siècle,” Revue de synthèse, 6th series, 1-2 (2007): 111–13 Google Scholar.

116. Sully attributed this very opinion to Henri IV. He himself boasted about his female ancestors: he emphasized that his paternal grandmother Anne de Melun was descended several times over from the first Capetians and that the House of Béthune had, through the women of the family, wed itself to many eminent families, counts of Flanders, dukes of Burgundy, as well as emperors and kings of Bohemia and Hungary. See Aristide, La fortune de Sully, 56 and 59.

117. Maynier de Saint-Marcel-Franfort, Histoire de la principale noblesse de Provence, 28.

118. Ibid., 53. This opinion arose in the middle of a discussion on the integration of Jewish families into the Order of Malta. While the Order indeed required “four quarters” of nobility, the acceptance of testimonial evidence meant that induction was in fact slightly less discriminating.

119. See Godelier’s, Maurice observations on the distinction between filiation and descent introduced by Anglophone anthopologists in Métamorphoses de la parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 101–37 Google Scholar.