Family, the State, and Law in Early Modern and Revolutionary France

ABSTRACT

Over the past two decades, feminist historians of early modern and revolutionary France have succeeded in pushing the history of the family in a political direction. They have achieved this not only by highlighting the centrality of the family to early modern and revolutionary political culture, but also by elucidating the ways that families and the state have reshaped one another over time through the medium of law and legal culture. Although the most prominent political histories of the family concern the abrupt shifts wrought by the French Revolution, specialists in early modern France have also charted important if less dramatic changes in the relationship between families and state. Comparing early modern and revolutionary changes to family law reveals that the Revolution not only offered a new but contested republican model of the family, it also changed the practical negotiations through which law is made and remade.