The Family and the Nation

The extended title of this book in itself suggests a complex interplay of legal and ideological abstractions current at a time of momentous legislative change in France, and so indeed it proves on reading. For the most part, Jennifer Heuer analyses those complexities with sureness and clarity, and her study is an important contribution to the comparative legal history and political theory of the period. ‘Family’, ‘nation’, ‘gender’ (itself a term not then used in its acquired modern sense), and ‘citizenship’ were all concepts the official meanings of which changed significantly across the forty years studied here. The account begins with the public debates at the end of the old regime, then moves on in greater detail to the unprecedented innovations of the Revolutionary reforms and their reformulation in Napoleon's monumental Civil Code of 1804, and ends more briefly with the revived monarchical discourse under the Bourbon Restoration. It also explains the changing meanings of other related concepts then at the centre of public debate, such as ‘patriotism’ (now seen in terms of a new idea of la patrie), ‘nationality’, ‘foreigner’, ‘naturalisation’, and the like. Besides their technical legal meanings, all of the concepts discussed had strong social and cultural associations, the popular influence of which ensured that judicial practice was often a pragmatic compromise with successive legislative acts. As a result, there was a fundamental continuity in the social relations which underpinned the legal definition of la puissance maritale (the authority of husbands over their wives) and la puissance paternelle (the authority of fathers over their children) within the traditional nexus of the French family. The evidence of several cited cases suggests a prevalent assumption that the unequal legal and political status of women reflected their natural place as wives and mothers in the home, or, as we read, ‘their gendered inability to witness the violence of the Revolution’ (p. 104). Sometimes they even invoked this very argument in court pleas for exemption from punitive laws, such as those aimed at French émigrés and their property in the 1790s—laws which consistently made no exception for the 14,000 women who then followed their menfolk into exile, and so often also into the legal oblivion of ‘civil death’ (mort civile) in their homeland, until Napoleon's amnesties of 1800 and 1802 brought some respite

Citizenship · Compromise · Ideology · Immigration · Legislature · Nationality · Patriotism · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law

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