Pyrenean marriage strategies in the nineteenth century: The French basque case

International Review of Social History

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 93-122

  Arrizabalaga, Marie Pierre ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 29344451481     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859005002087     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. On the demography of the Pyrenees, see G. Gallon, "Le mouvement de la population dans le département des Basses-Pyrénées au cours de la période 1821-1920 et depuis la fin de cette période", Bulletin de la société des sciences, lettres et arts de Pau, 53 (1930), pp. 81-113;
2. Michel Chevalier, La Vie humaine dans les Pyrénées ariégeoises (Paris, 1956);
3. André Etchelecou, Transition démographique et système coutumier dans les Pyrénées occidentales (Paris, 1991);
4. Théodore Lefebvre, Les Modes de vie dans les Pyréné es-Atlantiques orientales (Paris, 1933);
5. Jacques Saint-Macary, La Désertion de la terre en Béarn et dans le Pays Basque (Pau, France, 1939).
6. The "house system" in the Pyrenees is a system which all propertied families respected and upon which they all depended. Families were recognized as household units comprising individuals with different roles and status, cohabiting in one house, all descending from the same family. The house was to be transmitted intact from one generation to the next and was the guarantor of family succession, lineage, and continuity. Family culture imposed these traditional values for the survival of the house so much so that the interests of the house prevailed over those of individuals. The Civil Code threatened these old traditional values, and therefore the integrity of the house, because it protected individual rights over property rights by imposing equal inheritance or the equal partition of land between siblings. As a result of partition, the house could no longer support a three-generational family living together (the stem family). The family business might then go bankrupt and successors be forced to sell the house. To avoid such tragedy, families had to circumvent the new law to maintain single inheritance and thus protect the house system.
7. Georges Ravis-Giordano and Martine Segalen (eds), Les Cadets (Paris, 1994),
8. and Gérard Bouchard, John Dickinson, and Joseph Goy (eds), Les Exclus de la terre en France et au Quebec (XVIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 1998).
9. Rolande Bonnain, Gérard Bouchard, and Joseph Goy (eds), Transmettre, hériter, succéder. La reproduction familiale en milieu rural, France-Quebec, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1992),
10. and D. Comas d'Argemir and J-F. Soulet (eds), La familía als Pirineus (Andorra, 1993).
11. In addition, see works by: Isaac Chiva and Joseph Goy (eds), Les Baronnies des Pyrénées, Maisons, mode de vie, socié té, vol. 1 (Paris, 1981)
12. and Les Baronnies des Pyrénées. Maisons, espace, famille, vol. 2 (Paris, 1986);
13. Alain Collomp, La Maison du père. Famille et village en Haute-Provence aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1983);
14. Bernard Derouet, "Pratiques successorales et rapport à la terre: les sociétés paysannes d'Ancien Régime", Annales ESC, 1 (1989), pp. 173-206.
15. For publications on inheritance systems north of the Loire River, see Martine Segalen, Quinze générations de Bas-Bretons. Parenté et Société dans le Pays Bigouden Sud, 1720-1980 (Paris, 1985);
16. Gérard Béaur, "Land Transmission and Inheritance Practices in France During the Ancien Régime: Differences of Degree or Kind?", in David R. Green and Alistair Owens, Family Welfare: Gender, Property, and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 31-46.
17. On Basque emigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see William A. Douglass and Jon Bilbao, Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World (Reno, NE, 1975).
18. On Basque migration, see articles by Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga: "Réseaux et choix migratoires au Pays Basque. L'exemple de Sare au XIXe siècle", Annales de démographie historique, (1996), pp. 423-446;
19. "Comment le marché de l'emploi national et international a-t-il influencé les destins individuels au sein de familles basques et les modalités de transmission du patrimoine au XIX siècle?", in Christian Dessureault, John Dickinson, and Joseph Goy (eds), Famille et marché (XVIe-XXe siècles) (Sillery, Québec, 2003), pp. 183-198;
20. e siècles (Berne, 2005), pp. 183-195.
21. Historians specialized in inheritance and emigration in the Pyrenees in the nineteenth century have argued this, especially Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Rolande Bonnain. See also Gérard Bouchard, Joseph Goy, and Anne-Lise Head-König (eds), Problèmes de la transmission des exploitations agricoles (XVIIIe-XXe siècles) (Rome, 1998);
22. Anne-Lise Head-König, Luigi Lorenzetti, and Béatrice Veyrassat (eds), Famille, parenté et réseaux en Occident (XVIIe-XXe siècles) (Geneva, 2001).
23. The French Basque country is located in the most western part of the Pyrenees between the Atlantic Ocean in the west and Béarn in the east in the French département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques, and between Spain in the south and the French département of Landes in the north. The country is divided into three provinces: Labourd, Basse-Navarre, and Soule (from west to east). The six villages are: Sare, a highland village in Labourd; Aldudes and Mendive, two highland villages in Basse-Navarre; Aļcay, a highland village in Soule; and Isturits and Amendeuix, two lowland villages in Basse-Navarre. The regional capital city is Bayonne, a port city on the Atlantic Ocean. These isolated villages were deliberately selected away from Bayonne in order to make sure that the nearby regional city did not constitute a natural magnet to the excess rural population. As a result of the distances involved, people from isolated villages then had a wider variety of migration options.
24. Because some of the 120 couples' grandchildren, born in the late 1890s or early 1900s, lived long lives and died in the 1980s or 1990s, we systematically consulted the civil registers of the 6 villages and of all the 15-20 neighbouring villages from 1800 until the present.
25. This was the only way to study migration, because the nineteenth-century census data for all Basque villages were destroyed in two successive fires in the archives of Bayonne and Pau in the early twentieth century.
26. Children who died before the age of 21 were regarded as never having reached adulthood. A total of 111 of the 567 second-generation children (19.6 per cent of the cohort) and 230 of the 1,039 third-generation children (22.1 per cent of the cohort) died before reaching 21.
27. We were unable to locate the marriage certificates of all married descendants, especially those of emigrants who married in America or in large cities such as Bordeaux or Paris. As a consequence, our data suggest that only 40.2 per cent of the third-generation cohort married. It is likely that more of them actually married, but we were unable to reconstitute their lives, let alone their backgrounds. Nonetheless, many of this third-generation cohort probably remained single.
28. Women did not emigrate as much as men. Indeed, among the second- and third-generation cohorts, 67.5 per cent and 48.2 per cent of women respectively never left their rural environment, compared with 54.9 per cent and 37 per cent respectively for men (see Table 2). As a consequence, women's destinies were reconstituted in greater details than men's,
29. HISCLASS: a standard social-class scheme based on the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO). See the introduction to the present volume. The HISCLASS classification runs from 1 to 12: 1 and 2 referring to higher managers and higher professionals; 3, 4, and 5 to lower managers, lower professionals, clerical and sales personnel, and lower clerical and lower sales personnel; 6 and 7 to foremen and propertied medium-skilled workers; 8 to propertied farmers; 9 to landless lower-skilled workers; 10 and 12 to landless lower-skilled farm workers and unskilled farm workers; and 11 to unskilled workers. These have been restructured to form seven categories in the tables.
30. We were able to collect an extensive amount of information on the marriages of those who had settled in the local towns and the regional cities of Bayonne and Pau because we systematically consulted their registers from 1830 to 1950. We could not do the same for those who emigrated to America. Nevertheless, information on them was sometimes available in land and succession registers, Hence the number of unknown.
31. It is important to note that, for the purpose of our analysis, we disregarded all "unknown cases", individuals whose destinies were cases partially available or missing. Indeed, we sometimes know that specific individuals married, but we were either unable to collect information on the origins of their spouse or the data did not provide information on their in-laws.
32. Besides Frederick Le Play's works, see more recent contributions on the matter by Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Emiko Ochiai (eds), Maison et famille souche: perspectives eurasiennes (Kyoto, 1998).
33. On the matter of Pyrenean single inheritance strategies (the Basque case included) in comparison with Asia, sec Emiko Ochiai (ed.), The Logic of Female Succession: Rethinking Patriarchy and Patrilineality in Global and Historical Perspective (Kyoto, 2003).
34. See too RoseDuroux, "Emigration, Gender, and Inheritance. A Case Study of the High Auvergne, 1700-1900", in Green and Owens, Family Welfare, pp. 47-72.
35. To marry within their social group, men and women had to present a dowry equivalent to the préciput (equal to 25 per cent of the assets) or the extra share which the heir or heiress received upon marriage. If they were unable to save for such a dowry (as a result of the family being large), they could not marry within their social group.
36. The inheritance strategies to secure single inheritance were complex. They aimed at maintaining the house and property intact from one generation to the next while providing the non-inheriting siblings with compensation (generally less than their equal share) so that they could be comfortably settled and would not demand their equal share of the inheritance (this would have forced the estate to be partitioned). In this manner, the heir or heiress inherited the entire property, and one or two siblings generally received compensation for their share of the inheritance upon leaving the family house (generally in their youth, before their parents' death); this compensation they then used to marry into a propertied family or to emigrate to cities or overseas. The others remained single (at home or in the village, in towns or cities), never daring to force a partition of the estate to obtain their legal shares. All, however, enjoyed family solidarity. To survive, the system sometimes required family cohesion and individual self-denial.
37. Unlike propertied families, landless families rarely lived as stem families. Their rented farms were too small to house and occupy extended families. They often lived close to one another (as neighbours), but as nuclear families. Hence Peter Laslett's conclusions on the high frequency of simple households since the modern era.
38. Men valued their rural environment and their lifestyles as propertied farmers or medium-skilled workers. When they could not secure such a lifestyle in their rural environment, they emigrated to America, where they believed they had a greater chance of improving their lives than in cities, and where they could reproduce their family's lifestyle. For comparison, see Lorenzetti, Head-König, and Goy, Marchés, migrations et logiques familiales.
39. Recent comparative works on migration are numerous. See particularly Frans van Poppel, Michel Oris, and James Lee (eds), The Road to Independence: Leaving Home in Western and Eastern Societies, 16th-20th centuries (Berne, 2004).
40. Pierre Bourdieu also argued that women were more emancipated than men, adopting modern attitudes more rapidly than men in their quest for a better and easier life, especially in towns or cities; Pierre Bourdieu, Le bal des célibataires, Crise de la société paysanne en Béarn (Paris, 2002).
41. For a comparative study on family in the age of urbanization, see Gérard Bouchard and Joseph Goy (eds), Famille, économie et société rurale en contexte d'urbanisation (XVIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris, 1990).
42. This was also the case in other parts of the Pyrenees: in Béarn, as Jacques Poumarède and Christine Lacanette-Pommel have noted; in the Baronnies, as Rolande Bonnain has shown; and in Esparros, as Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux has explained. On the matter of inheritance strategies in a comparative perspective see Fauve-Chamoux and Ochiai, Maison et famille souche.
43. This right was termed the "droit de chaise". It was derived from ancient family rights and, according to pre-revolutionary customs, entitled all unmarried siblings, men or women, who did not receive a dowry, to live and die in the family house. Though deprived of compensation which would otherwise have enabled them to marry decently into a propertied family, these men and women could enjoy a decent life with the heir or heiress until death. This was a way to avoid providing additional dowries which might burden the family financially, to limit land partition, and, consequently, to maintain the family assets (the house system, earlier explained) intact from one generation to the next, despite the egalitarian laws of the Civil Code.