Dead Hands, or, How the French Stopped the Dead Seizing the Living

Abstract

The French Revolution’s severe restriction of the right of bequest reflected and consolidated a longstanding French legal skepticism about the ability of the dead to control property and, through property, the living. This article argues that this “resistance” to the power of the dead, and its legal enactment by the Revolution, had significant consequences not only for the legal but also for the literary cultures of post-Revolutionary France. The most straightforward of these was the relative absence of inheritance plots, and especially plots involving wills, in nineteenth-century French fiction, compared to their abundance in Victorian fiction. But through a reading of Honoré de Balzac’s “The Elixir of Life” and Colonel Chabert, the article suggests that this resistance was itself sometimes thematized, and allowed for a reflection on the difficult relationship of modern France to its Revolutionary and pre-Revolutionary past, as well as on the all-powerful status of the law.

Keywords:

• inheritance law
• inheritance in literature
• French Revolution
• Balzac
• Honoré de
• property in literature

Notes

1 For a history of the doctrine, see Jacques Krynen, “‘Le Mort saisit le vif’: genèse médiévale du principe d’instantanéité de la succession royale française,” Journal des savants (1984): 187–221.

2 Krynen, “Le Mort saisit le vif,” 192. See Code civil des Français: édition originale et seule officielle (Paris: Imprimerie de la République, 1804), art. 724. This and all subsequent translations are my own.

3 See Andrew J. Counter, Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), 79–81.

4 Discours de M. de Mirabeau l’aîné, sur l’égalité des partages dans les successions en ligne directe [etc] (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1791), 3.

5 Discours de M. de Mirabeau, 9.

6 Ibid., 9.

7 Ibid., 14.

8 For an exhaustive account of the practice, see Élie Haddad, “Les Substitutions fidéicommissaires dans la France d’Ancien Régime,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome—Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 124, no. 2 (2012).

9 Charles-Georges-Thomas Garnier, Mémoire présenté à l’Assemblée nationale […] sur l’ordre des successions, le mode des partages […] et encore sur les substitutions et donations (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1791), 11. On these regional variations, see Counter, Inheritance, 2–8.

10 See Thierry Bressan, “La Critique de la condition mainmortable en France à la veille de la Révolution,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 307 (1997): 75–91.

11 See Jean Imbert, “Les ‘Gens de main-morte’ avant l’édit de 1749,” Cahier des Annales de Normandie, 24 (1992): 337–46; and François-Régis Ducros, “L’Aliénation des biens ecclésiastiques sous l’Anciem Régime,” Hypothèses, 13 (2010): 201–9. Note that a one-time duty, the droit d’amortissement, was levied on property acquired by gens de main-morte.

12 Edicts (ordonnances) of August 1747 and August 1749. On d’Aguesseau, see Isabelle Storez, “La Philosophie politique du chancelier d’Aguesseau,” Revue historique 540 (1981): 381–400.

13 Haddad, “Les Substitutions fidéicommissaires,” 6. The edict required the public registration of entailed properties, in order to protect potential lenders.

14 See Imbert, “Les ‘Gens de main-morte’,” 345.

15 See Counter, Inheritance, 4.

16 Pierre-François Clerget, Coup d’oeil philosophique et politique sur la main-morte (London: n. pub., 1785), 37.

17 Garnier, Mémoire, 9.

18 Edme-Hilaire Garnier-Deschênes, Observations sur la faculté de tester (Paris: imprimerie de Du Pont, 1791), 19, 21.

19 Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, De l’étendue et des bornes naturelles du droit de tester (Paris: Baudouin, 1790), 8.

20 See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 64–71.

21 See Counter, Inheritance, 7–8, on these later developments.

22 See Xavier Martin, “The Paternal Role and the Napoleonic Code,” trans. Trista Selous, in Paternity and Fatherhood: Myths and Realities, ed. Lieve Spaas (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 31.

23 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (London: Penguin, 1996), 16.

24 Honoré de Balzac, “L’Elixir de longue vie” (1830), in La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. 11 of 12 (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1980), 485. Subsequent page references are given in the text.

25 There exists a large critical literature on Balzac and the law, of which the following are some highlights: Adrien Peytel, Balzac, juriste romantique (Paris: Ponsot, 1950); Marie-Henriette Faillie, La Femme et le Code civil dans “La Comédie humaine” de Balzac (Paris: Didier, 1968); Tim J. Farrant, “Le Rôle des modèles judiciaires dans l’élaboration du discours balzacien,” Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises 44 (1992): 177–89; Pierre-François Mourier, Balzac: l’injustice de la loi (Paris: Michalon, 1996); and Michel Lichtlé, Balzac, le texte et la loi (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2012).

26 Tim Farrant, Balzac’s Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86–7.

27 Olivier Besuchet, “‘Rien de nouveau sous le soleil’? L’Indice intertextuel dans L’Élixir de longue vie de Balzac,” A Contrario, 20.1 (2014): 113–27.

28 See Farrant, Balzac’s Shorter Fictions, 87.

29 This allusion to testamentary freedom represents a shift from Balzac’s earlier support of the reinstatement of primogeniture, which he called for in a pamphlet of 1826.

30 Jean-Marie Roulin, “The Return of the Undead: The Body Politic in Le Colonel Chabert,” South Central Review 29, no. 3 (2012): 21.

31 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 128.

32 Honoré de Balzac, Le Colonel Chabert (1846), in La Comédie humaine, iii (1976), 312. Subsequent page references are given in the text.

33 Charte constitutionnelle du 4 juin 1814, in Les Constitutions de la France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 219 (art. 9).

34 Cf. Charte constitutionnelle, art. 11; on forgetting, see also Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 121–3. Note that Caruth mistakenly suggests that the Restoration was eager to “return property to the aristocrats” (122), where in fact the regime’s Charter forbade this in most cases.

35 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 119.

36 Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, in Œuvres, ed. Alain Thibaudet and René Dumesnil, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951–52), 129.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew J. Counter

Andrew J. Counter is Associate Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. He is the author of Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family (Oxford: Legenda, 2010) and The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).