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Abstract
Many were the European towns where remarriage frequency declined, especially for widows, in the 17th and 18th centuries. This article investigates how remarriage models evolved in France, basing our analysis on vital events collected for the fourteen parishes of the town of Rheims in Champagne. A large set of Family Reconstitution Forms for the period 1668-1802 allows the study of remarriage among urban widows and widowers. Through four successive periods of time, we observe changes in remarriage behaviour in this preindustrial center as a case study, in a gender comparative perspective. In urban surroundings, in the late 18th century, strategies of remarriage may have been more flexible than in rural areas. Women were less exposed to family and social pressure preventing them to remarry, discouraging or delaying a new union. The presence of dependent children was always a problem when a widow tried to choose a new partner. It was easier for a man to remarry. A widower used to take a new wife quickly and a younger one, if possible without children at charge. A specific aspect of the urban context was population geographical turn-over and changing labour markets. It would explain, at least partly, the decreasing proportion of remarriages in Rheims. Female urban surplus was a constant, affecting the chances for remarriage, particularly in large European cities.
Notes
1 Ida Blom, twenty years ago, published a bibliographic overview on history of widowhood (Blom, Citation1991), with an emphasis on the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; historians of old age have been also very active on this field and outlined many aspects of widowhood (Aubry, Citation1989; Henderson & Wall, Citation1994; Kertzer & Laslett, Citation1995). Frouke Veenstra and Kirsten van der Ploeg edited another selected bibliography on "Widows in Western History" (Veenstra & van der Ploeg, Citation1995; Bremmer and van den Bosch, Citation1995); they noted then that few articles dealt with the household conditions of widows during the early modern period. Olwen Hufton gave a view of her previous work on eighteenth century Britain and France (Hufton, Citation1984; Citation1995a,Citationb) where she considered also spinsters and other women alone.
2 The Rheims data bank, build in the 1970s and updated in the 1980s, included nominative detailed parish registers information about births, marriages and deaths concerning individuals having a surname beginning with B [including Le B., De B., de la ., de le B. etc.] in the 14 parishes of Rheims (for the period of marriage 1668-1802) and in the hospitals. Tax lists and censuses information were added to vital events and were studied separately. The computerized sample covered 12.8% of the population, surname beginning with B being the more frequent in Northern France.
2 A family reconstitution was successfully completed in the 1970s (see following note on methods). More than 15 000 family reconstitution forms (FRF) were established manually for Rheims, linking all the nominative information available, parish after parish and finally all parishes together, adding hospital records. Among them, 2450 FRF providing a marriage date, the age of the woman and an end of union were digitalized and analysed. The present study is based on this set of family reconstitution forms (FRF). Events related to marriages which occurred in the last period, 1789-1802 were collected until 1820. The computerized set of 2450 Rhemish families (FRF) was sorted by periods of marriage (5 periods of 30years). Sets of socio-professional groups were also established but are not used in the present study devoted to remarriage.
4 Individuals and families came sometimes from far away, as various maps have shown. For out migration, it is extremely difficult - if not impossible - to reconstruct full family course because we usually do not know when the couple (with or without children) or the missing spouse, left Rheims. The present study of “familles achevées” means that the analyse is based here on couples who did not emigrate from Rheims. Both husband and wife are known to have died in the town. Of course some widows may have decided to go back to their native village for a new life and remarry there, but in this case they are not included in the present sample. The study of out migration for a large sample would need a systematic study of nominative censuses. This is not possible in France before the 19th century census registration.
4 When studying the 19th century, historians are able to reconstruct family courses thanks to kind of sources that do not exist during Ancien Régime. From Rheims, we guess that the privileged destination was Paris.
3 About “family reconstitution” methods and related techniques of historical demography analysis practiced from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, see Manuels published by Louis Henry (Fleury & Henry, Citation1956, 1985; Henry, Citation1970 ; Henry & Blum, Citation1988). Henry distinguished between families “achevées” (with an end of union) from “completed” (those providing an end of union occurring after the women has reached age 45). To study remarriage we consider all “familles achevées”, as soon as the date of marriage was known as the age of the spouses. We are lucky that information on age was very well recorded in Rheims and rarely missing.
3 Traditional methods are used in this paper, because the author began her research in 1969 (before personal computers existed), collecting alone vital events from parish registers, an enormous enterprise for an individual project. Louis Henry advertised to apply family reconstitution methods manually (since no satisfactory computer programs were yet available). Parishes were reconstructed separately. This took a long time (Chamoux, Citation1972; Citation1973a). Afterwards, a rearrangement of the family files was conducted in order to follow each couple moving from one parish to the other and identify all vital events concerning the same couple and its children within the town. We hope that a new project could allow a technical rearrangement and expansion of the Rheims data bank, in order to apply a multivariate model on the full sample.
5 I am very grateful to Tamara Hareven who suggested me, in the 1990s, to develop my research in this direction and provided me strong encouragements and advice for tracing intergenerational family histories of merchants, fabricants and textile workers.
6 Many monographic studies using family reconstitutions Henry's method were completed in France in the 1970s and 1980s that would allow further comparative studies. Unfortunately few of them were published and only some of them provide large sets of remarriages with published tables that may be used for tracing precise comparative statistics. This is why we made a choice among them for the present study.
7 Jean Ganiage supervised twenty master theses on 18th century Beauvais and Beauvaisis between 1970 and 1982 (Ganiage, Citation1999, p. 277).
8 About revival of interest towards remarriage, besides the session on “Widowhood and remarriage” that I organized at 7th ESSHC session, Lisbon, I was able to arrange previously two sessions in the frame of the 32nd annual meeting of Social Science History Association/ SSHA, Chicago, November 2007, one on «Remarriage and socio-differentiation » and the second on « Comparative western models of partnership in marriage and remarriage ». See also the special issue of Continuity and Change, 22, 3, 2007, on “Remarriage risks in comparative perspective” (Kurosu, Citation2007; Lundh, Citation2007; Breschi, Manfredini and Fornasin, 2007).
9 The "marriage squeeze," is the effect on marriage of an imbalance between the numbers of males and females in the population. It has been seen as having a great influence on marriage behaviour. Nonetheless, the demographic literature does not contain a clear definition of this concept, or estimates of its impact on marriage (Schoen, Citation1983).
10 It would be interesting to compare Rheims in detail with another case study, as the one provided by the Vernon project. Vital events were computerized for a set of 40 parishes near Vernon in Normandy and family reconstitution was realized. Two periods of marriage were compared, 1700-1749 and 1750-1789 (Beauvallet-Boutouyrie, Citation2001, p. 156).
11 Louis Henry, when studying marriage market, gave important advices to avoid statistical bias (Henry, Citation1969, Citation1981). Particularly, in the Portuguese edition of his Manuel de Démographie historique, he proposed a method how to evaluate the numbers of “missing remarriages”, in order to take account of population mobility between parishes, when only one parish was under study (Henry, Citation1988).
12 In a previous article, the author discussed the importance of female headed households, single or widows (Fauve-Chamoux, Citation1983), using the 1802 census in Rheims. She stressed the small mean household size in urban context when a woman was head of household. For widows, the reduced size of their household was due to departure of children. This could be checked, looking at the corresponding family forms (FRF). Unfortunately, no longitudinal study was systematically conducted on that point. From regular tax lists, the author enlightened later the question of living standards along family course during the 18th century (Fauve-Chamoux, Citation1993, p. 149) and compared Rheims with the town and region of Valenciennes in 1693, where a rich census was available.
13 Normandy was an exemption, where the dowry system prevailed, according to the custom (Dickinson, Citation2005; Fauve-Chamoux, Citation2009).