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ABSTRACT
Following the law of 1884 that re-authorised divorce in France, divorce was more frequent in the large cities before spreading to other urban areas and then to rural ones. Divorce rates were especially high in the Seine département from 1884 to the eve of the First World War. In this region, divorced people lived more frequently in Paris than in the suburbs. More precisely, they resided more often on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris proper (intra-muros) and, as an extension of this area, in the suburban cities to the west and, to the east, around the Bois de Vincennes. A comparison of the share of divorced men and women to the economic, demographic and cultural characteristics of the 20 Paris arrondissements and 74 suburban municipalities in the Seine département shows that a portion of the spatial distribution can be explained by the occupational structures of the area. Divorced people seldom lived in the most rural areas. This urban/rural divide can be explained by two main factors that can be complementary: the economic possibility to divorce – and here we will add the economic possibility for women to leave live alone after a divorce – and the social and cultural acceptance of divorce.
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Notes
1. The ‘Divorciaries’ (Divorciaires in French) are in favour of restoring divorce.
2. The Mouvement de la population are yearly statistical publications that provide information on births, marriages, divorces and deaths.
3. It also has to be noted that censuses are self-declared so it is possible that some people declare themselves as married even if they are divorced. Some single mothers may also declare themselves divorced (or widows) if they want to dissimulate their condition.
4. Only the 1886, 1891 and 1896 censuses of the Seine département have been published with detailed data on the city scale.
5. Notifications of divorce judgments are transcribed in the civil register of the city where the couple was married. When we use this kind of data, we can compare the cities where people divorced the most and the cities where were married. This data is very interesting to analyse the differences between couples who stayed married and people who divorced in a specific city (Brée & Gourdon, Citation2019).
6. This law was only applicable for legal separations in 1851 since people were not allowed to divorce until 1884, but thereafter, it was in force until 1972.
7. In the 1891 census, the proportion of individuals in the general population that earned their living, either directly or indirectly (family members, servants), was given for various types of occupations as agriculture, industry, trade or from their own investment income (rentiers).
8. Depending on whether the analysis is done with individual or aggregated data.
9. Illegitimate births will be approached by Coale’s Ih indices, which were measured in Brée (Citation2017).
10. 50% in another French département, 4% in Algeria, 6% abroad.
11. Algeria is then not considered as abroad but as a French département. It is distinguished from the other ones in the published 1891 census but not in the data tables Farcy (Citation1991) used for his work and that are kept in the Paris archives under the classification number D1M8.
12. We use the data collected on the religious practice of the French by the Canon Boulard who has published, in 1947, the first map of rural French religious practice with Gabriel le Bras (see Le Bras, 1955 for an overview of his 25 years of research on religious practice sociology).
13. The number of children is estimated from Coale’s indices using Sardon’s method that allows to convert overall fertility indices If into a number of children (Sardon, Citation1995).
14. Same remark as for Paris (see previous note).
15. I would like to thank the reviewers of this paper and Philippe Bocquier for their good advices about the statistical method for this paper.
16. Number of divorced men or women on the number of men or women of the arrondissement or municipality.
17. The weakness of the effect can be a consequence of the poor documentation of women’s work in old censuses and civil registration systems, especially for women who work on the family farm and for whom the mention ‘unemployed’ is very frequent (Schweitzer, Citation2002).