Policing paternity: historicising masculinity and sexuality in early-modern France

Abstract

In early-modern working communities, masculinity for young lower-rank men was embedded in particular performances and practices of licit intimacy. This essay analyses the specific expectations and parameters for men as well as women through which communities acknowledged and validated expressions of youth sexuality while marking and policing boundaries beyond which youthful courtship could become threatening to household and neighbourhood stability. Young men and women were the focus of these efforts just as they themselves participated in the assessment of appropriate behaviour. These issues suggest an on-going negotiation and contestation about what was appropriate for single men and women in terms of intimacy, and a clear sense that a violation of the community norms carried consequences for men as well as women.

Keywords::

• masculinity
• early modern
• intimacy
• youth
• sexuality
• Lyon
• France

In 1670, Madeline Vacheron asked her local court in Lyon to imprison her long-time partner, Jean-Paul Hugouin, unless he paid her 1500 livres or married her within three days. They had been together for more than a decade and she was pregnant with their fifth child.1 Hugouin went for a classic early-modern defence: Vacheron had been someone else's mistress for three years before their relationship started, an allegation that implied that her credibility and virtue were so corrupted that he should not be responsible for subsequent events. However, the lawyer for the court (and thus the state), the royal prosecutor, summed up the case for the judges by focusing not, as we might expect, on her early history or indeed her long out-of-wedlock intimacy with Hugouin, but instead very critically on his behaviour and legal strategy. It was, he said, ‘ill-judged’ for Hugonin to give the excuse of her history before they met when they had been together for years with several children and had ‘a life so conforming to that of a husband and wife’, a pattern that had ‘deceived’ her to expect marriage and indeed deceived their neighbours into thinking they were married. For Hugonin's accusation to carry any weight against her claim, the royal prosecutor continued: ‘It would be necessary that he had not abused her impudently for so long.’ That is, Hugonin had made his bed and had to lie in it. The royal prosecutor concluded with the recommendation that Hugonin ‘be condemned to marry the said Madeline Vacheron or pay her 2000 livres and take responsibility for the children – and had to chose the option he preferred in three days or she would get to choose’.2

This dispute between consensual intimate partners with its resort to the legal system and imprisonment sharply tellingly highlights the ways in which sexuality was a pivotal element of masculinity in early-modern communities. For modern historians, perhaps the most surprising residents of seventeenth-century French city prisons were the young men who had been detained under court orders requested by women who claimed they were pregnant. The men were sometimes held immediately after the initial complaint while the investigation proceeded or at some midpoint in the proceedings or until they paid what the court decided they were liable for – or until they married the offended party. Others were threatened with imprisonment if they failed to appear to answer the court's questions or until the money awarded to their partners was paid. Marguerite Joubert complained to the court in 1663, for example, that she had known Jean Bonjour about six months and slept with him after he promised to marry her on numerous occasions, but when she found out she was pregnant he did not want to keep his promises. So she asked the court to bring him in to respond to her complaint and ‘further to keep him in prison until he had kept the promises he often made her:’ that is, until he married her.3

Although these disputes and their many counterparts show that communities and local courts were focused on the disruptive potential of men's extramarital sexuality, this identification of men's sexuality as problematic is a still-emerging area of scholarly focus. Early-modern historiography traditionally emphasised the disciplining of female sexuality to be the key early-modern dynamic, driven by religious reformations and state formation. Katherine Crawford's valuable 2007 synthesis built out of many regional studies, European Sexualities, 1400–1800, is emblematic of this viewpoint.4 The dominant historiographical paradigm stresses that women were seen as the source of disruptions with regard to sexuality and were thus the focus of intense regulatory energy as well as prosecution.

Early-modern communities were indeed concerned about inappropriate female sexuality, but they were also concerned about young men's sexuality, and the explanation for the eliding of that part of the contemporary focus seems to lie primarily in the perspectives of the sources historians have traditionally used to examine sexuality. That is, the very particular construction of gendered sexuality for early-modern Europeans that has seemed beguilingly compelling to historians is based largely in elite print culture and in criminal-court proceedings where women usually appeared for what were judged to be sexual infractions and men for other matters.5 When we look at attitudes and practices from other archival angles, however, we see a more complicated story. By far, the majority of early-modern court actions were civil and highlight personal concerns of individuals and communities who bring the cases themselves rather than the issues of states or elites. In fact, as I have argued, in terms of gender identity and sexuality (and, indeed, in other respects), the social world of civil litigation was the opposite of the world ‘revealed’ by criminal prosecution.6 In litigation, we see women as workers, creditors, debtors, tenants and so on as well as sexual partners; we see men with equally many roles, including engagement in various kinds of male sexual behaviours that were repeatedly addressed in the civil process as problematic.

The burgeoning attention to early-modern male sexuality is beginning to identify key issues and in different sites. The control of male sexuality in terms of homosexuality has been a focus in work on Europe and colonial Latin America. Historians have found reformed Protestant and Catholic regimes to be concerned with the regulation of sexuality, especially but not only in terms of persuading fathers to take responsibility for offspring born out of wedlock as seen in Cornelia Hughes Dayton's discussion of Puritans in Geneva and New Haven or Edward Behrend-Martínez's work on the varied jurisdictions committed to regulating male sexuality in early-modern Spain. The longer roots of these practices are visible in Susan Broomhill's discussion of the use of notarial contracts to manage such situations even in the early sixteenth century in France.7

Scholars of the emerging histories of early-modern masculinity have begun to consider sexuality as a variable in the many-faceted register in which age, rank, reputation and competing priorities also complicated male privileges and obligations. I argued that a complex repertoire of practices of masculinity existed for French working men; Alexandra Shepard made a similar argument in her pioneering work on masculinity in early-modern England. Patricia Simons and Katherine Crawford have both recently emphasised the centrality of pleasure, and not just procreation, in normative elite discourses about male sexuality. Early-modern masculinity was not in fact a homogenous category, and while men enjoyed a range of legal and cultural privileges, access to what is often called patriarchal privilege was by no means uniform among them. I have shown that extramarital sexuality by married men in working communities in France was identified as problematic and damaged reputations, Bernard Capps has argued that sexual reputation was critical to concepts of masculinity in early-modern England, and Edward Behrend-Martínez has pointed to the tension between new ideals of manhood based on sexual probity for married and single men in early-modern Spain which contrasted with older constructions of masculinity that valorised a kind of hyper-sexuality.8 So the key role of sexuality as a constituent of early-modern masculinity is starting to emerge.

This article interrogates the intersection of sexuality and masculinity for young men from the vantage point of material for the decades following the mid-seventeenth century which are now filed in the archives under the category of ‘pregnancy declarations’ (‘declarations de grossesse’). The law mandating such declarations has become an iconic element of the historiographical emphasis on discipline as the key motif in early-modern female sexuality. In 1556 Henry II issued an edict against the ‘concealment of pregnancy and birth’, which required pregnant women to make public declarations about their status. The edict was part of a raft of legislation made famous in the ground-breaking work of Sarah Hanley which also included, for example, laws which required parental consent for marriage and made elopement or abduction without parental permission (rapt) a capital offence. Hanley argued that this legislation not only bound the interests of families and the state closely together, but also expanded the disciplining of young women even more than young men.9

However, the files labelled as ‘declarations’ show quite different uses of the legal avenue which hint at a more complex story in practice than a focus on the edict as a way to discipline female sexuality suggests. For sure the female plaintiffs were all pregnant, but, in the archival manner we all know and love, the 37 departmental archival boxes classified as ‘declarations’ hold thousands of pages of records for the 150 years from the mid-seventeenth century to the Revolution – with virtually no actual ‘declarations’ as such. Instead the cases gathered under this archival classification usually involved pregnant women who asked the court to question the men they identified as the fathers about the events of their relationships. Only rarely were specific claims of ‘rapt’ or ‘seduction’ made, which were possible criminal charges. Most were categorised at the time simply as ‘complaints’ (plaintes), and they were handled as civil matters. In almost all cases, young single women used this legal avenue to invite the courts to discipline their male intimate partners rather than being disciplined themselves.

The ‘declarations’ have sometimes been dismissed as formulaic, but this characterisation is too simplistic and hides the varied nature of the documents through the eighteenth century. In fact, the requirement to make such declarations was honoured more in the breach at least until the early eighteenth century when municipalities started to mandate them, and these city declarations do seem to have been more perfunctory and formulaic. The eighteenth-century declarations recorded by the municipality in Lyon seem similar, for example, to the Nantes municipal declarations Jacques Depauw examined in a seminal 1972 article about illicit sexuality, the earliest of a series of works in which historians have turned on occasion to this kind of material.10 However, some complainants used local royal courts both before the city mandates and after (alongside the municipal declarations) to seek recourse in the event of pregnancies not followed by marriage; these legal actions always generated diverse material. Many of the surviving Lyonnais cases include transcripts of question-and-answer sessions (‘interrogatories’ in the French legal system) with both plaintiff and defendant and depositions from witnesses as well as the occasional recommendation from a royal prosecutor or the brief judgements, which were all that French judges recorded in writing. They reveal, of course in the highly filtered form of cultural production involved in legal process and record-keeping, the voices and debates of young people and their elders as well as court officials on issues involved with young people's premarital intimacy.

As starting points, I want to reject the category of ‘illicit’ as covering all forms of extramarital sexuality and to explore the ways in which young men's sexuality was just as embedded as young women's in social, cultural and legal attitudes and practices which marked some expressions of sexuality as clearly wrong – and punishable by a variety of means – and others as appropriate.11 For early-modern young people, their families and communities, sexual desire and some forms of intimacy were not in fact illicit; what was illicit was intercourse that led to out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and even then perhaps not in every case. That left a lot of room for manoeuvre. The possibilities and parameters of licit desire and the licit practices associated with it for single men emerged in court-case discussions. I certainly do not intend to ignore the existence of coerced sex in many forms, but to interrogate the parameters of young people's licit and illicit desire against a historiography and elite cultural discourse that frame extramarital sexuality as forced or sluttish and a problem gendered at root as female.

This article explores attitudes about and experiences of licit intimacy between young people as a vector of early-modern masculinity. It analyses the specific expectations and parameters through which communities acknowledged and validated expressions of youth sexuality while marking and policing boundaries beyond which youthful courtship could threaten household and neighbourhood stability. Young men and women were the focus of these efforts just as they themselves participated in the assessment of appropriate behaviour. It looks at the management of young men's sexuality, at what spurred the use of a legal means to discipline young men, and at the relationship between law, legal practice and sexuality. These issues suggest an on-going negotiation and contestation about what was appropriate for single men and women in terms of intimacy, and a clear sense that a violation of the community norms carried consequences for men as well as women. In early-modern working communities, masculinity for young men was embedded in particular performances and practices of licit intimacy.

Negotiating licit intimacy

Young men themselves as well as their intimate partners, friends, neighbours, co-workers and kin negotiated licit intimacy in a variety of ways. Clearly not all the vested parties were in complete agreement about what was appropriate between young singles. Gender and generational fault lines were evident in terms of what the exact parameters of respectable intimacy were, but nevertheless a broad consensus existed that acknowledged a wide range of intimacy as acceptable and appropriate between young people. In fact, young women, their families and the witnesses who articulated community views all demonstrated a powerful inclination to see young men's sexuality as also potentially problematic, and their debates indicate the energy devoted to distinguishing and monitoring licit intimacy as a predictable and quotidian reality in relationships between young people.

Certainly what we now consider a stereotypical early-modern discourse existed about the threat women's sexuality posed to men. In the 1658 case between the servant, Francoise Beaujollin, and her employer, the silk merchant, Louis Bichon, the royal prosecutor wrapped his recommendation that Bichon be released from prison in a tirade about men's vulnerability to women's deviousness, especially sexual. If her ‘simple statement’ that Bichon was the father without other proof of other kinds was taken as ‘sufficient’ the prosecutor said, it would ‘create a maxim with perilous consequences’ that would encourage similar women to prostitute themselves more easily in the hope of their children being supported. Moreover, he continued, a woman who would accuse her master in this way was no doubt capable of ‘abandoning herself to others’ against whom she would then make similar accusations. The prosecutor imposed this highly gendered interpretative framework on the circumstances even while he acknowledged that in the wake of Beaujallion's complaint to the court, Bichon had been caught by sergeants trying to flee the city dressed as a woman, a choice that might seem to imply Bichon thought he indeed had something to run away from.12

However, even for court lawyers, these kinds of statements were exceptional, as the counter example of the court lawyer in the Vacheron-Hugonin case indicates. Matthew Gerber has recently shown that elite jurisprudence in bastardy cases, at least until the early eighteenth century, in fact sought to protect young women and their families by penalising extramarital fathers in a number of ways, including compulsory marriages.13 On-the-ground practices, even in local courts, and much less outside the courts, were not of course simply the outcome of such elite legal principles, but this kind of jurisprudential discourse highlights the need to re-examine many assumptions about attitudes to sexuality in other sites.

Even in the ‘she said, he said’ crossfire magnified in the process of litigation and the record of it, common ground emerged in the marking of the boundary between licit and illicit intimacy as well as in the debate over the parameters. Vital Delphin, an apprentice stocking-maker, and Jeanne Quentin, the daughter of his master, who said she also worked in her father's trade, agreed that in the four years since he had come to live with them as an apprentice they had constantly kept company with each other. He said that he ‘had crossed the limits of decency’ with her. She said ‘the love in her heart’ made her weak and agree to his ‘liberties’ and that he never missed an opportunity to tell her he loved her and didn't want anything more than that they be united in marriage. She had no experience, she said. They had kissed on the mouth, he said, and she ‘had taught him things of which he was until then ignorant and which decency does not permit him to describe’. Vital confessed to his priest who told him to leave his job to avoid any ‘shameful commerce’ with her. He left but she was already pregnant. Two witnesses recalled conversations with Vital just the previous weekend after his return to Lyon. They observed to him that it was a ‘nice business’ he had had with Jeanne. He ‘smiled’ and said he was ready to marry her if her father wanted and he ‘had done wrong by her’ in having intercourse.14

Their intimacy as recounted through the filter of legal records indicates that young men themselves identified parameters of appropriateness as did their partners. Jeanne distinguished between ‘liberties’ and intercourse, for which she used a common euphemism ‘last favours’ — the ‘liberties’, which were earlier favours, were apparently acceptable. Delphin coded his statement to the court in likely contrived innocence (‘impure touches’ and ‘indecent practices’ which she had persuaded him into in the months before they had sex), given the contrast with his seemingly nonchalant discussion of the same with his friends. However, even in a bar chat with male friends, he framed intercourse as a mistake and his wrongdoing, albeit an error he was willing to fix through marriage. For young men and women, expressions of intimacy short of intercourse were routine elements of youth relationships.

Debates over intimacy fuelled generational conflicts between men as, not surprisingly, women's fathers and their sexual partners could become antagonists. But these disputes centred on rank and marriage in the event of pregnancy, rather than on youthful intimacy per se. Fathers had often been well aware for months of growing intimacy between their daughters and their male visitors, but were outraged only when it seemed that marriage might not follow pregnancy or where rank differences meant they did not like the solution of marriage. Jeanne's father made no reference in court to the long intimate history between his daughter and his apprentice (who had been keeping company, to use an old-fashioned phrase, for four years according to their account), but highlighted his recent discovery that his daughter was six months pregnant. For her father, it was the ‘fault’ of Delphin. Quentin père wanted ‘repair’ of the harm because this situation was ‘a big crime on the part of a domestic worker against the daughter of his master’. Apparently here the remedy of marriage was not appealing to the father because of the cross-current of what he perceived as unequal rank.

The issue of rank that Quentin père focused on here clearly framed parameters of licit intimacy between young people – licit meant not only avoiding intercourse, but also avoiding intimate relations between social unequals for whom marriage would be an unlikely outcome. Marie Maugard, a seamstress, recalled how she and Jean Ravier, a cook, had explicitly discussed their equal status as well as his intentions (all honourable) as two important issues that meant no obstacles existed to their relationship. She consulted her kin, and they, as well as neighbours, knew they were a couple who were seen going for walks together on many evenings, kissing and even engaging in more intimate behaviour, such as Ravier touching her breasts. For their community monitors, all this behaviour was public knowledge and licit, and read as indications that they were likely to marry.15

These behaviours found cross-generational acceptance among young men and women, as well as their family and friends, of young people's desire for intimacy as usual and appropriate so long as it was rank specific. Young couples took lots of walks together, both unchaperoned and with groups of friends, and their neighbours and kin knew that they were keeping company with each other. Elizabeth Rozet, for instance, who sewed for a living, recalled her relationship with Jean Bouin, a dyer. They had known each other for several years when he started stopping by to see her and saying he wanted to marry her. She told him she ‘wasn't her own mistress and he would have to speak to her father’. Bouin said she had nothing to worry about as he only wanted her to be his wife. So she agreed to start taking walks with him, and he began to proposition her to ‘let him enjoy her’ which she resisted for a while. And then he overcame her resistance and they started having intercourse. Even when she told him she was pregnant, he said he wasn't bothered at all by that and he would marry her soon.16

Peers certainly watched young people's behaviour, but they tolerated quite a wide range of performances of desire. Barthelemy Caron and Elizabeth Demin often walked around together, their friends watched them kiss, and saw him caress her breasts and put his hands down her skirt. None seemed to think anything was amiss, saying only she made no effort to stop him which they seemed to accept as a sign of her consent, not inappropriate behaviour on his or her part. Marguerite Minquet and Estienne Dumaretz held hands and engaged in ‘all kinds of caresses, and he kissed her on the face’ in front of their peers. Youth heterosociability pivoted around evening walks during which young couples were free to engage in a range of intimacy in front of their friends, neighbours, family and community members. None of these expressions of intimate desire was regarded as problematic. Indeed, after the usual array of statements about Francoise Namy and Guillaume Bergeron's relationship, which included going out most evenings between 8pm and 10pm, being ‘very friendly’ with each other, ‘kissing and caressing’, one acquaintance added explicitly that they had not engaged in any ‘inappropriate behaviour’.17

The cues for inappropriate behaviour that crossed the line between licit and illicit were closely tied to choices associated with increased likelihood of sex. Young people were expected to keep company in public, even if their public were strangers, and any effort to be inside together or out of sight of other people was regarded as suspicious. A neighbour remembered she often saw a young couple talk in the evenings in the street outside her house, but when they disappeared around the back for 90 minutes, she suspected their conviviality had gone too far. Neighbours or co-workers frowned on any visiting in rooms where young people slept. Meanwhile both young men and young women defended their behaviour – and denied they had done anything inappropriate – by insisting they had never been in each others’ rooms.18

At the same time, observers felt free to speak up when they saw signs that youthful intimacy might be slipping towards intercourse and again men regulated each others’ behaviour in terms of marking boundaries of appropriate intimacy for young people. Phillipe Guy, the 50-year-old neighbour of lace-maker Philberte DeLuis, for example, noticed Rene Gaultier hanging out with her ‘continually’ and often going into her room, ‘which obliged’ Guy to speak to Gaultier at the door to ask him what he was doing. Gaultier insisted he had no ‘bad intentions’, but Guy nevertheless said he did not want Gaultier to visit DeLuis anymore without making a promise of marriage.19

Young men's sexuality was the subject of close surveillance by themselves, their peers, neighbours and co-workers as well as parents and other kin who all watched closely for signs that shifts in intimacy of the kind that made potential paternity (as well as maternity) likely. Intercourse was in fact one highly policed pole of a wide spectrum of expressions of desire which were quotidian, some tied to promises of marriage and some not. Even intercourse was not illicit when followed by marriage, and there was never any mention of anyone – parents, court officials or community members – finding premarital sex inappropriate in the context of clearly established existing agreement to marry. Breach of promise-to-marry cases across early-modern Europe attest to high rates of premarital sex when tied to promises of marriage. Lyonnais young women steadfastly claimed in court that they had engaged in intercourse only with expectations of marriage secured by promises clearly in place. This context for premarital intercourse was never challenged as illicit. Young people's intimacy, and even intercourse, became illicit only when pregnancy was de-coupled from marriage.

Managing illicit sexuality

When young people did indeed engage in illicit sexuality in the form of intercourse, the male as well as female partners, their family, friends and community used a variety of means to manage the outcome. These included a range of strategies implemented well before an unplanned pregnancy got the couple into court. Statistics on low illegitimacy but high rates of premarital conception indicate that on most occasions when young single women did get pregnant, their partners did indeed marry them, whether willingly or with some informal encouragement. Going to court was one among several options to resolve the situation, even if it is the most visible to historians today. When a pregnancy was extramarital for any reason, young men often chose to and certainly were expected to remedy the situation in some other way, and not simply walk away leaving the pregnant woman and her family or community to deal with the fall-out. For young men, their ability to preserve their reputation depended on their willingness to engage the consequences of their sexual activity.

Even though illegitimacy has been regarded over centuries as a classic example of an early-modern gender double standard, these Lyonnais cases suggest a more nuanced pattern. The common assumption is that men ‘got away with it’ and had no trouble marrying subsequently, whereas when women's experience of unwed motherhood was well known, their prospects for subsequent marriage – a key to any kind of stable life – were seriously damaged. In cities like Lyon, however, some of the solutions may have left women also able to marry. In addition, men were clearly expected to take some action to redress the situation, even outside of marriage. These remedies could involve efforts at terminations or making arrangements with the woman's family or without their explicit knowledge to resolve the situation with minimum damage to everyone's future prospects.

Young men themselves could seek to ensure that intercourse did not lead to paternity by assisting their partners in terminating unwanted pregnancies. Many young women said their partners had offered to procure ‘remedies’ for them. In court, of course, the women said they had refused to take them. Claudine Violet, for example, a 23-year-old textile worker, reported that when she told her co-worker, (no first name given) Belay that she was pregnant, he gave her ‘the remedies to take to injure herself, the intentions of which she never wanted to follow’.20 Yet the frequency of these conversations as reported in legal records suggests both that young men as well as young women were familiar with the strategy of resolving their dilemmas by trying to end the pregnancy with ‘remedies’ and that cases where the couples pursued that track successfully remain invisible to us, but were nevertheless a matter of local knowledge and practice at the time.

Moreover, such ‘remedies’ were not only concocted between the two young people, but were trafficked between networks of men. The reluctant fathers procured the remedies from surgeons or apothecaries. Jeanne Pezze, for example, complained to the court that a surgeon had agreed to ‘purge her so that she would lose her fruit’. These practices counter our usual narratives that managing early-modern fertility was a female matter, perhaps brokered by midwives.21 In fact, they show again a wide community involvement in policing parenthood by a variety of measures and a variety of actors.

Continuing pregnancies were also associated with substantial responsibilities for fathers; women asked and the courts endorsed that fathers would be responsible for their babies’ upbringing. They usually took care of this either by paying for wet nurses and subsequent upkeep or by arranging for the newborn to be admitted to the city's foundling hospital, one of many such institutions which were established across early-modern Europe. The relationship with which this article started – Vacheron and Hugonin – had produced four previous out-of-wedlock births before she pursed legal action during her fifth pregnancy. In each of the first four instances, Hugonin took care of the pregnancy by paying for Vacheron to move to stay with a midwife on the outskirts of the city where she gave birth, the expenses for which he paid, and then he paid likewise for the baby to be at the wet nurse. Vacheron testified that she did not know where those children were, that is, she had been separated from them since shortly after birth when he took custody of them. Such a resolution was surely far from an isolated matter, although few instances attracted the legal attention that makes them visible in today's archives. In many other cases women referred to their partners promising to take similar actions – or having previously taken such actions – and had they done so, the women presumably would never have gone to court. Men also on occasion admitted this. In 1725, for example, Charles Labranche confirmed that when his partner, Benoiste Durocher, was pregnant on a previous occasion he had ‘paid the rectors of the foundling hospital to receive the child she delivered’.22

Going to court then was an option exercised only when young partners failed either to go through with the agreement to marry or to agree/succeed in termination or to agree on terms by which the father would provide for the baby in terms of care and money. What courts did then was not to introduce a top-down state-driven disciplinary impetus, but to reinforce – even by physical confinement in royal prisons – the communities’ clear expectations about desirable outcomes, or more likely the least undesirable outcomes, which surely were obtained by extra-legal solution in many other cases.

Royal courts and local communities clearly expected single fathers to take responsibility for their newborns in terms of physical care and finances. A procureur du roi articulated this practice very clearly in a 1658 case, noting explicitly that women who were successful in their complaints were ‘discharged’ of the feeding and care of their babies. Both women's requests in their complaints to the courts and judges’ sentences granting such requests (although not always at the money value requested) reiterated that these responsibilities were routinely assigned to unwed fathers. Women also asked for the fathers of their babies to pay for the costs of their care and delivery, and the courts likewise agreed that.

This routine charging of the illegitimate newborn to the father's care in various forms both legal and extra-legal was in contrast to the varied arrangements Alexandra Shepard has shown in England at the same time. In France, it persisted until the 1760s after which it became common for single mothers in court cases to say explicitly that they would raise the babies themselves.23

Not surprisingly, single women's ability to use the courts in this way could be the source of plenty of gender conflict between intimate partners. Men claimed that women were able to get the courts to act with very little evidence. In May 1659, (first name illegible) Puzin complained that the court had had him imprisoned on the complaint of Marie Bourdain ‘without any information o[or other procedures’. He asked that her procureur be required to deposit a copy of papers at the court records office (the greffe) in three days or release him. Others alleged that women used this legal avenue unscrupulously. (First name illegible) Peyysol and Lucie Peyrieu were co-workers, and he responded to her allegation by admitting they had indeed slept together. However, he denied he had promised her marriage or anything else, saying: ‘Every day we see girls like her who accuse this person or that person to extract money off getting them pregnant …. And then they move on to the next guy.’ The allegations of unscrupulous use and no information supplied were combined in the request of Jacques Marest that he be released from prison because the complaints of Marguerite Tatier and her mother Etiennet Blanchi against him were the result of ‘pure animosity’. The judge released Marest a few days later after the women failed to deposit any evidence.24

Men's irritation at the legal pressure pregnant women could put them under to take responsibility for the outcomes of their sexual activity indicates that they experienced the making of court claims about illicit paternity as threats to their reputations and perhaps their futures. In contrast to the rhetoric that deceptive women were the source of false allegations, some men originated fraudulent declarations when they sought to deflect the threat of an unwanted pregnancy by suggesting their partners accuse someone else. Francoise Lerat, for example, explained that when she told Antoine Champetre that she was pregnant, he suggested that ‘she accuse another [man]’, but she had not wanted to ‘have a false declaration’, and he abandoned her without any support. Others were very cognizant of avoiding potentially damaging public knowledge about being associated with such claims. Julien Perrin came to court voluntarily, for instance, to complain that ‘people’ had told him a girl he claimed not to know had made a complaint to the court about his alleged paternity of a child. He said he would answer all and any of the court's questions, but asked the court to forbid its officers to use force or constraint to bring him in. That is, he wanted to avoid neighbours seeing court officers deliver a notice to appear in court. The court agreed to his request.25

Instances where partners had previously had a baby or two together without litigation clearly illustrate that going to court to make any form of complaint that might be coded as a ‘declaration’ was a strategy used only selectively. Vacheron and Hugonin may have been exceptional in having four ‘undeclared’ babies, but many out-of-wedlock births were not registered with the civil authorities for many reasons, and why or when a single pregnant woman or her family might press a court complaint depended on many factors. Although women (and their parents if the parents were involved in the case too) did refer to the loss of honour, the decision to pursue a legal avenue may have depended primarily on an economic calculation – that is, did the young man in question (or his family) seem to have the financial resources that would make it worthwhile?

Sometimes other factors may have determined the decision about legal action but they remain more difficult for us to recover. Madeline Vacheron did not explain, nor did the court ask her, why, after not having bothered to register any of the first four babies, did she suddenly make a complaint when pregnant with the fifth. Perhaps her patience with Hugonin's promises that he would eventually marry her was simply worn out by that time, and she wanted him to clarify the status of their long relationship. Many cases show that pregnant women waited, negotiated and pressed their intimate partners by many means to marry them, and only registered their legal complaint late in their pregnancies when it appeared the other strategies had not worked to persuade reluctant fathers-to-be to marry them. Occasionally women said they made legal complaints so that prison detention would stop their partners from leaving town to avoid their responsibilities. Pregnant single women and their communities were willing and able to use official means to sanction young men for what they defined as illicit sexuality, if they thought circumstances warranted pursuit of a public, legal remedy. And in those instances they were ready to see the young men imprisoned as part of that solution.

Conclusion: policing paternity

The policing of paternity in early-modern France took many forms and involved many participants. Fathers of daughters of course closely policed paternity, potential or actual, but so did young women, kin, co-workers, neighbours, casual observers and court officials, as well as young men themselves. Neither young men nor their communities inevitably blamed their female partners for extramarital intimacy, and in fact they apparently accepted a range of intimate practices as licit for young couples. Literal imprisonment was at one end of a spectrum of ways in which young men's sexuality was calibrated, monitored and, if necessary, penalised as well as young women's. In this process, a particular calibration of sexuality was a critical component of masculinity for young men of lower ranks.

In allowing for young people to have a wide spectrum of intimacy that was regarded as acceptable, intimate partners, their families and communities constituted licit desire and practice from a package of variables which also delimited behaviour deemed illicit. Licit desire and expression of that desire was marked as publicly observed, stable relationships between young people of similar rank spread over months and with the knowledge of kin and friends. When young people were monogamous within these parameters, they were permitted to engage in a wide range of intimacy without damaging their honour, reputations or futures. Even intercourse attracted no negative comment in the context of eventual marriage as the predicted outcome based on discussions between the couple. When couples’ relationships became illicit, defined quite narrowly as failure to marry in the case of pregnancy, young men were expected to remedy the situation by some means. The prospect or even experience of detention in prison while their culpability was debated in the legal system was no doubt a carrot and spur to some kind of resolution.

These uses of the early-modern legal system require us to re-examine our assumptions about the relationship between law and sexuality generally as well as male sexuality specifically in early-modern society. The disciplinary potential of the expansion of the regulation of sexuality in early-modern Europe that has received so much attention seems exaggerated. Earlier generations of historians who worked on law and sexuality, like Martin Ingram in his 1990 book, argued that this expansion of legal regulation shaped attitudes and even practices.26 Yet the example of the now famous French legislation of 1562 to require single mothers to register their pregnancies shows not only that early-modern states’ regulatory ambition far exceeded their ability to implement effective regulatory discipline (as in many other matters too), but that ‘lack of enforcement’ is too simplistic a concept to accommodate the ways in which communities managed their values and concerns. In civil cases, individuals and communities chose when to use royal legislation in the court system. And in instances of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, they most often chose not to use litigation as the solution. Through the eighteenth century, the management of young people's sexuality remained primarily a matter for the individual, family and local community. In terms of the tools the state offered in fact, at least in early-modern France, the ability to have young men detained for illicit sexuality far exceeded the official penalties young women faced.

When we view the project of early-modern masculinity through this lens, of evidence from civil records rather then criminal or elite or ecclesiastical prescription, as well as avoid presumptions about women's licentiousness being the only cultural filter, the ways in which young lower-rank masculinity was rooted in part in obligations about sexuality as well as privileges become clear.27 While abandoned single mothers are very visible to us in court records, the many ways in which young men were expected to remedy extramarital pregnancy – through marriage or by other means – and in fact very often did so remain more hidden from us but were very well known in their communities.

Gendering sexuality in these ways does not mean of course that a system existed where women were in control and men were secondary, but that managing male sexuality was also regarded as important. Historians have emphasised women as the target of policed sexuality because of the prism of elite print culture and criminal records, but through the lens of civil courts we see more male sexuality being policed and by extension understand the entwined economic and political as well as social stakes in that policing. States, communities and kin wanted to make intentional solid families and adopted a variety of strategies, from the legalisation of parental permission as an essential prerequisite for marriage, to the active management of the boundaries of domestic violence, to Munich's marriage bureau, which in principle provided licences to wed only to appropriate couples who would form stable households.28

For all parties committed to the policing of paternity, a key goal was to keep young men and women from making accidental families. For them, an important way to prevent accidental families was to pressure young men as well as, no doubt, to remind young women to save intercourse for marriage or at least until marriage seemed a certainty. Indeed another common phrase for intercourse in the depositions was ‘as husband and wife do’, to differentiate between that and what young social partners did or were supposed to do, that is, to chose other forms of intimacy until marriage was firmly intended. So while our dominant historiographical theme emphasises the disciplining of female sexuality as the key early-modern dynamic, as we start to press harder we can see that the regulatory and disciplinary pressure on women's sexuality was but one part of a larger mosaic of efforts to delineate sexuality and mark some expressions of male and female sexuality as inevitable and usual, while seeing other kinds of sexuality, especially extramarital reproductivity, as a threat for which men as well as women were held responsible.

In these practices for young men, the transition to honourable adult manhood allowed for and indeed was in part built on the performance of specific patterns of heterosociability and sexuality in which particular forms of intimacy were prerequisites in the choosing of marriage partners, in the management of social reproduction, and in the passage to the privileges that came with male head-of-household status. Young men's performance of acceptable courtship permitted the recognition of youthful desire as licit and allowed young people to explore potential life partners through an emotional register as well as the qualities of hard work and good reputation so highly prized in early-modern spouses. However, the obligations of masculinity were also clear in the expectation for monogamous stable intimate relationships and for the youthful father who was expected to acknowledge responsibility and participate in some kind of remedy if marriage failed to follow pregnancy. Among the lower ranks, what kind of men youths became depended in significant part on whether they adopted the forms of sexuality integrally braided into constructions of masculinity that constituted honourable status or whether, in disregarding those conventions, they found themselves marked as lesser men.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the many thoughtful comments made by the participants in the Histories of Early Modern Masculinities workshop at the University of Connecticut (2013). I also thank Nina Kushner and Karin Wulf for their sage advice, Maria Agren and the members of the Gender and Work in early modern Sweden program at the University of Uppsala for their suggestions, and the readers for the E.R.H.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Hardwick

Julie Hardwick, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, works on the intersections of law, economy, family and gender in early modern work. Her publications include The Practice of Patriarchy: gender and household authority in early modern France (1998) and Family Business: litigation and the political economies of daily life in early modern France (2009) as well as many articles. http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/history/faculty/jholwell

Notes

^1. Archives Départmentales du Rhone (hereafter ADR) BP 3540 Dossier of Madeline Vacheron and Jean Paul Hugouin – 1670.

^2. ADR BP 3540 Dossier Vacheron and Hugonin; Conclusions of the Procureur du roi, 15 Sep. 1670.

^3. ADR BP 3540 Dossier of Joubert and Bonjour; initial complaint, 14 Nov. 1663.

^4.Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800; Farr, Authority and Sexuality; Ferraro, Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice.

^5.Behrend-Martínez, “‘Taming Don Juan,’” which argues that men were pursued vigorously for sex crimes in a range of early-modern Spanish jurisdictions, makes an important statement about the need to re-examine some of these givens.

^6.Hardwick, Family Business.

^7.Dayton, “Was There a Calvinist Type of Patriarchy?” Behrend-Martínez, “Taming Don Juan;” Broomhill, “Le prix de l'amour.”

^8.Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe; Crawford, The Sexual Culture; Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood; Hardwick, Family Business, 108–10 and 199–200, and “Early Modern Perspectives;” Shepard, “Brokering Fatherhood;” Capps, “Double Standards;” and Behrend-Martinez, “Taming Don Juan.”

^9. Among Hanley's articles on this broad topic, see two early statements that proved enormously influential: “Engendering the State” and “Family and State.”

^10.Depauw, “Illicit Sexuality and Society in 18^th-Century Nantes.” For the Lyonnais equivalent of the municipal declarations Depauw examined for Nantes, see the book of declarations (“Livre pour les declarations”) that begins in 1741 in ADR BP 3940. The first one included specifically noted that the woman “made her declaration and denunciation” and the subsequent ones simply recorded a brief question and answer with the mother about how the pregnancy occurred. The declarations were recorded one after another with no other material. The complex litigation over pregnancy used here, however, continued in the city's courts simultaneously through the eighteenth century. Other work using “declarations” given to a variety of persons and institutions includes Farr, Authority and Sexuality; Farge, Fragile Lives, esp. 26–41 (based on a late-eighteenth-century sample of single pregnant women's complaints to Parisian police commissioners); Heyhoe, “Illegitimacy, Inter-Generational Conflict, and Legal Practice” (questioning the relationship between the much studied regulation of sexuality in early-modern France and the very little studied practice based on a range of late eighteenth-century declarations made to notaries and seigneurial courts in rural Burgundy); Phan, Les Amours illegitimes.

^11. My thinking about how we might productively problematise rather than assume the gendering of sexuality has been shaped by a variety of issues. However, I found especially helpful the discussion of Nayan Shah, whose emphasis on challenging/unsettling our conceptual stabilisations seems very fruitful. See Shah, Stranger Intimacy, esp. 6–9.

^12. ADR BP3540 Dossier of Beaujallion and Bichet, Procureur du roi conclusions 29 Jan. 1658.

^13.Gerber, Bastardy, 139–42.

^14. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Quentin and Delphin, various dates in March 1725.

^15. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Marie Maugard and Jean Ravier, July 1725.

^16. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Rozet and Bouin, 9 May 1725. Their story survives, of course, because by the time she was six months pregnant, he still hadn't married her and was refusing to say when he would, much to the exasperation of father and daughter. So they came to court to request he be ordered to pay her 500 livres as a provision for her as well as to pay the costs of the pregnancy and delivery and to take charge of the baby. Bouin admitted they had had sex but denied promising to marry her, saying he had given her lots of gifts.

^17. ADR BP 3542 Dossier of Caron and Demin, 27 Oct. 1686; ADR BP 3541 Dossier of Minquet and Dumarets, 13 Dec. 1682; ADR BP 3542 Dossier of Namy and Bergeron, 17 Oct. 1686.

^18. For the spatial aspects of young people's sociability, see Hardwick, “Sex and the (seventeenth-century) City.”

^19. ADR BP 3540 Dossier of Deluis and Gaultier, 6 Feb. 1668.

^20. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Claudine Violet and Belay, 18 May 1725.

^21. ADR BP 3540 Dossier of Pezze and Lasalle, 1659. For the female-centred fertility narrative, see, for example, Gowing, “Secret Births.”

^22. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Du Rocher and Labranche, 14 Jan. 1725.

^23. ADR BP 3540 29 Jan. 1658; ADR BP 3540 Dossier of Madeline Vacheron and Jean Paul Hugouin– 1670; Shepard, “Brokering Fatherhood.”

^24. ADR BP 3540 Dossier of Puzin vs [illeg], 25 May 1659; ADR BO 3540 1658 Dossier of Peyysol and Lucie Peyrieu; ADR BP 3541 Dossier of Blanchin and Marest, 5 July and 9 July 1685.

^25. ADR BP 3545 Dossier of Leurat and Champetre, 22 Jan. 1725 and 23 Jan. 1725; ADR BP 350 28 Aug. 1676 Complaint of Julien Simon.

^26. See Crawford's summary of the work of Ingram and others on the impact of expanded regulation of sexuality in Crawford, European Sexualities, 146 and passim.

^27.Hardwick, Family Business, 108, 200.

^28. , “Engendering the State;” Hardwick, “Early Modern Perspectives on the Long History of Domestic Violence;” Strasser, State of Virginity.