In Family Business, Julie Hardwick seeks to explore the dealings and conflicts between spouses in early modern France and to discover how neighbors, communities, and the state interfered in litigation concerning marriage, credit, and the use of violence. Towards this end, she examined the judicial archives of two different French cities, Nantes and Lyon, in the seventeenth century. The plaintiffs in these cases are mainly skilled artisans and small shopkeepers and their wives.
She starts by studying cases of separation of property and persons. The hypothèque légale, which was developing everywhere in France during the seventeenth century, permitted the married woman, despite her juridical incapacity, to preserve her rights in her own property. This, in turn, protected her against her husband's poor management of these assets and reinforced her control over any arrangements he made concerning their ultimate disposition. However, this protection of the patrimony of women did not develop without resistance from their husbands (Pierre Petot, Le statut de la femme dans les pays coutumiers français du XIIIe au XVIIe siècle, vol. 12, La Femme, Recueils de la société Jean Bodin pour l'histoire comparative des institutions [Brussells: Éditions de la Librairie encyclopédique, 1962], 251). The cases examined in Nantes (ruled by customary law) and in Lyon (governed by Roman law) confirm this trend and the reluctance of husbands. In both cities, more and more women asked for separate property in the second half of the seventeenth century. Thanks to Hardwick's careful analysis, we see the limits on marriage as a negotiable resource.
The next two chapters offer a rich analysis of courts of first instance, their workings, costs, and effectiveness. The analysis shows how gender shaped legal lives and the experience of litigation, and how men and women used different strategies to renegotiate their marriages and to navigate the opportunities and risks they faced. These chapters explore the dialogue between working people (be they plaintiffs or witnesses), on the one hand, and legal officials, on the other, and show how all negotiated the terms of gendered authority in marriage according to the particulars of context. The analysis of witnesses shows an unexpected fluidity of social status, since women, servants as well as low-status workers (like street porters), were all involved in such litigation. These two chapters document beautifully the diverse values through which people acted according to status.
Chapter 4 deals with credit. It provides many examples concerning the extent to which people were indebted and the diversity of creditors—a diversity arising from the fact that everyone could easily be at the same time both a creditor and a borrower. There are indeed very few studies regarding these issues. This study might, however, have reached further in its analysis. First, it relies on unquestioned assumptions about the market. It is based on the idea that the market was detrimental to working families, and the book never describes concretely how the market functioned. One might have expected detailed and gendered analysis regarding the many economic processes encountered in the archives, such as the use of various financial instruments and the costs and benefits of the extensive circulation of goods, rather than currency. The whole domain of informal finance (including hidden pawnshops and the financial role of charitable organizations) is left unexamined. It would have been very interesting to discuss the acts of working people, like the laundrywoman Antoinette Carvet, who knew how to make a living from this informal money market. Hardwick addresses the obligation to reimburse, but she might also have considered the obligations (and interests) related to practices of lending.
The fifth chapter, which returns to issues of family violence, is in the same vein as the first chapters and explores how contexts and values shape the meaning of violence and how a boundary was constructed between discipline and abuse in the treatment of wives and children. It examines the material organization of houses, apartments, and neighborhoods. Elite families and the authorities are the main actors in this part of the story.
Obviously, the author is much more at ease when working on social or political relations. She provides a very subtle analysis concerning matters of identity, but this sophistication is lacking in her discussion of economic issues. We have glimpses of how money is distributed between husband and wife and how it should be. Indeed, the distribution of resources within the marital relationship could have been a subject of research in its own right. The emphasis on hard work and cooperation is linked in the book more to authority and changing patterns of emotions than to the economic survival of the family. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith is very well aware of the constant preoccupation with economic survival that shapes the everyday life of working families, and he notes that, unlike the wealthy, they cannot afford any lapses in virtuous self-governance for fear of becoming utterly destitute. As he argues, it was among this class of people that the most extreme Puritan sects succeeded in recruiting adherents, and the most rigid moral code was developed as a protective barrier against the possibility of destitution. Especially in the seventeenth century, fear of the economic consequences of husbands' misbehaviors should, in my opinion, be read more as a struggle to stay above the fragile line of poverty than as the expression of different patterns of sociability, even if the latter did exist. This remains, however, a most welcome study on how spouses, neighbors, and the authorities negotiated matters of private life in the public sphere.
