Contested Paternity: Constructing Families in Modern France » (New Edition)

Rachel G. Fuchs is a professor of history at Arizona State University.

This groundbreaking study examines complex notions of paternity and fatherhood in modern France through the lens of contested paternity. Drawing from archival judicial records on paternity suits, paternity denials, deprivation of paternity, and adoption, from the end of the eighteenth century through the twentieth, Rachel G. Fuchs reveals how paternity was defined and how it functioned in the culture and experiences of individual men and women. She addresses the competing definitions of paternity and of families, how public policy toward paternity and the family shifted, and what individuals did to facilitate their personal and familial ideals and goals.

Issues of paternity and the family have broad implications for an understanding of how private acts were governed by laws of the state. Focusing on paternity as a category of family history, Contested Paternity emphasizes the importance of fatherhood, the family, and the law within the greater context of changing attitudes toward parental responsibility.

Introduction 1

1 Families and the Social Order from the Old Regime to the Civil Code 16

2 Seduction and Courtroom Encounters in the Nineteenth Century 59

3 Find the Fathers, Save the Children, 1870-1912 109

4 Courts Attribute Paternity, 1912-1940 150

5 Families Dismantled and Reconstituted, 1880-1940 200

6 Paternity and the Family, 1940 to the Present 240

Epilogue 278

Notes 289

Works Cited 325

Index 345