French landed tenure
9 February 2023 03:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeHaving been making good progress on Chapter the-second-and-last of "Chick nor Child" (although finding it rather harder than I had anticipated to include the snatch of dialogue which was supposed to provide the title!), I decided belatedly that I really ought to do some research to corroborate the social structure I had set up, given that I was now supposed to be writing from the peasant farmer point of view (and likely to run into indignant egalitarian Americans, as I discovered when presenting the prevailing employers' view of servants: unreliable, complaining and opinionated, rather than downtrodden slaves!)
Fortunately some hasty online research into post-revolutionary land holdings did confirm the assumptions I'd vaguely based on English practice and/or fiction of the era: emigrés did, or could, get their ancestral lands back (as Leroux implies by saying that the Chagnys were rich and dated back four hundred years), and surviving large estates tended to be let out to tenant farmers rather than being taken and given over to smallholders outright. And I was absurdly gratified -- just as I was when my subconscious came up with the Prater as a place to ride in Vienna -- to discover that when I'd written out of some dimly-recalled memory (probably D.K.Broster and very likely "Mr Rowl") that the Chagny of those days had "made his peace with the First Consul at the earliest possible moment" and returned to France, I'd got my facts astonishingly accurate; it was indeed Napoleon who passed a law permitting the return of the emigrated nobility after the Revolution, and he did indeed do so at the time when he was still First Consul and not yet self-styled emperor ;)
I'm afraid I was having a lot of fun at the time making up more bits of family history on the spur of the moment, as a result of which this story has now consumed a really ridiculous number of OC names: we have the medæval Counts Adhemar and Gilles, and the eighteenth-century Count Robert the Slow with a distant forebear and namesake Robert the Wild (i.e. le Sauvage) to explain how he gets that nickname to sum up conveniently his somewhat dim-witted character, given that 'modern' Counts wouldn't normally be expected to acquire a cognomen :-p
Anyway, I decided that I had better embark upon some Zola as hasty research, having heard that he wrote novels about the French lower classes and discovered that La Terre was almost exactly of the right period. [Edit: apparently it was actually set a generation before publication, in the 1860s rather than in 1887...] Of course he also writes colossal 19th-century doorstops, like Balzac (and about as dreary, by the looks of it). I have read about a hundred pages so far, a fifth of it, but at least it does give me a fairly vivid mental view of what the rural buildings and clothing *looked* like, or did in that part of the provinces at that date (the landscape around Chagny would have been a lot less flat, for one thing).
Though I have no intention of making my characters that wicked and depressing ;p It does confirm that illegitimacy would *not* have been regarded as a terrible sin by Perrette's class any more than by Philippe's, though (although Perrette and her family are a social step or two above Zola's straggling, starving peasants). On the other hand, it reminds me that Gaspard's farm ought properly speaking to have been subdivided amongst his (unspecified but many) offspring, rather than being taken over seamlessly by the elder son. (But would that apply to a tenancy, which the land-owner presumably does not expect to sub-divide when the previous tenant gives it up by death or decision...?)
Edit: something that occurred to me today in this context is that the issue of divided inheritances actually supplies a compelling motive for Philippe to rely upon Raoul as his heir rather than begetting further sons of his own, and makes it all the more imperative for Raoul to marry well! The Chagny inheritance has already been halved by the marriage of the two girls, whose husbands receive a quarter of the old Count's lands each as portioned out between the four children; if Raoul inherits from Philippe, the remaining family possessions are reunited. If, on the contrary, Philippe has, say, two sons, then they presumably get only one-eighth of Count Philibert's estate apiece (and a small claim on the chateau itself in common with all the other cousins?)
The normal method for restoring the family possessions after such a division would be to make a match bringing with it a similar parcel of lands from the wife's family. If Raoul de Chagny marries, for example, Eustacie de Moerogis, then their respective inheritances are combined (in the form of various estates all over France, which is what I've assumed the Chagny lands already consist of, rather than a single huge contiguous sweep). And if his elder brother does not marry or produce children, then Raoul presumably can also be bequeathed the Comte's own portion on his death (although if Philippe remains intestate his possessions are then shared between all his surviving siblings instead!)
But if Raoul quarrels terminally with his brother and chooses to marry a landless Nobody without possessions, then Philippe's quarter-share gets split between his sisters' offspring, by law or by explicit legacy, and the original estate ends up hopelessly shattered...
Fortunately some hasty online research into post-revolutionary land holdings did confirm the assumptions I'd vaguely based on English practice and/or fiction of the era: emigrés did, or could, get their ancestral lands back (as Leroux implies by saying that the Chagnys were rich and dated back four hundred years), and surviving large estates tended to be let out to tenant farmers rather than being taken and given over to smallholders outright. And I was absurdly gratified -- just as I was when my subconscious came up with the Prater as a place to ride in Vienna -- to discover that when I'd written out of some dimly-recalled memory (probably D.K.Broster and very likely "Mr Rowl") that the Chagny of those days had "made his peace with the First Consul at the earliest possible moment" and returned to France, I'd got my facts astonishingly accurate; it was indeed Napoleon who passed a law permitting the return of the emigrated nobility after the Revolution, and he did indeed do so at the time when he was still First Consul and not yet self-styled emperor ;)
I'm afraid I was having a lot of fun at the time making up more bits of family history on the spur of the moment, as a result of which this story has now consumed a really ridiculous number of OC names: we have the medæval Counts Adhemar and Gilles, and the eighteenth-century Count Robert the Slow with a distant forebear and namesake Robert the Wild (i.e. le Sauvage) to explain how he gets that nickname to sum up conveniently his somewhat dim-witted character, given that 'modern' Counts wouldn't normally be expected to acquire a cognomen :-p
Anyway, I decided that I had better embark upon some Zola as hasty research, having heard that he wrote novels about the French lower classes and discovered that La Terre was almost exactly of the right period. [Edit: apparently it was actually set a generation before publication, in the 1860s rather than in 1887...] Of course he also writes colossal 19th-century doorstops, like Balzac (and about as dreary, by the looks of it). I have read about a hundred pages so far, a fifth of it, but at least it does give me a fairly vivid mental view of what the rural buildings and clothing *looked* like, or did in that part of the provinces at that date (the landscape around Chagny would have been a lot less flat, for one thing).
Though I have no intention of making my characters that wicked and depressing ;p It does confirm that illegitimacy would *not* have been regarded as a terrible sin by Perrette's class any more than by Philippe's, though (although Perrette and her family are a social step or two above Zola's straggling, starving peasants). On the other hand, it reminds me that Gaspard's farm ought properly speaking to have been subdivided amongst his (unspecified but many) offspring, rather than being taken over seamlessly by the elder son. (But would that apply to a tenancy, which the land-owner presumably does not expect to sub-divide when the previous tenant gives it up by death or decision...?)
Edit: something that occurred to me today in this context is that the issue of divided inheritances actually supplies a compelling motive for Philippe to rely upon Raoul as his heir rather than begetting further sons of his own, and makes it all the more imperative for Raoul to marry well! The Chagny inheritance has already been halved by the marriage of the two girls, whose husbands receive a quarter of the old Count's lands each as portioned out between the four children; if Raoul inherits from Philippe, the remaining family possessions are reunited. If, on the contrary, Philippe has, say, two sons, then they presumably get only one-eighth of Count Philibert's estate apiece (and a small claim on the chateau itself in common with all the other cousins?)
The normal method for restoring the family possessions after such a division would be to make a match bringing with it a similar parcel of lands from the wife's family. If Raoul de Chagny marries, for example, Eustacie de Moerogis, then their respective inheritances are combined (in the form of various estates all over France, which is what I've assumed the Chagny lands already consist of, rather than a single huge contiguous sweep). And if his elder brother does not marry or produce children, then Raoul presumably can also be bequeathed the Comte's own portion on his death (although if Philippe remains intestate his possessions are then shared between all his surviving siblings instead!)
But if Raoul quarrels terminally with his brother and chooses to marry a landless Nobody without possessions, then Philippe's quarter-share gets split between his sisters' offspring, by law or by explicit legacy, and the original estate ends up hopelessly shattered...