Women Working the Law

Hardwick, Julie. "Women 'Working' the Law: Gender, Authority, and Legal Process in Early Modern France,"

in Journal of Women's History, v9 n3 (Autumn 1997), 28.

Abstract:

This article unpacks the contexts and meanings of one extended episode surrounding a notary's wife, her husband, their kin, his clients,

and the judicial system. It suggests how women as agents and subjects were central in the interlocking web of social relations and laws that

maintained a complex, negotiated, and contested, household-based gender hierarchy as a key element of the social and political topography of

early modern France. The legal disadvantages and exclusions women faced were key elements in the maintenance of an inequitable gender

hierarchy. Yet "the law" was a complicated matter involving national decrees promulgated by the monarchy and regional customary laws.

Moreover, these laws gained meaning only in the encounters between the many different actors--spouses and kin who were part of middling

families, as well as notaries, judges, and lawyers whose roles were to put laws into practice--that constituted the legal process.

In the autumn of 1656, Louise Lecoq, the wife of the notary Rend Guilloteau, was left to deal with family, neighbors, clients, and royal officials after her husband, in the face of rumors that he had embezzled clients' money, fled the city of Nantes in western France where they lived. Lecoq's experiences in seeking to defend herself, her husband, and their household illuminate wives' roles in middling families (such as those of notaries in this case study) and some of the possible strategies available to these women in dealing with a legal process that was largely both hostile and exclusionary towards women.

In broader contexts, this episode raises other key issues about the relationships among gender, law, and authority, and about how early modern law worked in everyday life. As in any society, the legal system could not ensure that all the laws passed were obeyed by the population. The patchwork and sometimes contradictory nature of the early modem French legal system, with its overlapping jurisdictions, regional customary laws, national royal decrees and many layers of officials, is well known. To speak about "the law" therefore is to utilize a form of shorthand that, in suggesting a capacity for order and social control, masks the complexity of and the many actors in the legal process.(1)

Thus, the gendering of the law and of the legal processes at the heart of Lecoq's experiences was a key mechanism of early modern patriarchy. A primary function of the law was to construct and maintain the gendered hierarchies that from the mid-sixteenth century increasingly provided an explicit basis for social and political organization on the notion of household patriarchy.(2) In France as in societies across western Europe, heads of state and members of local elites articulated and justified their power on the model of a familial household-based patriarchy and enacted legislation and community regulation according to that principle. As the discourses of struggles of the revolutionary era showed, household patriarchalism enjoyed broad success among many groups as a way of structuring power hierarchies.(3)

Just as "the law" encapsulates a dynamic with many elements, "patriarchy" veils the complexity, myriad actors, and multiple sites involved in creating and maintaining a cultural construction that would meet the needs of many different people. Ordinary men and women as well as elites played their roles in shaping the culture of their society; they were not simply passive recipients of a trickled-down version of patriarchy put forward by rulers. Through their participation in the everyday workings of the legal process, men and women at times strengthened and at others tempered household patriarchy while pursuing their own interests.

Recent feminist historiography has illuminated the role of national and local elites in promoting and legislating patriarchy to serve their own interests.(4) However, families such as those of notaries in the middling rank or lower--and thus far from elite and distant from power--had quite different interests. Moreover in early modem France, as in every historical place and time, a great difference existed between the intentions of laws and what they actually achieved.

This essay contextualizes individual actions in one legal episode within the broader frameworks of legal process and of the personal as well as public lives of members of notarial families in early modem France. Through this analysis, the multiple ways in which gender hierarchies were maintained as a structure of everyday life emerge. The actions and perceptions of officials, family members, and others constructed a complex, negotiated, and contested household gender hierarchy that was a basis of social and political organization.

A Crisis Unfolds

On the morning of 13 December 1656, two of the city's royal legal officials, the judge (prevost) of the local Nantais court and its prosecutor (procureur fiscal), arrived at the door of the Lecoq-Guilloteau household. "Several verbal complaints by various individuals" and "rumors" circulating about Guilloteau's "embezzlements and [of] lawsuits" pending against him had initially alerted the prosecutor. Three weeks earlier, court officials had sealed the locks of the armoires in Guilloteau's study (etude) and its door to secure his notarial papers and acts. Now the judge and prosecutor sought to inventory Guilloteau's papers on the grounds that the alleged embezzlements were to the "great prejudice and damage of several individuals and of the public." "The public," they maintained, "had a profound interest" in discovering the extent of wrongdoing.(5) On this first day too, as on the days that followed, a stream of clients and lawyers appeared. Most were looking for their own copies of contracts they had requested that Guilloteau make for them, often leaving him money to complete the transactions in question, and of which they had received no confirmation.

The officials immediately asked Lecoq if she had seen her husband, if he had "revealed to her the state of his affairs," or if she had other papers of his besides those placed under seal. Lecoq denied knowing her husband's whereabouts, or of any other notarial instruments besides those already sealed in his office. She also denied having any keys either to the office or its armoires and "did not know where they [the keys] were if her husband did not have them." She added that Guilloteau had sent her news, without telling her where he was, that made her hope he would be back in Nantes "shortly ... when he would give satisfaction to those who had business with him."

As the officials finished their questions, Lecoq took the initiative. She asked to be authorized to pursue her own claims as a creditor of her husband and renounced their marital property community. Two of Guilloteau's daughters from his first marriage followed suit; they declared themselves to be creditors and renounced the succession to his estate. By the time the crown's judicial officials returned the next day, Lecoq had retained a lawyer. She claimed to have received a letter from Guilloteau in the intervening hours that explained he was working out of town and that this correspondence led her to hope that he would return in a week. On these grounds, she asked that the inventory be delayed until his return. She continued to deny any knowledge of her husband's whereabouts and refused to show the court's officers the letter "because of the details in it." On this second day, she did admit, however, that she had a key to the etude but still denied that she knew of any other notarial acts beyond those already sealed in the armoires.

On this second day too, as on every subsequent day, Lecoq's sister-in-law Francoise was also present, as the judge and prosecutor went into Guilloteau's study at the back of the house where he and his wife lived to inventory the papers. They discovered that the study was full of loose papers, many unsigned and "for the most part eaten and spoiled by rats." Later a locksmith, called to open the armoire because Lecoq said she did not have a key, found its key inside. She professed astonishment, claiming that Guilloteau usually carried the only key in his pocket and had taken it with him when he left. As the inventory proceeded, many of the acts were found to be awry with documents filed out of chronological order. Clients who had been seeking verification that their acts had been made found little comfort in the chaotic conditions the court officials uncovered.

Guilloteau had been absent from town for five or six weeks by the time the court officials began to inventory his papers. At the end of September, he had served as godfather for a child of Lecoq's merchant brother and, according to at least one client, he was still in Nantes at the end of October. It is likely that he left the city soon after, for by mid-November, 10 days before his records were sealed--and a month before the court officials arrived at Lecoq's door--he was more than a hundred miles away in the city of La Rochelle.(6)

Finally, on 22 December, the officials adjourned their investigation for Christmas and no record survives of any subsequent action. Within 6 months Guilloteau's office of notary was sold, but Lecoq continued in the following years to deal with myriad problems. That Guilloteau's return was much delayed is perhaps not surprising given that notaries in other cities were hanged in the mid-seventeenth century for fraud and embezzlement, the crimes of which he was accused.(7)

Notaries, Laws, and Legal Process

As the Guilloteau-Lecoq episode suggests, early modern legal process was enacted not only by magistrates and lawyers in the august settings of court rooms in monumental buildings, but by the daily interactions of ordinary people in such places as the front steps or back rooms of a notary's house. In early modem societies from Italy to the newly founded American colonies, notaries served as loci between "the law" and the individual through which the relationships between gender and authority (as well as many other matters) were negotiated. Notaries' work incorporated the implementation of royal decrees and local customary law as well as meeting demands of clients. While notaries' legal initiatives were minor, the representations of power within the narratives of notarial acts enhanced or elided the roles of particular groups in ways that were critical to the maintenance of gender hierarchy.

Notaries' formal function in the legal process was to secure public confidence by guaranteeing the integrity of the transactions they recorded. Notaries were thus only by the loosest definition "lawyers." They--who neither made law, nor interpreted it through judgments, nor even appeared in court, but did in fact little more than copy formularies--were in a unique position with regard to the state and the legal process. On the one hand, they were at the margins of a legal system that had the king at its center, surrounded by a complicated hierarchical apparatus of law courts and lawyers of every kind. They were from this perspective the last fingers of the state. Yet on the other hand, they were the initial points of access to the legal process and hence one of its centers. Notaries were the first representatives of the state and its law whom people mundanely encountered in their daily lives, whether borrowing money, buying or renting property, or making preparations for marriage and death.

Notarized records offered early modem people a powerful resource and they illustrate how notaries were resources for their communities as well as for the state. Notaries offered their clients both protection from and a gateway to a legal system that privileged written rather than oral evidence. Since few acts carried the legal obligation to use a notary, and none to use any particular notary, individual decisions to pay one of them to make a public record of their personal affairs represented a positive choice. Clients used notaries in myriad ways, not only to record marriage contracts, wills, loans, and leases but to secure loans and to provide records of meetings or personal conflicts that they could refer to in case of later disputes.(8)

The French state's own authority, and its dictates over decisions such as marriage and other personal issues, became a matter of public record through notarization. Notaries who drew up marriage contracts, for instance, carefully noted that parental consent for the marriage of minors had been given. In doing so, they framed the lives of French subjects in terms of a household-based patriarchy, thereby diffusing on this level the enhanced parental powers promoted by edicts of the French crown since the late sixteenth century.

Notarial acts also did the state and community cultural work of maintaining the public perpetuation of household-based gender hierarchies. Only men and widows had direct access to notaries and the resources of power they offered, because wives and daughters were not permitted to make notarial acts except when explicitly authorized by their husbands or fathers or by the legal system--in the case of women whose property or person were separated from their husbands, for instance. Notaries carefully noted that such authorization had been given, thereby reiterating the dependent status of wives and daughters.(9)

Notarial acts, however, also embodied the emphases of local customary law. Such law regimes as those in Brittany and the northern half of France tempered royal legislation's increasing emphasis on distinct individual households and parental control through their stress on the role of male kin in overseeing internal household affairs and on the property rights of women and heirs. Breton customary family property law envisaged households less as autonomous units and more as nodes in a complicated web of extended familial ties. Customary law rules about the management of family property encouraged kin oversight of individual households at key moments of decision making in a family's patrimony. The importance ascribed to the role of kin was expressed for instance in notarial notations in marriage contracts. Contracts usually noted that marriages were made not only with the permission of the parents, but also with the explicit "advice and consent" of kin and friends who were present in addition to the couple's parents. This representation of household decision making pointed not only to the accrual of power by the husband or father in the direction of royal edicts, but to the ways in which male kinship alliances in middling families tempered the power of the head of household even while they consolidated gender hierarchies.(10)

Moreover, many of the acts notaries made for families reflected that the customary law of Brittany, like that of most other regions, contained provisions that protected the rights of women to property in a variety of ways. It strictly limited the opportunities of parents to determine who would inherit their property and in what form, by mandating absolutely equal division between siblings in families outside the nobility, regardless of sex. Customary law gave parents little opportunity to favor one child over another as testamentary bequests and other gifts between spouses were severely restricted. Parents could not limit the final interests of the spouses as future heirs by assigning wedding gifts as replacements for inheritances and "buying off" future claims. Under the western French system, all children had to be considered as heirs at the final division of their parental estates. Any gifts received before that time were simply advances, and they did not replace other expectations. Besides this diffusion of property rights to daughters as well as sons, customary law also gave women rights to petition for separation of property and to renounce their marital property communities (in which spouses pooled debts as well as assets).(11)

Yet the representations of power in notarial documents routinely elided the presence of women in ways that symbolically followed the emphasis of customary law on men's control of property, even while that same legal regime protected women's legal rights to property. The many acts recording loans, for example, often listed several male borrowers without noting that they were brothers-in-law or mentioning the women who linked them. These alliances between the households of collateral kin over issues concerning patrimony were key elements in the daily creation of gender hierarchies.

In these ways, notarial acts were central in the interlocking web of social relations and laws that perpetuated gender inequities in early modern France. Women as wives were normally denied access to the legal protections notarial acts could offer. In addition, the representations of power contained within such acts continually reaffirmed an equation that associated authority with men. Thus notarial acts regulated and shaped the intra- and inter-household relationships that were central in the reproduction of patriarchy, especially with regard to marriage and property.

Middling Families, Middling Households

Until her husband's abrupt departure, Louise Lecoq's life was typical of many non-elite urban early modern women whose experiences suggest the fundamental role middling wives played in facilitating their husbands' occupations. In terms of her background, kinship ties, role in the domestic economy, and direct and indirect participation in securing the position of and accomplishing the work of a notary, none of her experiences seem to have been exceptional.

Lecoq was the daughter of a baker and she was Rene Guilloteau's second wife. They married in 1641, not long after Guilloteau's first wife died following the birth of their tenth child. As Guilloteau's first marriage had lasted about 20 years, but he was Lecoq's first husband, we can assume that a considerable age gap most likely existed between them. Lecoq's sister Jeanne had also married a notary, Mathurin Coustans, as had Guilloteau's two sisters Francoise and Catherine. The three households of Guilloteau-Lecoq, her sister Jeanne and his sister Francoise were neighbors on a street behind the parish church of St. Croix while the other sister Catherine and her husband lived nearby in the same parish. As well as taking care of the children of Guilloteau's first marriage still living with them, Lecoq had seven children between 1643 and 1654.(12)

In all these regards, the Lecoq-Guilloteau household and other notarial families shared the middling milieu of master artisans, apothecaries, and booksellers that played an important role in early modern cities. Nantais notarial families were highly endogamous. The great majority of spouses were born in Nantes, and both worked and died in the city. The middling urban ranks of the artisanal elite and petty legal officials dominated their social backgrounds.(13) The subsistence of these families was secure, but the precariousness of early modern economies and demography meant that many were in more imminent danger of experiencing downward rather than upward social mobility. Kinship ties were strong and extensive, with the relatives of both husband and wife playing important material and emotional roles in the life of individual households. The horizons of middling families were narrow. Their occupational, economic, and political interests were focused on the immediate world around them. In their personal lives, they were members of a community who shaped a relationship between gender and authority that emphasized a system of collective oversight by which kin in particular stepped in to right any failings in the internal order of households and a community that allocated responsibility for good householding to women as well as men.(14)

In middling families, newlyweds and their kin set up new households after the families of the couple agreed on the terms of marriage contracts and church services had taken place. The arrangements made in marriage contracts had significant consequences for household relations, not only between spouses but between the couple and other kin. On the whole, the bride's family disproportionately subsidized the costs of setting up the new household. Husbands, as one seventeenth-century commentator noted, contributed their "labor" and "industry," so they did not have to contribute initial capital.(15) Subsequently, the new household's material form depended to a great extent on the dowry the bride's parents provided. Yet a majority of the dowry was defined as the lineage property (propres) of the bride, meaning that while her husband had the right to manage it, he could not sell it without her permission, and that if she died without children as heirs, he would have to return the lineage property to her birth family. The bride's family also gave gifts of wedding clothes as well as furniture and other household goods to equip the new household. A husband's family sometimes made contributions, especially if they were merchants, but these tended to take the forms of money or goods to fund trade.

The symbolic and material prominence of the brides' families in the construction of new households had important ramifications, pointing to the close ties that would continue to characterize relations between married couples and brides' kin. Although the inheritances sons could expect to receive at the partition of the parental estate may have eventually compensated for the input of the bride's family (especially in view of the endogamous marriage patterns prevailing among these families), the initial emphasis stressed the importance not just of kin ties but of bilateral kinship (where relatives of both spouses were equally valued). Women's retention of their family name was perhaps the most visible illustration of the ties women retained to their birth families.(16)

The complex foundations of the domestic and political economies of notarial households were illustrated by the ways in which the purchases of the offices of notary were often funded. While brides' parents often assigned their dowries to buy royal notary offices for their sons-in-law, they also determined that the office bought by the dowry would become the lineage property of the bride. She or her family, in effect, owned the husband's office, a practice that had significant implications for the husband. Julien Belon, for example, had purchased his position with his wife's dowry. When his wife, Anne Martin, died without their producing any heirs, he was forced to use his office as security of repayment of his wife's lineage property to her family.(17)

Such practices not only illustrate the importance of the capital women brought to marriage in funding their husbands' occupations, but suggest that the continued involvement of kin in managing the property of a new conjugal unit was as important as legal access to that property. The very considerable contribution of the bride's family to the new household in terms of money, furniture, accommodation, and even office, may have enhanced the position of wives within the household and certainly gave the bride's kin a stake in observing the affairs of the new household because of their interest in the value of the office. New spouses did not enter into a property community until a year and a day after the wedding, and as we have seen some of the patrimony of the new household was always reserved as lineage property.

The delay in initiating community property (premised on the expectation that in all likelihood the new couple would have produced an heir in whom kin of both sides were literally invested by the time a year and a day had passed) highlighted the contingent nature of the alliance and the importance of kin among these families. If the death of one spouse ended the marriage prior to this time, everything the bride had brought to the new household as part of her dowry--money or real property; furniture, linen and clothes--had to be returned to her or her heirs within a period specified in the marriage contract.(18) Additionally, if it was the bride who died, her birth family rather than her husband paid for the burial.

Households and Domestic Economies

Women in middling households, notarial and otherwise, had extensive obligations and responsibilities. Lecoq and other notaries' wives were engaged in their husbands' work as well as absorbed in more general household economy matters. Notaries' wives shared with women of all ranks responsibility with their servants for domestic chores, while in their particular cases the daily obligations of their husbands in town left them to supervise the rural small holdings that all these families owned, such as growing grapes for wine, as well as fruit and vegetables, and keeping cows for butter and cheese.(19)

Yet wives in middling families performed many other functions too. Notarial marriages, for instance, often brought responsibilities beyond the narrowly domestic household. Notaries were prominent among a group of artisans and low-ranking lawyers frequently called on by the city council to be the administrators of the Nantais poor house (Hotel-Dieu), two of whom were appointed each year to supervise its daily running. The position was onerous, calling for the supervision of buying daily supplies of food, overseeing admissions, and collecting money assigned for funding. Notaries' appointment clearly brought substantial responsibilities for their wives too, for as one notary, seeking to be excused on the grounds that his wife was too young and inexperienced in addition to being pregnant, explained in 1581, "The job depended rather on the diligence of a woman than a man."(20) While on one level, husbands and wives running the poor house replicated on a larger scale the roles of their own households, this position also gave women a set of extra-household duties that expanded the parameters of the domestic economy.

Notaries' wives also seem to have participated quite actively in their husbands' work in a variety of forms. Like artisans, notaries usually worked out of their own households, but the physical spaces of the studies were not monopolized by notaries and their male clerks. Household inventories included studies whose furniture included a spinning wheel, and people often mentioned in passing the presence of the notary's wife in the study. Teenage clerks learning the trade provided additional help in notarial offices, much as apprentices did in artisanal occupations. Like apprentices, the contracts of a notary's clerks committed them to live in the household of the notary for a fixed period of 1 or 2 years while the notary promised in return to teach them notarial skills and to provide board and lodging, all for a set fee. Often, however, these contracts also included acknowledgment of the notary's wife. In 1618, for example, when seventeen-year-old Antoine Hastier became the clerk of Jacques Denan, he paid 120 livres to Denan and "six livres for the hair pins of Denan's wife," a common formulation. In other such contracts, fees specifically paid to wives also included "une pistolle without diminution" of the yearly charge of 150 livres and an "ecu d'or" given "in favor" of the contract.(21) Such tributes apparently do not occur in apprenticeship contracts for other occupations, so they may acknowledge the involvement of wives in notarial work as well as the extra burden of another person for whom to cook and clean.

Louise Lecoq's involvement, and presumably that of her peers, sometimes went much further. Very occasionally, for example, a notary's wife might serve instead of the clerk as a substitute signer for an illiterate client on an act her husband had made.(22) After Rene Guilloteau's departure, clients as well as the judge and prosecutor repeatedly asked Lecoq for information, implying that they expected that she would have some familiarity with her husband's notarial work. Clients alarmed by rumors of Guilloteau's troubles had apparently been pressing Lecoq for answers to their queries for several weeks. One woman client had gone to the house on hearing of Guilloteau's absence "to try to know what was owed to her or in any case to get [her copies of] her contracts." Lecoq had not given her any "satisfaction," until she returned with a lawyer who had managed to get from Lecoq a copy of one of the contracts in question. Another aggrieved client had named both Guilloteau and Lecoq in a court action over a notarial transaction he had entrusted to Guilloteau, and sought to confirm her role by asking that she recognize the signature of her husband on his receipt for money he had left with Guilloteau, a task other notaries or lawyers were usually called on to carry out in such disputes.(23)

The wives of notaries thus straddled the boundary between artisanal crafts in which women might have expertise and those skills and sets of knowledge, such as law and medicine, which were defined as exclusively male. Evidence of this is clear in the treatment of widows of notaries. The widows of artisans, despite increasing restrictions, might expect the right to keep running their husbands' workshops after they died. Yet the widows of notaries, like the widows of lawyers or doctors whose husbands' occupational identities seemed to indicate a set of skills and responsibilities which excluded women, had no legally ensconced assumption of occupational competence. Notarial practice stopped at once when the notary died and his office had to be sold.

Lecoq's Choices

Thus Guilloteau's absence from his role as notary and as husband was problematic for contemporaries. Early modern patriarchy in all its varieties was based explicitly on a familial household model and premised on the concept of the husband and father having authority within the household and therefore being the person who mediated, especially in legal situations, the relations of his dependents with the rest of the world. Moreover, as we have seen, the law--even as a shorthand for a complex set of institutions, arenas, and actors--was mostly legally and culturally male dominated. In this context, Lecoq's own behavior--and the attitudes and assumptions judicial officials, Clients, and family expressed towards her--suggest how differing understandings of the workings of gender and authority in households could blur the edges of the strictly gendered identity of the law as the legal process took its course.

In trying to exploit the ambiguity of her situation to her advantage, Lecoq sought to make use of the complex cultural understandings of the law and the gender hierarchies that were an integral part of it to stall the court's investigation and to deflect clients' claims. She clearly played up the vision of patriarchy favored by the social and political elite she faced. In denying that she knew anything about any notarial acts or registers other than those locked in her husband's armoires as they should be, insisting at first that only he had a key which he always carried with him, asserting that she did not know where he was but was sure he would be back soon to answer queries, and repeatedly asking that no inventory be taken until he returned, she represented herself as the very model of a wife whose household revolved around its patriarch.

Yet Lecoq was playing a deceptively complicated hand because the reality of daily life in middling households not only placed her at the center of her household's domestic affairs, but also made her familiar with her husband's notarial work. These patterns and Guilloteau's own actions indicate that she must have known much more than she was willing to admit to the investigators. Guilloteau made an act giving her power of attorney (a procure) over their affairs soon after his departure, and with it gave Lecoq great responsibility. This act, notarized in La Rochelle, revealed the extent of the problems they faced and acknowledged implicitly that he did not expect to come back to town to sort it out. Guilloteau specifically authorized Lecoq to sell his notarial office, his property in town and in the surrounding countryside--"even my personal property (meubles)" as he put it--to use the money to pay off his debts, to appoint lawyers to take care of his interests in any legal actions and to "otherwise do with it what seems appropriate to her."(24)

Apparently, from the moment the court's officials arrived on her doorstep, Lecoq knowingly lied to them. She knew at least where Guilloteau had initially gone and that he expected her to sell his office, although she repeatedly maintained her ignorance. It seems likely she knew why he had left town and that her role was to minimize the ensuing damage. Although they seem not to have had time to draw up the act giving her power of attorney before he left, suggesting perhaps the abruptness of that decision, Guilloteau's entrusting of what was a very onerous and delicate task to Lecoq suggests he was sure both of her competence and of her familiarity with their affairs. Moreover, her rapid assertion on the first day of the investigation of her intent to renounce her marital property community and position herself as one of her husband's creditors likewise suggests that she knew quite well what was going on.

Lecoq was precariously caught between wanting to deter the officials and revealing too much about what she knew. On the first day, she gained some breathing space when the officials left after she insisted that she did not know where Guilloteau was but expected him back. When they returned the next day, she deferred further by claiming that she had received a letter from Guilloteau and expected him back in a week--although she refused to show them the letter in question. Whether or not Lecoq had actually received such a letter in so timely a manner, she perhaps made a mistake with this second day strategy. Her refusal--or inability--to share the letter with the judicial officials raised doubts about her credibility. At any rate, the court officials slowly began their inventory that day, but they seemed to have wavered over whether they should wait until Guilloteau returned, a route that better fitted their understanding of how notarial and household business worked, and one that may help explain the month's delay between their receiving the first complaints about potential fraud and their taking any action.

Lecoq's choices about how to present herself point both to her perception of her interests and to the multiple facets of early modern legal process. Her renunciation of her marital property community protected her from responsibility for the debts of their household. This decision may have been an assertion of a distinct self-interest and a desire to distance herself from her husband. Yet, her own interests were part and parcel of those of her household. By positioning herself as a creditor of her husband, she herself could shelter part of any funds liquidated, such as the sale of his office, from other creditors. This would have been a modest but by no means futile goal given the perilous state of their financial affairs. After all, their household, personal and notarial, was constructed from her labor as much as his authority.(25)

In choosing to renounce her marital property community, moreover, Lecoq was resorting to the provisions of customary law. The often clashing imperatives of royal statute and regional customary law heightened the complexity of legal process in early modern society. While contemporary royal decrees enhanced and reiterated the power and authority of husbands and fathers over household affairs such as children's marriages in ways that diminished women's legal abilities, the customary law of Brittany that applied to Nantes, like that in other parts of northern France, continued to offer some protection of women's property rights.

The Judiciary, the Clients, and Their Dilemmas

While Lecoq was the central figure in this episode, her responses and choices came out of her interactions with the other participants. The judge and royal prosecutor were also key actors in the making of this particular fragment of the legal process while a variety of clients also pressed their claims.

The personal presence of the two city court officials with their clerk suggests that they viewed l'affaire Guilloteau as a very serious matter. They explained their intervention on the basis of the extensive individual and public "interests" at stake in uncovering whether a wrongdoing had occurred. The interests of individuals were clear, represented vociferously by frustrated clients concerned about their possible financial loss. Individual interests and those of "the public," at least as perceived and pursued by the judge and royal prosecutor, were not, however, necessarily the same.

Guilloteau's clients who chose to assert their own interests were primarily concerned about protecting against their own households' financial loss. All the clients who made a case to the court's officials had left money with Guilloteau with which he was to make loans on their behalf, and none had yet received signed copies of contracts indicating that the transactions had actually been completed. Not surprisingly, they wanted to discover if their particular contracts did in fact exist, or if Guilloteau had embezzled their money as local "rumor" maintained.

The tension between the formal assumption that the law was a masculine domain and the informal realization of Lecoq's involvement in her husband's practice shaped attitudes towards her and was a critical element in creating the context in which this particular episode played itself out. Although contemporaries recognized the possibility existed that Lecoq had some knowledge and involvement in her husband's work, her position was shrouded with uncertainty for the clients and court officials trying to resolve the situation. Ordinary clients who usually visited notaries in their studies would have seen notaries' wives there and questioned her sharply based on that knowledge. The judicial officials on the other hand, drawn from the urban elite who were more likely to be visited by notaries in their own homes and who may have been more convinced that the legal process was a male world, seemed more uncertain about whether she would know anything.

As leaders of the municipal court, the judge and prosecutor were formally charged with maintaining the social and political order of the city. As notaries' official function was to guarantee public confidence, notarial fraud threatened that order and thus warranted the personal involvement of the highest ranking members of the municipal legal system. But the judge and prosecutor were faced with some awkward choices in determining what actions best served this "public" interest. If they vigorously pursued an investigation into the professional and personal affairs of Guilloteau's household and engaged in a confrontation with his wife, they risked encouraging worse disorder. Should they uncover large-scale fraud with massive losses involving many clients, real panic and unrest might spread. If they proceeded slowly in a very calm and orderly manner, they could hope for two potential gains: first, that Guilloteau himself might return to sort out the situation; second, that upholding the integrity of the household would reassure the majority of the Nantais population--who were not, after all, clients of Guilloteau. Early modern communities were by and large self-regulating and might find problematic the prospect of judicial officials' interference in the affairs of any household.

The best that can be said about the official investigation, in the face of overwhelming evidence as to the chaos of Guilloteau's affairs and consequently those of his clients, is that the judge and prosecutor proceeded very deliberately. After spending more than a week making the inventory, they adjourned without apparent concern for Guilloteau's clients' desire for closure. Their dealings with Lecoq markedly lacked the confrontational pressure they presumably could have put on her. Officials surely took note of the increasing number of inconsistencies in the story she gave them, but did not harass her about this or about her unwillingness to show them the letter that might have sealed the case one way or another. Apparently, they interpreted Lecoq's capriciousness as the behavior to be expected from women who were by nature disorderly.

Both judge and prosecutor were thus caught in the mire of what exactly gendered and hierarchical political and social authority entailed and how to best maintain it. Their approach suggests that they preferred, given their perspectives as members of the legal elite and their position in the judicial system, to respect the integrity of the household and the paternal and conjugal authority of its head along the lines elaborated by royal decrees. In the end, the judge, the prosecutor, and Lecoq all inclined towards recognizing the absence of Guilloteau from his household and place in the legal process as a factor meriting delay.

Kin Support and Supervision

The roles of Lecoq's kin highlight the ways individual households in middling families were embedded in kinship networks that could offer help and oversight. Lecoq and Guilloteau's immediate neighbors were his sister Francoise (herself the daughter, sister, and widow of notaries), and Lecoq's sister and brother-in-law (another notary, Mathurin Coustans). Their public behavior seemed to diverge during Lecoq's trials with clients and court officials. From the second day, Francoise was constantly present while Coustans was consistently absent throughout the investigation. However, the contrasting behavior of these two kin concealed a complicated and perhaps coordinated effort to do what they could to protect Lecoq and Guilloteau's interests as well as their own by mobilizing cultural expectations about the processes of law and patriarchy.

Francoise Guilloteau, engaged in what seems to have been a helpful and well-timed strategy that served Lecoq in addition to meeting her own needs. On the second day, for instance, when the court officials rejected Lecoq's efforts to deter them by explaining she knew Guilloteau would be back in a week, they had no sooner finished their exchange with Lecoq than Francoise Guilloteau arrived to make her case which further delayed any progress towards inventory making. She justified her presence on the grounds that her deceased husband's papers were among those to be inventoried in Rene Guilloteau's etude. Later it became clear that her stake in the proceedings was more personally complicated. One client revealed he had filed a lawsuit against Rene Guilloteau for making a fraudulent contract between the client and Francoise Guilloteau detrimental to the client.

Although Mathurin Coustans stayed away from the proceedings, his role in the Lecoq-Guilloteau family crisis was more intimate than the distance his public absence suggested. Clearly he had to preserve his own interests as a notary and consequently his own household economy: his reputation and business were probably already imperiled by his brother-in-law's woes, not only by virtue of their kinship but because they often worked together cosigning acts the other made, since every notarial act had to be witnessed by two notaries. Rene Guilloteau himself may have recognized this bind in giving the power of attorney with its concomitant task of sorting out his affairs to his wife rather than his brother-in-law, neighbor, and fellow notary who would seem in most ways ideally suited for such a task.

Yet multiple ties closely linked the two men, as they did other collateral male kin in this middling urban milieu, and these relationships (as we have seen) usually included the expectation that each had the right and obligation to oversee the other's household. Coustans seems to have maintained this role in practice, despite his absence during the visits of the investigating officials. He had made a copy of Guilloteau's act giving Lecoq power of attorney in mid-November so he certainly knew of the perilous state of their affairs. He may, of course, have advised her in other ways too.

In subsequent years, Lecoq continued to face difficulties and her household's relations with Coustans remained close. She used him as her own notary when she made transactions of various kinds.(26) Guilloteau's office was sold in 1657. Lecoq did attempt to liquidate their resources, presumably to pay off debts, but she remained embroiled in financial woes. In February 1659, for example, the heirs of a neighborhood apothecary brought a court action against the still absent Guilloteau for nonpayment of over 120 livres worth of material as well as arrears on a 100 livres loan. Lecoq, acting for herself and husband under the power the procure gave her, asked for more time to pay and for part of the debt to be forgiven in view of her "few goods." Nor did her travails end quickly. In 1670, the guardian of her deceased brother's children took her to court seeking repayment of a hundred livres her brother had lent her 7 years earlier to pay off debts she owed someone else. Four years later, Mathurin Coustans appeared in the Nantais court defending himself, his baker brother, and Lecoq against charges of "pure chicanery" in an inheritance dispute. Lecoq's older son Denis, a merchant, continued the pattern of family turbulence into the next generation. In 1676, his wife, Andree Lussard, petitioned for a property separation on the grounds that he was frittering away their household's resources by drinking and gambling, entertaining all comers at all hours and neglecting his shop.(27)

Despite such signs of desperate circumstances, Lecoq seems to have done quite well in controlling the fallout from her husband's abrupt departure, and Coustans was a party to her household's triumphs as well as tribulations. At least one of her children succeeded far beyond his father--a tribute to her efforts to restore the stability of her household. When her son Jacques married in St. Croix in 1672, he was a barrister (avocat), a post markedly above his father's humble notarial office. His uncle Coustans and his older brother, Denis, were present at the ceremony. Two years later, Lecoq and Coustans were the godparents of the first child born to this marriage.(28) There is no sign that Guilloteau ever returned to Nantes, and from 1670 Lecoq was described as a widow rather than his wife.

Perhaps these three family members determined in 1656 that the best course of action would be for Lecoq to emphasize her ignorance and dependency on her husband to highlight the incompleteness of her household and the break in the legal process, with Francoise as support for this position. Coustans, by staying away, not only protected himself but avoided facilitating the progression of the investigation by offering himself symbolically as another notary and patriarch who could re-knit the process frayed by Guilloteau's absence. Nevertheless, in his continued participation in the management of Lecoq's household affairs, Coustans upheld his right and obligation as her kinsman to oversee the internal management of a household whose disorder threatened to violate community norms.

Conclusion

Louise Lecoq's experiences came out of the everyday workings of the legal process and its role in maintaining hierarchies of gender and authority. With her husband's abrupt departure from town, she found herself in an unusual position. Her household was incomplete without its head and Guilloteau's absence from his occupation as an officer of the state symbolized a break at this lowly level in the male-dominated legal structure. The negotiations between all parties in the grey area that resulted illuminate some of the links among gender, law, and authority in early modern France. Multiple strands of interests, institutions, and actors found in a household-based model of authority a way to make sense of their world.

Women were in many ways primary subjects of the early modern French legal system, in particular the crown's construction of a legislated patriarchy. Royal decrees regulated their marriages, their sexuality, and their ability to make any act without the authorization of their fathers or husbands in a familiar pattern of gender inequality.

Yet "the law" was not straightforward in early modern societies. Legal process was prolonged and involved many participants whose confrontations and negotiations shaped the meanings and impacts of laws in daily life. Early modern states with their limited regulatory and enforcement apparatus were in fact far removed from the daily lives of their subjects. The people whose actions shaped legal process had varied interests and perspectives.

Notaries in part bridged the gap between crown and subject by diffusing the patriarchal impetus of the state on a grassroots level in their occupational role, but their complementary role as tools of the clients--who employed them, as well as of the state, and their own experiences as middling men--also colored their attitudes. Legal process was complicated too by the coexistence of regional customary laws that, in practice, carried just as much weight as royal statute and were often divergent in their emphases.

Clearly, the critical relationship between early modern "law" and society was complicated. While early modem royal decrees that increased paternal power over the making of marriages emphasized the power of the husband or father over his household, customary laws pertaining to the transmission and management of property gave women and men quite a broad array of options and emphasized the kin relations that also shaped the parameters of authority in middling families. The strong ties between male kin that Breton customary law encouraged tempered the power of individual heads of households but also entrenched gender hierarchies. The extensive managerial oversight male kin enjoyed over property reduced the daily significance that access to property customary law offered women.

Moreover, in the everyday processes and encounters on which the legal process was built, women's capital and labor--as well as the negotiations and moments of decision or indecision on the part of all involved--emphasized the contingency that underlay relations of gender and authority. The maintenance and reproduction of patriarchy did not simply trickle down from the imperative of the crown and elites but demanded the combined efforts of different groups and individuals each with their own particular interests and emphases. While a household-based gender hierarchy became immensely potent as the basis of early modern social and political organization, the many pieces of which it was constituted never fit together in a seamless web. The complexity and variety of ways in which structures of gender and authority were maintained created tensions and gaps which in turn provided at least the possibility of some space for individual women to maneuver.

Lecoq's experiences and those of her peers suggest how women participated in the legal process and how they could use some of the assumptions and elements of a fundamentally patriarchal but complex system to protect themselves. While women were in a variety of ways disadvantaged in and excluded from the legal process that constituted central pillars of patriarchy, the centrality of gender in early modern societies meant that women were never totally marginalized.

NOTES

(1) For a useful analysis of the complex ways in which law works, see Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London and Boston: Routledge, 1978), esp. 1-81.

(2) For the pertinent royal edicts and court judgments in early modern France, see Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 4-27, and S. Hanley, "Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marriage Pact," in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For evidence of patriarchy as the explicit basis of social and political organization elsewhere in early modern Europe, see Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society: Class and Gender in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (London: Oxford University Press, 1990).

(3) See the recent work of Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

(4) See especially Hanley, "Engendering the State" and "Family and State"; and Roper, Holy Household.

(5) This paragraph and the narrative that follows have been reconstructed from the 82-page transcript of events made by the clerk of the provostal court. Archives Departementales de Loire-Atlantique (cited as ADLA) B5694,13 December-22 December 1656, no page numbers.

(6) Guilloteau gave Lecoq power of attorney through an act dated 17 November 1656, a copy of which I found in the Nantais notarial archives. Attached to ADLA 4E2 / 547, 28 June 1657.

(7) See, for instance, ADLA 4E2 / 547, 24 March 1657, 28 June 1657, and 20 February 1659. For notaries being hanged, see Maurice Garsonnin, Histoire de la Communaute des Notaires au Chatelet d'Orleans (1303-1791) (Orleans: Imprimerie Moderne, 1922), 56.

(8) Many of Guilloteau's problems apparently stemmed not from his work as a notary per se but from his activities as a credit broker, a sideline most notaries were heavily involved in. For the multiple roles of notaries in their communities, see Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (State College: Penn State University Press, in press).

(9) Jean Chenu, Cent Notables et Singuliers Questions du Droict decidees par Arrests Memorables des Cours Soveraines de France, rev, ed. (Paris: Chez Nicolas Bourn, 1611), 233-43.

(10) For the roles of kin in middling families, see Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy.

(11) For Breton customary law, see La Coustume de Bretagne avec les commentaires et observations ... par Maitre Michel Sauvageau (Nantes: Jacques Mareschal, 1710). Discussions of the regional customary laws that operated alongside royal statute in early modem societies include: Jean Yver, Egalite entre hiritiers et exclusion des enfants dotes: essai de geographie coutumiere (Paris: Sirey, 1966); Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, "A System of Customary Law: Family Structures and Inheritance Customs in Sixteenth Century France," in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales Economies, Societes, Civilisations, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Unfortunately none of this literature has considered the gender differences in these coexisting systems or attempted to assess their impacts. For the differences between the large discretion of parents in southern France where Roman law prevailed and the very limited powers allowed by customary law in northern France, see James Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 40-45.

(12) The biographical details in this paragraph were drawn from a variety of sources, but particularly from the parish registers in the Archives Municipales de Nantes (cited as AMN) series GG.

(13) Based on the occupations of parents of 223 notaries and notaries' wives who worked in Nantes between 1560 and 1660.

(14) For elaboration of the middling status of notarial families and other issues in this paragraph, see Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy.

(15) Claude-Joseph Ferrire, La Science Parfaite des Notaires ou Le Parfait Notaire, rev. ed. (Paris: Michel-Estienne David, 1741).

(16) Unlike other cases, these urban middling families did not usually make gifts that might counter at least symbolically the prominence of the bride's kin in the future of her household. In elite Florentine families, for example, husbands provided bridal clothes both as counter gifts and to assert their wives' integration into a new household and lineage. See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, "The Griselda Complex: Dowry and Marriage Gifts in the Quattrocento" in C. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 224-25.

(17) For Belon-Martin, ADLA 4E2 /1369,19 February 1659. For three examples of dowries being assigned to fund the purchase of office, see ADLA 4E2 / 1718, 25 August 1624; ADLA 4E2 / 612, 11 June 1635; and ADLA 4E2 / 1034,20 January 1649.

(18) The marriage contracts given and received by members of notarial families in the seventeenth century consistently contained this provision, usually dictating that everything should be returned to the bride or her family within 612 months following the death of a spouse.

(19) See Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy.

(20) AMN BB17, 19 June 1581.

(21) See, among many examples, ADLA 4E2 / 1452, 6 October 1618; ADLA 4E2 1728, 10 March 1629; and ADLA 4E2 / 491, 13 December 1629.

(22) See, for example, ADLA B5660, 14 July 1628; ADLA B6664, 17 August 1647; and ADLA 4E2 / 1038, (torn) November 1653. Almost all notaries' wives were literate, as judged by their ability to sign their names.

(23) ADLA B5694, 13-22 December 1656.

(24) Attached to ADLA 4132 / 547, 28 June 1657. It is not certain exactly when Lecoq received this act, of course, but, even given the vagaries of the seventeenth-century postal system, a letter sent from La Rochelle could hardly have taken longer than a week to reach Nantes.

(25) Little is known about the practice of renouncing marital community property or about the further step of seeking legal separations of property and/or person in early modem France. In an early study assessing the situation of Parisian women in the late eighteenth century; Jacques Lelievre argued that a wife "in face of the juridical omnipotence of the husband [with regard to her property] was protected quite efficiently" by a balancing system of rights that included the ability to seek separate property and to renounce marital property community. Jacques Lelievre, La Practique des Contracts de Marriage chez les Notaires au Chatelet de Paris de 1789 a 1804 (Paris: Editions Cujas, 1959), 148-56. For the dynamics of seeking separations of property, see Julie Hardwick, "Seeking Separations: Gender and Household Economies in Seventeenth-Century France," French Historical Studies (forthcoming, Winter 1998).

For studies of gender and separate property in early modern England and British America, see Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London and New York: Wiedenfield and Nicolson, 1977); Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

(26) See, for example, ADLA 4E2 / 547, 24 March 1657, 28 June 1657, and 20 February 1659.

(27) ADLA 4E2 / 547, 24 March 1657, 28 June 1657, 20 February 1659; ADLA B6148, (no day or month) 1670; ADLA B5828, 1 October 1674; ADLA B5829, 19 March 1676; ADLA B5831, 26 April 1677; and ADLA B6150, 7 August 1677.

(28) ADLA J sous serie 25j, Registres Freslon under entries for "Guilloteau."