The Bachelors' Ball: The Crisis of Peasant Society in Bearn

The Bachelors' Ball The Crisis of Peasant Society in Beam

PIERRE BOURDIEU

Translated by Richard Nice

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

First published in French as Le bal des celibataires © Editions du Seuil, 2002. This English translation 2008 © Polity Press Ouvrage publie avec le concours du Ministere francais charge de la Culture—Centre national du livre. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture—Nation Centre for the Book. All rights reserved. Published 2008 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 0 8 ISBN-13: ISBN-13: ISBN-10: ISBN-10:

12 3 4 5

978-0-226-06749-0 (cloth) 978-0-226-06750-6 (paper) 0-226-06749-1 (cloth) 0-226-06750-5 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002. [Bal des celibataires English] The bachelors' ball : the crisis of peasant society in Beam / Pierre Bourdiei translated by Richard Nice. p. cm. Articles previously published in 1962, 1972, and 1989. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06749-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-06749-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06750-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-06750-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Single people—FranceBeam. 2. Marriage—France—Beam. 3. Sociology, Rural—France— Beam. 4. Beam (France)—Rural conditions. I. Title. HQ800.4.F82B68413 2008 306.81'520944716—
Contents

Introduction

1

Part One Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

7

1 The system of matrimonial exchanges in traditional peasant society 2 Internal contradictions and anomy 3 The opposition between the bourg and the hameaux 4 The peasant and his body Conclusion Appendix I Appendix II Appendix III

Bibliographical notes Changes in population, 1836-1954 Dialogue between a villager and a peasant Appendix IV Another dialogue between a villager and a bachelor Appendix V The exemplary tale of a younger son from a modest family Appendix VI Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood Appendix VII An attempt to generalize: bachelorhood in 16 rural cantons in Brittany

11 38 63 81 94 97 108 111 115 116 118 121

vi

Contents

Part Two Matrimonial Strategies in the System of Reproduction Strategies

131

Bibliographical notes

160

Part Three Reproduction Forbidden: The Symbolic Dimension of Economic Domination

165

1 Addenda and corrigenda 2 'From the closed world to the infinite universe' 3 The unification of the matrimonial market 4 'Sound opinions of the people'

169 174 180 190

Appendix

192

Postscript: A class as object

193

Index

201

takes place in the back room of a cafe. In A the middle of the brightly lit dance-floor, a dozen couples are dancing to the latest tunes. They are mainly "students" - pupils at the high schools and colleges of the neighbouring towns, mostly originating from the bourg. There are also a few conscripts, and young townsmen, employed as factory-workers or clerks, dressed in jeans and black leather jackets, bareheaded or wearing a Tyrolean hat. Among the girls dancing, several are from the remotest hameaux; nothing in their dress or behaviour distinguishes them from the other natives of Lesquire, working in Pau as seamstresses, maids or shop assistants. Some other young women, and even some girls as young as twelve, dance among themselves, while the young boys chase and jostle one another among the couples. Standing at the edge of the dancing area, forming a dark mass, a group of older men look on in silence. All aged about thirty, they wear berets and unfashionably cut dark suits. As if drawn in by the temptation to join the dance, they move forward, narrowing the space left for the dancers. There they all are, all the bachelors. Married men of their age do not go to balls any more - except once a year for the major village festival, the agricultural fair. On that day, everyone is "on the promenade" and almost everyone dances, even the "old-timers" . But still the bachelors do not dance. On those evenings, they are less conspicuous: the whole village is out there, both men and women, the men to chat and share a drink with friends, the women to spy and gossip and speculate endlessly on possible marriages. At dance-nights like this at Christmas or New Year, these bachelors have nothing to do. These are dances "for the young people", in other words those who are not married; they are too old, and they are and know they are "unmanageable". Folk come here to dance, and they will not be dancing. From time to time, as if to hide their embarrassment, they exchange a few jokes or lark about a little. A "march" is struck up; a girl goes over to the bachelors' corner and calls to one of them to join her. At first he declines, embarrassed but delighted. Then he goes once round the floor, deliberately exaggerating his clumsiness and heavy-footedness, rather as the oldtimers do when they dance at the fair, winking to his companions. C H P H E CHRISTMAS BALL

When the dance is over, he goes and sits down. He will not dance again, "That", someone tells me, "is An.'s son [the name of a big landowner]. The girl who invited him to dance is a neighbour. She offered him a dance to cheer him up." Everything returns to normal. The bachelors will remain there, until midnight, hardly speaking, in the light and noise of the ball, gazing at the girls beyond their reach. Then they will withdraw to the bar room and drink, sitting face to face. They will sing old Beam songs at the top of their voices, lingering on dissonant chords until their breath fails, while in the dance room behind them the orchestra plays twists and cha-chas. And as the night draws to an end they will slowly set off, in twos and threes, for their distant farms.' Pierre Bourdieu*

* 'Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination economique\ £tudes Rurales (Paris), 113-14 (Jan.-June 1989), pp. 15-36, at p. 9.

Introduction

The articles that I have brought together here approach the same problem three times, but each time armed with theoretical equipment that is more powerful because it is more general and yet closer to experience.1 As such, they may interest those who would like to follow a piece of research through the logic of its development and may lead them to share the conviction, which has always been mine, that the deeper theoretical analysis goes, the closer it gets to the data of observation. Indeed, I think that, in the social sciences, the heuristic itinerary always has something of the initiatory journey about it; and perhaps it is not entirely absurd or misplaced to see a kind of intellectual Bildungsroman in the history of this research, which, taking for its object the sufferings and dramas linked to the relations between the sexes - which is, more or less, the title I gave, before the emergence of 'gender studies', to the article in Les Temps Modernes on this problem2 - was the occasion or the operator of a veritable conversion. The word 'conversion' is surely not too strong to describe the transformation, both intellectual and emotional, which led me 1

P. Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne\ £tudes Rurales> 5-6 (Apr.-Sept. 1962), pp. 32-135 (Part One below); 'Les strategies matrimoniales dans le systeme de reproduction', Annates, 4-5 (July-Oct. 1972), pp. 1105-27 (Part Two below); 'Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination economique', ttudes Rurales, 113-14 (Jan.-June 1989), pp. 15-36 (Part Three below). 2 'Les relations entre les sexes dans la societe paysanne', Les Temps Modernes, no. 195 (1962), pp. 307-31 [trans.|.

2

Introduction

from the phenomenology of emotional life (which perhaps also arose from the affects and afflictions of life, which had to be intellectually denied) to a vision of the social world and of practice that is both more distant and more realistic, with the aid of an experimental apparatus designed to favour the transformation of Erlebnis into Erfahrung. This theoretical reorientation was fraught with social implications, because it was accomplished through the shift from philosophy to ethnology or sociology and more specifically to rural sociology, situated at the lowest level of the hierarchy of disciplines, and because the elective renunciation implied in this negative displacement within the academic world was counterbalanced by the confused dream of a reintegration with the world in which I grew up. In the first text, written in the early 1960s, at a time when the ethnography of European societies barely existed and when rural sociology kept a respectful distance from the 'field', I undertook, in an article warmly welcomed into Etudes Rurales by Isaac Chiva (would any editor nowadays allow almost half a whole issue of a journal to a young, unknown researcher?), to resolve the social enigma of the bachelorhood of eldest sons in a society renowned for its fierce attachment to the principle of primogeniture. Remaining very close to the naive vision from which I nonetheless intended to break away, I threw myself into a kind of total description, a somewhat frenetic one, of a society that I knew without truly knowing it, as is always the case with a familiar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of someone who discovers with a kind of wonder the pleasure of objectivating, as taught in Marcel Maget's Guide d'etude directe des comportements culturels, a tremendous hyperempiricist antidote to the fascination then exerted by the structuralist constructions of Claude Levi-Strauss (a fascination attested by the article on the Kabyle house3 which I wrote at roughly the same time). The most visible sign of the conversion of the gaze that is implied in adopting the posture of the observer was the extensive use I made of photographs, maps, ground plans and statistics: everything was thrown into the pot - a sculptured door in front of which I had walked a thousand times, the games played in the village festivities, the age and make of the cars, the age pyramid of the population - and 3

'La maison kabyle ou le monde renverse', in Jean Pouillon and Paul Maranda (eds), ^.changes et communications. Melanges offerts a Claude Levi-Strauss a Voccasion de son 60e anniversaire (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1970), pp. 739-58; English trans, in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) [trans.].

Introduction

3

I offer the reader the ground plan of a house that I knew well because I had played in it throughout my childhood. The immense and infinitely painstaking work required for the statistical construction of double- or triple-entry tables on relatively large populations, without the aid of calculator or computer, or the many interviews accompanied by intensive observations that I carried out then, had the character of an initiatory ascesis. Through total immersion, a reconciliation was brought about with things and people from which the entry into another life had insensibly distanced me and for which the ethnographic posture naturally imposed respect. The return to the origins was accompanied by a return, but a controlled return, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears hardly any trace. While the vague and essayistic final remarks on the gap between the primary vision and the scientific vision may give a glimpse of the intention of reflexivity that was at the basis of the whole undertaking (I wanted to do a 'Tristes Tropiques in reverse*4), nothing, except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the description of the ball, evokes the emotional atmosphere in which my fieldwork was conducted. I think back, for example, to what was the starting point of my project, the school class photograph that one of my fellow pupils, by then a low-ranking clerk in the neighbouring town, commented on, pitilessly intoning 'unmarriageable!' with reference to almost half of those who appeared in it; I think of all the interviews, often very painful, with old bachelors of the generation of my father, who often accompanied me in my work and, with his presence and his discreet intercession, helped me to elicit trust and confidence. I think of an old school friend, whose almost feminine tact and refinement endeared him to me, and who, having retired with his mother into a magnificently maintained house, had chalked on the stable door the birthdates of his mares and the girls' names he had given them. And the objectivist restraint of my remarks is no doubt partly due to the fact that I feel the sense of something like a betrayal - which had led me to refuse to this day any republication of texts whose appearance in scholarly journals with small readerships had protected them against ill-intentioned or voyeuristic readings. I do not have much to say about the subsequent articles that is not already said within them - no doubt because the progress they manifest lies in the order of reflexivity, understood as the scientific objectivation of the subject of objectivation, and because my awareness of A

A reference to Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955) (trans.]

4

Introduction

the changes in theoretical standpoint of which they are the product is expressed fairly clearly within them. The second, which marks a rather sharp break with the structuralist paradigm, through the shift from rule to strategy, from structure to habitus and from the system to the socialized agent, himself inhabited or haunted by the structure of the social relations of which he is the product, appeared in a history journal, Annalesy as if the better to signal the distance from structuralist synchronism. Prepared by the long historical postscript (written in collaboration with Marie-Claire Bourdieu) to the first article, it contributes significantly to an adequate, that is to say historicized, understanding of a world that is breaking up. The final text, which arrives at the most general model, is also the one which makes it possible to understand most directly what was both presented and disguised in the initial scene: the small ball that I had observed and described, which, with the pitiless necessity of the word ^marriageable', had given me the intuition of being confronted with a highly significant social fact, was indeed a concrete and visible realization of the market in symbolic goods, which, as it became unified at the national level (just as it is, now, with homologous effects, on a global scale), had thrust a sudden, brutal devaluation on those who were bound up with the protected market of the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlled by families. In a sense, everything was present from the beginning, in the first description, but in such a form that, as the philosophers would say, the truth unveiled itself there only by veiling itself. One would lose a great deal by purely and simply 'skipping' the appendix to the first article [appendix VII), which I wrote with the assistance of Claude Seibel and the resources of INSEE:5 bristling with curves andfigures,it offers a verification and a purely empiricist generalization to all the departements of Brittany of the results obtained at the level of one commune in Beam (which had already been verified at the level of the canton, to meet the purely routine and naively castrating demand of a Sorbonne gate-keeper whom I had had to consult). It represents a kind of impeccable dead end, enclosing the research in a purely positivistic conclusion which could easily have been crowned by a formalization and in a mathematical formula. The effort of theoretical and empirical inquiry could no doubt have ended there, to general satisfaction - did I not discover, in the course of my reading with a view to a visit to Japan, that Japanese peasants experienced a form of exclusion from marriage very similar to that of the peasants of Beam? In reality, only the Institur National de la Statistique et des £tudes ficonomiques [trans.].

Introduction

5

construction of a general model of symbolic exchanges (the robustness of which I have been able to test many times in areas as diverse as masculine domination and the economics of the house or the magic of the state) makes it possible to account both for the regularities observed in practices and for the partial, distorted experience that those who undergo them and take part in them have of them. The trajectory marked out by the three articles assembled here seems to me to be such as to give a fairly accurate idea of the specific logic of research in the social sciences. I do indeed have the sense, which is perhaps rooted in the particularities of a habitus, but which the experience of many years of research has never ceased to confirm, that only attention to the most trivial data - which other social sciences, which also talk about markets, feel entitled to ignore, in the name of a right to abstraction that is seen as constitutive of the scientific approach - can lead to the construction of models that are empirically validated and capable of being formalized. In particular, this is because, in the human sciences, progress in knowledge of the object is, inseparably, progress in knowledge of the subject of knowledge, which, whether it is realized or not, whether it is wanted or not, comes through the set of humble, obscure tasks through which the knowing subject frees himself from the grip of his unthought past and opens himself to the logics immanent in the knowable object. If the sociologist who writes the third article has little in common with the sociologist who wrote the first one, this is perhaps above all because he has constructed himself through an effort of research which has enabled him to reappropriate, intellectually and emotionally, what is no doubt the most obscure and archaic part of himself. It is also because, thanks to this effort of anamnesic objectivation, he has been able to reinvest in a return to the initial object of his research the irreplaceable resources that he acquired in research that took as its object, at least indirectly, the subject of the research, and in all the subsequent works that the initial reconciliation with a burdensome past had facilitated. Paris, July 2001

Part One Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

By what paradox can men's failure to marry appear to those men themselves and to all around them as the most striking symptom of the crisis of a society which has traditionally condemned its younger sons to emigration or bachelorhood? The exceptional scale and gravity of the phenomenon are certainly clear to everyone. 'Around here,' said one informant, 'I see elder sons of 45 and none of them married. I've been to the Ha utes-Pyrenees and it's the same thing there. Whole neighbourhoods are unmarried' (J.-P. A, age 85). Another said: 'You see loads of guys between 25 and 35 who are "unmanageable". Do what they may - and the poor wretches don't do much about it! - they'll never marry' (P. C , age 32).' Yet a glance at the statistics makes it clear that, however serious it may be, the present situation is not without precedent: in the 90 years from 1870 to 1959,1,022 marriages were recorded, an average of 10.75 a year; between 1870 and 1914 (45 years) there were 592, an average of 13.15 a year; between 1915 and 1939 (25 years) there were 307, an average of 12.40; between 1940 and 1959 (20 years) there were 173 marriages, an average of 8.54. But since the overall population was declining at the same time, the fall in the rate of marriage remains relatively slight, as shown by the table overleaf.2

1 This study is based on research conducted in 1959 and 1960 in the village I shall call Lesquire - in Beam, in the heart of the uplands, between the rivers known as the 'two Gaves\ 2 The rate of marriage (defined as the number of newly married persons in a year per 1,000 inhabitants) is close to 15%o in France as a whole. Some corrections need to be made to the rates given here. For example, in 1946 and 1954 the number of marriages was abnormally high. In 1960, the marriage rate was only 2.94%o.

10

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Population, number of marriages and marriage rate Year of census 1881 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1921 1931 1936 1946 1954

Total population

Number of marriages

Marriage rate (%o) (2M/Px 1,000)

2,468 2,073 2,039 1,978 1,952 1,894 1,667 1,633 1,621 1,580 1,351

11 11 15 11 18 16 15 7 7 15 10

8.92 10.60 14.60 11.66 18.44 16.88 17.98 8.56 8.82 18.98 14.80

Reading these figures, one might be tempted to conclude that all the informants are deluded or inconsistent. After all, the same informant who declares: 'Here I see elder sons and none of them married/ goes on to add: 'In the past there were many elderly younger sons and there are still are now . .. There were a lot who weren't married.' That being so, why is bachelorhood now experienced as exceptionally dramatic and totally unusual?

The system of matrimonial exchanges in traditional peasant society To those who prefer to remain in the paternal home, [this regime of inheritance] gives the tranquillity of bachelorhood as well as the joys of the family. Frederic Le Play, L'Organisation de la famille

Before 1914, marriage was governed by very strict rules. It brought into play the whole future of the family farming business, it involved an economic transaction of the highest importance, and it helped to reaffirm the social hierarchy and the position of the family within that hierarchy; it was therefore a matter of concern for the whole group rather than for the individual. The family made the marriage and the bride and groom were each marrying a family. The investigation that preceded a marriage extended to a whole family. Because they had the same name, distant cousins living in villages round about were not exempt from it: 'Ba. is very "big", but his relatives over in Au. [a neighbouring village] don't count for much.' The in-depth knowledge of others that was required by the permanent character of the coexistence was based on observation of other people's actions and habits (there are jokes about women living in the bourg] 1 The market-village (bourg) referred to here as Lesquire is surrounded by small clusters of farmhouses known as hameaux ('hamlets). The opposition between the two is so central to these texts, in which their connotations become apparent, that the French terms have been retained Itrans. |.

12

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

who spend their days watching the street from behind half-open shutters), on the constant comparison of judgements about others (this is one of the functions of 'gossip'), and on memory of biographies and genealogies. When the time comes to make a choice as important as that of a wife for one's son or a husband for one's daughter, families naturally mobilize all the cognitive instruments and techniques that are used less systematically in everyday life.2 This is the context in which one has to understand the custom, which was still seen in 1955, of 'burning the trousers' of a young man who, having 'frequented' one girl, then married another. Marriage has the primary function of ensuring the continuity of the lineage without compromising the integrity of the heritage. For the family is first of all a name, the index of the individual's position in the social hierarchy, and, as such, the source of his renown or the reminder of his low status. 'You could say that, in the countryside, each person has a halo which comes from his family, his property titles, his upbringing. His whole future depends on the greatness and glory of that halo. Even idiots from good families, wellregarded families, marry easily' (A. B.). But the lineage is first and foremost a set of rights over the heritage; and, of all the dangers that threaten the heritage, and which custom seeks to keep at a distance, without any doubt the gravest is that introduced by marriage. It is understandable, then, that the agreement between the two families should take the form of a transaction subject to the most rigorous rules. 'When I was 26 [in 1901], I was going out with a young woman named M.-F. Lou., a neighbour's daughter, aged 21. Because my father was dead, I told my mother about it. You had to get the authorization of both father and mother, and, up to the age of 21, you had to provide an "act of respect" which was presented to the mayor. The same went for the girl. If there was opposition, you needed three "acts". Because I was the younger son, my elder brother was married and living in the house. My fiancee was an heiress. Normally I should have moved into that property. I had a dowry [dot] of 4,000 francs in cash.3 Of course, the custom was to give me some linen which did not count as part of the dowry. It opened a 2

Cf. M. Maget, 'Remarques sur le village comme cadre de recherches anthropologiques', Bulletin de Psychologie du Groupe des ttudiartts de Psychologie de I'Universite Paris VIII (Apr. 1955), pp. 7-8, 378-82. 3 The dot was not a dowry in the usual sense, as will be seen below, but could be given either to daughters or to younger sons when they married to compensate them for giving up their share of the family farm. Amounts in francs are, of course, in pre-1958 old francs [trans.].

The system of matrimonial exchanges

13

door (que hese urbi ue porte)\ My fiancee had a sister. In such cases, the elder daughter received a third of all the goods with the agreement of the parents. As is the custom, my dowry of 4,000 francs had to be recognized by the marriage contract. Supposing that the property was put on sale two years after the marriage for a total of 16,000 francs, the division would have been as follows, after return of the dowry (tourne-dot): elder daughter, V3 + V? = 8,000 francs; younger daughter, V4 = 4,000. The marriage contract provided that the final division would only take place after the death of the parents. The arrangement was made between the future father-in-law and me. He would grant the third to his elder daughter by marriage contract. A week later, when the contract was to be signed before the notary, he backed out. He agreed to the marriage but refused to grant the third, while "recognizing" the dowry. In such cases, the husband's powers are limited. In exchange for return of the dowry, he can be made to leave. It was a rather rare case; the advantages are given once and for all by marriage contract. My fiancee's father had come under the malign influence of a third party who was a frequent visitor to the house; this "friend" thought my presence in the house would undermine his own influence. "The earth is low, he's going to run around, he'll stroll through the fields, and you'll be his servant." This lastminute refusal to grant us the third by contract was a real blow to my fiancee and me. She said: 'We'll wait.. . We'll look for a place to live {ue case). We won't turn ourselves into tenant farmers or domestic servants .. . I've got two uncles in Paris, they'll find me a job" [spoken in Bearnais]. I said: "I agree. We can't accept this refusal. And we'd always suffer for it." She said: "I'll go off to Paris. We'll write to each other." She went to see the mayor and the priest and off she went. I carried on with my apprenticeship as a gelder in B. [a neighbouring village]. *I looked for a position for myself. As the youngest child, and having failed to marry, I had to find a job, some sort of small business. I went round the Landes and the neighbouring departements. I found the house of widow Ho. and I wanted to buy it. They were about to make a contract (passa papes) with someone else. I set up a small business, a cafe, and I carried on with my trade as a gelder and straight away I married my fiancee who had come back from Paris. My father-in-law would visit every Sunday. What his daughter wouldn't take from him he gave to the children. When he died my wife got her share of the inheritance with no legal advantage. She didn't get either the trousseau or the dowry. She had left the house and freed herself from paternal authority. Her more compliant sister, i\\e years younger, got the third, when she married a domestic servant from the region. "That one knows how to do what he is told," my

14

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

father-in-law said. But he was wrong; he had to rent the property to his son-in-law and give up the farm.* (J.-P. A.) This single case raises the main problems. First, the unqualified right of the eldest child, which may favour either a daughter or a son, can only be understood by reference to the fundamental imperative of the safeguard of the patrimony, which is inseparable from the continuity of the lineage: the bilateral system of succession and inheritance leads people to merge the lineage and the 'house' in the sense of the set of persons enjoying permanent rights to the patrimony, although responsibility for and management of the domain fall to one person in each generation, lou meste, the master, or la daune, the mistress of the house. The fact that the right of primogeniture and the status of heiress (heretere) may fall to a daughter in no way implies that the inheritance custom is dominated by the principle of equality between the sexes, which would contradict the fundamental values of a society which gives primacy to its male members. In reality, the inheritor is not the first-born child but the first-born son, even if he is the seventh child. Only when, to the great distress of the parents, there are onlydaughters, or when the son has left, is a daughter instituted as heiress. If it is preferred that the heir be a son, this is because this ensures the continuation of the name and because a man is better suited to run the farm. The continuity of the lineage, the supreme value, can be ensured equally well by either a man or a woman - marriage between a younger son and an heiress fulfils this function as well as marriage between an elder son and a younger daughter. For, in either case, the rules governing matrimonial exchanges perform their primary function, which is to guarantee that the patrimony is maintained and transmitted undivided. An additional proof of this can be seen in the fact that when the heir or heiress leaves the house and the land, they lose their right of primogeniture because this is inseparable from the use made of it, that is to say the actual management of the estate. It appears therefore that this right is not attached to a particular person, whether man or woman, first-born or second-born, but to a socially defined function: the right of primogeniture is not so much a property right as the right, or rather duty, to act as the owner. The eldest son also had to be capable not only of exercising his right but equally of ensuring its transmission. Even if it is only a fable, it is significant that even today informants say that in cases where the eldest son had no children or died childless, one of the senior younger sons, who had remained unmarried, would be asked to marry in order to ensure the continuity of the lineage (J.-P. A.). Although it never became a true institution sanctioned by custom,

The system of matrimonial exchanges

15

marriage of the younger son with the widow of the eldest son - from whom he inherited - was relatively frequent. After the 1914-18 war, there were quite a number of marriages of this type: 'Things were sorted out. In general, the parents encouraged it, in the interest of the family, for the sake of the children. And the young went along with it. Feelings didn't enter into it' (A. B.). The rule required the title of heir to pass automatically to the eldest son; however, the head of the family might sacrifice custom to the interest of the house. This was the case when the eldest son was unworthy of his rank and if there was a real advantage in one of the other children inheriting. Although he did not have the right to modify the order of succession, the head of the family had such great moral authority, so strongly approved by the whole group, that the heir according to custom could only submit to a decision dictated by the concern to ensure the continuity of the house and give it the best leadership possible. The 'house' (la maysou), both lineage and patrimony, lives on while the generations that personify it pass away; it bears a name, whereas those who embody it are often distinguished only by a first name. It was not uncommon, for example, for a man whose name according to his birth certificate was, for example, Jean Cazenave, to be known as 'Yan dou Tinou' ('Jean of the Tinou family, the Tinou house'). The name might continue to be attached to the building, even when it ceased to be inhabited, and then be given to the new occupants. As the incarnation of the house, the capmaysoue, the head of the household, is the trustee of the name, the renown and the interests of the group. Thus everything combined to favour the eldest son (Vaynat, or Vherete or lou capmaysoue). However, the younger children also had rights over the heritage. These potential rights became real, in most cases, only at the time of a marriage, which always gave rise to a contract. 'Rich peasants always drew up a contract, and the poorer ones too, from 500 francs, in order to "place" the dowry (coulouca VadotY (J.-P. A). Consequently, the adot designated both the share of the heritage due to each child, whether son or daughter, and the endowment made at the time of marriage, generally in cash, to avoid breaking up the estate, or, exceptionally, in land. In this case, the land was only a security, which the head of the family could redeem by means of a sum fixed in advance. When the family had only two children, as in the case analysed here, the local custom required that one third of the value of the property be granted to the younger child by marriage contract. When there were n children (n > 2), a younger child's share was (P-P/4)/«, the eldest son's share being P/4 + (P-P/4)/«, where P represents the value set on the

16

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

property. The dowry was calculated as follows: the value of the property was estimated as precisely as possible, sometimes with the help of local experts, each party using their own. The basis for valuation was the sale price of a property in the neighbourhood or a nearby village. Then the 'day's work' {journade) of fields, woods or fernland was assessed at an agreed rate. These calculations were fairly precise and were therefore accepted by all. The Tr. property, for example, was valued at 30,000 francs (this was about 1900). The family consisted of the father, the mother, and six children, one boy and five girls. The eldest son was given one quarter, or 7,500 francs. The remaining 22,500 francs had to be divided into six parts. The share of the younger daughters was 3,750 francs each, or 3,000 francs to be paid in money and 750 francs in linen and clothes, sheets, towels, napkins, shirts, featherbeds and lou cabinet, the wardrobe that was always brought to the marriage by the bride' (J.-P. A.). In short, the amount of the dowry was a specific function of the value of the heritage and the number of children. However, not only did the customary rules appear to vary over time and from one village to another, but they were never applied with mathematical rigour, first because the head of the family always reserved the right to increase or reduce the share of one child or the other, and then because the shares of the unmarried children remained virtual and were still attached to the estate. The observation of reality is a warning against the temptation to construct over-simple models. The 'share-out' generally took place on friendly terms, at the time of the marriage of one of the children. This was when the eldest was 'instituted' in his role as capmaysoue, the head of the house and successor to the father. The 'instituting of the heir' was sometimes done in a will - many heads of families did this when they went off to war in 1914. After an estimation of the value of the property, the head of the family paid the younger child who was marrying a sum of money equivalent to his share of the inheritance, thereby defining the shares of the others, which they would receive either when they married or when the parents died. It would be a great mistake to be misled by the word 'sharing-out' [partage]. In fact, the function of the whole system was to reserve the whole patrimony for the eldest son; the 'shares' or dowries of the younger siblings were nothing other than a compensation given to them in exchange for their renouncing any rights over the land.4 4

The earlier character of the dowry as a freewill gift can be seen in the fact that the father was free to fix the amount according to his preferences; there was no strict rule defining the proportions.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

17

Proof of this can be seen in the fact that actual division was regarded as a calamity. The inheritance custom was based on the primacy of the interest of the group, to which the younger children had to sacrifice their personal interests, either contenting themselves with a dowry, or renouncing it entirely when they emigrated in search of employment, or spending the rest of their lives, unmarried, working on the ancestral land alongside the eldest son. So division would actually take place only as the last extremity, or when, because of disagreement within the family, and also because of the introduction of new values, what was only a compensation came to be regarded as a real right to a share of the inheritance. For example, around 1830, the Bo. family property and house (a big house with two storeys, a dus soules) were divided among the heirs, who had not been able to come to an agreement; since then, the estate has been 'criss-crossed with ditches and hedges' (toute croutzade de barats y de plechs).5 Because the whole system was dominated by the scarcity of liquid capital, although custom allowed payments to be staggered over several years and sometimes until the death of the parents, it sometimes proved impossible to pay the compensation and division of the property had to take place at the time of the marriage of the younger sons or daughters, whose dowries were paid in the form of land. A number of estates were broken up in this way. 'After divisions, two or three households would sometimes live in the house, each having its own corner and its share of the land. The room with thefireplacealways went, in that case, to the eldest son. That is what happened with the Hi., Qu. and Di. properties. At the Ans', there are plots of land that never came back. Some were bought back, but not all. The division created terrible difficulties. In the case of the Qu. property, which was divided between three children, one of the younger sons had to lead his horses right round the neighbourhood to reach a field that had been assigned to hinV (P. L.). 'Sometimes, in order to remain the master, some eldest sons would put the property on sale. But it could also happen that they were unable to buy back the house'6 (J.-P. A.). 5

Specialists from the Landes, known as barades (from barat, ditch), would come and dig the ditches dividing the estates. 6 In accordance with the principle that property belonged not so much to the individual as to the lineage, the 'right of repurchase' gave every member of the lineage the possibility of regaining possession of goods that had been alienated. 'The "mother house" (la maysou mayrane) retained "rights of return" {Lous drets de retour) over land that had been given away as a dowry or sold. So when these plots came up for sale, people knew that certain houses had rights over them, and would go and offer them to these families first* (J.-P. A.).

18

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Thus the logic of marriages is dominated by one essential objective, the safeguard of the patrimony; it operates in a particular economic situation, characterized in particular by the scarcity of money; it is subject to two fundamental principles, namely the opposition between the eldest son and the younger brother and the opposition between 'upward' marriage and 'downward' marriage, the point of intersection between the logic of the economic system on the one hand, which tends to classify houses as 'great' or 'little', according to the size of the estate, and on the other hand the logic of relations between the sexes, according to which primacy and supremacy belong to men, especially in the management of family affairs. It follows from this that every marriage is a function, on the one hand, of the birth rank of each of the spouses and the size of the families, and on the other hand of the relative positions of the two families in the social hierarchy, which itself depends on the value of their properties. By virtue of the equivalence between the inherited share of the heritage and the dowry (adot^ from adouta, to endow), the amount of the dowry is defined almost mathematically,' and with it the expectations of the beneficiary; likewise the claims of the future spouse's family as regards the dowry that it expects to receive are strictly in line with the size of the property. It follows that marriages tend to be made between families that are equivalent in economic terms. To be sure, a large estate is not in itself sufficient to make a 'great' family. 'Greatness' is never conferred on houses which owe their rise or their wealth only to their determination, their appetite for work or their lack of scruples, and which fail to manifest the virtues that should be expected of the great, particularly dignity in behaviour and the sense of honour, generosity and hospitality. Conversely, the standing of a 'great family' can survive impoverishment. While the judgement that is brought to bear on a family in everyday life apprehends wealth as only one aspect among others, the fact remains that, when marriage is involved, consideration of its economic situation remains the primary concern. The economic transaction of which marriage is the occasion is far too important for the logic of the system of values not to give way to the strict logic of the economy. Through the mediation of the dowry, the logic of matrimonial exchanges depends very strongly on the economic bases of the society. Economic imperatives do indeed bear on the eldest son with particular rigour, because, when he marries, he must obtain a dowry sufficient for him to pay the dowries of his younger siblings without being Although this was the case in Lesquire around 1900, in more recent times the system was not so rigid and the head of the family had greater freedom.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

19

obliged to resort to the sharing and break-up of the property. This necessity applies equally to all houses', rich or poor, because the dowries of the younger children increase directly with the value of the heritage, and also because wealth is mainly located in land and money is rare. The choice of the husband or wife, heir or heiress, is of crucial importance because it plays a part in determining the amount of the dowry that the younger children can receive, the marriages they can make and whether they can marry at all; in return, the number of younger sisters and more especially of younger brothers who have to be married off bears heavily on this choice. Thus, in each generation, the heir is confronted by the threat of division, which he must ward off at all costs, either by marrying a younger daughter with a good dowry, or by mortgaging the land to obtain money, or by securing deferments. It is not surprising that, within such a logic, the birth of a daughter is not greeted with enthusiasm. 'When a girl is born to a house, one of the main beams falls' (Cuan hat ue hilhe hens ue maysou, que cat u pluterau). Not only does a daughter represent a threat of dishonour, but she will need a dowry; moreover, 'she is no support', she does not work outside like a man and she leaves once she marries. If she remains unmarried, she is a burden, whereas a son provides valuable help, avoiding the need to use servants. So the primary concern is to marry her off. The previous examples make it clear how little room there is for manoeuvre. i have seen people refuse a marriage for the sake of 100 francs. The son wanted to marry. "How are you going to pay the younger children? If you want to marry [that girl] you can leave!" The Trs had five younger daughters. The parents constantly favoured the eldest son. He always got the best piece of salt meat and so on. The eldest son is often spoiled by the mother, until he talks of marriage . .. The younger daughters did not get meat, or anything else. When the time came for the eldest son to marry, three of the girls were already married. The boy was in love with one of the La. girls, who did not have a penny to their names. The father told him: "So you want to get married? I have paid for the three girls, now you must bring in the money for the other two. A wife isn't something to be put in the china cupboard8 [i.e. to be shown off]. That girl has nothing; what is she going to bring?" The boy married one of the E. daughters and g

Lou bachere, the piece of furniture that was generally placed facing the front door, in the reception room {lou salou), or more often, in the kitchen, and in which the finest crockery was displayed.

20

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

received a dowry of 5,000 francs. The marriage did not go well. He took to drink and went to pieces. He died childless. After a lot of quarrelling, they had to return the entire dowry to the widow, who went back to her family. Shortly after the marriage of the eldest son, about 1910, one of the daughters had been married to La., also with a dowry of 2,000 francs. When the war came, the family brought back the daughter who had married into the S. family [on one of the neighbouring properties] to take the place of the son. The other daughters, who lived further away, at Sa., La. and Es., were very upset about this decision. But the father had chosen the daughter who was married to a neighbour because this was the way to increase the patrimony'9 (J.-P. A., age 85). The authority of the parents, the guardians of the patrimony that is to be safeguarded and increased, is exerted in absolute fashion whenever feelings must be sacrificed to interest. And it is not uncommon for parents to block marriage plans. They could disinherit (deshereta) an eldest son who wanted to marry against their will. 'Eugene Ba. was going to marry a girl who was pretty but poor. His mother said: "If you marry her, there are two doors; she comes in by one, I go out by the other - or you do." The girl got wind of this. She didn't want to wait to be abandoned, and went off to America. Eugene came to us in tears. My wife said to him: "If you must listen to your mother..." "I'll marry her anyway," he said. But it was too late, the girl had gone off without telling him' (J.-P. A.)10 The mother played a crucial role in the choice of wife - not surprisingly, given that she is the daune, the mistress of the interior, and that her son's wife must submit to her authority. 'She doesn't want to give up the ladle' (nou boou pas decha la gahe), the symbol of authority over the household.11 9

The Tr. property (76 hectares) is the largest around Lesquire. Several houses formerly inhabited by other families (Ho., Ha., Ca., Si., Si-.) have fallen one by one into the hands of the Trs. 10 The same informant relates a host of similar cases, including this one: 'B. had a sweetheart in the neighbourhood. He didn't talk much. His mother told him: "You want to marry that one? What can she bring? If she comes in by one door I'll go out by the other, and I'll take my daughter [the younger sister] with me." He came and said to me: "Perdioul You're married; I want to marry. Where do I go?" The girl went off to America. She came back with much finery and didn't give a damn for B.. ..' 11 Wielding the ladle was the prerogative of the mistress of the house. When the meal was ready and the pot was boiling, she would place the 'sops' of bread into the tureen, pouring the soup and the vegetables over them. Then, when everyone was seated, she would bring the tureen to the table, stir the soup with the ladle in order to soak the bread, then turn the handle towards the head of the family (grandfather, father, or uncle), who would serve himself first. Meanwhile the daughter-in-law was occupied elsewhere. To remind the daughter-in-law of her place, the mother would say, 'I'm not handing over the ladle just yet.'

The system of matrimonial exchanges

21

That marriage was a matter for families rather than individuals can also be seen in the fact that the dowry was normally paid to the spouse's father or mother and only exceptionally to the heir himself. Some marriage contracts provide that in the event of separation the father-in-law need only pay interest on the dowry; the house remains, and the son-in-law can hope to return there after reconciliation. Every dowry was subject to a right of return (tournedot) in the event of the extinction of the line of descent from the marriage for which it had been constituted, and this right applied over several generations. As a general rule, if the eldest son died childless, his widow could remain and keep ownership of the dowry; she could also claim the dowry and leave. If the wife died childless, the dowry had to be returned. The tournedot represented a serious threat for families, especially if they had received a very large dowry. This was further reason to avoid too unequal marriages: 'Take the case of a man who marries a girl from a great family. She brings him a dowry of 20,000 francs. His parents tell him: "You're getting 20,000 francs; you think you're doing well. But you are really taking a chance. You have received a dowry by contract. You are going to spend part of it. What if something goes wrong? How are you going to give it back, if you have to? You can't." After all, a marriage is expensive, the groom must pay for the wedding, he must get things for the house, and so on' (P. L.). A whole set of customary safeguards tended to ensure that the dowry remained inalienable, imprescriptible and undistrainable: custom authorized the father to demand a security for the safeguard of the dowry; most contracts provided for the 'prioritizing' (collocation) of the total sum in conditions such that it would be safe and retain its value. In any case, the new family would not touch the dowry for fear that one or other of the spouses would die before the birth of children. The wife retained ownership of her dowry; the husband had only the use of it. In fact, the right of use over moveable goods, money for instance, amounted to a right of ownership, the husband only being required to restore the equivalent in quantity and value. Thus an eldest son could use it to dower his siblings. As for non-moveable goods, particularly land, the husband had only the use and management of them. The woman had rights over the dotal goods provided by her husband identical to those of a man over his wrife's dowry. More precisely, it was her parents, so long as they lived, who enjoyed the income from the goods provided by their son-in-law and who administered them. Thus the dowry had a threefold function. Entrusted to the family of the heir or heiress who would manage it, it was to be incorporated into the patrimony of the family resulting from the union; if the marriage was terminated, following the separation of the spouses (a rare

22

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

event) or the death of one of them, then, if there were children, it passed to them, with the surviving spouse retaining the use of it, and if there were not, it returned to the family of the spouse who had provided it. Secondly, through the dowry that it paid, the family guaranteed the rights of its child within the new house; the greater the dowry, the stronger the position of the incoming spouse. A husband or wife who brought a substantial dowry 'entered as master' or 'mistress' (daune) into the new house.12 This explains the reluctance to accept too great a dowry. Thirdly, while it is true, as has already been said, that marriage is too serious a matter for economic considerations to be absent or treated as secondary, significant economic interests also had to be committed in order for the matter to be truly serious. When a new 'house' is created, the economic transaction sealed by contract is both a guarantee and a symbol of the sacred character of the human relationships established by the marriage. It follows from all this that the eldest son should not marry either 'too high', for fear of having one day to return the dowry and lose all authority over the house, or 'too low', for fear of incurring dishonour through misalliance and finding it impossible to dower his younger brothers and sisters. But if the terms 'upward marriage' (maridadje de bach ta haut) and 'downward marriage' (de haut ta bach) always implied the point of view of the man (as shown in the choice of examples), this is because this opposition did not have the same significance for a man and a woman. Because the system of values gives the most absolute pre-eminence to men, both in social life and in the management of domestic affairs, a man's marriage with a woman of higher social standing encounters strong disapproval, whereas the opposite is in accordance with the deep-rooted values of the society. While the logic of the economy alone tends, through the mediation of the dowry, to favour marriage between families of roughly equivalent wealth, with approved marriages lying between two thresholds, application of the principle just mentioned introduces a dissymmetry into the system, as between men and women. For a man, the distance between his position and his wife's can be relatively great when it is in his favour, but must remain small when it is against him. For a woman, the opposite is the case. It follows that the heir must above all avoid taking a wife of higher social position than himself, first because, as already indicated, the size of the dowry received constitutes a threat to the property, but also because the whole balance of domestic relations is threatened. 12

The amount of the dowry was particularly important in the case of a man, a younger son entering the house of an heiress, for example.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

23

It is not uncommon for his family, and especially his mother, who is most at risk, to oppose such a marriage. The reasons are clear: a woman of low birth will be more submissive to the mother-in-law's authority. The wife will, if necessary, be reminded where she comes from: 'With what you brought...' {Dap go qui as pourtat...). Only when the mother-in-law dies can it be said (and it is) of the daughter: 'Now the girl is the daune.y By contrast, the daughter of a great family 'is the daune from the day she enters the house, thanks to her dowry (qu'ey entrade daune), she is respected' (P. L.). By the same token, her husband's authority is jeopardized, and, in the eyes of a peasant, there is nothing worse than a farm run by a woman. Respect for this principle takes on a decisive importance for a marriage between a younger son and an heiress. In the case of Eugene Ba., related above (p. 20), the mother owed her absolute authority to the fact that she was the heiress of the house and that her husband was of lower origin. 'She was the daune. She was the heiress. She was everything in that house. When a little younger brother moves into the house of a great heiress, she remains the boss' (J.-P. A.). The limiting case is that of a man of humble origin, a domestic servant for example, who marries an heiress. For example: 'The daughter of a great family married one of the servants. She played the piano, she looked after the harmonium in the church. Her mother had many connections and received visitors from the town. After various attempts at marriage, she fell back on her servant, Pa. He always remained "the man from the Pas'". People said to him: "You should have taken a nice little peasant girl; she would have been much more use to you." He lived a miserable life; he was like the fifth wheel on the cart. He wasn't allowed to meet his wife's former connections. He wasn't from the same world. He did all the work; she ran everything and enjoyed herself. He was always embarrassed and an embarrassment for the family. He didn't even have enough authority to make his wife be faithful to him"'(J.-P. A.).13 A man who marries a woman of higher rank is said to be placing himself as an 'unpaid servant' (baylet chens soutade). If downward marriage is disapproved of in the case of a woman, this is only in the name of the masculine ethic, the ethic of honour, which forbids a man to marry a woman of higher status. Likewise, " P. L. relates another case: 'H., a servant in a great house, was in love with land where he worked. He suffered (pasabe mau) when the rain didn't come. And as for he hail! And all the rest! He ended up marrying the mistress of the house. All these :haps who "marry above themselves" are marked for the rest of their lives. They are orever ill at ease.'

24

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

apart from the economic obstacles, nothing prevents an eldest daughter from a modest family from marrying a younger son from a great family. It seems therefore that while the economic imperatives make themselves felt equally strongly for men and for women, the logic of matrimonial exchanges is not exactly identical for men and women and possesses a relative autonomy because it appears as the intersection of economic necessity and imperatives alien to the order of the economy, namely those which flow from the primacy conferred on men by the system of values. Economic differences determine de facto impossibilities; cultural imperatives determine de jure incompatibilities. Thus, marriages between heirs were practically excluded, in particular because they led to the disappearance of a name and a lineage,14 and, likewise, for economic reasons, marriage between two younger children. The whole system tended to favour two types of marriage - between eldest son and younger daughter and between younger son and eldest daughter. In these two cases, the mechanism of matrimonial exchanges operates with the maximum of rigour and simplicity: the parents of the heir (or heiress) institute him (or her) as such; the parents of the younger son (or daughter) provide a dowry. Marriage between the eldest son and a younger daughter is perfectly in line with the fundamental imperatives, both economic and cultural; through it, the family preserves the integrity of its heritage and perpetuates its name. To see that marriage between an heiress and a younger son, by contrast, always threatens to contradict the fundamental imperatives, one only has to analyse the family situation which ensues. First, this marriage introduces a definitive and clear-cut break in the area of economic interests, between the younger son and his original family; in return for a compensation paid in the form of the dowry, the younger son renounces all his rights over the heritage. The heiress's family gains what the other family loses. The son-in-law hands over everything he brings to his father-in-law, who may, as a guarantee, grant him a mortgage on all his goods. If the young man brings a large dowry and makes his mark through his work and his personality, he is honoured and treated as the real master; if not, he sacrifices his dowry, his labour and sometimes his name to the adop14

Except perhaps in the case where the two inheritors are single children and where the properties are adjoining, this marriage is regarded as a bad one. Take the case of Tr., who married the Da. girl. He keeps going back and forth between the two places. He is always on the road, he is everywhere, but never at home. The master should be there' (P. L.).

The system of matrimonial exchanges

25

tive house, over which the parents-in-law seek to maintain their authority. It is indeed not uncommon for the son-in-law to lose his surname and become known only by the name of the house.15 Moreover, as has been seen, if he came from a family inferior to his wife's, or if he had a retiring personality, the younger son was reduced to a subordinate role in a house that was never truly his own. For those younger sons who did not manage to marry an heiress with the aid of the dowry, sometimes enhanced by a modest nest-egg (lou cabau), laboriously accumulated, there was no recourse but to seek elsewhere a trade and a position in life, either in the town or in America.16 There were indeed very few younger sons willing to face the perils of a marriage with a younger daughter, a 'marriage between hunger and thirst'; some 'hired themselves out with their wives as servants "livingin"' (baylets a pensiou)^ either in farms or in the town, thus solving the most difficult problem, that of finding a house (ue case) and a job. For others, especially the poorest, whether they were domestic servants or labourers in other people's houses or in their own family, there only remained bachelorhood, since it was ruled out for them to set up a family while remaining in the maternal house.17 That was

15

For example, in the Jasses family (not their real name), the successive sons-in-law have to this day always been known by their first name followed by the name of the ancestor, a head of the family of great renown: 'Although he was a decent fellow, the original name of Jan de Jasses, who came from Ar., and was stand-offish, was never used (mentabut). They talk a bit more about the present son-in-law, but they call him Lucien de Jasses' (J.-P. A). JASSES

I

O = A Jacques de JASSES (legally registered name: Lasserre) died young

died in 1918

A = O Genevieve de JASSES I A

O = A Jan de JASSES (Lacoste)

I O = A Lucien de JASSES (Laplume) '* In the Ho. neighbourhood, around 1900, there was only one house which did not count at least one emigrant to America. There were recruiting agents in Oloron who encouraged young men to leave; there were many departures in the lean years, between 1884 and 1892. 17 In a way, the strictly cultural imperatives, in particular the forbidding of upward marriage, applied less rigorously to younger sons.

26

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

a privilege reserved for the eldest son. As for younger daughters, their situation seems always to have been more favoured than that of younger sons. Because they mainly constituted a burden, their families hastened to marry them off and their dowries were generally greater than those of the sons, a fact which considerably increased their chances of marriage. Despite the rigidity and rigour with which it imposes its logic, particularly on boys, subject to the economic necessities and the imperatives of honour, this system never functions as a mechanism. There is always sufficient 'play' for affection and personal interest to intervene. Thus, and although they were also the umpires charged with ensuring respect for the rules of the game, with forbidding misalliances and imposing marriages conforming to the rule, in spite of sentiments, 'parents, to favour a younger son (or daughter), would enable him or her to accumulate a modest nest-egg (lou cabau); he or she would be granted, for example, one or two head of livestock which, held under a gasalhes18 arrangement, yielded good profits.' Thus, individuals play within the limits of the rules, so that the model that can be constructed does not represent either what must be done or even what is done, but what would tend to be done in extreme cases, if the intervention of principles external to the logic of the system, such as sentiment, were totally excluded. If the elements of the main diagonals in the matrix shown opposite are zero, except for two of them (probability 1/2), this is because marriages between two heirs or between two younger children are excluded in any case, a fortiori when this is compounded by a disparity in wealth and social rank; the dissymmetry introduced by marriage between an eldest daughter of a small family and a younger son of a great family, and by marriage between a younger daughter of a small family and an eldest son of a great family, is explained by the fact that the social barriers are not imposed with the same rigour on young men and young women, girls being able to marry upwards. If one adopts the principle of differentiation used by the inhabitants of Lesquire themselves, one is led to oppose 'great houses' and 'small houses', or again 'big peasants' and 'small peasants' (lous paysantots). Does this distinction correspond to a clear-cut opposition in the economic domain? In fact, although the distribution of land 18

An informal contract by which one entrusts a reliable friend with the care of one or several head of livestock having first estimated their value. Proceeds from the products, as well as gains and losses from the sale of the meat, are shared.

The system of matrimonial exchanges 'Great family'

27 'Small family*

Eldest Younger Eldest Younger son son son son Eldest daughter Younger daughter „ c ., , f Eldest daughter tc Small fam.ly { Y o u n g e r d * u g h t e r 'Great family'

0 1 0 1/2

1 0 1/2 0

0 0 0 1

0 0 1 0

ownership makes it possible to distinguish three groups, namely properties of less than 15 hectares (175 in number), properties of 15 to 30 hectares (96), and properties of more than 30 hectares (31), the cleavages between these categories are never so sharp. There are very few sharecroppers or tenant farmers; the smallest properties (less than 5ha.) and the largest properties (over 30 ha.) make up a very small proportion of the total, 12.3 per cent and 10.9 per cent respectively. It follows from this that the economic criterion is not sufficient in itself to determine significant differentiations. However, the existence of the social hierarchy is strongly felt and asserted. A great family is recognizable not only by the size of its estate, but also by certain external signs, such as the scale of the house: two-storey houses (maysous de dus soules) or 'masters' houses' (maysous de meste) are distinguished from single-storey houses, the dwellings of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and small peasants. The 'great house' is designated by the monumental gateway giving access to the courtyard. 'Girls', said a bachelor, 'looked more at the entrance gate (lou pourtale) than at the man.' The great family is also distinguished by a lifestyle: surrounded by collective esteem and honoured by all, it is called upon to manifest in the highest degree respect for the socially recognized values, if not out of respect for honour, then at least out of fear of shame (per hounte ou per aunou). The eldest son of a great family (lou gran aynat) must show himself worthy of his name and of the renown of his house: to do so, he must, more than anyone, embody the virtues of the man of honour (homi d'aunou), namely generosity, hospitality and the sense of dignity. The 'great families' that are not necessarily the richest ones of the day are seen and see themselves as representing a real nobility. Consequently, the social judgement is slow to recognize 'parvenus', whatever their wealth, their lifestyle or their success.

28

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

It follows from all this that the status groups that the common consciousness distinguishes are neither totally dependent on nor totally independent of their economic bases. This is seen perfectly on the occasion of marriage. No doubt, in the refusal of misalliance, the consideration of economic interest is never absent, because marriage is the occasion of an economic transaction of great importance. However, just as a family of lesser renown may bleed itself white to marry one of its children into a great house, so too the eldest son of a great house may reject a proposition that is more advantageous in economic terms in order to marry in accordance with his rank. Because it distinguishes status groups rather than classes strictly determined by the economy, the opposition between the great houses and the small houses is situated in the social order and is relatively independent of the economic bases of the society. Although they are never entirely independent, inequalities in rank and inequalities in wealth have to be distinguished, because they act very differently on the logic of matrimonial exchanges. The opposition based on the inequality of rank separates from the peasant mass a rural aristocracy distinct not only by its property but above all by the 'nobility* of its origin, by its lifestyle and by the social consideration with which it is surrounded; it entails the (de jure) impossibility of certain marriages that are regarded as misalliances, for reasons that are firstly social and secondarily economic. But, on another side, inequalities of wealth manifest themselves on the occasion of each particular marriage, even within the same status group and despite the homogeneous distribution of the lands possessed. The opposition between a richer and a less rich family is never the equivalent of the opposition between the 'great' and the 'small'. However, because of the rigour with which economic necessity dominates matrimonial exchanges, the margin of admissible disparity always remains narrow, so that, beyond a certain threshold, economic differences again raise a barrier, preventing alliances de facto. Thus, alongside the cleavage which separates two status groups endowed with a certain permanence because of the relative stability of their economic bases, inequalities in wealth tend to determine particular cut-off points, especially at the time of marriages. The complexity that results from the exercise of these two types of opposition is intensified by the fact that the general rules are never immune to spontaneous casuistics - because marriage is never fully situated either in the logic of alliances or in the logic of business. The 'house' - the aggregate of the moveable and immoveable assets forming the economic basis of the family, a patrimony which

The system of matrimonial exchanges

29

has to be maintained undivided through the generations, a collective entity to which each member of the family must subordinate his interests and feelings - is the supreme value by reference to which the whole system is organized. Late marriages that help to limit fertility, restriction of the number of children (two per household, on average), rules governing the inheritance of goods, the bachelorhood of younger sons - everything combines to ensure the permanence of the house. If it is not seen that this is also the primary function of matrimonial exchanges, it is impossible to understand their structure.

Within such a logic, wrho were the bachelors? Mainly they were the younger sons, especially in large families and poor families. Bachelorhood of the eldest sons was rare and exceptional, and appears to be linked to an over-rigid functioning of the system and the mechanical application of certain imperatives. This was true for example of elder sons who suffered from excessive parental authority. 'P. L.-M. (a craftsman in the bourg, aged 86) never had any money to go out; and he never did go out. Others would have rebelled against their father, others would have tried to earn a bit of money outside; he let himself be dominated. He had a sister and a mother who knew everything that was happening in the village, rightly or wrongly (a tor ou a dret)y without ever going out. They dominated the house. When he spoke of marrying, they sided with the father. "What is the use of a woman? There are already two in the house." He missed out on school. No one ever said anything to him. People laughed about it. All that is the fault of upbringing' (J-.P. A.I. Nothing is more enlightening than this testimony from an old bachelor (I. A.), born in 1885, a craftsman living in the bourg: 'I started work straight after school, in the workshop with my father. I was called up in 1905, to the 13th alpine regiment, in Chambery. I well remember my climbs in the Alps. At that time, there were no skis. You would attach rounded boards to your shoes and with those you could climb right to the top of the passes. After two years' military service, I came home. I courted a girl from Re. We decided to get married in 1909. She brought a dowry of 10,000 francs with the trousseau. She was a good match (w bou partit). My father was absolutely against it. In those days, the consent of the father and mother was

30

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

indispensable.19 "No, you mustn't marry." He didn't tell me his reasons but he made it clear what they were. "We don't need a woman here." We weren't rich. It would have been one more mouth to fed, and my mother and sister were there. My sister left the house for only six months, after her marriage. When she was widowed she came back and she still lives with me. Of course, I could have left. But in those days an eldest son who went off and set up house with his wife in a separate house was a disgrace [u escarni,10 in other words an affront that brings ridicule as much on the perpetrator as on the victim]. People would have thought there had been a serious quarrel. You didn't expose family conflicts in front of others. You'd have had to go far away, to get out of trouble (tiras de la haille: literally, pull oneself from the fire). But that was difficult. I was very upset. I stopped dancing. The girls of my age were all married. I didn't want any of the others. I was not attracted towards girls any more in order to marry though I had enjoyed dancing, especially the old dances, polkas, mazurkas, waltzes. .. But the blocking of my marriage plans had broken something. I didn't want to dance any more, or see other girls. When I went out on Sundays, it was to play cards; I would sometimes glance at the ball. I would stay out late with the lads, playing cards, and come home about midnight' (interview in Bearnais). But cases of this kind were found mainly among the capmaysoues, the eldest sons of great peasant families, on whom the economic imperatives bore most strongly. Those who wanted to marry against their parents' will had no choice but to leave, running the risk of being disinherited in favour of a younger brother or sister. But it was much easier for the eldest son of a great house to leave than for a younger brother. 'The eldest son of the Bas [whose story was related above, page 20], the richest family in Lesquire, could not leave. He had been the first one in the hamlet to wear a jacket. He was an important man, a municipal councillor. He could not leave. And besides, he would not have known how to make a living elsewhere. He had become too much of a gentleman (enmoussurit, from moussu, monsieur)' (J.-P. A.). Forced to live up to his rank, the eldest son was subject more than any other to social imperatives and the authority of the family. Moreover, so long as the parents were living, the heir

19 Both 'legally' and materially. Only the family could provide the 'furnished household' (lou menadje garnit), in other words the domestic equipment - the 'sideboard1, the 'wardrobe', the wooden bed [Varcaillieyet), the mattress, etc. 20 The verb escarni means 'to imitate derisively, to caricature'.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

31

only had potential rights to the property The father doled out the money pretty slowly. .. Quite often they could not even go out. The young folks would work and the old folks would hold on to the money. Some [of the younger sons] would make a little spending money elsewhere; they would hire themselves out for a while as coachmen or day labourers. In that way, they had a little money they could spend as they wished. Sometimes the younger son was given a little property (u cabau) of his own before he left for military service, maybe a little piece of woodland that he could exploit, or a couple of sheep, or a cow that enabled him to make a little money for himself. To me, for example, they gave a cow and I let a friend keep it as a gaselhes. But the eldest sons, most of the time, didn't have anything, and they couldn't even go out. "You will get everything (qu'at aberas tout)" the parents would say,21 but in the meantime they wouldn't let go of anything. In the old days many sons spent their whole lives at home. They couldn't go out because they didn't have a sou of their own to pay for a drink. And yet with five francs you could have a good evening out with three or four mates. There were families like that where there had always been bachelors. The young people had no personality; they were crushed by over-strong fathers' (J.-P. A.). While some eldest sons of great families found themselves condemned to bachelorhood through the excessive authority of the parents, the fact remains that they were normally favoured. The one who is capmaysoue has plenty to choose from' (P. L.). But marriage opportunities decline with social position. It was true that, unlike the eldest sons of great families, the younger sons and men of humbler origins, who were untroubled by concern about misalliance and all the obstacles raised by the point of honour or pride, had, in this respect, greater freedom of choice. But, in spite of the proverb that 'quality is better than money' (que bau mey gen qu'argen), they also had to consider, out of necessity more than pride, the size of the dowry their spouse would bring. As well as the younger son who leaves the family house and sets off for the town, in search of a modest job, or who goes and seeks his fortune in America,22 there is also the younger son who stays with his

21

This phrase is often used ironically because it appears to symbolize the arbitrariness and tyranny of the 'old folks'. 22 Caddetou, the little younger son, is a character in popular tradition with whom the Bearnais like to identify. Crafty and ingenious, he always succeeds in getting out of trouble.

32

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

brother out of attachment to the region, the family estate, the house, the soil that he has always worked and that he considers his own. He is totally possessed, and does not think of marriage. His family is in no hurry to see him married and often tries to keep him, at least for a time, in the service of the house; some families would make payment of the dowry conditional on the younger son's agreeing to work alongside the eldest son for a certain number of years; others would simply promise him an increased share. In some cases nothing less than work contracts were drawn up between the capmaysoue and the younger brother, whose position was that of a servant. 'I was the youngest of five children. Before the war of 1914 [born in 1894] I was a servant with the M. family, later with the Ls. I remember that as a very good time. Then I was in the war. When I came back, my family had been hard hit. One of my brothers, the eldest, had been killed, the third one had lost a leg, the fourth was not quite right in the head because of the war. I was overjoyed at being back home. My brothers were very good to me; all three had pensions as war casualties. They gave me money. The one who had a bad chest could not be by himself, so I helped him and went to the fairs and markets with him. After he died in 1929 I went to live with the oldest of my brothers and his family. And that is when I realized how isolated I was in that family, having lost my brother and my mother who had been so good to me. For example, one day when I had taken the liberty of going to Pau, my brother blamed me for the loss of a couple of cartloads of hay. They had been rained on in a thunderstorm and would have been brought in if I had been there. I had simply become too old to get married. The girls of my age had left or were married. I was often depressed and spent what free time I had drinking with the fellows, most of whom were in the same situation. I can tell you, if I had to do it over again, I would leave the family right away, find a job and perhaps get married. It would be a much better life for me. First of all, I would have a separate family that was all my own. And besides, when a younger son works for the family, he never works hard enough. He must always be on hand. And he is talked to in a way that no master would dare talk to his servants. To get a little peace and quiet I was forced to take refuge in the Es. house;23 in the only bit of it that was liveable in, I set up a camp bed' (interview in Bearnais). In opposite ways, the younger son who went off to earn his living in the town and the unmarried younger son who remained in the 23

An example of a house that has kept its name, although it has had various owners and is now abandoned.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

33

house ensured the safeguard of the peasant heritage.24 'There were some old younger-sons living at the Sas', and at the Chs' in the Le. neighbourhood, a two-hour walk (7-8 km) from the bourg. They came to mass in the bourg only on religious holidays and in all their 70 years had never once been to Pau or Oloron. The less they go out, the less they feel like going out. Of course, you had to go on foot. To walk to Pau, you really have to want to. If they had nothing to do there, they didn't go there. And they had nothing to do there. Only the eldest went out. These fellows kept the family going. A few of them are still around' (J.-P. A.). The situation of the farm domestic servant was somewhat akin to that of the younger son who stayed in the house. Unlike the day labourer, who finds his 'days' (journaus) only in the dry season and often remains without work in winter and on rainy days, who is often obliged to work for a fixed price to make ends meet (ta junta), who spends virtually all he earns ('a sou a day, with food, until 1914') on bread or flour, the domestic servant (lou baylet) has greater security.23 Hired for the year, he has no worries about winter or rainy days; his bed, board and laundry are provided. With his wage he can afford to buy tobacco and 'go for a drink' on Sundays. But in exchange the old domestic servant generally had to resign himself to bachelorhood, either out of attachment to the house and devotion to his employers, or because he did not have enough money to set up a home of his own and marry. For the servant, most often the younger son of a modest family, as for the labourer, marriage was very difficult and it was in these social categories that the highest proportion of bachelors used to be found.26 'As the youngest, I was placed as a domestic servant at Es. when I was very young, at the age of ten. I knew a girl down there. If we

24

The younger son had, in principle, lifelong use of his share. On his death, if he had remained unmarried, it reverted to the heir. 25 In the past, the following were distinguished: lous mestes or capmaysoues, i.e. the 'masters', great or small; lous bourdes-mieytades, sharecroppers; lous bourdes en afferme, tenant farmers; lous oubresy farmhands, and lous baylets, domestic servants. A very good domestic servant would earn 250 to 300 francs a year pre-1914. If he was very thrifty, he could hope to buy a house with 10 or 12 years' wrages and, with the dowry of a fiancee and some borrowed money, buy a farm and some land. The day labourer, by contrast, had almost no hope of improving his position. As soon as their children had had their first communion, they would be placed as servants or maids [gouye). 26 The age difference between the spouses was on average much greater in the past than now. It was not uncommon for old but wealthy men from great families to marry young women of 20 to 25.

34

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

had got married, it would have been, as they say, a marriage between hunger and thirst (lou maridadje de la hami dap la set). Both of us were equally poor. My older brother, of course, got the 'full household' (lou menadje garnit) of our parents, that is, the livestock, the poultry, the house, the farm tools, and so on, so it was easier for him to get hitched. The girl I went with left for the city; it is often like that, girls don't wait. It is easier for them to leave and to work in town as a maid, especially if they have a girlfriend who is already there. In the meantime I amused myself as well as I could with the other fellows who were in the same situation. We would spend whole nights (noueyteya, verb) in the cafe, play cards until dawn, make a "feast" of it. We would mostly talk about women; of course we said the worst things about them. And the next day we would speak ill of the fellows we had spent the night with' (N., a farm servant, born in 1898, speaking in Bearnais). Awareness of the social hierarchy is most clearly expressed in the relations between the sexes and at the time of marriages. 'At the dance a younger son of a modest family (u caddet de petite garbure) was careful not to pay too much attention to the younger daughter of the Gu. family [rich farmers]. The others would have immediately said, "He's pretentious. He wants to dance with the great heiress." Some of the servants, if they were good-looking, would sometimes ask heiresses to dance, but that was rare. There was once a good-looking servant, who made a good impression in society; he talked to an Es. heiress - and married her. Everyone "shouted out" [in outrage] at seeing him marry there. It was something extraordinary. It was thought he would be a slave. Not at all. He took on the habits of his wife's parents, who came back from America and lived on their investments. He played the gentleman and no longer worked. They used to go to Oloron every Friday' (J.-P. A). Thus the logic of matrimonial exchanges tends to shore up and perpetuate the social hierarchy. But, more profoundly, the non-marriage of some is integrated into the coherence of the social system and so has an eminent social function. While it constituted a kind of misfiring of the system, the non-marriage of eldest sons was itself at bottom simply the unfortunate effect of an excessive affirmation of the authority of the older generation, the keystone of the society. As for the others, the younger sons and individuals of low birth (de petite garbure) - tenant farmers, sharecroppers, farmhands and especially

The system of matrimonial exchanges

35

servants - their non-marriage was part of the logic of a system that cast a whole host of protections around the patrimony, the supreme value. In this society in which money is scarce and expensive,27 where wealth lies essentially in landed property, the right of primogeniture, which has the function of guaranteeing the land handed down by the ancestors, is inseparable from the dowry, the compensation granted to the younger children in order for them to give up their rights over the land and the house; and so every effort is made to avoid the division that would ruin the family. The authority of the parents, the strength of the traditions, attachment to the land, the family and the name, induce the younger son to sacrifice himself, either by going off to the town, or to America, or by staying on the farm, with no wife and no wages.28 To explain why marriage is a matter for the family more than the individual and why it takes place in accordance with models strictly defined by tradition, one only has to point to its economic and social function. But there is also the fact that in the traditional society and still even today, the segregation of the sexes is very clear-cut. From childhood, boys and girls sit separately on the benches of the classroom and at catechism classes. Likewise, in church, the men sit together close to the pulpit or at the back of the central bay, whereas the women sit at the sides or in the nave. The cafe is reserved for men, and when women want to call their husbands home, they do not go there themselves but send their sons. The whole cultural education and the whole system of values tend to develop in each sex attitudes of reciprocal exclusion and to create a distance that cannot be crossed without unease.29 Hence the intervention of the families was in a sense required by the logic of the system, as was that of the 'matchmaker', called the trachur (or talame, in the valley of the Gave de Pau). 'A go-between was needed to get them to meet. Once they had talked to each other, it was fine. There are many men who have no opportunity to meet girls or who don't dare to go there. The old 27

All the informants frequently emphasize the rarity of cash: There was no money, not even for going out on Sundays. People spent very little. They would cook an omelette or a cutlet or a chicken' (A. A.). 'Money circulates now in a way it didn't then. People are no richer, but money circulates more. A man who could live at home and make a few sous was happy, but not the man who had to buy everything, a labourer for example. He was the most unfortunate of all' (F. L.). 2 * Unlike other rural regions, Lesquire saw none of the ritual tricks played on unmarried men or women, at the time of the Carnival, for example (cf. A. Van Gennep, Manuel de folklore franqais, vol. I, 1 and 2 (Paris: Auguste Picard, 1943-6)). 2V The language is revealing: the expressions ha bistes (literally: to make views), parla ue gouyate (literally: to talk to a girl), mean 'to court'.

36

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

priest made many marriages between great families who attended his church. For example, B. didn't go out, he was shy, he hardly went to dances; the old priest went to see him and told him: "You should marry." His mother said "Yes, he ought to marry but he can't find anyone, it's difficult." "Don't look at the dowry," said the priest. "There's a girl who will be your fortune." The priest married him to a poor girl, the daughter of sharecroppers that he knew through a very devout aunt. The priest also arranged L.'s marriage. In many cases, he persuaded old families, who were unwilling to lose their standing, to agree to marriages with girls from poor families. Very often the pedlar (croufetayre) played the role of trachur. A mother would tell him: "I want to find a wife for my son." He would talk to families who had daughters in Ar., Ga., Og., and everywhere he went. Many marriages were made that way. At other times, a relative or friend would act as go-between. They would talk to the girl's parents, and then say to the young man: "Come along with me, I want you to meet someone"' (P. L., aged 88). Custom required that when the marriage was agreed, the trachur would be given a present and invited to the wedding. It was said of someone who had set up a marriage, 'He's earned himself a pair of boots' {que s'a gagnat u pa de bottines). It is in this context that one has to interpret the type of marriage called barate in the Gave plain and crouhou in Lesquire, in which two siblings from one family (two brothers or two sisters or a brother and a sister) marry two siblings from another. 'The marriage of one child gives the others the chance to meet. They make use of the opportunity' (P. L.). It should be noted that, in this case, unless one of the families has more than two children, no dowry is paid. Thus the restriction of freedom of choice has its positive side. The direct or mediated intervention of the family and especially the mother removes the need to look for a wife. A man can be clumsy, unrefined, inept, without losing every chance of marrying. Even the younger son of the Bas, 'jealous, uncouth, grumpy (rougnayre)y ill-tempered, graceless with women' was engaged to the An. daughter, the richest and prettiest heiress in the region. And perhaps it is not excessive to think that, through this mechanism, the society ensured the safeguard of its fundamental values, the 'peasant virtues'. The common consciousness traditionally opposed the 'peasant' (lou paysa) to the 'gentleman' (lou moussu). It is true that, just as he was opposed to the 'gentrified' (enmoussurit) peasant, so the good peasant was also opposed to the 'empeasanted' (empaysanit) peasant, the bucou™ the 30

This term tends now to refer to the bachelor: literally: tawny owl.

The system of matrimonial exchanges

37

man of the woods, and had to show he could be 'good company'; but the fact remains the emphasis was always placed on the peasant qualities. Especially when it was a question of marriage, a man was expected to be hard-working and understand the meaning of hard work, to be capable of running his farm, as much by his competence as by his authority. He could be allowed not to know how to 'make friends' (amigailha's) with women, to be so devoted to his work that he neglected some social duties; but the collective judgement was remorseless for the man who 'played the gentleman' (moussureya) at the expense of his work as a peasant. 'He was too much of a gentleman (moussu); not enough of a peasant. Afine-lookingman for going out, but no authority' (F. L., aged 88). A girl was prepared by the whole of her upbringing to perceive and judge suitors according to the norms accepted by the whole community.31 If a 'gentleman' had sought her hand, she would have replied, like the shepherdess in the song: 'You qu'aymi mey u bet hilh de paysa (I would rather take a good peasant's son).'32

31 Likewise a young man was bound to accept and adopt the collective ideal, according to which the ideal wife is a good peasant girl, attached to the land, hard-working, 'able to work indoors and outdoors, without fear of callusing her hands, and capable of dealing with the animals' (F. L.).

'Fair shepherdess, will you give me your love? I will be forever true to you. You qu'aymi mey u bet hilh de paysa . . . (I would rather take a good peasant's son . . .) Why, shepherdess, are you so cruel? Et bous moussu qu'et tan amourous? (And you, sir, why are you so amorous?) I cannot love all those fair ladies . . . E you moussu qu'em fouti de bous ... (And I, sir, give not a damn for you)' (collected in Lesquire in 1959) In a host of songs like this one, a shrewd, outspoken shepherdess exchanges dialogue with a franchiman from the town (the pejorative name given to someone who struggles to speak French, frartchimandeya).

Internal contradictions and anomy

We ply our hands in circuses and theatres rather than among crops and vines. Columella

Every peasant family is confronted with contradictory objectives: to protect the integrity of the family heritage and to respect the equality of rights among the children. The relative importance given to each of these objectives varies from one society to another, as do the means used to attain them. Beam society lies between the two extremes of inheritance by one child alone, generally the eldest son, and equitable division between all the children. However, the compensation granted to the younger children is only a forced concession to the demand for equity. The custom of inheritance resolutely favours the safeguard of the patrimony, which is assigned to the eldest, without the rights of the younger children being totally sacrificed, as was formerly the case in England. With the bachelorhood of the younger children and renunciation of the heritage, the system would be fulfilled in its full logic and would attain the limit towards which it tends but which it never does attain because this would amount to demanding a total and impossible sacrifice from a whole category. If the same phenomenon which once seemed self-evident is now perceived as abnormal, this is because the bachelorhood of some, which was in order because it helped to safeguard the social order,

Internal contradictions and anomy

39

now threatens the very foundations of that order. The bachelorhood of younger sons merely enacted the extreme consequences of the logic of the system, so that it could be seen as the natural sacrifice of the individual to the collective interest; now, it is seen as an absurd and futile destiny. In one case, there was submission to the rule, in other words, a normal anomaly; in the other, a disruption of the system, in other words anomy. The new bachelors Failure to marry appears as the most manifest sign of the crisis of the social order. Whereas, in the older society, bachelorhood was closely linked to the situation of the individual in the social hierarchy, itself the reflection of the distribution of landed property, it is now seen as linked, above all, to distribution in geographical space. No doubt, the efficacy of the factors that tended to favour bachelorhood in the past is not suspended. The logic of matrimonial exchanges remains dominated by the social hierarchy. A table distributing unmarried men and women born in the hameaux* by sociooccupational category, age, sex and birth rank shows clearly that the likelihood of marriage declines in parallel with socio-economic situation (see table on page 41). The percentage of those not married grows steadily as one moves towards the lower social categories: 0.47% of the unmarried are big landowners, 2.81% are medium-sized landowners, 8.45% are small landowners (a total of 11.73% for all landowners), 4.22% are farm labourers, 2.81% sharecroppers and tenant farmers, 11.73% are domestic servants and 69.50% family helpers. These figures have to be weighted to take account of the numerical importance of the various categories.2 For sharecroppers and tenant farmers, the percentage of the unmarried is 28.57%; for agricultural labourers, 81.8%; for domestic servants, 100%. 3 While, as earlier, the chances of 1 The population concentrated in the main village (which will be referred to subsequently as the bourg) is 264 in number; the scattered population (that of the hameaux) numbers 1,090 people. 2 Cf. appendix III, Family size by socio-occupational category of head of family, tables III A and B, in Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne\ pp. 123-4. 3 Although they have become very rare (and therefore very valuable), domestic servants do not have a situation markedly better than that of 50 years ago. They are entirely under the thumb of their often authoritarian employers, who go out of their way to belittle them in public so as to devalue them and discourage others from taking them, and they can often not even think of marrying. This testimony, from a man

40

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

marriage are much lower for individuals belonging to the least advantaged categories, especially farm labourers and domestic servants, it appears that the rate of bachelorhood is relatively high among landowners. The 28 unmarried heads of farms and the 22 eldest sons who, because their parents were still alive, were counted among family helpers, make up 22.32% of all the landowners in the hameaux. It has to be noted on the other hand that there are 89 bachelor eldest sons (55.6%), including 49 aged under 35, as against 71 younger sons (44.4%), of whom 38 are under 35. For the daughters, the relationship is reversed: eldest daughters make up only 15% of the unmarried women as against 84% for younger daughters. Thus a first conclusion emerges: the chances of marriage are less closely linked to socio-economic situation than before. The privilege of the landowner and the eldest son is threatened. While the capmaysoue naturally marries more easily than the domestic servant or the farm labourer, it is not uncommon for him to remain unmarried despite everything, while the younger son of a 'small' family finds a wife. But the essential point is that the opposition between eldest sons on the one hand and younger sons, labourers and servants on the other is relegated to the background, without being abolished, by the opposition between the urbanite from the bourg and the peasant from the hameaux. Whereas unmarried men over 21 make up only 16.44% of the male population of the bourg, they make up 39.76% of the male population of the hameaux (2.4 times more); the percentage for the commune as whole is 35.38%. For the age group 31-40, these differences are more marked.4 Bachelors make up 8.35% of the male population of the bourg and 55.73% of the male population of the hameaux, the essential fact being that the rate of bachelorhood has

bom in 1928, is typical: 'I went to school until I was 11, in the Rey neighbourhood. My father had a smallholding of 8 hectares, including some fernland and woods, vines, a few meadows and a couple of acres of maize field. I had an elder brother and a retarded sister. Aged 11,1 was placed as a servant with L. It's a harsh place, they are demanding masters. I was like a slave for six years, beaten down physically and mentally. It grinds you down to nothing, I had to cackle with laughter like a goose every time my master said anything remotely amusing. With my parents' agreement, I managed to get free of my master and go off to R., a relative, for eight months before my military service. When I came back from the army, I worked as a farmhand. It was tough, but not the slavery I had suffered as a servant. Later I got jobs with the local businesses. I worked at the school, for the water supply. Now I'm at the brickworks. Me, find a wife? If I were a cop, I'd find a score of them. You only have to look at gendarmes' wives, they're f a t . . . They don't lift a finger all day long.' 4 Average age at the time of marriage is 29 for men and 24 for women.

Unmarried men and women born in the hameaux Female

Male Socio-economic status and age Large landowners 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36^40 5. age 41 and over Medium landowners 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36^40 5. age 41 and over Small landowners 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 3 6 ^ 0 5. age 41 and over Sharecroppers and tenant farmers 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36-40 5. age 41 and over Farm labourers 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36-40 5. age 41 and over Domestic servants 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36-^0 5. age 41 and over Family helpers 1. age 21-25 2. age 26-30 3. age 31-35 4. age 36-40 5. age 41 and over Totals

Eldest

Younger

Eldest

Younger

1

1

Total

1

1

4

1

5

1 1 1 1 12

1

2 1 1 2 12

1

2 3

2 1

4

1 1 1 1

1 1 1 1 5

3

1

1

1 6

1

2 6

1 3

1 12

2 15

15 14 12 4 10

14 9 6 3 14

3 1

89

71

2

13 9 3 3 13

45 33 21 10 39

8

45

213

Landowners: large = >30ha.; meduim = 15-30ha.; small = <15ha.

15

13

Aged under 21 Aged 21 and over Totals

75

54

9

9

4

1

7

6

1

1

1

4

M

2

F

5

6

4

4

163

63

14

20

36

30

M

50

15

IS 189 264

3

3

15

14

F

Unmarried

Living in the bourg

86

67

F

Married

4

M

Population of Lesquire in 11954

Totals

Born between: 1933 and 1929 (age 21-25) 1928 and 1924 (age 26-30) 1923 and 1919 (age 31-35) 1918 and 1914 (age 36-40) before 1914 (age 41 and over)

Age groups

Unmarried

Bourg

14

250

204*

14

14

24*

20

13

980

678

58

71

97

76

Totals

1,090

299 791

Living ini the hameaux

328

257**

F

Married

5*

13

M

Hameaux

Marital status of the inhabitants of Lesquire by age group, sex and place of residence

374 980 1,354

Totals

*inc. 16 widowers **inc. 95 widows

*inc. 1 widow

*inc. 1 widower

Notes

Internal contradictions and anomy

43

risen from 23.6% for the older generation of men in the hameaux (aged over 40) to 55.73% for the younger generation (men aged 31 to 40): it has more than doubled. Among the women, the phenomenon appears quite differently. Given that the number of women who leave the commune, either to work in the city or through marriage, is much greater than the corresponding number of men, comparison between the rates of nonmarriage for men and women is not justified. The same is not true for comparison between the rates of spinsterhood for women in the bourg and women in the hameaux. Spinsters make up 13.13% of the female population of the bourg aged over 21, as against 13.22% for the hameaux. The percentage for the commune as whole is 13.20%, and the difference is negligible. In the bourg, unmarried women make up 17.39% of the female population aged 21 to 40, as against 33% in the hameaux (a ratio of 1 to 1.9). Thus, while the opposition between the bourg and the hameaux is very strongly marked for men, it is non-existent for the adult female population as a whole, although the women of the younger generation in the hameaux are disadvantaged compared to their elders, but infinitely less so than the men.5 Thus, if we draw up a balance sheet of the findings so far, it appears, first, that the chances of marriage are seven times greater for a man of the younger generation (aged 31 to 40) living in the bourg, than for a man of the same generation living in the hameaux; secondly, that the disparity between women from the hameaux and women from the bourg is much less great than among the men, with women from the bourg having only two times fewer chances of remaining unmarried than women in the hameaux.6 5

If we consider the female population living in Lesquire (not taking account of women born in Lesquire and married or resident in the towns), it appears that, in the bourg, 1 in 7 is unmarried, this rate rising to 2 in 11 for women aged 21 to 40. In the hameaux, the proportion is the same for women aged over 21; it rises to 1 in 3 for women aged 21 to 40. Thus the influence of place of residence on the chances of marriage is also exerted on the women who live in Lesquire. 6 Let us consider simply the marginal distribution of the data below. Place of residence and the associated lifestyle influence marital status (very significantly: Men

Women

Unmarried

Married

Total

Unmarried

Married

Total

Bourg Hameaux

15 163

75 250

90 413

13 50

86 328

99 378

Total

178

325

503

63

414

477

44

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition The factors disrupting the system of matrimonial exchanges

The appearance of these abnormal phenomena makes it clear that the system of matrimonial exchanges as a whole has suffered a profound disruption, the essential causes of which have to be understood before one analyses the present situation. First, the system has been undermined through the dowry, which was its keystone. With the inflation following the First World War, the equivalence between the dowry as a share of the inheritance and the dowry as a gift to the child who was marrying could no longer be maintained. 'After the war, people thought that the crazy prices would come down again. Around 1921, the cost of living did start to fall, pork and veal prices fell; but not for long. A few months later, prices started going up again. This led to a real revolution: savers were ruined; there were endless disputes between owners and sharecroppers, tenant farmers and landlords. It was the same thing for the division of inheritances: younger daughters, married years before, wanted to recalculate the inheritance at the new prices. For marriages, the dowry counts for less and less. Nowadays, people hardly see it as important. What is money worth? You'd have to ask for a lot. A property worth 20,000 francs before the war is worth 5 million now. No one can pay dowries on that scale. What is the use of a dowry of 15,000 francs? The upshot is that no one cares any more' (P. L.-M.). Because of this, the dependence of matrimonial exchanges on the economy declines, or rather, it changes its form. Instead of position in the social hierarchy, as defined by land ownership, it is much more social status - and X2= 16.70): there are five times more married men than bachelors in the bourg and only twice as many (1.99) in the hameaux. By contrast, place of residence does not influence the marital status of women significantly (x2=0.67). Unmarried men

Unmarried women

Total

Bourg Hameaux

15 163

13 50

28 213

Total

178

63

241

Let us now consider only the marginal data concerning the unmarried. Tests of statistical significance lead to the conclusion that place of residence does not exert the same influence on men as on women, nor on men in the bourg and men in the hameaux. Since it has been established that the divergence does not stem from the difference between women in the bourg and women in the hameaux, nor between men in the bourg and men and women in the bourg, it can only be due to the particular situation of the men in the hameaux.

more precisely, the corresponding lifestyle - that emerges as linked to marriage. Added to the undermining of the economic base of the system, there is a veritable reversal of values. In the first place, the authority of the elders, which was ultimately based on the power to disinherit, is weakened, partly for economic reasons, partly under the influence of upbringing and new ideas/ Parents who wanted to show their authority by threatening to disinherit their children have provoked the break-up of the family, with the young people going off to the city. This is mainly true of girls, who were formerly bound to the house and forced to accept the decisions of their parents. 'Nowadays, how many girls do we see attached to the land? None. Thanks to education, they all have jobs. They would rather marry a white-collar worker, anyone. He gets his pay every day. Otherwise, you have work every day without knowing what will happen. And in those days? And where could they go? Now they can. They can write .. / (J.-P. A.). 'Girls go out as much as boys; often, even, they are smarter. .. That's education. In the old days, there were girls who were placed in the towns, of course, but now they all have jobs; they have their school certificates and so on . . . In the past, a lot of girls would go and work for a while in the towns, to make a bit of money for their trousseau, then they'd come back. But now, why should they come back? There are no more seamstresses. Once they are educated, they go off when they want to' (P. L.-M.). The weakening of parental authority and young people's openness to new values have taken away the family's role as an active intermediary in the arrangement of marriages. In parallel, the intervention of the 'matchmaker' (lou tracbur) has become much rarer.8 As a consequence, the search for a partner is left to individual initiative. In the old system, there was no need to 'court' and it was possible to know nothing of the art of the suitor. Now everything has changed. The separation of the sexes has only grown with the weakening of social ties, especially in the hameaux,9 and with the greater distance 7

There are still families in which parental authority is absolute. 'Even in recent times a Bo. daughter, the eldest, married a man from the mountains; the husband came and lived in Lesquire. The mother organized the marriage of her younger daughter, aged 16, with the elder brother of her elder daughter's husband. She said: "You have to marry them off young, later they want to choose for themselves"' (J.-P. A.). This type of marriage is called barate (haa ue barate). 8 It is significant that the younger generations do not even know the term trachur, or the associated traditional customs. There are still some people who busy themselves with arranging marriages, but they are regarded with some ironv. 9 See pp. 68ff.

46

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

between opportunities for meeting. There is more need than ever for 'go-betweens', but 'young people have more pride than before; they would think they were a laughing-stock if anyone tried to pair them off (J.-P. A.). In a general way, the younger generation no longer understands the old cultural models. A system of matrimonial exchanges dominated by the collective rule has given way to a system governed by the logic of individual competition. In this context, the peasant from the hameaux is particularly poorly armed. Both because they are rarer and because the whole of early upbringing tends to separate and oppose male and female society, relations between the sexes lack naturalness and freedom. 'To charm a girl, a peasant offers marriage, or allows it to be assumed; friendship between the sexes does not exist. There are no day-to-day relations between boys and girls. The prospect of marriage serves as the bait. At least, it used to, but now that doesn't work. Marriage with a peasant is devalued. They have no other arguments to win a girl's heart' (P. C, 32, villager). Simply approaching a girl and talking to her is in itself a challenge. Although, or perhaps because, the couple have known each other since childhood, the slightest approach is highly charged because it abruptly beaks the relationship of ignorance and mutual avoidance.10 The girl responds to the boy's unease and clumsiness with awkward smiles and her own embarrassment. What is lacking is the whole set of gestural and verbal models that would facilitate the dialogue - taking the hand, smiling, joking, everything is difficult. And then there is other people's opinion, watching and judging, turning the most banal encounter into an irreversible commitment. When a young man and woman are said to be 'talking to each other', that means they are going to marry . . . There are not, and cannot be, any neutral relationships. Moreover, everything tended previously to favour the 'good peasant': the value of the landowner depended on the value of his land, and vice versa. The norms governing the selection of a partner 10

They lack self-confidence. After looking at her for 15 years, they don't dare approach a girl. They say: "She's not for me." They go to school. They work without enthusiasm. They get the primary certificate or the equivalent. If the parents don't push them, and as a rule they don't (that has changed over the last few years), they go back to the farm and get bogged down. They lead a quiet life, with a bit of pocket money on Sundays. They go off for their military service and get a bit more beaten down and submissive. They come back, the years go by, and they don't marry' (A. B.). 'You have to see them. You don't turn up in front of a girl feeling relaxed. The sense of being unable to express yourself. You're ashamed. I tell you! They have the chance to talk for five minutes once a fortnight to girls they may have thought about non-stop for that whole fortnight' (P. C ) .

Internal contradictions and anomy

47

were valid, in rough terms at least, for the whole community: the accomplished man had to combine the qualities of the good peasant and the sociable man, and find a proper balance between lou moussu and lou hucou, the rustic and the urbanite. Today's society is dominated by divergent systems of values: alongside the essentially rural values that have been defined, new values are emerging, borrowed from the urban world and adopted mainly by the women; within this logic, priority is given to the 'monsieur', and to the ideal of urban sociability, quite different from the old ideal, which was mainly directed towards relations between men. Judged by these criteria, the peasant becomes the hucou. But perhaps the essential fact is that this society, once relatively self-enclosed, has now resolutely opened up to the external world. It follows first that the eldest sons, bound to the heritage that they cannot abandon without dishonour, often find it harder to marry especially if their property is small - than their younger brothers who have forsaken the land for the town or the neighbouring bourgs. But the exodus is essentially of women, who, as has been seen, are much better equipped than before to confront urban life and who aspire more and more to flee the servitudes of peasant life. 'Girls don't want to be peasants any more. Finding a wife isn't easy for many young men - the sons of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and even landowners, especially when the farm is deep in the countryside, a long way from the school, the church, the shops, or even a road, especially when the land is harsh and the soil poor and hard to work. It all started after 1919. When the peasants' sons, who didn't have their fathers' deep-rooted love of the land, started to leave to take jobs in the towns, the girls were able to find partners who could give them an idle, easy life, a home where they could be the "mistress of the house" (daune) from day one. In the old days, before the inflation, the parents of girls who needed to be married (maridaderes) gave them a good dowry to "set them up" among peasants; they know that in today's money, the dowry that cost them so much sacrifice is worthless. They prefer to send their daughters off with a small trousseau and a bit of money in their purses; they know that that way they won't come back later complaining of working like slaves and being treated as intruders' (P. L.-M.). (See also appendix V.) Less tied to the soil than the young men (the eldest sons, at least), provided with the minimum of education needed to adapt to the urban world, partially freed from family constraints through the weakening of traditions, readier to adopt urban models of behaviour, young women can move into the towns or bourgs more easily than

48

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Comparison of number of births and number of residents Year of birth 1923-1927 1 Male Born in Lesquire Living in Lesquire in 1954 Departures % of departures 2 Female Born in Lesquire Living in Lesquire in 1954 Departures %of departures

1928-1932

1933-1937

1938-1942

Total

88

80

65

40

273

67 21

49 31

44 21

33 7

193 80

24%

38%

32%

17%

86

65

71

47

269

40 46

41 24

40 31

35 12

156 113

53%

27%

43%

29%

29%

42%

young men. To measure the relative sizes of male and female migration, one only has to compare the number of men and women born in Lesquire over a given period and recorded in the 1954 census as living there with the number of the males and females registered as having been born there over the same period. As well as the significant drop in the number of births (by more than 50% between 1923 and 1942), the table also shows that women leave Lesquire more often than men do. Among people aged 27 to 31 in 1954, 2.22 times more women than men left (and 1.4 times more for the years 1923 to 1942). In broad terms, 6 women and 4 men left the village each year. For women, departures start early, in adolescence. Men leave later, mainly between the ages of 22 and 26, after their military service. The extent of women's exodus (42%, almost 1 in 2) should not lead one to ignore the emigration of men (29%, almost 1 in 3) - otherwise it becomes impossible to understand why the rate of non-marriage has grown in relative terms among women of the younger generation who have remained in the hameaux,

Internal contradictions and anomy

49

Sex ratio and distribution by place of residence Bourg

Hameaux

Age group

M

F

Pre-1893 1893-1902 1903-1912 1913-1922 1923-1932 1932-1954

24 16 19 13 19 22

41 61.53 18 88.89 19 100 14 92.82 13 146.15 36 88.41

Total

123 141

Sex ratio M

88.48

F

All Sex ratio

M

F

Sex ratio

105 125 70 52 87 74 63 42 97 67 157 151

86.06 134.61 117.56 150 144.77 103.98

129 166 80.12 86 70 122.85 106 93 113.97 76 56 135.71 116 80 145 189 187 96.25

579 511

113.97

702 652

108.53

1,354

while one would be tempted to attribute the pathological rate of male non-marriage to a dearth of women.11 The inhabitants of Lesquire have a correct perception of the objective situation: every informant mentions the exodus of women, generally overestimating it. It follows that women have the hope of leaving Lesquire whereas most of the men feel condemned to live there (all the more so because the male exodus is relatively underestimated). So they are justified in preparing for departure from the end of adolescence and spurning the men of the village, whereas the men seek to build their future on the land. An analysis of the sex ratio for the different age groups (based on the 1954 census) confirms these observations. In comparison with the sex ratio for France as a whole in 1954, which was 92, it is clear that the sex ratio for the population of Lesquire is abnormally high; it is low for people over 60 and those under 22, who are too young to " The causes of the young women's failure to marry are not exactly the same as those of the men. No doubt some of the young women remain subject to determinisms similar to those that lead the men not to marry. This is true of some girls described as empaysanides, 'empeasanted', ill-attired and clumsy; like their male counterparts, they are the 'wallflowers' at the ball, left out of account. Some are heiresses who remain at the family farm rather than abandon their parents; others stay to keep company with an unmarried brother. Such pairs of unmarried siblings are found in 30 or so houses. There are also girls of doubtful reputation whom the young men will not court for fear of ridicule and the collective judgement. Finally, some of the young women in the bourg remain spinsters because they cannot find a man who corresponds to their expectations and their lifestyle; they would rather stay single than marry a peasant from the hameaux.

50

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

emigrate, but very high for the age groups in-between. From this it can be concluded that the rate of emigration is greater for women than for men, especially from the hameaux, with the sex ratio for the bourg population always being below 100 except for the years 1923-32. Internal contradictions Thus, as a result of various factors, a full-scale restructuring has taken place. However, although the conditions in which it is exercised are quite different, the fundamental principle which dominates the logic of matrimonial exchange, namely the opposition between upward marriages and downward marriages, has been maintained. This principle is closely linked to the fundamental values of the cultural system. Although there is absolute equality between men and women as regards inheritance, the whole cultural system does indeed remain dominated by the primacy conferred on men and masculine values.12 In the old society, the logic of matrimonial exchanges was closely dependent on the social hierarchy, which itself reflected the distribution of landed property; in addition, it had the social function of safeguarding this hierarchy and, through it, the most precious value, the patrimony. It follows that the imperatives of the economic order were at the same time social imperatives, imperatives of honour. To marry downwards was not only to threaten the ancestral heritage but also and above all to step down socially, to compromise a name and a house, and thereby to threaten the whole social order. The mechanism of matrimonial exchanges was the result of the harmonious combination of a principle springing from the specific logic of matrimonial exchanges (and independent of the economy) and principles derived from the logic of the economy, namely the various norms imposed by the concern to safeguard the patrimony, such as the right of primogeniture and the principle of the equivalence of fortunes. The influence of economic inequalities is no doubt still felt today. But whereas formerly, because it was integrated into the coherence of the system, this principle prevented some marriages only so as to favour others, everything now takes place as if economic necessity exerted only a negative effect, preventing without favouring. Because it continues to function while the system within which it had an essential 12

The significant age difference between the spouses (on average the husband is five years older) is further evidence of this.

Internal contradictions and anomy

51

function has collapsed, this principle only increases the anomy. 'Nowadays there is a greater need for a wife. There can be no question of refusing a marriage, as people did in the past, for the sake of a dowry' (J.-P. A). And yet although necessity enforces a transgression of the old principles, they continue to operate, as if 'in neutral' and out of phase. Mothers, for example, are mainly concerned to 'marry off the daughter' when they should rather think about their son. The old norms (reduced to 'prejudices') still forbid a certain number of marriages between an elder son of a 'great' family and a girl of low birth.13 So, among the men of the hameaux, who are disadvantaged overall, some are doubly so, namely those who were already disadvantaged in the old system, the younger brothers who remain on the land, and the poorest men - the sharecroppers, tenant farmers and domestic servants. The excessive attention paid to the size of the dowry; the fear of the costs entailed by the wedding celebrations, the refurbishment of the house, traditional at the time of marriage, and the purchase of the trousseau that is shown to the guests; the reluctance of girls to suffer the excessive authority of parents who remain in control of the budget and the running of the farm - all these are obstacles or hindrances which can often cause marriage projects to fail. Time goes by; meanwhile, the girl has 'found' the gendarme or the postman. With such men, everything is simple: there is no need for a dowry, a trousseau, or expensive ceremonies and festivities; above all no need to live with the mother-in-law. Although it continues to exert a decisive influence on the mechanism of matrimonial exchanges, the opposition between eldest and younger sons now has a quite different functional significance. A study of 100 marriages registered between 1949 and 1960 shows this clearly: one finds 43 marriages between an heir and a younger daughter, 13 between a younger son and an heiress, 40 between two 13 A whole category of bachelors (especially among men aged 40 to 50) can be seen as the 'product' of the mismatch between the old norms and the new situation. 'Some young men from "great" families who didn't want to lose status and who had not seen how the situation had changed remained bachelors. Take the case of Lo., one of those Lesquire peasants who were doing really well after the war. Bom to good peasant stock, with plenty of money in his pockets, always well dressed, he used to go to dances quite a bit. He was one of those peasants of good family, with ready money, who had had a degree of success for all those reasons and had never known failure on account of being peasants. It's a certainty that a good number of girls that he once turned his nose up at would suit him very well now. Yet he doesn't seem to regret having missed his chance, He consoles himself now, every week, over a pintou (half-litre of wine) with his companions in misfortune . . .* (P. C).

52

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

younger sons and daughters and only 4 between an heir and an heiress. Thus, marriages between younger sons and daughters, which were once the exception, have become almost as numerous as marriages between eldest sons and younger daughters. This is understandable if one observes that, on the one hand, the younger sons married to younger daughters almost all have a job in the non-agricultural sector, and, on the other hand, that for people in the bourg, the opposition between eldest and younger sons has a secondary function in matrimonial exchanges; the different types of marriages are randomly distributed. Younger sons, who are now much less dependent on the 'house' because they have secured other sources of income enabling them to set themselves up elsewhere, and who are much less attentive to the size of the dowry, do not hesitate to marry younger daughters without a fortune. The relative rarity of marriages between heiresses and younger sons is essentially due to the fact that, simply by leaving the house, many heiresses who marry outside the village or in Lesquire itself renounce the right of primogeniture, which generally passes to their younger brother. This is mainly the case with the eldest daughters of large families who cannot wait, in order to marry, until their younger brothers come of age and who prefer to leave for the town. It is also, very often, the case with 'small heiresses', who hand the role over to a younger brother. Thus heiresses, who were always less numerous than heirs, are tending to become very rare. Whereas for the inhabitants of the bourg and more generally for non-agricultural wage-earners most of the old constraints have disappeared, they continue to bear on the peasants in the hameaux, as is shown by the extreme rarity of marriages between an heir and an heiress (4%). Marriages between heirs and younger daughters, and, less frequently, between heiresses and younger sons, remain the rule. But the existence of a high rate of bachelorhood, even among heirs, is evidence, once again, that the old system has remained strong enough to impose observance of the fundamental principles, but not enough actually to favour the very things that these principles claimed to guarantee. The logic of the system tended to ensure on the one hand that the heritage could not be lost to others, fragmented or abandoned, and on the other that the lineage would be perpetuated; to this end, the heir or heiress was always found a spouse, and if they had no children, their rights passed to the younger brothers. While the first of these two functions is still achieved - perhaps more effectively than ever, since the departure of the younger sons and the daughters removes the threat of division and leaves the land to the

Internal contradictions and anomy

$3

first-born or whoever occupies his place14 - the bachelorhood of the eldest son signals the end of the lineage. Of the old system, there remain for the peasants of the hameaux only the negative determinisms. Thus, although the rate of non-marriage has perceptibly increased over the last few years, the change in matrimonial exchanges cannot be described as a simple quantitative modification of the distribution of the different types of marriage. What one observes, in fact, is not the break-up of a system of models of behaviour and its replacement by simple statistical rules, but a veritable restructuring. A new system, based on the opposition between the villager and the peasant of the hameaux, is tending to take the place of the old system, based on the oppositions between, on the one hand, the elder brother and the younger brother, and, on the other hand, between the big and the small landowner (or the non-landowner). Considered in isolation, the system of matrimonial exchanges developed by the peasants of the hameaux seems to bear within itself its own negation, perhaps because it continues to function as a system endowed with its own rules, those of another time, when it is caught up in a system structured according to other principles. Is it not precisely because it continues to constitute a system that this system is self-destructive? Peasants and villagers To define the function of the new opposition between the inhabitants of the village and the peasants of the hameaux, one only has to analyse on the one hand the matrimonial exchanges between the two groups and on the other hand their respective 'marriage areas'.13 Between 1871 and 1884, marriages between people born in the commune made up 47.95% of the total. In the period 1941-60, they made up only 39.87%. Matrimonial exchanges between bourg and hameau declined considerably, from 13.77% to 2.97% of all marriages. Over the same period, the proportion of external marriages 14

Younger sons who have gone off to the town are much less attached to their rights over the land. 'What use is the land for a younger son who has gone off to the town, who works in a factory or an office? In any case he could only sell it. A lot of them prefer to be paid in cash, but there are also a lot who are fobbed off with promises' (A. B.). Other factors tend to strengthen the position of the eldest son, such as the decline in the average size of families in the hameaux (cf. pp. 72-3). 15 See the pyramid of the ages for the population of Lesquire (not reproduced here), in Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne', p. 73.

54

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

increased significantly (by 8.08%). If marriages to someone from outside the commune are divided up according to the distance of the outsider's residence from the bourg, one finds that the main area of exchanges coincides, now as earlier, with the circle of radius 15 km within which 91.33% of marriages took place,16 as against only 80.31% now, and secondly that the proportion of marriages within a radius of more than 30 km, which was always relatively high, has considerably increased in recent times (see the table opposite). To explain the extension of the marriage area and also the virtual disappearance of exchanges between the hourg and the hameaux, one has to look at the proportion of marriages of each type relative to the total number of marriages in each of the four categories. This reveals the relative expansion of the respective marriage areas and the structure of the distribution of the various types of marriage for each category (see the table on p. 56). Comparison of the two periods shows that the distinction between the bourg and the hameaux played a very small part in the old system of matrimonial exchanges. Men from the hameaux took 11.2% of their wives from the bourg, the villagers 45.5% of their wives from the hameaux (the population of the bourg being equivalent to 24% of that of the hameaux). Marriages between men from the bourg and women from the hameaux accounted for 7.65% of the total number of marriages, and marriages between men from the hameaux and women from the bourg 6.12% of the total. Whereas, in the more recent period, the villagers still found 21.2% of their wives in the hameaux, compared to 45.5% previously, marriages between men from the hameaux and women from the bourg have become the exception; the last marriage of this type was in 1946.17 A man from the hameaux thus has almost no chance of marrying a woman from the village; village women regard such marriages as inconceivable, even if it means remaining unmarried. But the persistence of a current of one-way exchanges should not mask the fact that the overall quantity of exchanges between the bourg and the hameaux has fallen dramatically; for the years before 1900, marriages between the bourg and the hameaux accounted for 13.77% of 16 The number of marriages between blood relations is small: only nine dispensations were granted by the Church between 1908 and 1961 inclusive, for marriages between first or second cousins. 17 It will be noted that, while matrimonial exchanges between the bourg and the hameaux were more important and more balanced in the past than they are now, men from the bourg have always taken more of their wives from the hameaux than men from hameaux took wives from the bourg, a tendency which has only been accentuated in recent vears.

1941-1960 As % of total marriages

0.59

2.38

32.14

54

4.76

8

5.61

28.57

6.12

1

11

6Bg9Bg

56

SHam9 Ham

12

SHam9Bg

4

15 1871-1884 As % of total marriages 7.65

<3Bg9 Ham

Variations in marriage area according to residence

14.94

25

19.89

12.50

21

10.71

13.09

22

12.75

1.19

2

1.53

1.78

3

1.02

2

25

21

39

3

10.1- 15.1- 20.115 km 20 km 25 km

5.110 km

05 km

1.78

3

1.02

2

14.94

25

5.10

10

25.1- 30.1 30 km 6c+km

100

168

100

196

Total

56

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Men from the hameaux 1871-1884 (n=106) 1941-1960 (n = 98) Men from the bourg 1871-1884 (n = 33) 1941-1960 (n = 19) Women from the bourg 1871-1884 (n = 37) 1941-1960 (n = 19) Women from the hameaux 1871-1884 (n = 114) 1941-1960 (n = 99)

6Ham-9Bg (n = 12) 11.2% (n=l) 1% SBg-9Ham (n=15) 45.5% (n=4) 21.2% 9Bg-6Ham (n = 12) 32.4% (n=l) 5.3%

6 Ham- 9 Ham

6 Ham- 9 Ext.

(n=56) 52.8% (n=54) 55.1%

(n = 38) 35.8% (n = 43) 43.8%

SBg-9Bg (n=ll) 33.3% (n = 8) 42.1% 9Bg-6Bg (n = l l ) 29.7% (n = 8) 42.1%

SBg-9Ext. (n = 7) 21.2% (n = 7) 36.7% 9Bg-dExt. (n = 14) 37.8% (n = 10) 53.6%

9Ham-6Bg

9Ham-SHam

9 Ham-6 Ext.

(n=15) 13.1% (n=4) 4.1%

(n=56) 49.1% (n=54) 54.5%

(n=43) 37.7% (n=41) 41.3%

the total number of marriages, compared to 2.97% for the recent period. Over the same time, exchanges have intensified within the bourg and within the hameaux, leading to the formation of two clusters of matrimonial exchanges, and exchanges with the external world have increased. This increase in the proportion of external marriages does not have the same significance for the different categories, although it manifests itself to varying degrees in each of them. The existence of a dual frame of reference, two contrasting systems of values, urban and rural, means that similar behaviours or regularities may conceal entirely different meanings. Thus, for example, the extension of the women's matrimonial area, both in the bourg and in the hameaux, stems from the fact that it is relatively easy for them to make themselves acceptable to an urbanite and to adapt to urban life, whereas

Internal contradictions and anomy

57

it is difficult to imagine a man from the hameaux - assuming he were able to acquire enough of an urban appearance to win the heart of an urban woman - being able to persuade her to accept and adopt life on the farm.18 It follows that the extension of the matrimonial area may be attributable to opposite reasons in the cases of women and of men, and, in another sense, in the cases of peasants and villagers. A woman may marry afar because she can and wants to, because marriage in a distant bourg, and, a fortiori, in a town, is seen as a liberation; by contrast, a man may do so because he is forced to look for a wife at a distance, having failed to find one in the vicinity. One only has to analyse the matrimonial area of the men of the hameaux to be persuaded of the importance of this opposition. It is clear, first, that the proportion of marriages within a radius of five kilometres has fallen considerably (from 16.9% to 9.10%). This would be sufficient to show the difficulty that men in the hameaux have in finding a local wife, if one were unaware of the existence of a high rate of non-marriage. One sees at the same time a very evenly spread growth in marriages in remoter areas, with the main increase being in marriages in a radius of over 30 kilometres. In the past, marriages outside the commune always made up a high proportion of the total number of marriages - in the logic of the old system, only the eldest son and generally one of the younger sons married within the commune or in the neighbouring hameaux. Younger sons who wanted to escape bachelorhood could only seek a wife at a distance. Once married, they often worked in more or less remote villages but kept close links with the house and on that account remained citizens of Lesquire. Nowadays, with many elder sons remaining unmarried while marriages between younger children are increasing, it is understandable that the proportion of marriages at a distance of more than five kilometres should have increased (from 18.7% to 34.5%). In seeking a wife at a distance, preferably in a remote and 'backward' hameau, the peasant of the hameaux hopes to escape the constraint of the traditional rules (see the table overleaf). 18

In the case of the women, the figures are not entirely representative, since a high proportion of marriages (not easy to estimate accurately) take place outside the commune and so do not appear in the local register. As a rough guide, however, one can compare the statistics for women from the bourg and women from the hameaux: the proportion of external marriages is now much higher for the former (53.2%) than for the latter (41.3%), whereas they used to be virtually identical (37.8% and 37.7%). This is easily explained, given that girls in the bourg are much more 'urbanized' than those in the hameaux (we also know that the rate of non-marriage for women is much higher in the hameaux than in the bourg).

From hameaux

Women From bourg

From bourg

Men From hameaux

(n=4) 10.8% (n = 2) 10.5%

(n=13) 11.4% (n=12) 12.0%

1871-1884 (n=114) 1941-1960 (n=99)

(n=4) 12.1% (n=2) 10.5%

1871-1884 (n = 33) 1941-1960 (n=19)

1871-1884 (n=37) 1941-1960 (n = 19)

(n=18) 16.9% (n = 9) 9.1%

1871-1884 (n=106) 1941-1960 (n = 98)

Area I 0-5 km

(n = l l ) 9.6% (n = 5) 5.0%

(n=2) 5.4% (n=3) 15.7%

(n = l ) 3.0% (n=2) 10.5%

(n=7) 6.6% (n = l l ) 11.2%

Area II 5.110km

(n=ll) 9.6% (n = 9) 9.0%

(n=2) 5.4%

(n=2) 6.2% (n=l) 5.2%

(n=6) 9.4% (n=12) 12.2%

AreaHI 10.115 km

(n = 2) 1.8%

(n = 1) 0.9% (n=2) 2.0%

Area IV 15.120 km

(n = l ) 1.0%

(n=l) 2.6% (n = 2) 10.5%

(n=l) 0.9%

Area V 20.125 km

(n=l) 1.0%

(n=2) 5.4%

(n = 2) 2.0%

Area VI 25.130 km

Distribution by category of external marriages, according to distance from spouse's place of origin

(n = 14) 37.8% (n=10) 53.2% (n=43) 37.7% (n=41) 41.3%

(n = 6) 5.2% (n = 13) 13.0%

(n = 7) 21.2% (n=7) 36.7%

(n = 38) 35.8% (n=43) 43.8%

Total

(n = 3) 8.1% (n = 3) 15.7%

(n=2) 10.5%

(n = l ) 0.9% (n = 7) 7.1%

Area VII 304-km

Internal contradictions and anomy

59

For the men of the bourg the situation is very different. The fact that 73.8% of them marry within a radius of 5 km is sufficient to indicate that they have no difficulty in finding wives, even within a restricted area - and we know that their rate of bachelorhood is very low. The growing proportion of external marriages, linked to the decline (1/2) in exchanges with the hameaux, shows that the bourg has progressively turned away from its hameaux and opened up to other bourgs or the towns. While the radius of 15 km within which all marriages formerly took place remains the main area of exchanges (89.5% of marriages), there is a significant proportion of marriages more than 30km away (10.5%). This is evidence that the villagers, whose social space is much wider than that of the hameaux, have the opportunity of finding wives at a distance and sometimes even in the towns. In fact, a geographical definition of matrimonial areas perhaps misses the essential point. The marriage of a woman from a hatneau of Lesquire with a man from a hatneau elsewhere, however distant on the map, should be placed in the same category as a marriage with a man from another hameau of Lesquire and clearly distinguished from marriage with a man from the neighbouring town. The geographical areas do not coincide with the social areas. For a peasant from the hameaux, the area of marriages formerly extended to the region of the hills between the two Gaves, where one finds communes consisting of a small bourg of concentrated population and a very significant scattered population distributed among numerous farms built on the hillsides and the lower slopes of the mountains. There are several reasons for this. First, the implicit models which orient the choice of a wife lead to a search for a 'good peasant woman', hard-working and prepared for the hard life that awaits her; it is obvious that a woman - even a peasant - who was accustomed to the easier work in the Gave plain would find it hard to adapt to the harsh conditions she would find in a remote farm in the hameaux and still more so a woman from the town. The girls of the neighbouring hamlets or the villages of the uplands, who had already experienced a similar existence, were more inclined to accept and cope with that life. Having been born and brought up in a region relatively closed to external influences, they were less demanding and judged their potential partners by less unfavourable criteria. Moreover, the area of marriages coincided with the zone within which one did not feel too far from home.19 The balls that one dares to go to take place 19 For the inhabitants of the Gave plain, the people of the uplands are mountagnoous, mountain-dwellers, rustics. They deride their looks and their harsh accent (for example, whereas the people of the plain say you for T , those living in the hills say

60

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

within this area, and those balls help to define the 'beaten tracks' that matrimonial exchanges tend to follow. As a result, the towns that a person visits most regularly, especially for their markets, are quite different from the ones with which the most intense exchanges take place. But over the last few years, this closed world where people felt 'at home', 'among their own', has opened up. In the hameaux of the main marriage area, as in the hameaux around Lesquire, the women look to the town much more than to their own hameau or the neighbouring ones, which offer them exactly what they want to escape from.20 Urban models and ideals have invaded the territory of the peasant. It follows that the women are reluctant to marry a peasant who cannot offer them anything other than a life that they already know only too well. In addition, they are less and less disposed to accept the idea of submitting to the authority of the husband's parents, who are 'unwilling to step down' [nous bolin pas desmete) and in particular refuse to renounce their property rights in the presence of a notary. They often fear the tyranny of the old daune who intends to continue to rule the roost, especially when the father lacks authority because he has married upwards (see appendix VI: the case of the Se. family). Secondly, it follows that the spatial and social mobility of the women, who are quicker in general to adopt urban models and ideals, has increased much more than that of the men. The women are much more likely to find a spouse outside the peasant world, first because, in accordance with the very logic of the system, they are the ones who circulate; secondly, because they assimilate some aspects of urban culture more rapidly than the men (something which will need to be explained); and thirdly, because the implicit rule which forbids men from marrying beneath them is bound to favour women. It follows from all this that matrimonial exchanges between the peasant hameaux and the town can only be in one direction. For example, whereas a native of the hameaux would not think (in normal circumstances) of going to a dance in a neighbouring town, young men from the town often come in groups to country balls, where their urban appearance gives them a considerable advantage over the peasants. As a result, even if the area within which they go dancing were as restricted as that of the young men, the girls of the 20

All the phenomena observed in the hameaux can also be seen the villages of the canton, which, relative to the bourg of Lesquire, are in the same situation as the hameaux. Thus the population of the canton fell from 5,260 in 1836 to 2,880 in 1936. The exodus of women is particularly strong everywhere.

Internal contradictions and anomy III

I

8Ham9 Ham 9 Another hameau 9 Bourg 9 Another bourg 9 Town

Chances of marriage

Prestige

+

+

+ -

+ +

-

+ +

Chances of marriage 8 Bourg9 Ham 9 Another hameau 9 Bourg 9 Another bourg 9 Town

II Chances of marriage 9Ham6 Ham 8 Another hameau 8Bourg 8 Another bourg 8 Town

+

±

Prestige

+ + + +

±

+ + +

IV Prestige

+ + +

61

+ + +

9Bourg8 Ha 8 Another hameau 8 Bourg 8 Another bourg dTown

Chances of marriage

Prestige

+

-

+ +

+

+ +

+ +

hameaux would still be able to meet boys from the town. By contrast, few girls from the town would come out to dances in the country (except for the annual festivities) and if they ever did so they would be likely to disdain the peasants. To schematize, one could say that each man is located in a social area of matrimony, the rule being that he can easily find a wife in his own area and those below. It would follow that whereas the townsman can theoretically marry a woman from the towns or the bourgs or the hameaux^ the peasant in the hameaux is confined to his own area. A native of Lesquire used to have a more than 90 per cent chance of finding a wife within a radius of 15 km from his home. It might therefore be expected that the recent extension of this area would be accompanied by an increase in the chances of marriage. In fact this is not at all the case. Social distance imposes much more rigorous limitations than spatial distance. The circuits of matrimonial exchanges are becoming detached from their geographical base and

62

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

organizing themselves around new social units, defined by the sharing of certain conditions of existence and a certain lifestyle. The peasant from the hameaux around Lesquire now has as little chance of marrying a girl from Pau, Oloron or even the bourg of Lesquire as he formerly had of marrying a girl from some remote hameau in the Basque country or Gascony.

The opposition between the bourg and the hameaux ^w^y

As in former times, the peasant's soul is in the allodial idea. He instinctively hates the man of the bourg, the man of the corporations and guilds, just as he hated the lord, the man with feudal rights. His great preoccupation is, to use an expression of the old law which he has not forgotten, to drive out the outsider. He wants to reign alone over the land and, through this domination, to make himself master of the towns and dictate the law to them. Proudhon, The Political Capacity of the Working Classes

This restructuring of the system of matrimonial exchanges might well be correlative with a restructuring of the overall society around the opposition between the bourg and the hameaux which is itself the outcome of a process of differentiation tending to confer the monopoly of urban functions on the bourg. So, before analysing the role played by this opposition in the experience of the inhabitants of Lesquire, and consequently in their behaviours, we must describe its genesis and form on the basis of the objective data. In a small basin where the valleys of the Baise and the Baisole merge, the houses of the bourg crowd together, forming a continuous line of facades along the main street, on either side of the church and the central square, where the main institutions of village life are grouped together: the town hall, the post office, the savings bank, the school, the shops and the cafes. Situated on the line between the

64

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

hillside and the damp basin, the bourg seems to have been drawn there by the meadows that border the river and the vineyards that covered the surrounding hills. Around it, on the hillsides which rise to heights of 200 to 400 metres, the farms of the hameaux are scattered at distances varying from 200 metres to a kilometre. Generally built on the rounded hilltops and on the highest slopes, they are surrounded by vineyards, fields, orchards and woods. While the choice of these sites avoids the humidity, fog and especially the frosts of the lower levels, it means that access to the farms is often difficult and that water has to be drawn from wells sometimes 15 or 20 metres deep. Sunken tracks, partially tarmacked in 1955, link the houses to the bourg, but the remotest houses are only connected by farm tracks, kept more or less open but sometimes impassable in winter, because they often run alongside the gullies (arrecs) gouged by the streams that run down into the Baise. This is typical bocage country, where each plot is carefully enclosed with thick hedgerows often including trees. Each property is a little isolated domain, with its fields generally defined on the summit or flanks of the hill, with its vines on the side facing the sun, its woods on the steep slopes and in the steep-sided valleys, its pastures in the damp hollows. The homogeneity of the physical conditions, across a territory too subdivided to offer broad tracts of farmland, enables each isolated farm to contain the various elements of the farming landscape, so that, over short distances, the most varied crops are juxtaposed. Much land that was once cultivated now again lies fallow and shrubs have invaded thefieldsaround the abandoned farmhouses. The vineyards themselves, the peasant's pride, have greatly regressed as a result of the phylloxera plagues of 1880 and 1917 and the lack of hands to tend them after the 1914-18 war. Within a radius of six or seven kilometres around the bourg, the houses are distributed very homogeneously. However, it is possible to distinguish hameaux or neighbourhoods (quartiers) which roughly correspond to morphological units - for example, an area of hills between two hollows (the Rey quartier) or a small valley (Labagnere). Stretching over several kilometres across the hills, the quartier was once a very lively neighbourhood unit. Although, by virtue of its situation, the bourg has always fulfilled the role of administrative, craft and commercial centre, the opposition which now dominates the whole of village life took on its present form only gradually, and mainly after 1918. In 1911, 78.4% of the heads of households resident in the bourg lived on non-agricultural income as against 88.8% in 1954. In fact,

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

65

Distribution of heads of households by socio-occupational category Sociooccupational categories Landowners Sharecroppers, tenant farmers Agricultural labourers Non-agric. labourers Shopkeepers Professions Craftsmen Executives and civil servants Army and police Inactive Retired Total

1954

1911

1881

Hameaux Bourg Hameaux Bourg Hameaux Bourg 13

345 18

-

15

280

224

6

25

-

21

1

20

1

22

10

11

4

17 2

4 3 27

3 13 9 29

5 —

31

30 20 8 36

11

6 12 5 23

4

13

6

14

8

10

5 442

3 8 132

2 2 371

5 15 3 116

2 6 288

5 6 17 95

-

the figures minimize the extent of the process of urbanization. In fact, only 7.7% of the heads of households residing in the bourg actually engage in agricultural occupations (four of the six landowners do not farm their own land), compared to 21.5% in 1911. In addition, before 1914, except for the civil servants, the inhabitants of the bourg were 'all peasants to some degree' (J.-P. A). The craftsmen and small shopkeepers of the bourg all had some land and some animals; nowadays, although shopkeeping has kept its undifferentiated character grocery stores being combined either with a butcher's, or a baker's, or a cafe,1 or several of these - the shopkeepers have all given up 1

There are six cafes, of which only one is purely a cafe; one doubles as a grocerystore, another as a butcher's, a third is both a grocery and a butcher's, and two are also inns. Two grocery stores are also bakers. Some craft activities have disappeared or are in serious crisis - the weavers (there were 2 in 1881), and the cobblers and clog-makers, of whom there were 12 in 1881, 7 in 1911, and 2 (unemployed) in 1954; among the farriers and blacksmiths, some have managed to adapt by moving into decorative ironwork and car repairs.

66

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

their agricultural activities, as have the craftsmen. The meadows along the river, much coveted because hay is scarce and expensive and also because they can be rented out in winter for the flocks and herds which are brought down from the mountains, almost all belonged to just six families in the bourg.2 Almost all the families owned cows. Every house in the bourg had its vineyard (in which there would always also be a few peach, cherry and apple trees) on the neighbouring slopes. As soon as an inhabitant of the bourg had achieved a certain degree of wealth, he would buy a vineyard or, better, a meadow: in accordance with a typically peasant system of values, he attached prestige, not, like modern-day villagers, to the accumulation or display of consumer goods such as a car or a television set, but to the enlargement of his landed property. And everyone, as much in the bourg as in the hameaux, made it a point of honour to serve at his table only the wine of his own vineyard (or what was presented as such). The houses still today bear the marks of that past. Almost all have retained the arched carriage entrance through which hay carts would be brought. The owners preferred to reduce the living space by the width of the passage connecting the street with the barn behind the house, rather than reduce the size of the already narrow garden by the width of a pathway. In the inner courtyard, sometimes in the rear part of the house, are the pigsty and henhouse; beyond these, the barn with the cowshed, the wine press and the hayloft; then, the garden, a strip of land as wide as the house and about a hundred metres long, delimited on either side by a row of climbing vines.3 In spite of the transformations, the interiors remain today still organized in terms of the technical imperatives of agriculture, with the concern for comfort resolutely pushed into second place. Thus, the urban facades mask the peasant past (cf. the figure opposite).4 2

The meadows have (with one exception) all remained to this day the property of these six 'great' families, who, over the last century, have provided most of the mayors and town councillors. 3 Most gardens still have vines, although, because of the frosts and the age of the plants, the yield is close to zero. 4 One might see another sign of a greater interpenetration between the bourg and the hameaux in the fact that, around 1900, 14 houses in the bourg belonged to peasants in the hameaux. Eleven of these houses have no carriage door, which is understandable since they were only for occasional use or were rented to farm labourers or small craftsmen; four of them are now occupied by their owners, who left their hameau. If they had no house there, many peasants from the hameaux had a friendly family whose house they could visit (to change their shoes, eat, etc.) on Sundays and feast days.

street

living room

passage

wine store

courtyard

wine press

® store for farming tools cowshed

to garden

Typical ground plan of a house in the bourg

68

Bachelorhood and the Feasant Condition

In 1911, in the hameaux, 13.1% of the heads of households lived on non-agricultural income as against 11.5% in 1954.5 But the changes that have occurred in the last 20 years are more profound than the figures suggest. For example, there were six to ten 'inns' (auberges) for each neighbourhood around 1900, ten or so for example in the Lembeye neighbourhood, where there is only one today; each of them had its own skittle room (quillier).6 Men would also go there to play cards, and balls would be held there. On the road from Pau to Oloron there were a score of auberges where carters and people going to market would stop. They have all disappeared. Until 1914, and although there were four bakers' shops in the bourg, every house (in the bourg itself) had its bread oven in which bread would be baked, once a week, to last for the whole week;7 only for festivals or special occasions would people buy bread from the baker's. Some peasants continued to bake their own bread long after 1914. The bakers started to deliver their bread in the countryside, using a horse-drawn van, around 1920. Likewise, meat was bought from the butcher's only for major occasions; boiled beef was the dish for feast days and weddings.8 The rest of the time, people would eat the produce of the farm, in particular preserved pork, goose and duck; fresh meat, and especially butcher's meat, was regarded as a luxury. Coffee had been available since 1880, but it was only drunk on feast days. Sugar (bought in slabs) was consumed less than nowadays. In short, new tastes and easier transport have progressively increased the economic dependence of the isolated neighbourhoods on the bourg. Conversely, the dependence of part of the bourg population on its peasant clientele has also increased. So, in economic terms, urbanization of the bourg has been accompanied by a 'peasantification' of the hameaux. This is the case in all areas of existence. The neighbourhood was once a very lively unit. It was first of all a group of neighbours who would come together for shared labours, family ceremonies and festivals. For funerals, for example, the 'first neighbours' would go round inviting all the families of the neighbourhood, house by house. ' The number of agricultural labourers fell by almost 50% between 1881 and 1954. 6 The quillier is the covered room, adjoining the inn, in which the square area where the skittles are set up is marked out. 7 The mesture, a coarse bread made from maize flour, was eaten until 1880-90. It was replaced by the biaudey half maize, half wheat. 8 In 1881 there were two butchers in Lesquire. They sold, on average, one to two calves each Sunday. At Christmas, before 1900, they would slaughter a dozen cows. Custom required a beef casserole, which was eaten after midnight mass.

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

69

'There was a "marking out" of the neighbourhood [i.e. of the markers which indicated its boundaries]. The old people told the younger ones. It amounted to a lot of people, because it was a very big neighbourhood. Quite a few men were needed to carry the corpse, a very painful task. The body was wrapped in a linen winding sheet woven in the house (lou lin$ou dou lans)-, the winding sheet was itself wrapped in a bed sheet, carried by six men who held the knotted corners. From 1880 the coffin (lou baht) made of four planks began to be used. To carry it, two well-polished bars were passed through two wicker loops on each side of the coffin. The men would take turns to act as the four pall-bearers all the way to the cemetery. The coffin was not closed until the last moment, so that everyone could see the deceased. It could not be closed until everyone in the neighbourhood had arrived. They would arrive, say a prayer, sprinkle some holy water along with the laurel, then shake hands with everyone'9 (J.-P. A). The solidarity between inhabitants of the same neighbourhood was also expressed at the time of collective labours -houdjere (from houdja, to hoe) and liguere, the hoeing and binding of the vines in the course of which the groups of workers alternated their singing from one hillside to the other, pelere, the slaughter and processing of the pig, battere, the threshing, esperouquere, the stripping of the maize (from peroques, the leaves around the cob). Esperouqueres, for example, lasted for three weeks or a month in autumn. The whole neighbourhood, 30 or 40 young men and women, would gather together to strip the maize. They would go from house to house, each evening, until Halloween. When they finished the work in one house, generally on a Saturday, they would hold a party (las acabiailhes, from acaba, to finish). They would play and dance until daybreak. 'Esperouquere was the festival of youth. People didn't eat much - just chestnuts and peppers. Nowadays, you serve coffee, cheese and so on . . . They would smack each other with peroques; there was a lot of laughter. Sometimes we played charades. We would put a candle in a hollowed pumpkin. How we laughed!' (J.-P. A.). The collective labours were not the only occasion for celebrations. 'There were not so many dances in the village as there are now. But there were a lot out in the country. Between the ages of 17 and 30, I danced a lot - the mounchicou, the crabe (the goat). Four or five neighbours would get together, in a barn or a corner of the meadow, almost every week. There were musicians (lous baladis) who provided 9

In the bourg, two neighbours would go from house to house, one on each side of the street to invite everyone to the funeral. This custom persisted until around 1950. 'Many women didn't want to do it. They found it ridiculous' (A. B.).

70

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

the music, or else someone would sing, beating the time on a drum. Young people got together a lot more than they do nowadays. People knew one another within their neighbourhoods. They would make acquaintance at the festivities. People lived more together (lou mounde que biben mey amasse), neighbourhood by neighbourhood. These days they keep much more to themselves. Nowadays everybody complains and yet there is plenty of money... In the old days, people were much happier with life. The "scraps" (lous patacs), the work, the festivals . .. That's all gone now. People aren't happy in the way they used to be. There's no youth any more. We were happier, we reckoned we were happy' (J.-P. A.). Thus, because the bonds of neighbourhood (lou besiat, the group of neighbours, besis) and local area [quartier] were very strong, there was great social density in these hameaux, where the residents now feel lost and isolated.10 Since 1918 the quartier has ceased to be a real unit. Many collective tasks have disappeared either because they are done by machines or because the festivities to which they gave rise became too expensive. Even the richest peasants, those most renowned for their sense of honour, now have their pigs slaughtered by the village butcher. The major festivities, the dances for the agricultural fair, Christmas, New Year's Day or the Assumption, are organized in the bourg by the young people who live there. In the traditional society, spatial dispersion was not experienced as distance, because of the strong social density linked to the intensity of collective life. Nowadays, given that collective work and neighbourhood festivals have disappeared, peasant families feel their isolation concretely. It is true that the motor car has shortened distances, especially now that the main side roads have been tarmacked; but 'psychological' distance remains as great as ever, as can be seen from the social function bestowed on the car. With a few exceptions, the peasants would never think of using their car to go to a meeting of the 'Sporting Club' or the festival committee, or to go to the cinema on a Sunday evening. It is significant that the public meetings preceding the municipal and departement elections are held not only in the bourg but also in the various hameaux. People go the town in their cars as they used to go in their carts - faster, but no more often and not for any new reasons. The car has simply taken over the functions of the cart. It is mainly used to transport agricultural produce and for other purely practical journeys. Whereas in the village 41.4% of 10

The first neighbour, 'the one you call first if someone dies, is the one living in the house opposite. You can communicate with the first neighbour by making signs. The second neighbour {lou counterbesi) is the house "next door"' (J.-P. A.).

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

71

the cars are less than five years old and are used only for passenger transport (as against 14.6% in the hameaux), 63.4% of the cars owned in the hameaux are more than 20 years old (figures based on annual licences issued in 1956).n In the bourg, the concentration of dwellings maintains a strong social cohesion although the traditional techniques of collective leisure activities have disappeared: the bourg is the arena of gossip; on summer evenings, neighbours gather in twos and threes to talk on the benches set on the pavement in front of most of the houses. That is also where the carrerens (the inhabitants of the street, canere) sit on Sunday mornings to stare at the peasants as they go by dressed in their 'Sunday best*. For the peasants, these benches symbolize the malice and idleness of these 'townies* (citadins). Many peasants, rather than run the gauntlet of the ironic stares of the villagers, prefer to take the alleys which wind round behind the back gardens of the houses to the main square. However limited the horizon, however muffled the sounds of the city and of modern life, the population gathered in the bourg forms a society open to external influences. Because of their isolation, the peasants generally have no other opportunities to meet than those offered by the bourg - Sunday mass and the festivals. They are kept abreast of the life of the commune only through the mediation of the villagers.12 Thus, the barrier between town and country, between the peasant and the townsman, which used to run between people from Pau and Oloron and the people of Lesquire, without distinction, now separates the villagers, lous carrerens, from the peasants of the hameaux. The opposition between peasant and townsman now starts in the very heart of the village community. Before describing the most obvious forms that this opposition now takes, it is useful to show how it is expressed at a deeper level, that of demography, for example. Whereas the gap between average family size in the bourg and that in the hameaux was only 0.94 persons in 1881, it was 1.79 in 1911 and 1.13 in 1954. The reduction " Cf. table, not reproduced here, in Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne', p. 87. 12 Studying a rural area divided into 12 'school districts', each possessing a traditional name and forming a community conscious of its own identity, J. M. Williams shows how these neighbourhood units dissolve as they merge into the village community as a whole. Among the phenomena linked to the change in the structure and function of these units, he notes the emigration of craftsmen from the rural districts to the village centre, the concentration of 'cultural' activities in the bourgy and the social differentiation of the population (see An American Town (New York, 1906)).

72

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Average family size

Bourg Hameaux

1881

1911

1954

3.56 4.51

2.52 4.31

2.71 3.84

Number of houses occupied

Total population

Number of inhabitants per house

Year

Bourg

Hameaux

Bourg

Hameaux

Bourg

Hameaux

1881 1901 1911 1921 1954

97 92 92 83 94

418 367 293 339 273

471 322 355 259 258

2,468 1,656 1,601 1,408 1,096

4.8 3.5 3.1 3.1 2.7

4.8 4.2 4.5 4.1 4

of the difference between 1911 and 1954 is attributable on the one hand to a slight increase (since 1945) in family size in the bourg, and on the other to a regular decline in family size in the hameaux.u In a general way, families in the hameaux are significantly larger than those in the bourg, with more people living under the same roof. The differentiation between bourg and hameau has arisen in the last 50 years. Formerly, in the bourg as in the hameaux, the extended family predominated. In becoming more 'urban', the bourg has taken on the demographic characteristics of the town: the number of children has declined, the extended family which grouped together several households and their servants has tended to give way to the nuclear family, and the number of people living alone has steadily increased, especially in the category 'retired and non-active'. This phenomenon becomes particularly apparent when one considers the proportion of families consisting of four or more persons (including domestic servants) at the various dates. Thus the proportion of extended families was slightly higher (1 to 1.7) among landowners than villagers in 1881; but by 1954 it was three times greater. 13 See the tables showing family size by socio-occupational category of the head of the household and by place of residence (bourg or hameau)y according to the censuses of 1881, 1911 and 1954 (not reproduced here) in Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne', pp. 119-24.

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

73

Proportions of households of four or more members All families ini the hameaux

Landowners in the hameaux 1881 1911 1954

All families in the bourg

47% 43% 32%

53% 46% 36%

31% 8% 10%

Sex and place of residence Distance from Zones birthplace 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Bourg M

F

Total

0-5 km 64 61 125 - Lesquire - Other 8 13 21 communes 22 10 11 5.1-10km 27 11 16 10.1-15 km 4 7 3 15.1-20 km 2 5 3 20.1-25 km 4 5 9 25.1-30 km 49 20 29 30+km 123 141 264 Total

Hameaux M

F

402 317

Total

All M

F

719 466 378

All 844

40 39 79 48 52 100 24 42 66 34 53 87 52 73 125 63 89 152 11 11 22 14 15 29 9 2 11 12 4 16 4 2 16 7 8 15 37 25 62 57 54 111 579 511 1,090 702 652 1,354

By 1911 the bourg family had taken on its present form: the proportion of families of four persons and more was six times lower than the corresponding figure among landowners in the hameaux. The consequences of these morphological differences are considerable, particularly as regards marriage. As well as being a considerable burden for the young couple and especially for the young wife, the extended family exerts control and constraints which are increasingly irksome for women of the younger generation. 'Young people, especially young women, can no longer put up with the "big family". For example, in my house, for the young woman, there's the husband's grandmother, his mother and father, his sister and also his aunts who come from time to time. What a burden!' (P. C). To cast light from another angle on the opposition between the bourg and the hameaux, the totality of the individuals living in the commune of Lesquire according to the 1954 census are distributed in the table above by the distance from their place of birth.

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

It can be seen that 73.2% of the men and 65.9% of the women of the commune were born within a radius of 5 km, in other words within the commune or in immediately adjacent communes. Whereas, among the villagers, the proportions are only 58.5% for men and 52.6% for women, they are considerably higher for the population of the hameaux, which is essentially rural and sedentary: 76.3% for men and 69.6% for women. In the bourg, men and women born more than 30 km away make up 16.2% and 20.5% respectively of their category, as against 6.3% and 4.3% for the corresponding categories in the hameaux. Thus the bourg has a much more mixed population, likely to be more open to the external world. It is in the linguistic domain that the clearest and most significant manifestation of the opposition is to be found. Before 1914, Bearnais was the language used by all the inhabitants of the commune, both at home and in social relations. The school was virtually the only place where French alone was spoken. Civil servants and professionals, who were themselves generally from the village itself or the region, almost always used Bearnais in their dealings with the peasant population. People spoke French with difficulty, almost as if it were a foreign language, and they knew it. They felt a kind of embarrassment in using it, for fear of the ridicule incurred by lou franchiman, someone who struggles to speak French. After 1919, because of the mixing of populations due to the war and the presence of refugees in whose presence Bearnais could not be used, the use of French became more widespread, especially in the bourg. Since 1939, it has been very common for children to speak French at home and for adults to use French when speaking to them. Although all the inhabitants of the bourg - except for a few adolescents and those who have arrived from outside the region - are able to speak Bearnais, they often make it a point of honour to use only French, and they regard the 'patois' as a lower, vulgar language; they make fun of the uncouth rustics whose 'Frenchified' Bearnais produces comic effects, who mangle French and who persist in doing so out of pretentiousness or naivety (franchimandeya). For the peasant, by contrast, Bearnais is the spontaneous mode of expression, closely attached to the preoccupations of everyday existence; it is the language of oaths and insults, sayings and proverbs; the language of family life, farmwork and the market. Two peasants would be incapable, without feeling ridiculous, of discussing their harvests or their livestock other than in Bearnais. Although this language is becoming adulterated by the introduction of 'dialectized' French words in place of the old Bearnais words, and by the growing number of borrowings from French, especially in the areas of modern technologies and

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

75

institutions, it has kept all itsflavourand vigour, in a word, its spirit. French, on the other hand, is the language of relations with the urban world, and by the same token a language in which one is often as uncomfortable as in the 'Sunday best' one puts on to go to the carrere; or in the world of offices and bureaucrats in which one feels inept and disarmed.14 'Nowadays, a lot of people want to speak French. From their military service or the war, they have learned that officers have to be addressed in French' (A. B.). The use of French is the often forced and reluctant homage that the peasant pays to the moussu of the town and his paperwork; although he generally knows how to express himself in a perfectly correct French, he appreciates it when an interlocutor chooses to address him in Bearnais; he sees in it a willingness to make the relationship more direct, more relaxed, more equal. Between the last houses of the bourg where French is spoken and the first isolated farms, barely a hundred metres away, where Bearnais is spoken, runs the frontier between what might be called urban identity (citadinite) and peasant identity (paysannite).15 So, at the very centre of his universe, the peasant finds a world in which, already, he is no longer at home, Objectively, the bourg exists only through the hameaux, since it lives almost entirely on activities in the tertiary sector; however, this relation of dependence remains abstract, so that it does not reach the level of consciousness. The peasant, by contrast, feels concretely his dependence, not on the bourg as a collectivity but on certain persons whom he concretely needs. The relation of dependence is immediate and personal; it is therefore not surprising that it can take the form of homage. The civil servant provokes ambivalent attitudes.16 On the one hand, as the concrete embodiment of the state, he stands in as the victim of the resentment against the 'masters in Paris' (lous mestes ou lous commandans de Paris) and against the state, 'the biggest thief. He 14

The peasants of the hameaux generally speak French with a strong accent. The rolled r, which is the most characteristic feature, persists among inhabitants of the bourg whose mother tongue was Bearnais, whereas it is disappearing among the young. The local accent is generally less marked among the girls than the boys of the hameaux. Some 'semi-urbanites' in the bourg make efforts to correct their accents. 15 There are of course exceptions. In particular, the use of Bearnais has been kept up mainly among craftsmen (who are in closer contact with the country people) and among the farmhands. 16 The peasant's attitude towards the civil servant seems to conform to a more general model, the one which governs relations between the peasant and the educated official in many non-industrial civilizations.

76

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

is seen as 'the idler of the town' (lous fenians de la carrere),17 the 'man of leisure', with white hands, always 'in the shade', the man who can count on a good salary arriving every month, regardless of the weather, and without exerting himself, while the peasants toil, with no guarantees for the future, to produce the goods he consumes. 'Oh, diable, he has a good life (que s'at hire bet), they say. He's in the shade and out of the mud. He's learned how to talk and stare at people (debisa). He can wear a white shirt. He doesn't sweat much. Holding a pen doesn't give you callused hands. Yes, they've found easy work! The work of a gendarme . .. The sweat of a road-mender! And the postman .. . he's finished early in the day. They have time to sit and play cards. No doubt about it, they've found cushy jobs' (P. L.-M.). So, in the eyes of those who live in the hameaux, the man of the bourg is truly the bourgeois, someone who has deserted the land and broken or renounced the bonds that linked him to his roots. But, on the other hand, the villager, as local administrator or civil servant, plays the role of mediator between the peasant and the state. Representing central government, which has delegated its authority to him, the civil servant is its concrete embodiment. As the state and its administration intervene ever more in the peasant's daily life, so the civil servants become more and more significant and respected. More often than not, the peasant's relation to them is that of a supplicant who needs something from them. Whether he cannot manage to fill in his papers, or has lost his way in the rules, or is reluctant to make his own telephone call to the veterinary surgeon, he needs the help of those he calls the escribans de la carrere, the 'town scribblers'. The very use of this pejorative term shows that he never fully accepts their superiority. Yet he would never go to collect his pension, fill in forms at the town hall or consult the doctor without taking a dozen eggs or a litre of wine. This was no doubt a way of acknowledging a service rendered, but also of paying homage. 'All those papers, it's not enough to read them! You don't understand a word, or you get hold of the wrong end of the stick!' (P. LM.). For the peasant, the relation between the individual and the state cannot be set up, as it is in urban society, through impersonal, interchangeable relays, the policeman or clerk, the anonymous channels of an anonymous, faceless authority which manifests itself through them but is never reducible to this manifestation, the state being no 17

The respect inspired by an educated person never excludes irony, even a certain contempt; although he is seen as. in one respect, indispensable, he never ceases to be perceived as a parasite.

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

77

more than the endlessly retreating horizon of an infinite series of intermediate terms. In place of the disconcerting contact with the massive impersonality of the administration, the peasant sets up a person-to-person relationship. The more disarmed he feels, the more he is led to place his trust in individuals: he identifies the function with the functionary and recognizes the administration only through those who represent it. The Post Office is the post office clerk, and if the regular clerk is on holiday, the peasant will go away without having done the business he came for.18 But the peasant's reverence for the 'bourgeois' is not just a matter of self-interest. The people from the hameaux are very happy to be able to be "face to face in the cafe" (debisa au cafe) with a "monsieur" of the bourg, be it the mayor, a councillor, a court clerk, a post office clerk or a gendarme - in short, all those who possess a morsel of the central authority. Even today they remain somewhat "overawed" by this relatively comfortable "elite" of the bourg, by all those who have a "good situation". You have to remember that 50 years ago a gendarme expected a dowry of 3,000 francs; he would choose a younger daughter from a well-off family.19 And since then, that situation has only intensified. Every young man was "weighed up" and "labelled". When he got a job, it was a revolution. He became a "monsieur". All that means that the peasants always apply a certain respectful reserve in their relations with lou carreren. They are glad to invite him for a drink in the cafe. The "townsman" will lead the conversation; he relates the news with ease and self-assurance. Lous branes (the people from the uplands, brane, the rustics) from the depths of the Laring or Lembeye neighbourhoods will take care not to interrupt him and not to miss a word he says, so that they can pass it all on and entertain the whole household with the gossip. Where else would they learn all the "state secrets" if not in the bourg} Back home, they dissect their relations with the carrerens. They will judge them very lucidly, especially after paying the bill in the cafe' (A. B.). In such conditions, it is not surprising that the citadins have always retained the monopoly of political power. The mayors and the councillors of the departement have always been the schoolmasters, 18

Nowadays, the peasants endeavour to give their children the basic education needed to cope with modern life. 'Every sensible peasant wants an intelligent child so he can make him study . .. You have to be able to understand!' (J. L.). 19 'In my day, to marry a gendarme you needed quite a dowry - 3,000 francs. At G. there was a girl who married a gendarme. It caused the family a lot of difficulty. They struggled for a long time. The dowry was demanded because a gendarme's wife was not supposed to work, she shouldn't have dealings with the public' (J.-P. A.).

78

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

doctors and landowners of the bourg, with the peasants from the hameaux serving only as deputy mayors or municipal councillors. Being in a clear majority, they could have elected one of their own.20 For the peasant's judgement of himself is just as ambivalent as his judgement of the townsman and the civil servant. Pride in what he is, linked to his contempt for the townsman, coexists, if not with shame, at least with an acute awareness of his shortcomings and limitations. The peasants will turn their irony on the townsmen whenever the opportunity arises - when they gather together or privately - but face to face with them they are embarrassed, clumsy and deferential. It is significant that the anecdotes most appreciated are about the clumsiness and absurdity of the peasant, and especially the peasant among townsmen. And so, when it is a matter of managing the interests of the commune, and, a fortiori, of dealing with the authorities in the town, the peasant does not even think of delegating to another peasant. Because he is familiar with the administrative rules and the subtleties of national political life, because his professional role puts him in touch with the world of offices and administrations, because he has spare time, and above all because he 'knows how to speak', the man of the bourg, and especially the civil servant, seems to him to be predestined to play the role of mediator between himself and the town. The villager, for his part, especially if he has acquired some education and something of the external appearance of the man of the town, sometimes has only disdain for the inhabitants of the hameaux. No one could be further from the peasants than some of these notables - civil servants or members of the professions - who readily adopt a paternalist or protective attitude towards the savages of the fields or woods among whom they feel themselves exiled and whose interests and concerns are equally alien to them; forming a small, closed society, they seek to appear as an aristocracy of the intellect, as opposed to the rustics and 'simple folk' who surround them. Very often, moreover, it is in the lower strata of village society, those closest to the peasants in their culture, their language and their men20

One can also conjecture that, because of their rivalries, the peasants ultimately prefer to elect a carreren rather than distinguish one among themselves. 'Of course, they are no more indulgent towards one another [than towards the townsman]. From one field to another, they keep watch on what the others are doing - "Jean, it's time to get the plough out, so-and-so has started ploughing, or pruning his vines...". Some of them have a reputation for always being the first to start the various stages of work in the fields. Others always follow behind, and they are the butt of sarcastic remarks. And there are families who are thought to be poor hosts. They aren't spared!' (A. B.)

Opposition between bourg and hameaux

79

tality, that one finds the greatest concern to stand apart from the paysands, the ridiculous peasant. Among the greater number one detects, more or less overtly expressed, the sense of possessing 'burgher rights', of belonging to a more civilized, more polished, more cultured world. It is true that the peasant often exposes himself to irony or mockery. In every era, for example, the time-lag in styles of dress has made him an object of derision. While lous mousses de la carrere were wearing jackets by 1885, the countrymen still wore home-made linen smocks. When the wearing of jackets had become standard, around 1895, married men would go out 'in their wedding jacket' (dap la beste d'espousat), if it was still in good condition, whereas unmarried men still wore smocks. 'Ah, you should have seen the way they looked! They wore enormous berets! To make them bigger and keep them stiff, they would put a twig of wicker inside. They were a sight when they walked by on a blowy day, when the wind swelled and lifted their smocks, revealing their red belts. Sometimes their berets would be blown off and roll along like hoops, and they would run clumsily after them to catch them* (P. L.-M., age 88, a resident of the bourg). Even today, and although they do their best to dress so as to pass unnoticed, the peasants stand out in their 'Sunday best' suits, ill-fitting garments bought cheaply off the peg. With their big berets on their heads, their thick socks between their creased, tooshort trousers and their unfashionable shoes,21 they thrust their hands into the pockets of their frayed jackets. Used to walking in heavy clogs carrying heavy loads on uneven, sloping ground, they move slowly and ponderously: branneses (or branes), heath-dwellers, aubiscous (a grass that grows in the touyas), bouscasses (men of the woods, boscq), escanoulhes (a kind of onion), laparous or lagas (ticks) - all these are pejorative nicknames applied to the paysands de Souboley the 'gross peasant of Saoubole',22 clumsy, coarse, covered in mud, ill-groomed and ill-attired. The superiority that the villager attributes to himself is never fully conceded to him by the peasant. The man of the bourg is not the urban citadin he pretends to be. The most rustic of peasants knows this, and he knows that the man of the bourg for whom he is a peasant has his own citadin. The would-be urban postures that the 'burgher' often takes towards him are met with a silent irony or 21

Country people are uncomfortable with shoes because they only wear them once a week, to visit the bourg. Many peasants arrive in their clogs and change into their shoes when they enter the village. 22 An invented place-name whose clumsy sound evokes a savage, benighted land.

80

Bachelorhood and the Peasant

Condition

reference to a common origin: 'We know where he comes from!' or 'His father wore clogs.. .' The peasant perceives himself as a peasant only in the presence of the citadin; but the citadin himself only exists as such by opposition to the peasant. More generally, the bourg is citadin only by opposition to the peasant hameaux. Through the mentality and lifestyle of its inhabitants it might appear as a 'city' if it did not fail to fulfil the most important functions of a town. Having lost almost all its great landowners, it now has only 'tertiary sector' notables, who can provide examples of innovation in the area of consumption, but not production. This residence of civil servants and professionals, craftsmen and shopkeepers, and pensioners23 is a pseudo-city, incapable of providing economic stimulus - and especially in the agricultural sector. The history of the last few years is proof of this. It is the middle and lower strata of the peasantry in the hameaux that have produced the new rural elite, while the urban notables retained the traditional powers. The Foyer Rural, the Cooperative d'Utilisation du Materiel Agricole (created in 1956), the Centre d'Etudes Techniques Agricoles (1960), all these new institutions stem from the initiative of young farmers; they lie outside the power of both the old peasant aristocracy, the 'great' peasants, and also of the notables of the bourg, who are more interested in keeping control of local affairs through more or less demagogic measures than striving for a profound renewal of the rural economy.24 Because it has the monopoly of the urban functions, because it contains all the shops, cafes and offices, the bourg is sufficiently 'urbanized' to make the hameaux appear and see themselves as 'peasant' by contrast. But it is far from being able to stimulate them by its initiatives or its example.

23

In 1958, 28 heads of households out of 95 in the bourg lived on a civil service pension (Post Office or teaching) or a military pension (gendarmerie or Army), as against only two in the hameaux. 24 The CUMA [the local cooperative for the pooled acquisition of farm machinery trans.] had 25 members in 1958. They are all former members of the Cercle des Jeunes, a Catholic organization. They are small and medium-sized landowners; the big landowners have the means to buy a tractor and enough arable land to use it. According to various informants, 15 to 20 hectares of arable land, on a property of 30 to 40 hectares, are required to make buying a tractor worthwhile.

The peasant and his body /^c/

Plato in his Laws esteems nothing of more pestiferous consequence to his city than to give young men the liberty of introducing any change in their habits, gestures, dances, songs, and exercises, from one form to another. Montaigne, Essays, I, XLIII

The data of statistics and observation warrant establishing a close correlation between the vocation to bachelorhood and residence in the hameaux; and the historical approach enables one to see the restructuring of the system of matrimonial exchanges on the basis of the opposition between the bourg and the hameaux as a manifestation of the overall transformation of this society. However, it still remains to be established whether there is an aspect of this opposition that is more closely correlated with the vocation to bachelorhood; through what mediations the fact of residing in the bourg or the hameaux and the economic, social and psychological characteristics that are bound up with each of them can act upon the mechanism of matrimonial exchanges; how it is that the influence of residence does not affect men and women in the same way; and whether there are significant differences between the people of the hameaux who marry and those who are condemned to celibacy - in short, whether the fact of being born in bourg or hameau is a 'necessitating condition* or a 'permissive condition' of bachelorhood. Whereas in the old society marriage was mainly the business of the family, the search for a partner is now, as we know, left to the initiative

82

Bachelorhood and the Feasant Condition

of the individual. What needs to be better understood is why the peasant of the hameaux is intrinsically disadvantaged in this competition; a n d more precisely why he proves to be so ill-adapted, so disconcerted, in the institutionalized occasions for encounters between the sexes. Given the sharp separation between masculine society and feminine society, given the disappearance of intermediaries and the loosening of traditional social bonds, the balls that take place periodically in the bourg or in the neighbouring villages have become the only socially approved opportunity for meetings between the sexes. As such, they provide a privileged opportunity to observe the root of the tensions and conflicts. The Christmas ball takes place in the back room of a cafe. In the middle of the brightly lit dance-floor, a dozen couples are dancing in very relaxed fashion to the latest tunes. They are mainly 'students' (bus estudians) - pupils at the high schools and colleges of the neighbouring towns, mostly originating from the bourg. There are also a few conscripts, very sure of themselves, and some young townsmen, employed as factory-workers or clerks; two or three of them wear jeans, black leather jackets, and Tyrolean hats. Among the girls dancing, there are several from the remotest hameaux, elegantly and even fashionably dressed and coiffured; and some others, born in Lesquire, who work in Pau as seamstresses, maids or shop assistants. Everything about their appearance is urban. Some other young women, and even some girls as young as 12, dance among themselves, while young boys chase and jostle one other among the dancing couples. Standing at the edge of the dancing area, forming a dark mass, a group of older men look on in silence. As if drawn in by the temptation to join the dance, they move forward, narrowing the space left for the dancers. There they all are, all the bachelors. Married men of their age do not go to balls any more - except once a year for the major village festival, the agricultural fair. On that day, everyone is 'on the promenade' and almost everyone dances, even the 'old-timers'. But still the bachelors do not dance. On those evenings, they are less conspicuous: the whole village is out there, both men and women, the men to chat with friends and the women or to spy and gossip and speculate endlessly on possible marriages. But at dance-nights like this at Christmas or New Year, these bachelors have nothing to do. People come here to dance; these men will not be dancing, and they know it. These are evenings for 'the young people', in other words those who are not married. They are too old for such occasions, but they are and know they are 'unmarriageable'. From time to time, as if to hide their embarrassment, they lark about a little. A new dance is struck up, a 'march'. A girl goes over to the bachelors'

The peasant and his body

83

corner and tries to lead one of them onto the dance floor. He first declines, embarrassed but delighted. Then he goes once round the floor, deliberately exaggerating his clumsiness and heavy-footedness, rather as the old-timers do when they dance at the fair, and looks back, laughing, at his mates. When the dance is over, he goes and sits down. He will not dance again, That', someone tells me, 'is An.'s son [the name of a big landowner]. The girl who invited him to dance is a neighbour. She offered him a dance to cheer him up.' Everything returns to normal. The bachelors will remain there, until midnight, hardly speaking, in the light and noise of the ball, gazing at the girls beyond their reach. Then they will withdraw to the bar room and drink, sitting face to face. They will sing old Beam songs at the top of their voices, lingering on dissonant chords until their breath fails, while in the dance room behind them the orchestra plays twists and cha-chas. And as the night draws to an end they will slowly depart, in twos and threes, for their distant farms. In the front bar, three bachelors are seated at a table, drinking and chatting. 'So you're not dancing?' 'No, we're past it.. .' My companion, a villager, says quietly to me: 'What a joke! They've never danced.' Another says: 'I'm waiting till midnight. I had a look in there, there are only youngsters. That's not for me. Those girls are young enough to be my daughters . . . I'm going off to eat something; I'll be back later. Anyway, dancing isn't for a man of my age. If there was a nice waltz, I might dance, but they don't play any. And young people don't how to waltz.' 'So you think there might be some older girls later?' 'We'll see. And why aren't you dancing? I promise you, if I had a wife, I'd dance.' The villager: 'Yeah, and if they danced, they'd have wives. No way out of it.' Another: 'You shouldn't worry about us, you know, we're not unhappy.' At the end of the ball, two bachelors are slowly leaving. A car starts up; they stop in their tracks. 'You see, they look at the car the way they were looking at the girls. Anyway, they are in no hurry to get home, you can be sure of that... They'll hang around like that as long as they can.' So this small country ball is the scene of a real clash of civilizations. Through it, the whole urban world, with its cultural models, its music, its dances, its techniques for the use of the body, bursts into peasant life. The traditional patterns of festive behaviour have been lost or have given way to urban patterns. Here, as in other realms, the initiative lies with the people of the hourg. The dances of the old days, which bore the stamp of peasant culture in their names (la crabe, lou branlou, lou mounchicou, etc.), in their rhythms, their music and the words that accompanied them, have been ousted by dances imported from the town. Now, it is clear that the techniques of the body

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constitute systems, bound up with a whole cultural context. This is not the place to analyse the motor habits characteristic of the Beam peasant, the habitus that betrays the paysands, the lumbering peasant. Spontaneous observation perfectly grasps the hexis that serves as a foundation for stereotypes. 'Peasants in the old days', said an old villager, 'always walked with their legs bowed, as if they had crooked knees, with their arms bent' (P. L.-M.). To explain this attitude, he evoked the posture of a man wielding a scythe. The critical observation of the urbanites, always quick to spot the habitus as a synthetic unity, stresses the slowness and heaviness of the gait: perceived by the man of the bourg, the man from the brane ('uplands') is one who, even when he treads the tarmac of the carrere (the main street), always walks on uneven, difficult, muddy ground; the one who seems to drag heavy clogs or clumsy boots even when he is wearing his Sunday shoes; the man who always advances with big, slow strides, as when he walks, with the goad on his shoulder, turning back from time to time to call the oxen who follow him. No doubt, this is not a real anthropological description;1 but, on the one hand, the townsman's spontaneous ethnography grasps the techniques of the body as one element in a system and implicitly postulates the existence of a correlation at the level of meaning, between the heaviness of the gait, the poor cut of the clothes and the clumsiness of the expression; and on the other hand, it suggests that it is no doubt at the level of rhythms that one would find the unifying principle (confusedly grasped by intuition) of the system of corporeal attitudes characteristic of the peasant. For anyone who recalls Mauss's anecdote about the misadventures of a British regiment that was given a French band to march to, it is clear that the truly empaysanit ('empeasanted') peasant is not in his element at the ball.2 For, just as the dances of the old days were bound up with the whole peasant civilization,3 so too modern dances are linked to 1

Cf. J.-L. Pelosse, 'Contribution a l'etude des usages traditionnels', Revue Internationale d'Ethnopsychologie Normale et Pathologique (Editions Internationales, Tangiers), 1, no. 2. 2 M. Mauss, Sociology and Psychology (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 99-100. ' Sport provides another opportunity to confirm these analyses. The rugby team rugby being an 'urban* sport - is made up almost entirely of 'urbanites' from the bourg. Here too, as at the ball, the 'students* and carrerens are prepared by their whole cultural upbringing to take their place in a game which demands agility, invention, elegance, as much as strength. Having watched games from their earliest years, they have a 'feeP for the game even before they play it. The games that used to be played on feast days (hu die de Nouste-Dame, 15 August, the feast of the village patron saint) - lous sauts (jumping), lous jete-barres (throwing the bar), running, skittles - demanded mainly athletic qualities and gave the peasants an opportunity to show their strength.

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urban civilization. By demanding the adoption of new uses of the body, they demand a veritable change in 'nature', since bodily habitus is what is experienced as most 'natural', that upon which conscious action has no grip. Consider dances like the Charleston or the cha-cha, in which the two partners face each other and hop in staccato halfsteps, without ever embracing;4 could anything be more alien to the peasant? What would he do with his broad hands, which he is accustomed to hold wide apart? Moreover, as simple observation and interviews confirm, the peasant is loath to adopt the rhythms of modern dances. 'Ba. danced a few paso-dobles and javas; he used to get well ahead of the band. He couldn't handle any two-step, threestep or four-step tunes. You lunged in and you marched, you trod on people's feet or worse, but what mattered was the speed. He was soon reduced to the rank of spectator. He never concealed his annoyance at not being able to dance properly' (P. C). Sixty-six per cent of the unmarried men cannot dance (as against 20 per cent of the married men); a third of them nonetheless go to the ball. Moreover, one's 'demeanour'5 is immediately perceived by others, and especially by women, as a symbol of economic and social standing. Bodily hexis is above all a social signurn.6 This is perhaps particularly true for the peasant. What is called the 'peasant look' is no doubt the irreducible residue that those most open to the modern world, those most dynamic and innovative in their occupational activity, are unable to shake off.7 Now, in the relations between the sexes, the whole bodily hexis is the primary object of perception, both in itself and as a social signum. 4

Curt Sachs contrasts 'feminized* societies, where people tend to dance 'on the spot', shaking, with societies with descent through the male, where pleasure is taken in moving about (Sachs, World History of the Dance (London: Allen & Unwin), quoted by Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, pp. 115-16). One might risk the hypothesis that the reluctance to dance of many young male peasants is due to a resistance to this kind of 'feminization' of a deep-rooted image of the self and the body. 5 tenue: 'bearing', behaviour, manners, and often also 'dress' [trans.]. * That is why, rather than sketch a methodical analysis of bodily techniques, it seemed preferable to relate the image that the 'urbanite' forms of it, an image that the peasant tends, willingly or not, to internalize. A whole category of bachelors corresponds to this description. 'Ba. is an intelligent, good-looking young man; he has modernized his farm, which has fine lands. But he has never been able to dance properly (cf. text quoted above). He always stands watching the others, as he did a few evenings ago, until two in the morning. He is a typical example of a young man who has never had opportunities to approach young women. Nothing about his intelligence, his situation or his looks should have prevented him from finding a wife' (P. C). 'Co. danced acceptably, but simply because of his class he could never aspire to invite anyone other than "peasant girls"' (P. C ) . (See also the text quoted on p. 87, the case of P.)

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

If he is in any way clumsy, ill-shaven, ill-attired, the peasant is immediately perceived as the hucou (the tawny owl), unsociable and churlish, 'sombre (escu)> clumsy (desestruc)y grumpy (arrebouhiec)^ sometimes gross (a cops grousse), graceless with women (chic amistous ap las hennes)' (P. L.-M.). It is said of him, n'ey pas de here, literally 'he is not at the fair' (to go to the fair, one put on one's smartest clothes), he is not presentable. Thus the young women, who are more open to urban ideals, and rendered particularly attentive and sensitive by all their cultural training to gestures and attitudes, clothing and a person's whole demeanour [tenue], readier to deduce deep personality from external appearance, judge the men according to alien criteria. Judged by this standard, the men are worthless. Placed in such a situation, the peasant is led to internalize the image that others form of him, even when it is a simple stereotype. He comes to perceive his body as a body marked by a social stamp, as an empaysanit, 'em-peasanted' body, bearing the trace of the attitudes and activities associated with peasant life. So he is embarrassed by his body, and in his body. Because he grasps his body as a peasant's body, he has an unhappy consciousness of his body. Because he grasps his body as 'em-peasanted', he has a consciousness of being an 'empeasanted' peasant. It is no exaggeration to assert that it is for him a moment of exceptional awareness of the peasant condition. This unhappy consciousness of his body, which leads him (in contrast to the town-dweller) to break solidarity with it, which inclines him to an introverted attitude, the root of shyness and gaucheness, excludes him from the dance, prevents him from having simple, natural attitudes in the presence of the girls. Being embarrassed by his body, he is awkward and clumsy in all the situations that require one to 'come out of oneself or to put one's body on display. To present one's body as a spectacle, as in dancing, presupposes that one consents to externalize oneself and that one has a contented awareness of the image of oneself that one projects to others. Shyness and the fear of ridicule are, by contrast, linked to a fascinated awareness of oneself and one's body, to a consciousness fascinated by its corporality. Thus, the reluctance to dance is only one manifestation of this acute consciousness of the peasant condition which is, as we have seen, also expressed in self-mockery and self-irony - particularly in the comic tales in which the unfortunate hero is always the peasant struggling to come to grips with the urban world. Thus, economic and social condition influences the vocation to marriage mainly through the mediation of the consciousness that men attain of that situation. The peasant who attains self-awareness has

The peasant and his body

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a strong likelihood of seeing himself as a 'peasant' in the pejorative sense of the word. One sees a confirmation of this in the fact that among the bachelors onefindseither the most 'empeasanted' peasants or the most self-aware peasants - those most aware of what remains 'peasant' within them.8 It is to be expected that the encounter with a girl brings the unease to its paroxysm of intensity. First, it is an occasion upon which the peasant experiences, more acutely than ever, the awkwardness of his body. In addition, owing to the separation of the sexes, girls are entirely shrouded in mystery. 'Pi. went on outings organized by the parish priest. Not too often to the beach, on account of the provocative swimsuits. Co-ed outings with girls from the same movement, the JAC.9 These excursions - fairly rare, one or two a year - took place before military service. The girls remained in a closed circle in the course of them. Although there was some shared singing and a few timid games, you had the impression that nothing could happen between participants of different sexes. Camaraderie between boys and girls does not exist in the country. You can be friends with a girl only when you experience friendship and when you know what it means. For the majority of boys, a girl remains a girl, with everything that is mysterious about a girl, with the great difference that there is between the two sexes, and a gulf that is not easily crossed. One of the best ways to come into contact with girls (the only one there is in the countryside) is the ball. After a few timid attempts, which never took him further than the Java, Pi. stopped asking. They fetched him a neighbour's daughter who didn't dare refuse. That was one dance at least. Just one or two dances at each ball, that's to say every fortnight or every month, is little, very little. Certainly too little to be able to go from ball to ball further afield with any chance of success. That's how you end up as one of those who watch the others dancing. You watch them until two in the morning; then you go home, thinking that those who are dancing are having fun; and so the gap widens. If you want to marry, it becomes serious. How are you to get close to a girl you fancy? How do you find an opportunity, especially if you're not the go-getter type? There's only the ball. Outside the ball, there is no salvation .. . How do you keep up a conversation and lead it to an embarrassing subject? It's a hundred times easier in the course of a tango... The lack of relations and contacts with the opposite sex is bound to give a complex to the most audacious young man. 8

Many boys from the bourg are objectively as clumsy as some peasants from the hameauxy but are not conscious of it. 9 Jeunesse Agricole Catholique, 'y° u n g catholic farmers', founded in 1929 |trans.].

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

It's even worse when he has a slightly shy nature. You can overcome shyness when you have everyday contact with women, but if you don't it can get worse. Fear of ridicule, which is a form of pride, can also hold a man back. Shyness, sometimes a bit of false pride, having to come out of your shell, all that creates a gulf between a girl and a decent young man' (P. C). The cultural norms that govern the expression of feelings help to make dialogue difficult. For example, affection between parents and children is expressed much more in attitudes and gestures than in words, i n the old days, when the harvesting was still done with sickles, the harvesters would move forward in a row. My father, who was working beside me, would cut in front of me when he saw I was tired, to give me some relief, without saying anything' (A. B.). Not so long ago, father and son would feel some awkwardness at being in the cafe together, no doubt because it could happen that someone would tell lewd stories or make remarks that would have caused intolerable embarrassment to both of them. The same modesty dominated relations between brothers and sisters. Everything that relates to intimacy, to 'nature', is banned from conversation. While the peasant may enjoy making or hearing the most unrestrained remarks, he is supremely discreet when it comes to his own sexual and especially emotional life. In a general way, feelings are not something it is appropriate to talk about. The verbal awkwardness that compounds physical clumsiness is experienced as embarrassment, both for the young man and for the young woman, especially when the latter has learned the stereotyped language of urban sentimentality from women's magazines and serialized love stories. 'Dancing isn't just a matter of knowing the steps, putting one foot in front of another. And even that isn't so easy for some people. You also need to know how to talk to girls, before you dance and while you're dancing. You've got to be able to talk during the dance about something besides farm work and the weather. And not many men can do that' (R. L.). If women are much quicker than men to adopt urban cultural models regarding both the body and dress, this is for various convergent reasons. First, they are much more strongly motivated than men, because for them the town represents the hope of emancipation. It follows that they present a privileged example of what Mauss called 'prestigious imitation'.10 The attraction and the grip of new products or new techniques in matters of comfort, of the ideals of courtesy or the entertainments offered by the bourg, are to a large extent due to 111

Mauss, Sociology and Psychology, p. 101.

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the fact that they are seen to bear the stamp of urban civilization, identified, rightly or wrongly, with civilization as such. Fashion comes from Paris, from the city; the model is imposed from above. Women strongly aspire to urban life and this aspiration is not unreasonable, since, according to the logic of matrimonial exchanges, they circulate upwards. They look first and foremost to marriage for the fulfilment of their wishes. Placing all their hopes in marriage, they are strongly motivated to adapt by adopting the outward appearances of the women of the bourg. But there is more to it: women are prepared by their whole cultural training to be attentive to the external details of the person and more especially to everything that has to do with 'tenue' in all its senses. They have a statutory- monopoly of the judgement of taste. This attitude is encouraged and favoured by the whole cultural system. It is not uncommon to hear a ten-year-old girl discussing the cut of a skirt or a bodice with her mother or her friends. This type of behaviour is rejected by the boys, because it is discouraged by social sanction. In a society dominated by masculine values, everything, by contrast, helps to favour the rough, coarse, pugnacious attitude. A man who paid too much attention to his dress and appearance would be regarded as 'gentrified' or (which amounts to the same thing) effeminate. It follows that, whereas men, by virtue of the norms that dominate their early upbringing, are struck by a kind of cultural blindness (in the sense in which linguists speak of 'cultural deaf-muteness'11) as regards all aspects of Henue\ from bodily hexis to cosmetics, women are much more inclined to perceive urban models and integrate them into their behaviour, whether it be clothing or techniques of the body.12 The peasant woman speaks the language of urban fashion well because she hears it well, and she hears it well because the 'structure* of her cultural language predisposes her to do so. What peasant men and women perceive, both in the hameau-dweUer and 11 The term is used by E. Pulgram, Introduction to the Spectrograph-}' of Speech (The Hague: Mouton, 1959). See also N. S. Trubetzkoy, Principles of Phonology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 51-5, 62-4. 12 Clothing is an important aspect of overall appearance. It is in this area that one sees most clearly the men's 'cultural blindness' to some aspects of urban civilization. Most of the bachelors wear the suit made by the village tailor. 'Some try out wearing sports outfits. They get it all wrong in combining the colours. It is only when the mother in the family is up-to-date or, better, when his sisters, who are more in tune with fashion, take things in hand, that you see well-dressed peasants' (P. C). In a general way, if a man has sisters, this can only increase his chances of marriage. Through them, he can get to know other girls; he may even learn to dance with them.

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Bachelorhood and the Feasant Condition

the world of the hameau and in other peasants, is thus a function of their respective cultural systems. It follows that whereas the women adopt first the external signs of 'urbanity', the men borrow deeper cultural models, particularly in the technical and economic sphere. And it is easy to understand why this is so. The town is, for the peasant woman, first of all the department store. 'Clothes, too, are worn out of doors, and people of different classes meet and notice each other, so that there is a certain uniformity here also. A common market exists for food and to some extent for clothes.'13 Given the one-sided and superficial character of her perception of the town, it is natural that the young peasant woman associates urban life with a certain type of clothes and hairstyle, clear signs, in her eyes, of freedom - in short, she only sees, as the saying goes, the good side of it; and it is understandable, on the one hand, that the town exerts a real fascination for her and, on the other hand, that she borrows from the townswoman the external signs of her condition, in other words what she knows of her. From time immemorial, the better to prepare them for marriage and also because they were less indispensable to the farm than the boys, a number of families would place their daughters in apprenticeships, as soon as they left school, with a seamstress for example. Since the creation of the cours complementaire,14 they have been more readily persuaded than boys to pursue their studies to the brevet elementaire, which can only increase the attractiveness of the town and widen the gap between the sexes.15 In the town, through women's li M. Halbwachs, The Psychology of Social Class (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 95. 14 Additional years of schooling after primary education [trans.]. 11 Distribution of pupils in the cours complementaire in Lesquire in 1962 by sex and parents' socio-occupational category:

Sodo-occupational category of parents

o

I Male Female Total

9 17 26

2 0 2

5-*

B

o

8

5

a 2

k «£ .2 A 2 c

2 5 7

1 2 3

1 2 3

O

*§ S

S

o

£

4 3 7

2 2 4

21 31 52

The peasant and his body

91

magazines, serials, 'film stories' and songs on the radio,16 girls also borrow models of the relations between the sexes and a type of ideal man who is entirely the opposite of the 'empeasanted' peasant. In this way there is built up a whole system of expectation which the peasant cannot fulfil. We are a long way from the shepherdess in the ballad whose only ambition was to marry 'a good peasant's son':17 the 'gentleman' is back in favour. Owing to the duality of the frames of reference, a consequence of the different rates at which the sexes adopt urban cultural models, women judge their peasant menfolk by criteria that leave them no chance. It is then understandable that a certain number of dynamic farmers will remain unmarried. Thus, of the farms where bachelors are found, 14 per cent - all belonging to relatively well-off peasants - have been modernized. In the new rural elite, among the members of the JAC18 and the CUMA19 in particular, many are unmarried. Even when it helps to confer a certain prestige, modernism in the technical domain does not necessarily favour marriage. 'Young men like La., Pi., Po., perhaps some of the most intelligent and dynamic in this whole area, have to be classified among the "unmarriageable". Yet they dress properly and they go out a lot. They have brought in new methods and new crops. Some have modernized their houses. It's enough to make you think that, in this domain, imbeciles do better than the rest' (P. C). In the old days, a bachelor was never really an adult in the eyes of society, which made a clear distinction between responsibilities left to the young people, that is to say the unmarried, such as for example the preparation of public holiday celebrations, and the responsibilities reserved for adults, such as the town council;20 nowadays, failure to marry is increasingly seen as an Because they spend more time at home than the men, women listen more to the radio. A reference to the song quoted earlier [trans.J: 'Fair shepherdess, will you give me your love? I will be forever true ro you. You qu'aymi mey u bet hilh de paysa . . . (I would rather take a good peasant's son .. .) Why, shepherdess, are you so cruel? Et bous moussu quet tan amourous? (And you, sir, why are you so amorous?) I cannot love all those fair ladies . . . E you moussu qu'em fouti de bous .. . (And I, sir, give not a damn for you)' (collected in Lesquire, 1959) Jeunesse Agricole Catholique, see note 9 above [trans.]. " Cooperative d'Utilisation du Materiel Agricole, see p. 80, note 24, above [trans.]. 20 Marriage marks a break in the course of life. From one day to the next, there are no more dances, no more going out in the evening. Young people of bad reputation have often been seen to suddenly change their behaviour and, as the phrase goes, 'fall

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

inevitability, so that it has ceased to appear as something imputable to individuals, to their faults and shortcomings. 'When they belong to a great family, people find excuses for them - especially when the appeal of a great family is combined with the appeal of a strong personality. People say, "It's a shame, and yet he has a fine property, he's intelligent, and so on." When he has a strong personality, he manages to make his mark anyway, otherwise he is diminished' (A. B.). This will be seen more concretely through the story told by a woman who, as a neighbour, went to help with the pelere, the slaughter and processing of the pig, at the farm of two bachelors aged 40 and 37. 'We said to them: "What a mess we found!" Those birds (aquets piocs)\ Just touching their crockery! Filthy! We didn't know where to look. We threw them out of the house. We said to them, "You should be ashamed! Instead of marrying . . . We shouldn't have to do that... You need wives to do that for you." They hung their heads and crept away. When there is a daune, the women - neighbours or relatives - are there to help. But when there are no wives, the women [who come to help] have to decide everything' (M. P.-B.). The fact that 42 per cent of the farms run by bachelors (of which 38 per cent are classed as poor peasants) are in decline as against only 16 per cent of the farms belonging to married men shows that there is a clear correlation between the state of the farm and bachelorhood; but the decline of the property can be as much the effect as the cause of the absence of marriage. Bachelorhood, experienced as a social diminishment, induces in many cases an attitude of resignation and renunciation, resulting from the lack of a long-term future. Again a testimony confirms this: 'I went to see Mi., in the Houratate neighbourhood. He has a well-kept farmhouse surrounded by pine trees. He lost his father and mother around 1954 and now he's about 50. He lives alone. "I'm ashamed to be seen by you looking like this," he said. He was blowing on a fire he had lit in the courtyard to do his washing. "I'd have liked to invite you in and do you the honours. You have never been. But, you know, it's a real mess inside. When you live alone . . . Girls don't want to come out into the country any more. I've given up hope, you know. I would have liked to have a family. I would have organized things a bit, on this side of the house [the custom is to do something in the house when the eldest son is into line*. 'Ca. hung out at all the dances. He married a girl younger than him who had never gone out. He had three children with her in three years. She never goes out, though she'd love to. He'd never think of taking her to a dance or to the cinema. That's all over. They don't even get dressed up* (P. C ) .

The peasant and his body

93

married]. But now the land is blighted. There won't be anyone else. I can't bring myself to work on it. True, my sister came; she does come from time to time. She's married to a man who works for the railways. She comes with her husband and her little daughter. But she can't stay here"'21 (A. B.). The bachelor's plight is often exacerbated by the pressure of the family, who are desperate at seeing him reduced to this. 'I give them an earful,' said a mother whose two, already elderly, sons were still not married; 'I tell them "You're afraid of women! You spend all your time drinking! What will you do when I'm gone? I can't do it for you!"' (Widow A., aged 84). And another, talking to one of her son's friends, said: 'He needs to be told he has to get a wife, he should have married at the same time as you. Really, it's terrible. We are about as alone as can be' (related by P. C ) . No doubt everyone makes it a matter of pride and honour to disguise the shame of his situation, perhaps drawing on a long tradition of bachelorhood for the resources of resignation he needs to endure an existence that has no present and no future. Yet bachelorhood is the privileged occasion to experience the wretchedness of the peasant condition. If the bachelor expresses his misery by saying that 'the land is blighted', this is because he cannot do otherwise than grasp his condition as determined by a necessity that weighs on the whole of the peasant class. The non-marriage of men is experienced by all of them as the index of the mortal crisis of a society incapable of providing the most innovative and boldest of the eldest sons, the trustees of the heritage, with the possibility of perpetuating their lineage, in short, incapable of safeguarding the foundations of its order, at the same time as making room for innovative adaptation.

21

The judgements of opinion are often severe but they confirm the conclusions of the bachelors themselves. 'They have no taste for work. There are 50 of them like that who haven't married. They are wine-tipplers. If you're looking for men to drink on the carrere ... The land is blighted.'

Conclusion

'Girls don't want to come out into the country any more . . . ' The judgements of spontaneous sociology are always partial and onesided. The constitution of the object of research as such no doubt also presupposes the selection of one aspect. But, because the social fact, whatever it may be, presents itself as an infinite plurality of aspects, because it appears as a web of relationships that have to be untangled one by one, this selection cannot fail to see itself for what it is, to offer itself as provisional and supersede itself through analysis of the other aspects. The primary task of sociology is perhaps to reconstitute the totality from which one can discover the unity of the subjective awareness that the individual has of the social system and of the objective structure of that system. The sociologist endeavours on the one hand to grasp and understand the spontaneous consciousness of the social fact, a consciousness that, by virtue of its essence, does not reflect on itself, and on the other hand to apprehend the fact in its own nature, by means of the privilege provided to him by his situation as an observer renouncing the opportunity to 'act on the social' in order to think it. That being so, he must aim to reconcile the truth of the objective 'given' that his analysis enables him to understand and the subjective certainty of those who live in it. When he describes, for example, the internal contradictions of the system of matrimonial exchanges, even when those contradictions do not present themselves as such to the consciousness of those who are victims of them, he is simply thematizing the lived experience of the

Conclusion

95

men who concretely experience those contradictions in the form of the impossibility of marrying. While he declines to give credit to the consciousness that the subjects have of their situation and to take literally the explanation they give of it, he takes that consciousness sufficiently seriously to try to discover its real foundation, and can only be satisfied when he manages to bring together in the unity of an understanding the truth immediately given to lived consciousness and the truth laboriously acquired through scientific reflection. Sociology would not be worth an hour of effort if its sole aim were to discover the strings that move the actors it observes, if it were to forget that it is dealing with people, even when those very people, like puppets, play a game of which they do not know the rules, in short, if it did not assign itself the task of restoring to those people the meaning of their actions. The informants J.-P. A., 85, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg but spent all his jouth in a hameau; widower; primary education [level of Certificat d'Etudes Primaires: CEP]; interviews alternated between French and Bearnais. P. C , 32, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; educated to level of Brevet Elementaire [elementary certificate]; junior executive; interviews in French. A. B., 60, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; level of Brevetfilementaire;junior executive; interviews in French, breaking occasionally into Bearnais. P. L., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; widower; primary education; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. P. L.-M., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; bachelor; primary education; craftsman; interviews alternated between French and Bearnais. A. A., 81, lives in a hameau; widower; can read and write; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. F. L., 88, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; married; can read and write; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. Mme J. L., 65, born in Lesquire; lives in a hameau; married; can read and write; peasant farmer's wife; interviews in Bearnais. R. L., 35, born in Lesquire; lives in the bourg; married; can read and write; shopkeeper; interviews in French. Mme A, 84, born in Lesquire; lives in the hameau; widow; can read and write; worked as peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais.

96

nacneiowooa ana we reasani ^onanton

B. P., 45, born in a neighbouring village; lives in the hameau; married; primary education; peasant farmer; interviews in Bearnais. L. C , 42, born in a neighbouring village; lives in the bourg; married; primary education; shopkeeper; interviews in French. Similar information regarding the bachelors is also to be found in the transcripts of their interviews. The testimonies given in the local language are transcribed in the spelling conventionally used in Bearnais literature.

Appendix I Bibliographical notes

The Pyrenean provinces - Bigorre, Lavedan, Beam and the Basque country - preserved an original customary law the rules of which could only be maintained in manifest contradiction of the principles and legislation of the Civil Code. This fact has not failed to attract the attention of historians and legal scholars. The law of Beam', writes Pierre Luc, 'appears to be essentially a customary law and shows very little influence of Roman law. As such it offers us an extremely interesting model. Such things, for example, as the swearing of oaths of innocence with oath-helpers, the designating of hostages to guarantee contracts, mort-gagey and the possibility of acquitting monetary obligations in kind were still currently practised there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while in certain other regions they had fallen into disuse more than two centuries earlier' [12, pp. 3-4]. Beam has interested jurists and historians because, in contrast to what happened in most provinces of southern France, local customs long resisted contact with Roman law. For a long time, legal and historical studies were exclusively based on collections of customary laws, in other words, on the Fors de Beam. Thus, as early as the eighteenth century, some local jurists, De Maria [1 and 2], Labourt [3] and Mourot [4 and 5], wrote commentaries on the Fors de Beam, particularly on the subject of the dowry Bibliographical notes compiled in collaboration with Marie-Claire Bourdieu. Numbers in brackets refer to items on the bibliographical list that follows on p. 105.

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

[dot] and on the customs of succession. Unfortunately, there is only one rather mediocre edition of the Fors [6], which brings together often very corrupted readings dating from various periods and therefore needs a great deal of critical editing (as was already observed by Roge [7 and 8]) before it can serve as the basis for an analysis. Since such an edition does not yet exist, modern scholars have concentrated on the reformed For of 1551, on the wide variety of legal treatises available since the sixteenth century and, above all, on the commentaries on these texts by the legal scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though two of these modern studies, Laborde's work on the dowry in Beam [9] and Dupont's book on the practices of succession in Beam [10], are based on the reformed For and on the jurisprudence of the last two centuries of the monarchy, they are extremely valuable. The voluminous thesis of Fougeres [11] merely repeats, at least for Beam, what had already been said in earlier works. The historians of law have come to the conclusion that compilations of customary law should be used with caution, since they present a relatively theoretical law containing obsolete rules while neglecting provisions that are still observed. They have found that notarized documents are one source that can furnish information on actual practices. The model for this type of research is the work of Pierre Luc [12]. On the basis of notarial registers, this author first studied the living conditions of the rural population and the system of land ownership, the structure of the Beam family and the rules under which its patrimony was preserved and passed on to the next generation. In the second part, he examines the technical and legal procedures involved in working the land in the framework of the family and of the community, as well as a number of problems concerning the rural economy, such as credit and practices of exchange. Comparison between the information that can be gathered from ethnographic inquiry about the Beam society of the past and the data that historians and legal scholars have derived from the documents (customary law and notarial registers) can serve as a basis for a methodological reflection on the relationship between ethnology and history, and more precisely the history of law. The mountains of Beam and Bigorre are also where Frederic Le Play, the most famous critic of the Code Napoleon, situated the famille souche, the 'stem' family, which he considered the ideal family organization, especially by contrast with the 'unstable' family resulting from application of the Civil Code [13]. Having defined three types of families, namely, the patriarchal family, the 'unstable' family - which is characteristic of modern society - and the 'stem' family,

Bibliographical notes

99

Le Play proceeds to describe the latter (pp. 29ff) and enumerates the advantages each of its members derives from it: 'On the eldest, who carries a heavy burden of obligations, it (this system of inheritance) confers the respect attached to the ancestral home or workshop; to those members who marry outside the family, it gives the support of the "stem" house along with the satisfactions of independence; to those who prefer to remain in the paternal home it gives the tranquillity of bachelorhood as well as the joys of the family; and to all it affords the happiness of reliving in their paternal home the joys of early childhood, even in advanced old age' (pp. 36-7). 'By instituting one heir in every generation, the landowning stem family does not sacrifice the interests of the younger children to those of the eldest. On the contrary, it obliges the latter to renounce the net profit of his work throughout his life, first in favour of his siblings, then in favour of his children. The family can only obtain this material sacrifice by granting him a compensation of a moral order, namely the respect attached to the possession of the ancestral home' (p. 114). The second part of Le Play's book is a monograph on the Melouga family, an example of the stem family of the Lavedan in 1856. An epilogue by E. Cheysson describes the end of that family under the impact of the law and the new mores: 'Until very recently, the Melouga family had continued to exist; it was like a living remnant of a once powerful and fruitful social organization. But it, too, finally succumbed to the influence of the law and of the new mores that had spared it owing to an exceptional combination of favourable circumstances. The Code is doing its work; the levelling process continues; the stem family is dying; the stem family is dead' (p. 298). The claims of the theoreticians of the Le Play school are not borne out by the data of ethnographical studies. They are also contradicted by the work of Saint-Macary [14] who, on the basis of the notarized documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showed the persistence of inheritance and marriage patterns that do not conform to the Civil Code. The various authors offer very varied explanations for the permanence of the family institution and the inheritance customs that are bound up with it. For J. Bonnecaze, for example, 'the maintenance of the organic conception of the family by the rural populations of Beam has no other source than the Bearnais soul itself, of which it is the reflection' [15]. This 'soul' is characterized by a profound mysticism expressed in the cult of the house and the spirit of sacrifice to the values of the group, allied to a very realistic conception of the economic and social factors attached to the organization of the stem family.

100

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

Others have explained the persistence of ways of life and customs in terms of geographical and historical factors. Beam was the only feudal state to break free completely from the authority of the king of France, and the viscount of Beam the only feudal lord who fully asserted his rights. This explains why, of all the old provinces, Beam was the one that remained longest on the margins of the kingdom of France. Its spirit of independence and its refusal to merge its identity were kept up until the Revolution. A century after its attachment to France, the Intendants who sought to impose the laws and ways of the centralizing monarchy still encountered mistrust and hostility from the bodies representing the Bearnais community - the Parlement of Pau and the fitats de Beam. The longevity of this national resistance implied strong internal cohesion; and, indeed, the two groups which formed the Beam population, the shepherds of the mountain valleys and the peasants of the foothills, had social organizations which, though distinct, were both characterized by a high degree of integration. So there is every reason to think the explanation for the permanence of profoundly original cultural models should be sought in an original history. But the history of Beam has never been studied from that point of view. It therefore seemed necessary to seek the elements of such a study in already published works, even if the gaps in the documentation make it impossible to present a real synthesis. As regards the Middle Ages, the authors have mainly been interested in the rural life and social organization of the Pyrenean populations. Copious documentation will be found in the first part of the works of Theodore Lefebvre [17] and Henry Cavailles [18], as well as good bibliographies. The rural history of the populations of the foothills is much less well known. However, Pierre Luc's work, already cited [12], presents a detailed picture of rural life, farming techniques and the condition of the rural populations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although this study would have gained from being placed in a historical context and making use of the comparative method. While the remarkable stability of Beam rural society appears to be linked to the inheritance and matrimonial customs, the permanence of these customs themselves cannot be explained without a study of seigniory and the community of the bests (lou besiat or besiau). If, as March Bloch thought, 'these two kinds of bonds are not antinomic, but, on the contrary, reinforce each other', then a study of the rural seignory, characterized by its modest dimensions and a simplified organization (the interlocking of feudal rights seems to have been less intense than elsewhere), might supply

Bibliographical notes

101

one of the reasons for the internal cohesion of the small peasant communities. Although it is mainly devoted to political and institutional history, P. Tucoo-Chalaa's work [19] makes an important contribution to the history of Beam society of that time and more especially to the history of the rural classes that is part of the general history of the viscounty. Without claiming to offer an exhaustive study of the rural seigniory, Tucoo-Chalaa emphasizes its originality: he shows that the opposition in lifestyles and interests between the mountain populations and the lowland peasants dominates the whole rural history of Beam and explains many facets of the evolution of Beam society up to the French Revolution. The need to protect the landholding against fragmentation is certainly due to a large extent to the fact that the mountain populations placed severe restrictions for the lowland peasants on all the uncultivated land which could have allowed an extension of the patrimony through clearance. Some aspects of the history of the rural classes are covered in the works of J.-B. Laborde [20 and 21], the author of a history of Beam which is well documented and enriched with the findings of personal research [16]. In the Middles Ages, the peasantry of the foothills still included a significant proportion of serfs, as shown by the works of Paul Raymond [22 and 23]. They were freed only within the framework of the movement of the bastides, which developed relatively late, in the early fourteenth century. The history of the institutions of the Middle Ages provides valuable insights into the birth of the Beam nation. It enables one to follow, through the extension of the fors and privileges and through the progress of communal freedoms, the formation of this little independent state, with a remarkable system of legislation which gave the Bearnais the opportunity of playing a significant role in public affairs. Institutions like the £tats de Beam, or, at the level of the community, the assemblies oibesis and their jurats [municipal magistrates], appear as a force for integration of the society, if only through their role in maintaining the Bearnais language and the local customs, and as the expression of a strongly integrated society. The basic data on the history of the institutions are brought together by P. Tucoo-Chalaa in chapter 13 of Histoire des institutions au Moyen Agey entitled 'Les institutions de la vicomte de Beam (Xe-XVe siecles)' [25]. The work by Leon Cadier [26], though older and contested on some points by Tucoo-Chalaa, nonetheless remains the essential reference for the whole period of the establishment of the institutions, bringing to light the dual origin, feudal and 'democratic', of the Etats. Although they stemmed from the old feudal court, which was itself

102

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

a particularly strong and influential institution owing to the independence of the vassal nobles from the suzerain, the long process of transformation of this court into a representative assembly of the three orders of the Province can only be understood by reference to the development of municipal and bourgeois liberties; but these had no doubt found a favourable soil in the spirit of independence that was alive in the communities by virtue of the various privileges and liberties with which the viscounts of Beam had endowed them as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the vitality of the old feudal institutions, the liberalism of the suzerain and the extent of the rights and freedoms acquired by the communities and towns all contributed to the establishment of this liberal institution, which, from the end of the Middle Ages, gave an equal place to nobles and commoners, which was to play such an important role in the government and administration of the country, and which was to exert such a great influence over legislation and be the backbone of resistance to assimilation into the kingdom of France. 'Few provinces of Old France', Cadier concludes, 'had such liberal institutions as the small independent state of Beam.' There is no overall study of the evolution of Bearnais rural society and economy in the last centuries of the ancien regime and during the Revolution. The most recent and most synthetic works on this period are those of Maurice Bordes [27, 28 and 29]. It seems that it was in this period that the stability of Bearnais society was most clearly manifested. Whereas in other regions the rural economy and society were shaken by the beginnings of the agricultural revolution, in Beam the technical and economic transformations seem to have helped to strengthen the internal cohesion of the society and consolidate its economic bases. The factor that dominates the rural history of eighteenth-century France is demographic expansion. After long centuries of demographic stability (it had not suffered the haemorrhage of population resulting from the Hundred Years' War), Beam too saw its population increase in the second half of the century, although, to judge from the figures cited by J.-B. La fond, to a lesser extent than other regions [31]. The question is whether this increase was great enough to lead to the creation of a class of labourers, as in other provinces. Everything suggests that was not the case, since we know that it resulted in a wave of emigration abroad, especially to Spain, and since it seems that this society, given its structure, could integrate this slight increase. Even wrhen the land could not feed the whole family, those offspring who were to earn their living as employees retained close links with the family estate. Thus the younger sons who formed the

Bibliographical notes

103

underclass of domestic servants and labourers remained attached to the traditional social organization. The slow growth of the population also helps to explain the weak development of the towns, and consequently of industry and commerce, as shown by Abbe Roubaud in his review of the Beam economy in 1774 [32]. Because it always remained small in number, the bourgeois class never took possession of a large proportion of the peasants* landholdings, all the more so because, after having long invested their incomes in livestock, they mainly aimed to acquire the aristocratic lands, for reasons of prestige. This explains why the various forms of indirect land ownership, in particular tenant farming, never took a strong hold. The peasant, the master of his own domain, was able to enclose it relatively early, because of the structure of land ownership. 'In Beam . .. each community, or almost, possessed, next to its "plain" of entirely arable land, its "slopes" covered with fern, gorse and grasses, where every year the peasants would come and clear the space for several fields, which would soon disappear again' [33]. These heaths constitute great natural grazing areas which made it possible to suppress the common pastures and therefore fallow land on the ploughed areas. Moreover, inheritance and matrimonial custom had preserved the landholding against the fragmentation which elsewhere held back the movement towards enclosure [30]. A comparison of the reviews of the Bearnais economy drawn up by Intendant Lebret in 1703 [34] and Prefect Serviez [35] at the end of the century shows the scale of the transformation of techniques and crops resulting from this movement. At the same time, there were endeavours to clear uncultivated land, favoured by the Edicts of Clos and sometimes even common lands. These attempts were encouraged by the Intendants and the local authorities (especially d'fetigny). Marc Bloch has shown how egoistically the Beam lords fought against the collective rights; but no study tells us what the attitude of the communities was [36 and 37]. The suppression of fallows, the introduction of fodder plants and especially maize, mentioned by L. Godefroy, contributed to a considerable improvement in living standards, which was assisted by the relatively low population growth [17]. And so it is understandable that in 1787 Arthur Young was able to find in Beam the spectacle of a prosperity found nowhere else in the realm of France: 'Take the road to Moneng [Monein, ten kilometres from Lesquire] and come presently to a scene which was so new to me in France that I could hardly believe my own eyes. A succession of many well-built, tight, and comfortable farming cottages, built of stone and covered with tiles; each having its little garden, enclosed by clipped thorn hedges, with plenty of peach and other fruit trees, some fine

104

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

oaks scattered in the hedges, and young trees nursed up with so much care that nothing but the fostering attention of the owner could effect anything like it. To every house belongs a farm, perfectly well enclosed, with grass borders mown and neatly kept around the cornfields, with gates to pass from one enclosure to another. The men are all dressed with red caps, like the highlanders of Scotland. There are some parts of England (where small yeomen still remain) that resemble this country of Beam; but we have very little that is equal to what I have seen in this ride of 12 miles from Pau to Moneng. It is all in the hands of little proprietors, without the farms being so small as to occasion a vicious and miserable population. An air of neatness, warmth, and comfort breathes over the whole. It is visible in their new-built houses and stables, in their little gardens, in their hedges, in the courts before their doors, even in the coops for their poultry and the sties for their hogs. A peasant does not think of rendering his pig comfortable if his own happiness hangs by the thread of a nine years* lease. We are now in Beam, within a few miles of the cradle of Henry IV. Do they inherit these blessings from that good prince? The benign genius of that good monarch seems to reign still over the country; each peasant has the fowl in the pot.. .' [38, pp. 375-6]. Thus, improved living conditions seem to have reinforced the economic bases of peasant society and helped to maintain a class of smallholders in which no doubt a hierarchy is found, but certainly not the sharp oppositions that are observed in other regions. If Beam society has retained its distinctiveness, this is perhaps because it has remained outside the great modern economic movements, resulting from the development of towns, and more generally because of its marginal situation. But above all this society has always manifested an acute awareness of its values and a strong determination to defend the foundations of its economic and social order. There are indeed few societies in which this determination has been expressed in such a conscious and also institutionalized way. The commune was a besiau, in other words 'a set of neighbours who possessed the right of neighbourhood'. Each best had the right to graze his livestock, cut wood, gather acorns, fern and undergrowth from the common lands. He had the privilege of taking part in the assemblies of the community and was alone eligible for the positions of responsibility. The right of neighbourhood, a personal right in towns, was in the countryside a real right attached to possession through inheritance of a house and with it an estate; the community, concerned to maintain a constant number of besis and properties, very strictly regulated accession to the title of besi. The right of neighbourhood could be acquired by the newcomer (the poublan) only with the consent of the

Bibliographical notes

105

community assembly, after swearing an oath and paying a sum of money [39 and 31]. These assemblies no doubt reflected the social hierarchy: the jurats, who generally belonged to the peasant 'great families', had duties and responsibilities proportionate to their rights and to the consideration that the collectivity granted them. These were so many signs of a considerable social integration. It is understandable that a society so strongly organized to defend its own foundations should have been able to conserve its heritage of customary rules virtually intact through the upheavals introduced by the Revolution and the Civil Code [14].

Thematic bibliography Works devoted to Beam custom 1 De Maria, 'Memoires sur les dots de Beam', with appendix: 'Memoires sur les coutumes et observances non ecrites de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 2 De Maria, 'Memoires et ficlaircissements sur le for et coutume de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 3 Labourt, 'Les Fors et coutumes de Beam', MS, Pau municipal library. 4 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des dots suivant les principes du droit romain, confere avec les coutumes de Beam, de Navarre, de Soule et la jurisprudence du Parlement (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below], p. 15). 5 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des biens paraphernaux, des augments et des institutions contractuelles avec celui de Vavitinage (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below]). 6 A. Mazure and J. Hatoulet, Fors de Beam, legislation inedite du Xle au Xllle siecley with facing translation, notes and introduction (Pau: Vignancour; Paris: Bellin-Mandar, Joubert, n.d. [1841-3]). 7 P. Roge, Les Anciens Fors de Beam (Toulouse and Paris, 1908). 8 J. Brissaud and P. Roge, 'Textes additionnels aux Anciens Fors de Beam\ Toulouse, 1905 (Bulletin de VUniversite de Toulouse, memoires originaux des facultes de droit et des lettres, serie B, no. III). 9 L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam (Bordeaux, 1909). 10 G. Dupont, 'Du regime successoral dans les coutumes du Beam', thesis, Paris, 1914. 11 A. Fougeres, 'Les Droits de famille et les successions au Pays basque et en Beam, d'apres les anciens textes\ thesis, Paris, 1938. 12 P. Luc, 'Vie rurale et pratique juridique en Beam aux XlVe et XVe siecles\ thesis, Toulouse, 1943.

106

Bachelorhood and the Feasant Condition

13 F. Le Play, L'Organisation de la famille selon le vrai modele signale par I'histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps, with an epilogue and three appendices by E. Cheysson, F. Le Play and C. Jannet, 3rd edn, augmented by new documents by Ad. Focillon, A. Le Play and Delaire (Paris, 1884). 14 J. Saint-Macary, *Les regimes matrimoniaux en Beam avant et apres le Code civiP, thesis, Bordeaux, 1942; 'La desertion de la terre en Beam et dans le Pays basque', thesis, Bordeaux, 1942. 15 J. Bonnecaze, La Philosophic du Code Napoleon applique au droit de la famille. Ses destinies dans le droit civil contemporain, 2nd edn (Paris, 1928).

Studies in the history of Beam and the Pyrenees region

16 J.-B. Laborde, Precis d'histoire du Beam (Pau, 1941). 17 T. Lefebvre, Les Modes de vie dans les Pyrenees atlantiques orientates (Paris: A. Colin, 1933). 18 H. Cavailles, La Vie pastorale et agricole dans les Pyrenees des Gaves, de I'Adour et des Nesles (Paris: A. Colin, 1931). 19 P. Tucoo-Chalaa, Gaston Febus et la vicomte de Beam (1343-1391) (Bordeaux: Biere Imprimeur, 1960). 20 J.-B. Laborde and P. Lorber, 'Affranchissement des besiaux, fondation des bastides en Beam aux XDIe, XJVe siecles', Revue d'Histoire et d'Archeologie du Beam et du Pays Basque, 1927. 21 J.-B. Laborde, 'La fondation de la bastide de Bruges en Beam', Revue d'Histoire et d'Archeologie du Beam et du Pays Basque (1923-4), and offprint, Pau, 1924. 22 P. Raymond, 'Enquete sur les serfs en Beam sous Gaston Phebus', Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pauy 2nd series, 7 (1877-8), and offprints, Pau, 1878. 23 P. Raymond, 'Le Beam sous Gaston Phebus, denombrement des maisons de la vicomte de Beam', extract from vol. 6 of the summary inventory of the Archives des Basses-Pyrenees, Pau, 1873. 24 H. Fay, Histoire de la lepre en France, vol. 1: Lepreux et cagots du Sud-Ouest (Paris, 1909). 25 P. Tucoo-Chalaa, 'Les institutions de la vicomte de Beam (Xe-XVe siecles)', in F. Lot and R. Fawtier (eds), Histoire des institutions au Moyen Age, vol. 1: Les Institutions seigneuriales, ch. 13 (Paris: PUF, 1957). 26 L. Cadier, Les Etats de Beam depuis leur origine jusqu'au commencement du XlVe siecle (Paris: Cadier, 1888). 27 M. Bordes, Contribution a I'etude de Venseignement et de la vie intellectuelle dans les pays de Vintendance d'Auch au XVIIIe siecle (Auch: Cochevaux, 1958). 28 M. Bordes, D'£tigny et I3Administration de Vintendance d'Auch (17511767) (Auch: Cochevaux, 1957). 29 M. Bordes, 'Recueil de lettres de l'intendant d'£tigny', thesis, Paris, 1956.

Bibliographical notes

107

30 H. J. Habakkuk, 'Family structure and economic change in nineteenth century Europe', Journal of Economic History, 15 (1955) (includes an extensive bibliography). 31 J.-B. Lafond, 'Essai sur le Beam pendant Padministration de d'£tigny\ Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 37 (1909), pp. 1-263. 32 Abbe Roubaud, ^'Agriculture, le commerce et l'industrie en Beam en 1774' (repr. from Journal de ('Agriculture, du Commerce, des Arts et des Finances), Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 39(1911), pp. 207-26. 33 M. Bloch, Les Caracteres originaux de Vhistoire rurale francaise, 2nd sdn (2 vols, Paris: A. Colin, 1955). 34 M. Bloch, 'Memoire publie par Soulice', Bulletin des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Pau, 33 (1905), pp. 55-150. 35 Serviez, Statistiques du departement des Basses-Pyrenees (Paris, an X ;i801-2)). 36 H. Durand, Histoire des biens communaux en Beam et dans le Pays basque (Pau, 1909). 37 De Boilisle, Correspondance des controleurs generaux desfinancesavec } es intendants des provinces (3 vols, Paris, n.d.). 38 A. Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788 and 1789: undertaken "nore particularly with a view ofascertaining the cultivation, wealth, resources md national prosperity of the kingdom of France (London, 1792). 39 J. Tucat, Espoey, village bearnais, sa vie passee et presente (Pau, 1947).

Appendix II Changes in population, 1836-1954

Between 1836 and 1954, the population fell by a half. The rural exodus is directly linked to the crisis of agriculture, with a 16 per cent decline in the total population between 1881 and 1891. It is known that between 1884 and 1893 there was a series of bad years for farming: 'They sowed wheat and didn't even recover the seed corn. There was frost, rain, no fertiliser, poor tools, only the scratchplough (aret). Many farmers had to borrow money. They were at the mercy of the money-lenders, "the eaters of the poor" {lous minjurs de praubes), who forced a good number of them to sell up. Bo. had loaned 500 francs. He fell out with his debtor. He sent a summons to pay. Then he had the property seized. The daune already owed 1,800 francs to another lender. In short, Bo. wasn't even paid. In 1892, a very bad year, La. (a big landowner in the bourg) hired some labourers without feeding them - the men at 1 franc a day, the women at 12 sous [60c]. They had to form a chain to bring up the earth from the vineyards in small baskets. The men filled the baskets and the women passed them from hand to hand. He had 30 labourers. He didn't hire any more. There were too many people' (J.-P. A.). Between 1891 and 1896, the decline slowed very considerably (1.7 per cent). The year 1893 was another very bad one. For years afterwards there was talk of 'the drought (sequere) of '93'). 'The years 1894 and 1895 were very good, the wheat was plentiful, with the coming of the fertilisers. It had rained on 1st May. There was no more rain before the maize harvest. It was a very good maize crop.'

Changes in population, 1836-1954

Year

Bourg

Hameaux

B/H as %

Total

1836 1866 1881 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1921 1931 1936 1946 1954

499

2,330

21

471 407 374 322 328 293 259 262 258 303 258

1,997 1,666 1,665 1,056 1,624 1,601 1,408 1,371 1,363 1,277 1,093

24 24 23 19 20 18 18 19 19 19 18

2,829 2,541 2,468 2,073 2,039 1,978 1,952 1,894 1,667 1,633 1,621 1,580 1,351

109

Decline (%)

10.1

2.8 16.0

1.7 2.9 1.6 2.9 11.4

2.0 0.7 2.5 14.4

Until 1914, the rate of decline remained more or less steady. 'Around 1905, there were some very good years. The strikes by the wine growers in the Midi led to a turnaround. From then on, everything was better. The price of wine kept rising. Wine from the Midi, second-vintage, watery stuff, would reach Oloron at 1 sou a litre. The peasants went on strike against the traffickers. Here, you couldn't sell wine. Before 1905, a good barrel of wine was sold at 25 or 30 francs a litre. After 1905,100 francs a litre. Wine from the Midi was sold at 4 sous and the local wine had gone up. People lived well' (J.-P. A.). The 1914-18 war led to a new and sharp drop in the population (11.4 per cent). There were 94 war deaths for the commune as a whole. Between 1921 and 1946, the rural exodus again slowed down. Except in 1932, those years saw good harvests. After 1945, the exodus resumed on a scale comparable to that of 1881-91 (14.4 per cent), but with quite different causes. Previously driven from the land by poverty, the peasants were now drawn to the city. The essential factor in the demographic slump was departure for the towns, although the decline in the birth rate also played a part (cf. table on family size, p. 72). Beam has always been a region that younger sons would leave. But in the past they left for lack of land, whereas now there is a lack of manpower. 'Tenant farmers, sharecroppers and labourers have become extremely rare. The sons and daughters of truque-tarrocs aus cams dous autes (the breakers of clods on the fields of others) have gone off in search of an easier life, or at least a more secure income' (P.-L. M.). The newest phenomenon is the exodus of girls who have had enough of peasant occupations.

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Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

The decline that can be observed in Lesquire is a general phenomenon in all the rural cantons of Beam. Between 1946 and 1954, the Basses-Pyrenees departement gained 4,200 inhabitants while the towns doubled in size, which gives a measure of the overall depopulation of the rural areas. Those cantons which do not overlap an urban zone or do not have an active industrial centre have lost inhabitants. The commune of Lesquire is one of those most affected by emigration, since the decline there is 14 per cent compared to 11 per cent for Accous, 10 per cent for Aramits and 9 per cent for Lembeye.

Appendix III Dialogue between a villager and a peasant n*s

He arrives in the square in front of the church just before midday. He is pushing a muddy bicycle in dingy colours, with the bags stuffed with provisions (groceries etc.), and a large cboyne (a 2-kilo loaf of bread) across the handlebar. His walks heavily, wearing an old worn suit that has seen much service on Sundays and market days, a beret rendered shapeless by the weather, and striped trousers frayed at the bottoms, revealing discoloured socks in rubber clogs. 'Not going home for an early lunch?' 'Oh no . . . but I had a good breakfast before I set o u t . . . We have a hot meal about nine in the morning.' 'And you're the one who does the shopping?' 'Yes, maman is 80. She said to me: "You can go on your bike, go and fetch the bread and the groceries.'"1 'You don't have a mobile grocer who comes round your way?' 'We're too far out, the grocery and bread van only goes as far as the Pes' farm; but we only just missed him. It was a nuisance to have to change and come all this w a y . . . It's almost six kilometres from us to the carrere'1 'You haven't got a neighbour who comes to the bourgV

1

Tu que pots courre en bicyclete, ben me cotteille lou pa e las epiceries. nies que se labem manquat per prim . . . 0/; que m'embestiabe d'em cbamya et de ba lou cami... quy a pres de 6 kilometres de nouste a la carrere.

1

112

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

'Just imagine . . . I'm alone with my mother. My neighbour Ja. works as a labourer on my land. He's abandoned the plot he inherited undivided with Ja.. .. Since his uncle died, what do you expect him to do alone in that house? At 40 he can't take or even find a wife. The other neighbour, Remi, lives alone with his mother, who's 80. His house is falling into ruin and so there won't be a single room left that can be lived in.' 'It sounds like a scene of desolation.' 'You could say so. The Di. farm was occupied by the El. son until marterou [All Saints' Day].' 'And now he's left the land too?' 'He liked being there: the plot is "smiling" (gauyous) though it has a steep slope. He had got himself well organized. His sister came and did his laundry.3 Ja. would go and look after his cowshed when he went to the bourg for his supplies, or go and play cards with him of a Saturday evening. He couldn't carry on like that for ever and he really had to find a wife . . . ' 'I wonder how a man on his own could keep going in such a remote spot.' 'He had a will of iron. Very skilful and adroit; he wept when the bailiff brought him notice to quit.' 'He was afraid of change?' 'He was sick at heart at getting rid of his animals. The soil had been well worked and he could have expected good harvests. He had the impression that the reasons given for the notice to quit (lou counyet) weren't valid.' 'Didn't he make an appeal?' 'He's too proud, and stubborn as a Basque! He sold everything and went off to Pau to work in a firm.'4 'So there's no one left in the neighbourhood?'5 'Now that the Ju. family, the nearest neighbours, have gone, there's no one left to do the shopping for us.'6 'Oh yes, the Jus, the big family that filled the place.' 'They were right to leave. The youngsters, four brothers and a sister, had bikes and motorbikes, even an old car in the end. How else would they get to the bourg} We have 800 metres of lousy track 3 L'endret que y gauyous bien here en penen. Que s'ere organisat. La so deu Moult queou biene ha la bugade. 4 Quey trop fier et cabourrut count, u basquou! Qua d'a benut tout et quey partit ta Pau tribaiha dens ue entreprese. 5 Dens lou quartile n'y soun pas arres mey? 6 Despuch que la famille deou Ju. - lou purme best - e soun partits, n'abem pas arres mey t'as ha las commissious.

Dialogue between a villager and a peasant

113

that is almost impassable. A camiasse (bad road) cut up by the streams. They didn't find it easy to pay for those machines and all the rest... It was a good thing for them that they were forced to sell their little farm for a song. Anyway the youngsters are earning good wages and they are still well married in Pau or Toulouse.' 'Can't you get that road repaired?' 'I meant to do so when I came back from POW camp. A kilometre of road is a big job, I only have Ja., P. and Mo. to help me! . . . If I were younger . . . but the War cost us years of our lives . . . And now I'm all alone . . . Who would I be doing it forV1 'You ought to have found a woman . ..' 'You're right there.8 But with that War and the prison camp . . . Yes, I should have! My father had more taste for working.9 But a man on his own, all alone, is lost on the land. Preparing the meals, doing the washing, leading and guarding the animals. Seeing to the lamps in the house. Going to market, keeping the door open. Women nowadays don't want a peasant!'10 'But why not? They wouldn't be unhappy with hardworking chaps like you .. .'" 'The problem goes back a long way. They know what goes on in a farm! They hear their parents complaining. You have to accept that where you sow, you don't always reap. Nothing is certain. You have to have a lot of patience with the old people who always hold the purse strings. And you need money to equip yourself! I had to buy a "mechanical mower" and I cut everywhere, however steep the slope, but you have to steer a straight course to keep going.'12 'But you got help?'13 'Yes, the Credit Agricole [bank], rural development.14 But you have to pay the interest, and repay the loan fairly quickly. Girls hear all about that at home. The parents talk and often they argue: "The 7

Et puch que souy tout soul. Ta qui ha tout aco .. . Qu'abet raisou. 9 Lou me pay que tribailhabe dap mey de gous. 10 Guida e guarda lou bestia. Ha luts dens la may sou. Ha lous marquats., tiene la porte uberte. Ouey ne bolin pas mey d'u paysa la hennes. 1 ' Mes perque... f Pourtan ne seren pas malerouses dap garcous serious count bous.... 12 Lou semia n'ey pas toustemt lou recoultat: arre de fixe - que cau here de patience dat lous bieilhs que toustem tienen lous sous. S'en yaabans des poude equipa! Qu'ey poudut croumpam ue 'faucheuse mecanique' et que coupi pertout per tan penen que sie mes que cau tira de dret ta s 'en sourti. 13 Mes quet aydats? 14 Qui, lou Credit agricole, lou genie rural. 8

114

Bachelorhood and the Peasant Condition

neighbour's bought a tractor!"15 So all the girls leave the "hut" as soon as they can and go to the town for a wage of 20,000 francs, with good board and lodging. No more mud on their clogs and they can go to the cinema.'16 'You've never courted any of them?' There used to be lots of girls in my neighbourhood - those were the days! My sister got married fairly young to a fine elder son in the Rey neighbourhood. She liked dancing and had great fun at the dances. For men of my age, that War and then imprisonment stopped us setting up a household. While we were away, the women of our age got themselves set up in town, a few in the country. Those who were left looked at the "position", the "courtyard door" [the symbol of the importance of the house], as much as the man.'17 'I can see that the taste for work is lost in those conditions.'18 '"You must get married," people say.19 You can understand that those who can find something better, even without looking, just leave; that happened with the Ju. family, and lots of other girls. Elsewhere they get a month's pay, however small... and then, rightly or wrongly, the peasant's job is much decried.'20 'And more's the pity!' 4 Yes, it hurts to hear some of the discouraging things people say. I'll keep going as long as I can, but then? I'm rambling. I'm wasting your time . .. You have work to do too. Come and call on me if you'd like to but when the weather is better. Maman will think I hung around drinking {apintoua's, from pintou, a half-litre of wine).'21 'Goodbye, sir.' He disappears into the cul-de-sac behind the La. house, where, traditionally, the men from his neighbourhood change their shoes and arrange their loads on their motor bikes or bicycles before setting out on the long route to their houses.

15

Lou best qua crownpat lou tractur. N'an pas mey 'la hangue' aus esclops et que podin ana tau cinema. 17 Qu'espiaben la pousissiou, lou pourtau autan coun I'homi. 18 Que compreni que lous gous deu tribail ques per hens aqueros counditious. 19 Quet cau maridat, se disen lou mounde. 20 Ailhous que toque 'u mes' per petit que sie... .Et puch a tor ou a raison lou mestie de paysa here descridat. 21 Que tirerey tan que pousqui, mes apresf Que m 'escapi... . Je vous fais perdre votre temps - vous avez du travail vous aussi. .. venez me voir sip he plase mes cuan lou terns sie mey beroy. Mama que ba pensa quern sout apintouat.. .. 16

Appendix IV Another dialogue between a villager and a bachelor 'You see, the other day I visited Ra., one of the richest farmers around here. I said to him, "You think you are the master of your farm, right? You think that all these fields and vines belong to you? You think you're rich, do you? Well, let me tell you, you are the slave of your tractor. What have you got, with all this land? Yes, you've got 4 or 5 million [old francs] in land. And then? Work out what you earn. Yes, take a pencil and paper. You see, the old ways are finished. A peasant who doesn't calculate, who doesn't always have a notebook and pencil, is washed up. Work out how much you give per hour of work to your father, your mother and your sister, who all help you, work out how much you earn. You'll see that you will take your wallet and fling it into the courtyard. Imagine you fall in love with a girl. Do you think she'll want to come here, to slave all day and come back in the evening to milk the cows, fed up with toil (harte de mau)} Peasants' daughters know the peasant life, they know it too well to want to marry a peasant. And get up at five every morning? Even if she loves you, she'd rather marry a postman, right? Yes, a postman or even a gendarme. When life is too hard, a couple don't even have time to make love. You slave away all day. Where's the love? What does that mean? You come home whacked. What kind of life do you think that is? There is no girl who wants that kind of life. There is no more feeling, no more affection. And then there are the old folks. No one wants to hurt them. You'd like to cuddle them, stroke them. But you end up arguing with them because there are too many cares, because you're too tired. Young women want their independence, they want to be able to buy something they like without having to justify it. No, there isn't a single one who would wanj to come here."'(L. C.)

Appendix V The exemplary tale of a younger son from a modest family ^•v/ Lo., born in 1895, is the second of seven children living on a small property (about 20 hectares). He went to school until he was 12. In 1916 he was taken prisoner and worked in the mines in Essen until 1918.' 'When I came back, my elder brother was married. I spent two years working on the family farm. We had a lot of fun after the War. I didn't dance, but we played cards endlessly and stayed up all night in cafes. In 1923,1 left the family home. Why? It embarrassed me to have to agree a wage with my parents or with the eldest brother's new family. I went off to become a servant in the wider family, for the elder brother of my sister's husband. He was the same age as me and was alone in charge of a big property. He had come back an invalid from the War and had a large family. He died in 1960. The widow and the children - they are grown up now - regard me as the head of the property.' 4 Why did you never marry?' 'I would have had to find an heiress. I had no money to set up on my own. And besides, I was happy like that, I was attached to that house, the terre mayrane [ancestral land], and the neighbourhood. What would I have gone and done elsewhere? I get a war pension and, since I became 65, the retired workers' pension. I'm in good health and I'm very happy to be able to keep myself busy, without 1

Only rhe significant details arc reproduced here. The autobiographies dwell a great deal on military service and the War.

Younger sons

117

being troubled by anyone, working in thefields.I've loved these fields for the 40 years I've been working them, whereas the neighbouring properties are abandoned.' Another younger son from a modest family (interview in Bearnais)

J. Lou., born 16 November 1896 in Sa.: 4In our time, life was very hard. I was the last but one in a family of six children. My parents weren't very canny and found it hard to make a living. They were sharecroppers at the Ha. house where they had a small property that they had to sell to pay their debts. So, when I was still young I was "placed" like my brothers. My turn came at the age of seven and I went to earn my crust at the Ba. house. I looked after the animals in the forest. I had some fine stomachs out of fear and hunger (de bets bentes de pou y de hami). School? Most of the time, the women of the house or the neighbours would be wanting me to lead the cows in the fields or run errands! My wage of 10 francs a year was often "committed in advance" (crubat dfavance)\ The main meal was half a salt sardine with sometimes some boiled potatoes. Ah, people these days don't know their luck. The more they have, the more they complain (mey en an me es plagnen)l When I was about 12,1 had myfirstcom munion in that house. I was not called up for military service on grounds of weak constitution. I didn't like dancing. What misery! I knew a few women, mothers of large families, who "gave themselves" for a couple of sous. With that, they bought their bread. When I could go out, I had no money to buy clothes! The small property that I've lived in for a long time now came to me thanks to my grandparents. They had given my mother a dowry of 2,000 francs on condition that it was used to buy land, which could not be sold so long as she was alive. My brothers and sisters pestered me for their shares. They had to wait until my mother died in 1929. Then I had to give them their shares although I had laboured and sweated blood on that land. Marriage? There wasn't a sou. How could I marry? (Quin se cale maridaf) We would go and spend the nights in the inns of Lesquire (quanabem, noueyteya en las auberyes), sometimes in Pau. I was one of the famous cupeles. That was what they called the men who had been dispensed from military service and who were "recuperated" for the Army in 1916. When I came back, I farmed my small property with the help of some women workers. I spent some wild nights with mates from the neighbourhood, who were bachelors like me or unhappily married.'

Appendix VI Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood ^•^/

The Se. family The father belonged to a grande famille. He was quiet, very well brought up, refined; he drank a little. He married a very young woman (partly thanks to his war pension). She was from a very grande famille, pretty and somewhat pretentious. They had four children. He never dared to go against his wife's wishes. Because there was some money (the pension) she led rather an extravagant lifestyle. She would go to market every Monday and Thursday to keep up with the local gossip and keep up the reputation of the family in Pau. The children were very disciplined. They were made to feel they belonged to a family that counted for something. They were in awe of their mother, who took all the decisions. In all important matters, the sons would side with the mother. The daughter went out with a gendarme. She was kept confined in the house for two years on the pretext that she was ill. The mother was against the marriage because the gendarme came from too "small" a family. In that area, a mother has her way. Normally a man has to think about the barn more than the house. The animals are sacred. Often the cowshed and barn are better cared for and more important than the house; but now the barns are falling down, one after another. A house run by a woman is soon on the ground. There are some things that a woman cannot decide and does not know how to decide. The girl eventually married.

Excessive maternal authority and bachelorhood

119

One of the boys managed to marry G. He had had to leave, his father's pension stopped when he died (in 1954). With the help of a mason the sons rebuilt part of their barn. Now they have no chance of marrying. They don't have the slightest personality. They never go out. There's no question of improving the equipment. They've just bought a reaper. The meadows are in a wretched state, full of rushes. The trees haven't been attended to. I saw them the other day, patching up a wooden harrow! The house is falling to pieces. The mother is still determined to keep up the prestige of a grande famille, which is quite out of line with the current state of the property' (A. B.).

The Ja. family The father was a pensioner, a fine old man who liked a drink from time to time. He had poor health and was very fat. But what had done for him was the [1914-18] war, and he had no influence in the house. His wife had the upper hand in every aspect of the household. Very authoritarian. She went regularly to the markets, every Monday and Thursday, to keep up with the gossip, cultivate her connections, get herself seen, play the dauneya. Wasted time, money spent buying things . . . and then, when the woman is away, the house is empty. A complete mess. With their chattering and their photo magazines, women bring other preoccupations into the house. Inside, it is abandoned and neglected. The farmhouse isn't cared for. The woman keeps going off to sell a few dozen eggs so as to have an excuse to go to Pau. The men start doing a bit of cooking. That dishonours a man and it's not in the rules. They gradually get demoralized and start going off to work a bit later. It's the woman who holds a farmhouse together. She's the one who prepares the meals and makes sure the men look presentable. Conflicts always come from women. Potential daughters-in-law are always afraid of battles with the old ladies. The old ladies say, "They ought to get married." But that's a way of asserting themselves. There are also lots of bachelors who say, "As long as Mum is there . . . ! " The old lady takes on too much importance. The presence of the mother makes marriage less urgent. And she can also hold it back In conditions like that, everything goes downhill. The equipment is rudimentary and the income is minimal. Keeping the tools up to scratch is very important. The equipment comes before the house. A woman can't keep an eye on things like that, jammed axles and so on. The house, which used to count for a lot, is in disrepair, the roof

120

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is leaking. They are afraid to borrow money from the Credit Agricole because they are already in debt and then maman ne bou pas (Mum doesn't want to). The mother more or less holds the purse strings. They can't buy anything. They couldn't easily pay for the mother's funeral (in 1959). They are victims of their upbringing. Time seems to eat up everything. The three brothers feel more and more powerless every passing day, despite help from outside. It's as if they were powerless. They are crushed under the ruins. In those conditions, marriage is out of the question. Thefinancialsituation is difficult, the reputation poor, marriage is impossible for any of the brothers. There was talk of a possible marriage for the eldest (aged 48) with a girl from the neighbourhood, of Basque origin, 22 years younger than him. He's a fine lad but too quiet and too clumsy alongside thatfierylittle Basquaise! Yet they have a nice-looking property on the edge of a big wood. Now they do their own washing, as well as the work in the fields' (A. B.). When his mother died in 1959, the eldest son, born in 1922, took charge of a 30-hectare farm including 10 hectares of woodland and fernland; he had attended the village school to the age of 13, then worked on the family farm, with the aid of his younger brothers, until his military service. He was called up into the Chantiers de Jeunesse [the Vichyite work scheme] in 1942 and sent to work in Germany in 1943. He worked as a turner in a factory in Saxony 'Much harder work than in the fields.' He was freed in 1945. 'When my mother died, the three of us found ourselves alone. And how could we marry? We've never danced. We sometimes went to the dance hall to watch. Life isn't always much fun. We have big problems, what with the cost of roof repairs. We aren't rich. I cook the meals, I mend the clothes and do the washing. For the pele-porc [the slaughter and processing of the pig] the neighbours come and help. It's not a very enjoyable day. The neighbours, especially the women, don't miss a chance to rub salt in the wound.'

Appendix VII An attempt to generalize: bachelorhood in 16 rural cantons in Brittany niK/

In order to ascertain whether it is possible to generalize from the phenomena observed in Beam, it was decided to study 16 cantons in central Brittany (totalling 135,433 inhabitants), in which the population fell by more than 10 per cent between the censuses of 1948 and 1954.1 This study, carried out in collaboration with Claude Seibel, a senior statistician at INSEE, shows significantly a low rate of marriage among men throughout the area studied. Because it was not possible to distinguish more precisely between the inhabitants of relatively densely populated areas and those in sparsely populated areas, it was decided to exclude communes of more than 1,000 inhabitants. Finally, the rural sector of the area was broken down according to the socio-occupational category of the head of the household (see table overleaf).

1

The cantons [administrative divisions of a department] chosen are as follows - in the Cotes du Nord departement: Bourbriac, Callac, Coiiay, Gouerec, Mael-Carhaix, Rostrenen and Saint-Nicolas-du-Pelem; in Finistere: Carhaix, Chateauneuf-du-Faou, Huelgoat, Pleyben and Sizun; and in Morbihan: Cleguerec, Le Faouet, Gourin and Guemene-sur-Scorff. Within those cantons, the following communes, which each have more than 1,000 inhabitants, were excluded: in rhe Cotes du Nord, Callac and Rostrenen; in Finistere, Carhaix, Chateauneuf-du-Faou, Huelgoat and Pleyben; in Morbihan, Le Faouet, Gourin and Guemene-sur-Scorff. Of rhe 123 communes within the area studied, 114 were thus chosen, all of them rural and characterized by low population density (average 45 inhabitants per sc). km).

head of household wife children ascendants other Widowed and divorced of which: head of household ascendant other

53.4% 43.6 3.7 3.1 3.0 19,865 43.1% 38.7 2.9 0.9 0.6 3.5% 1.9 1.3 0.3

Unmarried of which: children head of household other relatives pensioners &c servants Married

of which:

46,122 100.0

TOTAL POPULATION Percentage

44.4% 39.2 1.1 2.9 1.2 19,838 47.3% 0.3 42.1 3.4 1.1 0.4 8.3% 4.6 3.3 0.4

41,936 100.0 45.3% 38.6 3.9 1.4 1.4 10,096 47.8% 44.8 2.4 0.2 0.4 6.9% 5.7 0.7 0.5

21,131 100.0 35.8% 27.4 5.4 1.7 1.3 10,390 39.7% 1.4 35.6 2.2 0.3 0.2 24.5% 21.8 1.9 0.8

26,244 100.0

Female

Male

Male

Female

SOC of head of household non-agricultural

SOC of head of household agricultural

50.9% 42.0 3.8 2.6 2.5 29,961 44.5% 40.6 _ 2.7 0.7 0.5 4.6% 3.1 1.1 0.4

67,253 100.0 41.1% 34.6 2.8 2.5 1.2 30,228 44.3% 0.7 39.6 2.9 0.8 0.3 14.6% 11.2 2.8 0.6

68,180 100.0

Female

Overall Male

16 cantons in central Brittany

Proportions of unmarried men and women: comparison between central Brittany and the city of Rennes

51.4% 48.6 _ 1.8 0.2 0.7 3.4% 2.6 0.3 0.4

45.2% 38.7 2.7 0.6 3.2

51,203 100.0

Male

43.4% 33.7 4.5 1.2 4.0 26,702 43.4% 1.1 40,0 1.7 0.2 0.4 13.2% 10.7 1.8 0.7

61,514 100.0

Female

Rennes overall

17,500 41.7

100.0 32.7% 27.8 0.7 2.4 1.8 65.5% 0.3 56.4 7.4 0.8 1.8%

20,637 44.8

100.0 52.0% 38.9 4.3 3.8 5.0 47.3% 40.2 6.3 0.8 0.7%

Percentage of total

Unmarried of which: children head of household other relatives pensioners &C servants Married of which: head of household wife children other Widowed and divorced

SOC=socio-occupational category

AGED 18-47 100.0 38.9% 29.9 4.2 1.9 2.9 59.9% 53.3 6.0 0.5 1.1%

7,836 37.1 100.0 26.0% 18.5 3.5 1.6 2.4 69.8% 2.0 60.7 6.7 0.4 4.2%

8,134 31.0 100.0 48.4% 36.4 4.3 3.3 4.4 50.8% 43.8 6.2 0.7 0.8%

28,473 42.4 100.0 30.5% 24.8 1.5 2.2 2.0 66.9% 0.8 57.8 7.6 0.7 2.6%

25,634 37.6 100.0 29.2% 17.0 4.7 1.1 6.5 69.3% 64.1 — 4.1 1.1 1.5%

22,086 43.1

100.0 31.6% 17.6 5.2 1.4 7.4 64.5% 1.6 58.5 3.8 0.6 3.9%

26,730 43.5

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It can be seen that, within the agricultural population, the percentage of unmarried men aged 18-47 is 52% - of which 38.9% are the sons of the head of the household and 5% are domestic servants - as against 38.9% in the non-agricultural population and 29.2% for the city of Rennes. In the age group 29-38 the percentage of bachelors declared as sons of the head of the household is particularly high in the agricultural population: 28.3% (out of 41.0%) as against 5.7% (out of 11.8%) in Rennes for the same age bracket. The percentage of unmarried women, which is always lower than for men - 32.7% as against 52% in the agricultural categories, 26.0% as against 38.9% in the non-agricultural categories - does not appear to be independent (in relative terms at least) of place of residence and socio-occupational category. Their curves show a remarkable correspondence between the rates of the different categories, whereas comparison of the two curves shows how different are the situations of the men and the women.2 Thus, on a larger scale and in a different region, onefindssituations identical to those observed in Lesquire: men in agricultural occupations have one chance in two of remaining unmarried, whereas women avoid the determinisms related to residence or occupation. Although the explanations put forward in relation to Lesquire have every likelihood of accounting for the overall phenomena, one cannot assume that identical effects derive from identical causes, and sociological analysis of the particular conditions would be required.

2

For a comparison with the data for France as a whole, see the journal Population 2 (1962), pp. 232ff\

Ploughing The women are not only in charge of the farmyard, and more especially the livestock, but also play an important part in the work in the fields - haymaking, harvesting and grape-picking. They lead the oxen during the ploughing, a particularly demanding task when the animals have to be trained.

Aerial view of the western part of the bourg of Lesquire The houses of the bourg are packed tightly together, forming a continuous line of facades along the main street. Almost all of them have retained the arched gateway, wide enough for haycarts to pass through. In the inner courtyard, behind the house, are the pigsty and the rabbit hutch. Beyond it is the barn, with the cowshed, the wine-press and the hayloft. Behind the barn is the garden, a strip of land as wide as the house and a hundred metres long, delimited on each side by a row of climbing vines.

The eastern part of the bourg of Lesquire

The centre of the bourg

An isolated farm in the hills The farmhouse and the barns surround the farmyard on all four sides, giving the whole the appearance of a fortress.

A large abandoned farmhouse

The ball of the agricultural fair Standing at the edge of the dancing area floor, forming a dark mass, a group of older men look on in silence. All aged about 30, they wear berets and unfashionably cut dark suits. As if drawn in by the temptation to join the dance, they move forward, narrowing the space left for the dancers. There they all are, all the bachelors. On the day of the agricultural fair, everyone is 'on the promenade' and almost everyone dances, even the 'old-timers'. But the bachelors still do not dance, though they are less conspicuous, because the men and women of the village have come, the men to chat with friends, the women to spy and gossip and speculate endlessly on possible marriages.

Part Two Matrimonial Strategies in the System of Reproduction Strategies

The beneficiary of the entail, the eldest son, belongs to the land. The land inherits him. K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The fact that the practices through which the peasants of Beam tended to ensure the reproduction of their lineage and the reproduction of its rights over the means of production present clear regularities does not entitle one to see them as the product of obedience to rules. One has to break away from the legalistic kind of thinking which, to this day, haunts the entire anthropological tradition and tends to treat every practice as an act of execution - the execution of an order or a plan in the case of naive legalism, which proceeds as if practices could be directly deduced from expressly constituted and legally sanctioned rules or from customary prescriptions coupled with moral or religious sanctions;1 the execution of an unconscious 1 Among countless other proofs of the fact that ethnology has borrowed from the legalistic tradition not only concepts, tools, and problems but also theory of practice, which is most obvious in the relationship it establishes between the 'names of kinship' and the 'attitudes of kinship', one only has to cite Radcliffe-Brown's euphemistic use of the term jural and recall that Radcliffe-Brown still said father-right and motherright for patriarchy and matriarchy). 'This term [jural]', observes Louis Dumont, 'is difficult to translate. We shall see that its meaning is more than just "legal" or "juridical". It applies to relationships that can be defined in terms of rights and duties customary rights and duties, regardless of whether they involve legal or only moral sanction, possibly in conjunction with religious sanctions. In short, it applies to relationships which are subject to precise, binding, strict prescriptions, whether concerning people or things' (L. Dumont, Introduction a deux theories d'anthropologic sociale (Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 40). Obviously, such a theory of practices would not have survived in an ethnological tradition that speaks the language of the rule rather than that of strategy, if it had not been in tune with certain assumptions that are inherent in the relationship between the observer and his object and that are part of the process of defining the object so long as they are not themselves explicitly taken as an object. Unlike the observer, who does not have a practical mastery of the rules he is trying to discern in practices and words, the informant perceives the system of objective relationships - of which his words or his practices are so many partial

134

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model, in the case of structuralism, which revives the theory of practice of naive legalism under the guise of the unconscious and treats the relationship between structure and practice, like that between language and speech, according to the model of the relationship between the musical score and the execution of the music.2 In fact, the system of dispositions inculcated by the material conditions of existence and by family upbringing (the habitus), which constitutes the generating and unifying principle of practices, is the product of the structures which these practices tend to reproduce. As a consequence, agents can only reproduce - that is to say, unconsciously reinvent or consciously imitate, as self-evident or more appropriate or simply more convenient - the already tried and tested strategies, which, because they have always governed practices ('from time immemorial'), seem to be part of the nature of things. And because all these strategies, whether for the handing on of the undiminished indications - only as profiles, that is, in the form of relationships arising one by one or successively in the emergency situations of daily life. Thus, when asked by the ethnologist to reflect in a quasi-theoretical manner on his practices, the best-informed source will, even with the ethnologist's help, produce a discourse combining two opposing systems of lacunae. Inasmuch as it is a discourse of familiarity\ it will not say all the things that 'go without saying'; inasmuch as it is a discourse for an outsider, it can only be intelligible if it excludes all direct reference to particulars (and this means roughly all information directly related to proper names that evoke and summarize an entire system of pre-existing information). The informant is willing to use his natural language of familiarity freely only if he feels that the observer is familiar with the world of reference of his discourse (a familiarity that is revealed by the form of the questions asked, either detailed or general, informed or ignorant). This explains why ethnologists are usually virtually unaware of the distance between the scholarly reconstruction of the world of their 'native' informants and the native experience of it. The latter can only be inferred from the silences, ellipses and lacunae of the discourse of familiarity, which is fully understood only in a restricted universe where the same knowledge is shared by practically everyone, where all individuals are proper names and all situations are 'common places'. The very conditions leading the ethnologist to an objectivating perception of the social world (in particular his situation as an outsider, which implies the real performance of all the breaks that the sociologist who does not want to be trapped in the illusions of familiarity has to perform as a matter of methodical decision) tend to prevent him from reaching the objective truth of his objectivating perception itself: access to that third kind of knowledge presupposes that one secures the means of seeing what causes the objective knowledge of the social world to be radically irreducible to primary experience of that world by constructing the truth of all native experience of the social world. 2 To cite just Saussure: 'Neither is the psychological part wholly involved: the executive side is left outside, for execution is never the work of the mass; it is always individual and the individual is always the master of it; we shall call it speech' F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 30.

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patrimony and the maintaining of the family's position in the social and economic hierarchy, or for the biological continuity of the lineage and the reproduction of its labour power, are by no means necessarily compatible, even though they have the same functions, only the habitus, the system of schemes orienting every decision without ever becoming completely and systematically explicit, can furnish the basis for the casuistics required to safeguard the essential at all times, even if it should become necessary to violate 'norms' which exist only in the legalistic thinking of ethnologists. Thus, a transgression of the principle of male predominance, such as the act of conferring upon women not only part of the inheritance but the status of heir (herete, masculine, heretere, feminine), is most likely to catch the attention of an observer who is aware, that is, forewarned, of all the strategies deployed to defend the (socially defined) interests of the lineage or - and this amounts to the same thing - the integrity of the patrimony. Just as the ethnologists have reduced the marriage patterns of Berber and Arab societies to marriage with a parallel cousin, because this type of marriage, which represents only one among a number of marriage strategies and not even the most frequent, appeared to them as the distinctive trait of that pattern by reference to the classificatory system of the ethnological tradition, so most of those who have analysed the Beam system of inheritance have characterized it as 'integral right of the eldest', likely to favour an eldest daughter as much as an eldest son, because the legalistic bias induced them to see a mere transgression against principles as the distinctive feature of the entire system, even though these very principles were still operating in such cases. In reality, only the absolute necessity of keeping the patrimony in the lineage can bring about the desperate solution of entrusting a woman with the task of transmitting the patrimony, which is the very basis for the continuity of the lineage. Such a solution can only be produced by a single, extraordinary circumstance, namely, the absence of any male descendant. For we know that the status of heir does not fall to thefirst-bornchild, but to thefirst-bornson, even if he is last in the order of birth. This reversal of the traditionally held view becomes incontrovertible as soon as one ceases to treat the rules of inheritance and marriage as legal norms, like the historians of law who, even and especially when they base their work on the study of notarial documents, which provide them with no more than the actual or potential failures of the system, are still very remote from the reality of the practices; or like the anthropologists who, through their reified taxonomies, usually derived from Roman law, produce

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spurious problems, such as those involving a canonical distinction between unilineal systems of succession and bilateral or cognatic systems.3 There are, on the contrary, very strong reasons for postulating that marriage is not based on obedience to an ideal rule but comes about as the end result of a strategy which, implementing the strongly internalized principles of a particular tradition, is able to reproduce, more unconsciously than consciously, one or another of the typical solutions explicitly contained in that tradition. The marriage of each one of its children - eldest or younger, boy or girl - presents every family with a specific problem it can solve only by weighing all the possibilities for perpetuating the patrimony offered by the traditions of succession and marriage. Acting as if this supreme function justified any means, the family could avail itself of strategies which the classificatory system of anthropological legalism would consider totally incompatible. It could, for example, disregard the 'principle of the predominance of the lineage', cherished by Meyer Fortes, and entrust women with perpetuating the lineage. It could also minimize or even entirely nullify - if need be, by means of legal artifices - the consequences of inevitable concessions to a bilateral succession that would normally be fatal to the patrimony. In a more general sense it could even manipulate the relationships objectively present in the genealogical tree in such a way that they would, ex ante or ex post, justify such kinship relations and alliances as were necessary to safeguard and augment the interests of the lineage, in other words, its material or symbolic capital. They have discovered that they are very close kin to the Xs,' said one informant, 'ever since the latter have become important through the marriage of their daughter to the son of the Ys.' It is too often forgotten that, especially in illiterate societies, genealogical trees exist as such only when they are constructed by the ethnologist, who is the only one capable of calling forth this complete network of relationships over several generations tota simul, that is, 3

The errors inherent in juridism are most clearly evident in the works of the historians of law and custom. Their whole training, together with the nature of the documents they study (particularly the notarial documents representing a combination of the legal precautions produced by the repositories of a learned tradition, the lawyers, and the procedures actually envisaged by those who availed themselves of their services), leads such historians to elevate inheritance and marriage strategies to the status of strict rules (cf. the bibliographical notes, particularly numbers 9, 10, 12, and 14, pp. 160-3).

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all of it at the same time, in the form of a spatial schema that can be perceived uno intuitu and followed in every direction, starting at any one of its points. The network of relationships between contemporaneous relatives is a system of relationships that may or may not be used and represents only one part of the entire network.4 The kinship relations that are actually and presently known, recognized, practised and, as people say, 'kept up', are to the genealogical construct what the network of roads that are presently built, travelled, kept up and therefore easy to use - or, better, the hodological space of actual comings and goings - is to the geometric space of a map furnishing an imaginary representation of all the theoretically possible paths and itineraries. To carry this metaphor even further, all genealogical relationships would soon disappear, like abandoned paths, if they were not constantly maintained, even if they are used only intermittently. It is often pointed out how difficult it is to re-establish a relationship that has not been kept up by visits, letters, gifts, and so forth ('You don't want it to look as if you only went there to ask a favour'). Just as the exchange of gifts dissimulates its objective purpose as long as it is spread out over time, although its reversible nature as an act of 'give so that you may be given' becomes cynically evident when gifts are exchanged simultaneously, so the fact that kinship relations are continually kept up as if for their own sake dissimulates their objective function, which would be unmasked by the discontinuous use of the assurances that are always involved in them. Because the upkeep of kinship relations is clearly incumbent on those who, standing to profit most from them, can keep them in working order and at the same time camouflage their true function only by continuously 4

The Kabyles make an explicit distinction between the two points of view under which kinship relations can be considered, depending on the circumstances, i.e. depending on the function imparted to these relations. They distinguish between thaymath, the group of brothers, and thadjadith, the group of descendants of one real or mythical ancestor. Thaymath is invoked when it becomes necessary to oppose another group, for example if the clan is attacked. It is an actual and active bond of solidarity between individuals united by real bonds of kinship spreading over two or three generations. On the other hand, the group united by thaymath only represents one section, larger or smaller depending on the circumstances, of the total unit of theoretical solidarity that is referred to as thadjadith, the totality of genealogically based kinship relations. 'Thaymath is of today,1 they say, 'thadjadith is of yesterday.' This clearly indicates that the role played by 'brotherhood' {thaymath) is infinitely more real than the reference to a common origin, for the latter attempts an ideological justification of a threatened unity while the former expresses the sense of a living solidarity.

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'cultivating' them, the proportion of 'working relationships' among the 'theoretical' relatives figuring in the genealogy almost automatically grows ever larger as one moves closer to the top of the hierarchy recognized by the group. In short, nepotism is created by nephews. Indeed, we only have to ask ourselves how and why the powerful have so many nephews, great-nephews and great-great-nephews to realize that if the great have the greatest number of relatives and if 'poor relatives' are also poor in relatives, it is because, here as elsewhere, wealth attracts wealth: the memory of cousinship and the desire to maintain it are a function of the material or symbolic advantages to be obtained from 'cousining'.5 Let us imagine that in the society under consideration here the marriage of each of its children represents the playing of a card in a card game. It is clear that the value of this 'move' (measured by the criteria of the system) depends both on the quality of the hand that the family has been dealt, whose strength is defined by the rules of the game, and on the greater or lesser degree of skill with which this hand is played. In other words, given that matrimonial strategies (at least in the most advantaged families) were always designed to bring about a 'good marriage' rather than just any marriage, that is, to maximize the profits and/or to minimize the economic and symbolic costs of the marriage as a transaction of a very particular kind, these strategies are in every case governed by the value of the material and symbolic patrimony that can be committed to the transaction and by the mode of transmission of the patrimony, which established the systems of interests of the various claimants by assigning differential rights to the property to each of them according to sex and birth rank. In short, the matrimonial opportunities generically open to the descendants of the same family by virtue of that family's position in the social hierarchy - a position mainly, though not exclusively, based on the economic value of its patrimony - were specified by the mode of succession that introduced such criteria as birth rank. While thefirstand most direct function of the matrimonial strategy is to reproduce the lineage and thereby its labour power, it also has to assure the safeguarding of the patrimony, and to do so in an

5 This means that the use of genealogy for the ideological purpose of justifying existing political structures (as in the case of the Arab tribe) is only a particular - but particularly interesting - case of the functions that can be assigned to kinship structures.

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economic environment dominated by the scarcity of money.6 Since the share of the property to which a descendant is entitled by tradition and the compensation paid at the time of marriage are one and the same, the value of the property determines the amount of the adot (from adouta, to make a donation, to give a dowry), which, in turn, determines the matrimonial ambitions of its holder. By the same token, the size of the dowry demanded by the family of the future husband depends on the size of its own property. It follows that, through the mediation of the adot, the economy governs matrimonial exchanges, with marriages tending to take place between families of the same rank in economic terms. It is true, of course, that extensive property is not enough to make a 'great' family: such 'letters of nobility' are never granted to houses that owe their elevation and their wealth only to their meanness, their hard work, or their lack of scruples, and that are unable to exhibit the virtues that one is entitled to expect from the 'great', in particular, a dignified bearing, a sense of honour, generosity and hospitality; conversely, the standing of a 'great' family can survive impoverishment.7 The gulf between the mass of the peasantry and an * The investigation on which these analyses are based was conducted in 1959 and 1960 and again in 1970 and 1971 in a village of Beam we shall call Lesquire. It is situated in the centre of the hill country, between the two Gave rivers. 7 Awareness of the social hierarchy is most clearly expressed in the relations between the sexes and at the time of marriages: 'At the dance a younger son of a modest family (u caddet de petite garbure) was careful not to pay too much attention to the younger daughter of the Gus [rich farmers]. The others would have immediately said, "He's pretentious. He wants to dance with the great heiress." Some of the servants, if they were good-looking, would sometimes ask heiresses to dance, but that was rare' (J.-P. A.). Does this very strongly felt distinction between 'great houses' and 'small peasants' (lou paysantots) correspond to a clear
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'aristocracy' distinguished not only by its material capital but also by a symbolic capital measured by the value of its entire kin on both sides of the lineage and over several generations,8 by its style of life, which must manifest its respect for the values of honour (aunou), and by the social consideration it enjoys, makes certain marriages impossible, because they are regarded as misalliances. These status groups are neither totally dependent on nor totally independent of their economic foundations, and while considerations of economic interest are never absent from a family's refusal to accept a misalliance, a 'modest house' may bleed itself white in order to marry one of its daughters to the eldest son of a great family (The things I had to do to put her there! I wouldn't be able do it for the others'). Conversely, the eldest son of a 'great house' may forego an economically more advantageous match in order to marry according to his rank. But the margin of acceptable disparity is always narrow, and beyond a certain threshold, economic differences effectively rule out alliances. In short, inequalities in wealth tend to determine the cut-off points within the field of possible, that is, legitimate, marriage partners that his or her family's position in the hierarchy of status groups assigns to each individual. ('Madeleine, a younger daughter of the Ps, ought to have married one of the Ms, Ls, or Ps.') The principles which, through the adot, tend to exclude marriages between overly unequal families, on the basis of an implicit 'cost analysis' aimed at maximizing the material and symbolic profit to be derived from the matrimonial transaction within the limits of the family's economic independence, combine with the principles that give supremacy to men and primacy to the first-born son, to define the matrimonial s

Here are the calculations of an informant who was asked to explain why he considered a recently concluded marriage to be a 'good match': 'The father of the girl who came [to marry] one of the Pos was a younger son of the Las of Abos, who had come to Saint-Faust to marry into a good property. The eldest of that family, the brother of the girl's father, had kept the case (house) in Abos. He was a schoolteacher and then went to work for the railways in Paris. He married the daughter of La.-Si., a big shopkeeper in Pardies. I learned all this from my mother. One of his sons became a doctor in Paris (a specialist at one of the hospitals), the other a railroad inspector. The father of the girl who married one of the Pos is the brother of that fellow.' It was possible to verify in many other cases that the local inhabitants possess complete knowledge of the genealogical information within the area of possible marriages (which presupposes permanent mobilization and updating of their proficiency). It follows that bluff is practically impossible ('Ba. is very grand, but at his family's home, near Au., everything is very small'), since every individual can be reduced at any moment to his objective truth, that is, the social value (according to the native criteria) of his entire kin over several generations. The same is not true in the case of a distant marriage 'He who marries outside', the proverb says, 'either cheats or is cheated' (on the value of what he is getting).

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strategies. The principle of primogeniture, together with male supremacy, tends, as will be seen, to favour a strict homogamy by denying men the option of the 'upward marriages' that would be implied by the pursuit of maximum material and symbolic profit. The eldest son must not marry too high, not only because he might one day have to return the adot, but also and especially because such a marriage would threaten his position in the domestic power structure; nor must he marry too low, because a misalliance would dishonour him and also make it difficult for him to dower his younger siblings. And a younger son, for whom the risks and the material and symbolic costs of a misalliance were even greater than for an eldest son, could not yield to the temptation of marrying too obviously above his condition without incurring the risk of finding himself in a dominated and humiliating position. To the extent that it afforded peasant families one of the most important opportunities for monetary exchanges and also for the symbolic exchanges that asserted the family's position in the social hierarchy and thereby confirmed that hierarchy itself, marriage, an institution that had a direct bearing on the increase, conservation, or dissipation of a family's material and symbolic capital, was no doubt at the centre of the dynamics and statics of the entire social system, within the limits of the permanence of the mode of production. The legalistic discourse that informants readily draw on to describe the ideal norm, or to explain a particular case as handled or reinterpreted by notaries, reduces the complex and subtle strategies by which families - who alone are competent (in the double sense of that word) in these matters - attempt to steer a course between these two opposing risks, to formal rules which, in turn, can be reduced to quasi-mathematical formulas. Each of the younger sons and daughters is entitled to a specified share of the patrimony,9 the adot. 9

Given a family with two children, the share of the younger son is one-third or (P-P/4)/n, while the share of the eldest is then P/4 + (P-P/4)/w, where P designates the value set on the property and n the total number of children. It was customary to evaluate the property as precisely as possible; if this was disputed, local experts chosen by the different parties were consulted. The price of the journade [literally, 'day's work'] of fields, woods, and fernland was arrived at on the basis of the sale price of a property in the same or a neighbouring village. These calculations were fairly precise and were therefore accepted by all. The Tr. property, for example, was valued at 30,000 francs (this was about 1900). The family consisted of the father, the mother, and six children, one boy and five girls. The eldest son was given onequarter, or 7,500 francs. The remaining 22,500 francs had to be divided into six parts. The share of the younger daughters was 3,750 francs each, or 3,000 francs to be paid in money and 750 francs in linen and clothes, sheets, towels, napkins, shirts, featherbeds and lou cabinet, the wardrobe that was always brought to the marriage by the bride' (J.-P. A.).

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Because the adot was usually given at the time of marriage, almost always in money in order to avoid fragmentation of the property and only exceptionally in the form of a piece of land (which, however, constituted no more than a security redeemable at any time through the payment of a sum agreed upon in advance), it is often mistakenly identified with a dowry. In fact, however, it was only a compensation accorded younger children in exchange for their renouncing any claim to the land. Here again we must caution against a legalistic approach which, by treating patterns of landholding in the same manner it treats genealogy, would interpret measures taken only as a last resort by the head of a family determined to keep the property intact, as the universally applicable norms of an 'inheritance law' that is just as unreal as mechanical models of matrimonial exchanges.10 The extreme scarcity of liquid capital (related, at least in part, to the fact that wealth and social status were measured first and foremost by the size of the landed property) sometimes made it impossible to pay the compensation, even though custom afforded the possibility of spreading payments over several years or even deferring them until the death of the parents. In such cases the division had to take place when one of the younger children married or when the parents died. This meant that the family had to pay the adots in the form of land, hoping to be able some day to restore the patrimony to its full size by somehow raising the money needed to repurchase the land sold in order to pay the adots or given away as adots.u But the family property would have been very ill-protected indeed if the adot, and hence marriage itself, had always depended only on the value of the patrimony and on the number of legitimate heirs, and if there had been no other means of dealing with the threat of division that was unanimously considered to be a 10

There is every indication that it is the change in economic attitudes and the advent of new values, making an equitable compensation appear as a real right to the patrimony, which have led the peasants of Beam to make increasing use of the weapons offered by the legal system and the services of lawyers, who, consciously or not, tended to create the need for their own services merely by formulating matrimonial or inheritance strategies in the language and the logic of written law, thus charging them with potentialities that contradicted their principle. 1 ' In accordance with the principle that property belonged not so much to the individual as to the lineage, the 'right of repurchase' gave every member of the lineage the possibility of regaining possession of goods that had been alienated. 'The "mother house" {la maysou mayrane) retained "rights of return'' (lous drets de retour) over land that had been given away as a dowry or sold.' In other words, 'when these plots came up for sale, people knew that certain houses had rights over them, and would go and offer them to these families first' (J.-P. A.).

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catastrophe.12 In fact, the parents themselves 'made the eldest', as the saying went, and a number of informants stated that in earlier times the father was completely free to decide the amount of compensation to be paid to younger children, since the proportions were not fixed by any rule. In any case, it is known that in many families the young couple was totally without information, let alone control, concerning the family finances until the death of the 'old folks' (any income from important transactions, such as the sale of livestock, was entrusted to the old mistress of the house and locked up in the wardrobe, lou cabinet). Under these circumstances it is unlikely that legal rules were ever very strictly applied, except in the pathological cases that came before the law and the notaries, or in the cases produced in advance by the legal pessimism, which, although invariably provided for in the contracts, were statistically exceptional.13 In reality, the head of the family was always at liberty to manipulate the 'rules' (not least those of the Civil Code) if he wished to favour one of his children more or less secretly by means of cash gifts or fictitious sales (ha bente, 'to make a sale'). It would be extremely naive to be taken in by the word 'sharing-out' (partage)y which is sometimes used to designate family 'arrangements' intended to avoid the division of the property. These 'arrangements' were made at the occasion of the 12

Although, at the time of the investigation, I did not think to ask systematic questions concerning the incidence of division over a specific period of time, it appears that it was a rare, even exceptional occurrence and therefore faithfully recorded in the collective memory. For example, I was told that about 1830 the Bo. property and house (a big two-storey house, a dus soules) were divided among the heirs, who had been unable to settle matters amicably. As a result, the property is now 'criss-crossed with ditches and hedges' (toute croulzade de barats y de plechs). (There were specialists, called barades, who came from the Landes, the flat areas around Bordeaux, to dig the ditches dividing such properties.) 'After these divisions, there were sometimes two or three families living in the house, each in its own section and each with its share of the land. In such cases the room with the fireplace always went to the eldest son. This is what happened on the Hi., Qu., and Di. properties. At the Ans there are some pieces of land that have never come back. They were able to buy back some after a while, but not all. The division created terrible difficulties. In the case of the Qu. property, which was divided among three children, one of the younger sons had to take his horses all the way around the neighbourhood to reach a far-away field that had fallen to him' (P. L.). 'In order to retain sole possession, eldest sons sometimes put the property up for sale (with the aim of buying it themselves), but it also happened that they were unable to buy back the house' (J.-P. A.). 13 There are strong reasons to believe that the innumerable protective clauses surrounding the adot in the marriage contract in order to ensure its 'inalienability, imprescriptibility and unseizability' (guarantees, 'collocations' establishing the order of creditors, etc.) are products of the legalistic imagination. Thus, separation of the spouses, one of the forms of dissolution of the marriage which, under the terms of the contract, calls for the restitution of the dowry, is unknown in peasant society.

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'instituting of the heir', which usually took place with the consent of all concerned (though duly sealed in a notarial document) when one of the children married, or else was stipulated in a will. Many men 'instituted the heir' in this way before they went to war in 1914. Following a valuation of the property, the head of the family proceeded to define the claims of everyone concerned - those of the heir, who was not necessarily the eldest,14 and of the other children, who often willingly endorsed provisions that were more advantageous to the heir than those of the Civil Code and even the customary law. If the arrangement was made at the time of the marriage of one of the younger children, he or she would receive a portion whose equivalent was to be given to the others either at the time of their own marriage or upon the death of the parents. But we would continue to be taken in by the fallacies of legalistic thinking if we went on citing examples of anomic or regulated transgressions against the supposed rules of succession: it is not certain that, as the old grammarians would have us believe, 'the exception confirms the rule', but it does at least tend to confirm the existence of the rule. In fact one should take seriously the practices which indicate that all means are justified when it comes to protecting the integrity of the patrimony and warding off the prospects of division of the property and the family, as a set of competing claims to ownership of the patrimony that are contained in every marriage. Everything takes place as if all the strategies were generated from a small number of implicit principles. Thefirstof these, the primacy of men over women, implied that, even though claims to the property could sometimes be transmitted through the female line, and even though the family (or 'house'), a monopolistic group defined by the ownership of a specific set of assets, could be abstractly identified with the whole set of those who had claims to these assets, regardless of their sex, the status of heiress could fall to a woman only in the last resort, namely in the 14

The head of the family was in a position to place the interest of the patrimony above the customary rule under which the title of heir normally went to the first-born boy. He might decide upon such a course, for example, if the eldest son was unworthy of his rank, or if there was a real advantage in having another child inherit (e.g. in the case where a younger son, by his marriage, could easily bring about the unification of two neighbouring properties). The moral authority of the head of the family was so great and so strongly approved by the entire group that the customary heir had no choice but to submit to a decision that was dictated by considerations involving the continuity of the house and adopted the course best suited to that end. Also, the eldest son automatically lost his claim if he should leave the household, since the heir is always the one who stays on the land, as we still see clearly today. And even today, there are elderly heads of families who do not have children and are looking - not always successfully - for a true heir, that is, some relative, even distant, such as a nephew, who will stay on the land and cultivate it.

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absence of any male descendant; for we know that girls were relegated to the status of younger child, regardless of their birth rank, as soon as there was a single boy, even if he was younger. And this is only logical, once we understand that the status of 'master of the house' (capmaysoue), repository and guarantor of the name, the reputation, and the interests of the group, implies not only rights to the property, but also the political right to exercise authority within the group and, especially, the right to represent and involve the group in relationships with other groups.15 Under the logic of the system, this right could be conferred (after the death of the parents) only upon a man, either the eldest of the agnates or, in his absence, the husband of the heiress. When the latter, an heir through the female line, became the representative of the lineage, he was in some cases obliged to sacrifice his very family name to the 'house' that had appropriated him by entrusting him with its property.16 The second principle, the primacy of the eldest over younger siblings, tends to make the patrimony the real subject of the economic and political decisions made by the family.17 Identifying the interests of the designated head of the family with those of the patrimony is a more effective way of establishing his identification with the patrimony than the application of any expressly stated and explicit norm. To assert that power over the land is indivisible and to place it in the hands of the eldest son amounts to asserting the indivis15 The head of the 'house' had the monopoly of outside contacts, particularly the important transactions negotiated in the marketplace. He thus had authority over the financial resources of the family and, hence, over its entire economic life. The younger son, who was usually confined to the house (a situation that further reduced his chances of marriage), could acquire a modicum of economic independence only if he were able to put away a small nest egg of his own (for example, the income from a war pension), for which he was respected and envied. 16 The relative autonomy of political rights in relation to property rights is convincingly demonstrated by the ways in which the adot was used. Even though it theoretically belonged to the wife even after the marriage (since the obligation to return its equivalent in quantity and value could take effect at any time), the husband was entitled to the income and, as soon as offspring was assured, he could use it to give portions to his younger brothers and sisters. (Of course, this right to the income was rather more restricted when the adot was in the form of real estate, particularly land.) For her part, since the wife had the same rights to her husband's dotal property as he had over her dowry, her parents enjoyed the income from the assets their son-inlaw had brought into the marriage and managed it as long as they lived. 17 Whenever the subject of a sentence is a collective noun, such as society, the family, etc., one should consider whether, as would be implied by a rigorous usage of this category of concepts, the group in question really constitutes a unity, at least in the respect directly in question, and, if the answer is positive, one should further ask by what means this unification of points of view, practices, or interests has been achieved. This question is particularly important here, since the survival of the house and its patrimony depends upon its ability to maintain the integration of the group.

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ibility of the land and to making the eldest son responsible for its perpetuation.18 In short, as soon as we postulate the fundamental equation that the land belongs to the eldest son and that the eldest son belongs to the land, in other words, that the land inherits its heir, we have established a structure that generates such practices as conform to the fundamental imperative of the group, namely, perpetuating the integrity of the patrimony. But, in spite of all the inculcation exercised by the family, continuously reinforced by the whole group, which constantly reminds the eldest son, especially in a 'great house', of the privileges and duties attached to his rank, it would be naive to think that this identification succeeds in all cases, and always without conflict or tragedy. The occasional failures in this concerted effort at indoctrination and cultural reproduction mean that the system never functions mechanically and is never totally free of contradictions between dispositions and structures, which may be experienced as conflicts between sentiment and duty. Nor is it always free of subterfuges intended to satisfy individual wishes within the limits of what is socially acceptable. For example, the same parents who, on other occasions, felt free to bend the custom in order to satisfy their own inclinations (for example, by permitting a favourite child to accumulate a little nest egg),19 felt dutybound to prohibit a misalliance and to force their children, regardless of feeling, into unions that were best suited to safeguard the social system by safeguarding the position of the lineage within that system. In short, they made their eldest son pay the price of his privileges by subordinating his own interest to those of the lineage: 'I have seen people give up a marriage for the sake of 100 francs. The son wanted to marry. "How are you going to pay the younger children? If you want to marry that girl, you can leave!" The Trs had five younger daughters. The parents were always favouring the eldest son. He was always given the best piece of salt meat and all the rest. The eldest son n Proof that the 'right of the eldest' is but the transfiguration of the rights of the patrimony over the eldest lies in the fact that the distinction between older and younger children pertains only in property-owning families. It has no meaning at all for the poor - small proprietors, farmhands, or servants. (There is no such thing as youngest or eldest,' one of the informants said, 'when there is nothing to chew.') 19 One of the most widely used subterfuges for favouring one of the children consisted in handing over to him, long before his marriage, one or several heads of livestock which, held under a gasalhes arrangement, brought good profits. {Gasalhes is an informal contract by which one entrusts a reliable friend with the care of one or several heads of livestock, having first estimated their value. Proceeds from the products, as well as gains and losses from the sale of the meat, are shared by both partners.)

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is often spoiled by the mother, until he talks of marriage... The younger daughters did not get meat, or anything. When the time came for the eldest son to marry, three of the girls were already married. The boy was in love with one of the La. girls, who did not have a sou. The father told him: "So you want to get married? I have paid for the three girls, now you must bring in the money for the other two. A wife isn't made for being put in the china cupboard (lou bachere) [i.e. for being shown off]. This one has nothing; what is she going to bring? What she has between her legs?" The boy married one of the E. daughters and received a dowry of 5,000 francs. The marriage did not go well. He took to drink and went to pieces. He died childless.'20 Those who wanted to marry against the wishes of their parents had no choice but to leave the house at the risk of being disinherited in favour of a brother or sister. But for the eldest son of a great house the obligation to maintain his rank was so compelling that he could choose this extreme solution, which went against all the norms of the group, even less than anyone else. The eldest son of the Bas, the richest family in Lesquire, could not leave. He had been the first one in the hamlet to wear a jacket. He was an important man, a municipal councillor. He could not leave. And besides, he would not have known how to make a living elsewhere. He had become too much of a gentleman (enmoussurit, from moussu, monsieur)' (J.-P. A.). Furthermore, so long as the parents were living, the heir only had potential rights to the property, so that he did not always have the means to uphold his rank. He often had less freedom than some younger sons or the eldest sons of lesser families. The father doled out the money pretty slowly . .. Quite often they could not even go out. The young folks would work and the old folks would hold on to the money. Some [of the younger sons] would make a little spending money elsewhere; they would hire themselves out for a while as coachmen or day labourers. In that way, they had a little money they could spend as they wished. Sometimes the younger son was given a little property (u cabau) of his own before he left for military service, maybe a little piece of woodland that he could exploit, or a couple of sheep, or a cow that enabled him to make a little money for himself. To me, for example, they gave a cow and I 20

The end of the story is no less edifying: 'After much quarrelling, they had to return the entire dowry to the widow, who went back to her family. Shortly after the marriage of the eldest son, about 1910, one of the daughters had been married to La., also with a dowry of 2,000 francs. When the war came, the family brought back the daughter who had married into the S. family (on one of the neighbouring properties) to take the place of the son. The other daughters who lived further away were very upset about this decision. But the father had chosen the daughter who was married to a neighbour because this was the way to increase the patrimony' (J.-P. A., aged 85 in 1960).

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let a friend keep it as a gaselhes. But the eldest sons, most of the time, didn't have anything, and they couldn't even go out. "You will get everything" (qu'at aberas tout),21 the parents would say, but in the meantime they wouldn't let go of anything.' Thus parental authority, the principal means of perpetuating the lineage as long as the interests of the parents coincided with those of the lineage - and this was usually the case - could work against its legitimate function and deter an eldest son, who could neither revolt against the authority of his parents nor renounce his own feelings, from marrying at all, for this was the only way he could protest if he was not permitted to make his own choice.22 21

This phrase, often used ironically because it appears to symbolize the arbitrariness and tyranny of the 'old folks', is at the very core of the specific tensions that are created by every mode of transmission of power and privileges which, like this one, leaves no intermediate status between the class of heirs without resources and that of legitimate possessors. On the contrary, it seeks to induce the inheritors to accept the servitudes and sacrifices of a prolonged minority for the sake of the distant gratifications when they attain majority. 22 The full cruelty of this aberrant situation - aberrant in terms of the norms of a system that regarded the continuity of the lineage as the supreme value - can be seen in the testimony (taken in the dialect of Beam) of an old bachelor (I. A.), a craftsman, born in 1885 and living in the bourg: 'Right after school, I began working in the shop with my father. I was drafted in 1905 and served with the 13th Alpine chasseurs at Chambery.. .. After my two years of military service I again lived at home. I courted a girl from Re.. .. We had decided to get married in 1909. She had a dowry of 10,000 francs plus her trousseau. She was a good match {u bou partit). But my father was strictly against it. In those days, parental consent was necessary [both 'legally' and materially since only the family could provide the household equipment {lou menadjegamit): the 'buffet', the wardrobe, the bedstead [Varcalheyt), etc.J. "No, I don't want you to get married." He did not give any reasons, but he hinted at them. u We don't need a woman here." We were not rich. It would have meant another mouth to feed, for my mother and my sister were already living with us. My sister had left the household only for six months after she was married. When her husband died, she came back and she is still living with me. Of course, I could have left. But in those days an eldest son who took his own house with his wife brought disgrace to the family (u escarni, i.e. an affront that made both the perpetrator and the victim look ridiculous). It would have looked as if we couldn't get along at all. It would not do to let people know about one's family troubles. . . . I was very upset. I no longer went to dances. The girls of my age were all married. I was no longer interested in anyone else. When I went out on Sundays, I played cards; sometimes I would watch the dancing for a while. I spent the evenings with the boys; we played cards, and then I would go home about midnight.' This testimony is similar to that of another informant: 'P.-L. M. [a craftsman living in the bourg. aged 86 in 1960) never had any money to go out; and so he never went out. Others would have stood up to their father; they would have tried to earn a little money elsewhere, but he buckled under. He had a sister and a mother who knew everything that went on in the village, whether it was true or not, even though they never left the house. These two ruled the household. When he talked of getting married, they allied themselves with the father: What good will a woman do? We already have two in the house!' (J.-P. A).

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But these pathological cases, in which it is necessary to assert parental authority expressly in order to repress individual feelings, are the exception and should not make us forget the many cases in which the norm can remain unspoken because the dispositions of the individuals involved are objectively in conformity with the objective structures. But how can younger sons, who, after all, were sacrificed to the imperatives of the land, be made to consent to something that not even the heir, whom the system favoured, is always willing to do? We should certainly not forget - as we might if we considered marriage strategies as autonomous - that fertility strategies can also contribute to solving the problem, simply by eliminating it. This can be the case if, due to a biological chance by which the first child happens to be a boy, the succession can be entrusted to an only child. And indeed, parents can manipulate their 'hand' by limiting the number of cards, if they are satisfied with those they have been dealt. Hence the crucial importance of the order in which these cards are dealt, that is, the biological chance that makes the first-born child either a boy or a girl. Given the close interrelation between these two reproductive strategies, marriage and fertility, a family can limit the number of its children to one in the first case but not in the second. The birth of a girl is never greeted with enthusiasm ('When a girl is born to a house,' the proverb says, 'one of the main beams falls'), because she invariably represents a bad card. This is true even though she can move upward and, unhindered by the social constraints a boy has to respect, can marry de facto and de jure above her station. If she is an heiress, i.e. an only child (and this is very rare, since families keep hoping for an 'heir'), or if she is the eldest of two or more sisters, she could only ensure the preservation and continuity of the patrimony at great risk to the lineage. For if she marries an eldest son, her 'house' will be in a sense annexed by another, and if she marries a younger son, domestic power will pass to a stranger - at least after the death of her parents. If she is a younger daughter, the only thing to do is to marry her off and, therefore, dower her, since, unlike a boy, she cannot very well be sent away or kept, unmarried, at home; the reason being that the labour she could furnish would not be commensurate with the cost of her upkeep.23

23

Occasionally, one of the important families who could afford such an additional burden might keep one of the daughters at home. 'Marie, the eldest daughter of the Ls of D., might have married. She was treated like a younger daughter and, like all younger daughters, she became an unpaid servant for life. They made her stupid. Very little was done to find her a husband. In this way they kept the dowry, they kept everything. Now she takes care of the parents.'

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Now let us consider the situation if the progeny included at least one boy, whatever his birth rank. The heir may or may not be an only child. In the latter case, he may have one or several brothers, one or several sisters, a brother and a sister, or several brothers and sisters in varying proportions. In themselves, these combinations offered very unequal chances for success when dealt with under the same strategy. Each one of them therefore called for a different strategy, but some of them were easier to apply and more profitable than others. When the heir was an only son,24 one would assume that the marriage strategy would stake everything on obtaining as great an adot as possible through a marriage with a wealthy younger daughter, thus bringing in money without giving up anything. However, these efforts at maximizing the material and symbolic profit from a marriage, if need be by bluff (although this was a difficult and risky business in a world in which people knew practically everything about each other), were limited by the economic and political risks inherent in an unequal or, as it was called, upward marriage. The economic risk was the tournedot, the return of the dowry, which could be demanded should the husband or the wife die before the birth of a child, an eventuality that aroused fears not justified by its likelihood. 'Suppose a man marries a girl from a great family. She brings him a dowry of 20,000 francs. His parents tell him: "You're getting 20,000 francs; you think you're doing well. But you are really taking a chance. You have received a dowry by contract. You are going to spend part of it. What if something goes wrong? How are you going to give it back, if you have to? You can't!" After all, a marriage is expensive, the groom must pay for the wedding, he must get things for the house, and so on' (P. L.). Most people did not touch the adot for fear that one of the spouses might die before children were born.25 The risk that can be called political is no doubt taken more directly into account in these strategies, since it touches on one of the funda24 The chances of seeing the extinction of the lineage due to the bachelorhood of the eldest son were practically nil in the organic period of the system. 25 The adot, normally paid to the father or the mother of the bridegroom and only exceptionally (that is, if his parents were deceased) to the heir himself, was meant to become part of the patrimony of the family resulting from the marriage. If the marriage was dissolved or if one of the spouses died, it went to the children, if there were any, although the surviving spouse continued to have the use of the income. If there were no children, it reverted to the family of the spouse who had brought it into the marriage. Certain marriage contracts stipulated that in the case of separation, the father-in-law only had to pay the interest on the adot brought by his son-in-law, thus giving the younger man the possibility of returning to his house after a reconciliation.

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mental principles of all practices. Owing to the dissymmetry that the cultural tradition establishes in favour of the man, according to which every marriage is to be judged from the masculine point of view ('upward' thus always implicitly meant between a man of lower and a woman of higher status), there is no reason, aside from economic barriers, why the eldest daughter of a modest family should not marry a younger son of a great family, whereas the eldest son of a modest family cannot marry the younger daughter of a great family. Among all the marriages made for economic reasons, only one kind is fully acceptable, namely, an alliance in which the arbitrary cultural bias in favour of the male is confirmed by a corresponding discrepancy in the social and economic status of the spouses. The greater the adot, the more it strengthens the position of the spouse who brings it into the marriage. Although, as has been seen, power within the household has relatively little to do with economic power, the size of the adot does represent one of the factors in the balance of authority, particularly in the structural conflict opposing mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw.26 A mother who, as mistress of the household, would in other cases use every means at her disposal to prevent a 'downward' marriage for her son, is the first to oppose his marriage with a woman of (relatively) too high a status, being very well aware that it will be much easier to exert her authority over a girl from a modest background than over one of those girls from a great family who, as the saying goes, 'come in as mistress of the house {qu'ey entrade daune) the moment they come into their new families'.27 An 'upward' marriage threatens the principle of male pre-eminence, which the group recognizes not only in a social context but also in the context of work and domestic affairs. By defending her own authority, that is, her interests as the mistress of her household, the mother 16

Of an authoritarian woman it was said, 'She does not want to give up the ladle,' the symbol of authority over the household. Wielding the ladle was the prerogative of the mistress of the house. When the meal was ready and the pot was boiling, she would place the 'sops' of bread into the tureen, pouring the soup and the vegetables over them. Then, when everyone was seated, she would bring the tureen to the table, stir the soup with the ladle in order to soak the bread, then turn the handle towards the head of the family (grandfather, father, or uncle), who would serve himself first. Meanwhile the daughter-in-law was occupied elsewhere. To remind the daughter-inlaw of her rank, the mother would say, 'I'm not giving you the ladle yet.' 27 To evoke the marriage settlement is the supreme argument in the struggle for domestic power: 'Someone who has brought what you have brought' (dap $o qui as pourtat). At times the initial imbalance is such that only after the death of her motherin-law can it be said of the young wife: 'Now the young woman is the daune.y

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is simply defending the interests of her lineage against outside usurpation.28 The risk of imbalance is greatest when an eldest son marries a younger daughter of a large family. Given the approximate equivalence between the adot and a share of the patrimony (which is attested by the double meaning of the word adot), the adot brought by a girl from a very rich but very large family may well not be greater than that of a younger daughter of a modest family who has only one brother. Despite the apparent balance between the value of the adot and the new family's patrimony, this situation may disguise a discrepancy that can lead to conflict, since authority and claims to authority depend as much on the material and symbolic capital of a spouse's original family as on the size of the actual adot. The question of political authority within the family becomes most acute, however, when an eldest son marries an eldest daughter, especially if the heiress is the wealthier of the spouses. Except in cases where it united two properties because the spouses were neighbours, this type of marriage tended to create a permanent back-and-forth between the two homes or even led the spouses to maintain their separate residences. What was at stake in this open or hidden conflict over the place of residence was, again, the predominance of one or the other lineage and the extinction of a 'house' and its name.29 Possibly because it approached the question of the economic basis of domestic power more realistically than other societies and therefore came closer to the objective truth in its statements and 28

The influence wielded by each of the spouses in the domestic power structure is, in fact, a very important factor in the family's marriage strategies. The mother is in a much better position to profit from the opening made by her own marriage and to marry her son in her native village or neighbourhood, thereby enhancing her own position in the family, if she has brought a substantial dowry. In other words - as will be confirmed by other evidence - the entire matrimonial history of the lineage is involved in every marriage. 29 It is significant that, in all the attested cases, properties united in this manner were eventually separated, often in the very next generation when each of the children received one of them as their inheritance. Thus, two of the greatest families of Lesquire had become united through the marriage of two heirs who continued to live on their separate properties. ('One wonders when they ever got together to produce these children.') The eldest son of that marriage (born about 1890) received his father's property, his younger brother that of his mother, the eldest daughters a farm inherited from an uncle who had been a priest, and the two youngest daughters a house in the bourg. Questions concerning marriages between heirs always produce the same disapproval, and always for the same reason: 'Take the case of Tr., who married the Da. girl. He keeps going back and forth between the two places. He is always on the road, he is everywhere, he is never at home. The master should be there' (P. L.).

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strategies,30 the society of Beam suggests that the sociology of the family, which is so often depicted as based on sentiment, might be no more than a particular case of political sociology. The position of the spouses in the domestic power structure or, to use Max Weber's vocabulary, their chances of success in the competition for authority over the family, that is, for the monopoly of the legitimate exercise of power in domestic affairs, is never independent of the material and symbolic capital they bring into the marriage (although the nature of that capital may vary according to time and society). However, one male heir without siblings was a relatively rare phenomenon. In all other cases, the marriage of the heir largely determined the size of the adot that could be given to younger siblings, hence the kind of marriage they could make and even their chances of marrying at all. The best strategy in this case, therefore, consisted in obtaining from the parents of the bride an adot sufficiently large to pay the adots of younger sons and daughters without having to divide or mortgage the property, yet not so large as to threaten the patrimony with the return of a dowry beyond the means of the family. This, incidentally - contrary to the anthropological view that every marriage is an autonomous unit - means that every marriage transaction can only be understood as one moment in a series of material and symbolic exchanges, since the economic and symbolic capital a family is able to commit to the marriage of one of its children is largely determined by the position this particular exchange occupies in the entire matrimonial history of the family.31 Although it is not readily apparent, the case of an eldest son who has a sister (or sisters) is quite different from that of one who has a brother (or brothers). If, as all the informants spontaneously indicated, the adot of girls was almost always greater than that of boys, which tends to increase their chances of marriage, the reason is that, as has been seen, there is no choice but to marry off these useless mouths, and as quickly as possible.

30

It is said that in order to assert his authority within the marriage the groom should step on the bride's dress, if possible during the nuptial blessing; while the bride should bend her ring finger in such a way that the groom is unable to push the ring all the way down. 31 The order in which the children of the same family marry can also be a determining factor. This is the case when the marriage of the first son absorbs all of the family's resources or when a younger daughter marries before her older sister, who then becomes harder to 'place' in the marriage market because she is suspected of having some hidden flaw. In this situation it was said of the father: 'He has yoked the oneyear heifer (ranouille) before the two-year-old (la bime)."

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In the case of younger sons the strategies could be more complex, the first reason being that an abundant, even superabundant, supply of labour will create a great desire for land that can only be beneficial to the patrimony. It follows that families are less anxious to marry off a younger son (except, perhaps, the first of the younger sons in a great family) than a younger daughter or even an eldest son. One way would be to marry him to an heiress, a course that is very normal and best suited to his own interests, though not necessarily to the interests of the lineage: if he marries into a family of the same rank (and this is usually the case), in short, if he brings a good adoty and makes his mark in terms of fertility and work, he is honoured and treated as the true master.32 If, on the other hand, he marries 'upwards', he has to sacrifice everything to the new house where his parents-inlaw mean to 'stay the masters' - his adot, his labour, and sometimes his very family name ('Jean Cazenave', for example, could become 'Jean dou Tinou': 'Jean of the Tinou family').33 There were very few younger sons willing to face the prospect of a marriage with a younger daughter, one of those 'marriages between hunger and thirst', sometimes also called esterlou ('sterile'), which the very poorest among them could only avoid by hiring themselves and their wives out as 'resident servants' (baylets a pension). On the other hand, the 12 The situation of such a younger son is very realistically described in a proverb: 'If he is a capon, we'll eat him; if he is a cock, we'll keep him.' " Although it was as effective for assuring the continuity of the lineage and the transmission of the patrimony as a marriage between an eldest son and a younger daughter, a marriage between a younger son and an eldest daughter was completely respectable only if the economic situation of the 'son-in-law' was such that it gave him the authority to take his place as the head of his new family. In all other circumstances - of which the marriage of a servant to his patronne [boss] was only the extreme case - the most fundamental cultural imperatives were violated. 'When a poor younger brother moves into the house of a great heiress, she remains the patronne* {].-?. A.). 'The daughter of a great family married one of her servants. She played the piano, she looked after the harmonium in the church. Her mother had many connections and received visitors from the town. After various attempts at marriage, she fell back on her servant, Pa. He always remained "the man from the Pas". People said to him: "You should have taken a nice little peasant girl; she would have been much more use to you." He lived a miserable life; he was like the fifth wheel on the cart. He wasn't allowed to meet his wife's former connections. He wasn't from the same world. He did all the work; she ran everything and enjoyed herself. He was always embarrassed and an embarrassment for the family. He didn't even have enough authority to make his wife be faithful to him' (J.-P. A.). 'H., a servant in a great house, was in love with land where he worked. He suffered when the rain didn't come. And as for the hail! And all the rest! He ended up marrying the mistress of the house. All these chaps who marry above themselves are marked for the rest of their lives' (P. L.).

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possibility of founding a family while staying in the paternal home was a privilege for eldest sons only. For these reasons, those who were unable to marry an heiress, thanks to their adot, possibly supplemented by a small, laboriously accumulated cabau, had only two options: they could either emigrate to the city or to America in the hope of establishing themselves in some craft, or else they could forego marriage and become servants either to their own family or (in the case of the very poorest) to others.34 It is therefore understandable that for the family it was much better to have younger sons than younger daughters, since it was rather less costly to marry them off and even more advantageous for them to remain unmarried. And, of course, the advantage of having boys rather than girls became increasingly great with the size of the family. Indeed, the burden of providing for the marriages of three or four younger daughters created insurmountable difficulties even for the wealthiest houses and could even lead to breaking up the property. Thus, in the last analysis, the entire system is based on fertility strategies.35 A negative proof for this contention can be found

34

Day labourers found 'days' [journaus) only in summer, were often out of work all winter and on rainy days, and were often obliged to take on piecework {a pres-heyt) in order to make ends meet. A day labourer spent almost everything he earned ('until 1914 a sou a day and meals') for bread or flour. By contrast, domestic servants {baylets) were hired for the year and received free room, board, and laundry service. A very good domestic servant earned 250-300 francs per annum before 1914. If he was very careful, he could hope to buy a house with ten to twelve years' wages, and a farm and some land with the dowry of a girl and some borrowed money. But he was often condemned to bachelorhood: 4As the youngest, I was placed as a domestic servant at Es. when I was very young, at the age of ten. I knew a girl down there. If we had got married, it would have been, as they say, a marriage between hunger and thirst. Both of us were equally poor. My older brother, of course, got the "full household" (lou menadje garnit) of our parents, that is, the livestock, the poultry, the house, the farm tools, etc., so that it was easier for him to get hitched. The girl I went with left for the city; it is often like that, girls don't wait. It is easier for them to leave and to work in town as a maid, especially if they have a girlfriend who is already there. In the meantime I amused myself as well as I could with the other fellows who were in the same situation' (N., a farm servant, born in 1898, speaking in Bearnais). The condition of the day labourer, which used to be worse than that of the domestic servant, has improved at least in relative terms. This is due to the increasing practice of payment in money and an improvement in the bargaining position of agricultural labour resulting from the rural exodus and the emergence of a few non-agricultural occupations. By the same token, the position of the domestic servant and the dependent relationship it implies is increasingly felt to be unbearable. 3j These strategies included belated marriage, which tends to limit fertility. Thus, the average age at marriage between 1871 and 1884 was 31.5 for men and 25 for women, compared to 29 and 24 respectively for the period 1941-60.

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in the fact that the very poorest - the smallest of the smallholders, domestic servants, day labourers - who in any case could not play this game, excluded themselves by the excessive size of their families. In short, it is not enough to say that families are not anxious to have younger sons marry; we should say that they did not press the matter; and, in a world where marriages were arranged, such a 'hands-off policy is sufficient to lessen their chances of marriage considerably. Some families go so far as to make the payment of the adot conditional upon the younger son's working for his brother for a certain number of years, some sign veritable work contracts with him, and some families even leave him hoping for a higher sum. No doubt there were other ways for a younger son to become a confirmed bachelor, from the marriage that does not materialize to a process of getting used to the situation until it is 'too late to marry', all of this taking place with the complicity of families who are, consciously or unconsciously, glad to keep such an 'unpaid servant' in their service, at least temporarily.36 In opposite ways both the younger son who left home to make his living in the city or to seek his fortune in America, and the younger son who stayed at home supplying his labour without adding to the expenses of the household or diminishing the property, made a contribution to the preservation of the

36

One fairly typical testimony will suffice to make this point: i was the youngest of five children. Before the war of 1914 (born in 1894] I was a servant with the M. family, later with the Ls. I remember that as a very good time. Then I was in the war. When I came back, my family had been hard hit. One of my brothers, the eldest, had been killed, the third one had lost a leg, the fourth was not quite right in the head because of the war .. . My brothers were very good to me; all three had pensions as war casualties. They gave me money. The one who had a bad chest could not stay by himself, so 1 helped him and went to the fairs and markets with him. After he died in 1929 I went to live with the oldest of my brothers and his family. And that is when I realized how isolated I was in that family, having lost my brother and my mother who had been so good to me. For example, one day when I had taken the liberty of going to Pau, my brother blamed me for the loss of a couple of cartloads of hay. They had been rained on in a thunderstorm and would have been brought in if 1 had been there. I had simply become too old to get married. The girls of my age had left or were married. I was often depressed and spent what free time I had drinking with the fellows, most of whom were in the same situation. I can tell you, if I had to do it over again, I would leave the family right away, find a job and perhaps get married. It would be a much better life for me. First of all, I would have a separate family that was all my own. And besides, when a younger son works for the family, he never works hard enough. He must always be on hand. And he is talked to in a way that no master would dare talk to his servants.'

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patrimony.37 Younger sons had learned since childhood to embrace the traditional values and the customary distribution of tasks and powers among brothers. They had a deep attachment to the family patrimony, to the house, the land, the family, and perhaps especially, the children of the eldest son. Many of them might therefore be willing to accept this kind of life which, to use the blithely functionalist formulation of Le Play, 'gives [them] the tranquillity of bachelorhood as well as the joys of the family'.38 Being inclined, for all these reasons, to give himself totally to a family and a patrimony he had every reason to consider his own, a stay-at-home younger son represented (for the family, i.e. for the system) the 'ideal' limiting case of the domestic servant, who was often treated as 'one of the family', had his private life invaded and virtually taken over by the family life of his employer, and was consciously or unconsciously encouraged to give a large part of his time and affection to his borrowed family and usually paid for the economic and affective security afforded by this inclusion in family life by forgoing marriage.39 Thus the younger son is, so to speak, the structural victim, that is, the socially designated and therefore resigned victim, of a system that places a whole set of protective devices around the 'house', as a collective entity and an economic unit, or rather, a collective entity based upon its economic unity.

Everything takes place as if matrimonial strategies aimed to rectify the failures of fertility strategies. There are, however, 'hands' that defy the skill of even the best player - for example, a family with too many 37

In principle, the younger son was entitled to the income from his portion for his lifetime. If he had not married, his share reverted to the heir after his death. 38 'There were some old younger-sons living at the Sas', and the Chs' in the Le. neighbourhood, a two-hour walk (7-8km) from the bourg. They came to mass in the bourg only on religious holidays and in all their 70 years had never once been to Pau or Oloron. The less they go out, the less they feel like going out. .. Only the eldest went out. These fellows kept the family going. A few of them are still around' (J.-P.A.). 39 It is said that sometimes, in cases where the eldest son had no children or had died without issue, an old bachelor brother was asked to marry in order to ensure the continuity of the lineage. Marriage between a younger brother and the widow of the eldest (levirate marriage), although not really an institution, was relatively common. After the 1914-18 war, marriages of this type were fairly numerous. Things were sorted out. In general, the parents encouraged it, in the interest of the family, for the sake of the children. And the young went along with it. Feelings didn't enter into it' (A. B.).

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children, including too many daughters. The mastery manifested in the art of marriage strategies does not attain the level of discourse, because, except when it fails, it tends to exclude the conflicts between duty and feeling, reason and passion, collective interest and individual interest, which, like the norm intended to resolve or overcome them, arise from the 'misfirings' of the socially produced instinct which is the habitus inculcated by the conditions of existence, themselves transcribed and transfigured in the recommendations and ethical and educative discourse. It is clear how artificial and quite simply extrinsic it is to ask questions concerning the relationship between structures and sentiments. While individuals and even families may recognize only the most outwardly respectable criteria, such as virtue, health and beauty in girls, or dignity and hard work in boys, they never cease to identify, under these disguises, the criteria that are really pertinent in the logic of the system, namely the value of the patrimony and the size of the adot. The system can function, in the great majority of cases, on the basis of the criteria least pertinent in terms of the real principles of its functioning,firstand foremost because family upbringing tends to ensure a very close correlation between the criteria that are primary from the point of view of the system and the features that are primordial in the eyes of the individuals - just as the eldest son of an important family must, more than any other, embody the virtues of a 'man of honour' (homi d'aunou) and the 'good peasant', so the 'great heiress' or 'good younger daughter' cannot settle for the middling virtue that might be good enough for a girl from a minor family. Furthermore, the earliest learning experiences of children, reinforced by all their social experience, tends to impose their schemes of perception and appreciation, in a word, tastes, that are applied to sexual partners as much as in other areas and which, even outside any specifically economic or social calculation, tend to rule out misalliances. Here as elsewhere, propitious love, a love that is socially approved and predisposed to success, is nothing other than the amor fati, the love of one's own social destiny, that brings together socially predestined partners through the seemingly accidental and arbitrary paths of free choice. And everything takes place as if the most patent discrepancies, which lead a marriage between a poor man and a rich but ugly, or much older, heiress to be judged scandalous, represented the minimum of randomness that is necessary to ensure the dissimulation and misrecognition of the pre-established harmony and the transfiguration of destiny into free choice. The constraints bearing on every matrimonial choice are so numerous and enter into such complex combinations that the individuals

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involved cannot possibly deal with all of them consciously, even if they have mastered them on a different level. They can therefore not be confined within the mechanical rules that the implicit representation of practice as the execution of explicit, express norms or unconscious models requires one to invent, ex nihilo and in infinite number, to account for the infinite diversity of practices, and in particular for the strategies that enable families to reconcile, counterbalance, and sometimes cancel out the constraints. Faced with all the threats that marriage presents to the property and through it to the family that it serves to perpetuate - since the compensation granted to younger children is always liable to lead to the breaking up of the patrimony that the privilege assigned to the first-born son was designed to avert at all costs - families deploy a whole system of 'parries' and 'moves' similar to those of fencing and chess. Far from being simple procedures, analogous to those invented by the legalistic imagination in its efforts to bend the law, far also from being reducible to formal and explicit rules, these strategies are the product of the habitus, meaning the practical mastery of the small number of implicit principles from which an infinite number of practices are generated. These practices can be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules; because they are 'spontaneously' regulated, there is no need to make the rule explicit, to invoke or impose it. Being the product of the structures that it tends to reproduce, and because, more precisely, it implies a 'spontaneous' compliance with the established order and with the orders of the guardians of that order, namely, the elders, the habitus contains the principle of the phenomenally very different solutions, such as the limitation of family size or the emigration or bachelorhood of younger sons, which, depending on their position in the social hierarchy, their birth rank, their sex, etc., the different agents bring to the practical antinomies generated by systems of demands that are not automatically compatible. Matrimonial strategies as such can therefore not be dissociated from inheritance strategies, fertility strategies, and even educative pedagogical strategies, that is, from the whole set of strategies for biological, cultural, and social reproduction that every group implements to pass on to the next generation, maintained or enhanced, the powers and privileges it has itself inherited.

Bibliographical notes

The Pyrenean provinces - Bigorre, Lavedan, Beam and the Basque country - preserved an original customary law which, in contrast to what happened in most provinces of southern France, long resisted contact with Roman law. This fact has not failed to attract the attention of historians and legal scholars. The law of Beam', writes Pierre Luc, 'appears to be essentially a customary law and shows very little influence of Roman law. As such it offers us an extremely interesting model. Such things, for example, as the swearing of oaths of innocence with oath-helpers, the designating of hostages to guarantee contracts, mort-gage, and the possibility of acquitting monetary obligations in kind were still currently practised there in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while in certain other regions they had fallen into disuse more than two centuries earlier' [12, pp. 3-4]. For a long time, legal and historical studies were exclusively based on collections of customary laws, in other words, on the Fors de Beam. Thus, as early as the eighteenth century, some local jurists, de Maria [1 and 2], Labourt [3] and Mourot [4 and 5], wrote commentaries on the Fors de Beam, particularly on the subject of the dowry and on the customs of succession. Unfortunately, there is only one rather mediocre edition of the Fors [6], which brings together often very corrupted readings dating from various periods and therefore needs a great deal of critical editing (as was already observed by Roge Bibliographical notes compiled in collaboration with Marie-Claire Bourdieu.

Bibliographical notes

161

[7 and 8]) before it can serve as the basis for an analysis. Since such an edition does not yet exist, modern scholars have concentrated on the reformed For of 1551, on the wide variety of legal treatises available since the sixteenth century and, above all, on the commentaries on these texts by the legal scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even though two of these modern studies, Laborde's work on the dowry in Beam [9] and Dupont's book on the practices of succession in Beam [10], are based on the reformed For and on the jurisprudence of the last two centuries of the monarchy, they are extremely valuable. Fougeres's voluminous thesis [11] merely repeats, at least for Beam, what had already been said in earlier works. The historians of law have come to the conclusion that compilations of customary law should be used with caution, since they present a relatively theoretical law containing obsolete rules while neglecting provisions that are still observed. They have found that notarized documents are one source that can furnish information on actual practices. The model for this type of research is the work of Pierre Luc [12]. On the basis of notarial registers, this author first studied the living conditions of the rural population and the system of land ownership, the structure of the Beam family and the rules under which its patrimony was preserved and passed on to the next generation. In the second part, he examines the technical and legal procedures involved in working the land in the framework of the family and of the community, as well as a number of problems concerning the rural economy, such as credit and practices of exchange. The mountains of Beam and Bigorre are also the place where Frederic Le Play, the most famous critic of the Code Napoleon, situated the famille souche, the 'stem' family, which he considered the ideal family organization, especially by contrast with the 'unstable' family resulting from application of the Civil Code [13]. Having defined three types of families, namely, the patriarchal family, the 'unstable' family - which is characteristic of modern society - and the 'stem' family, Le Play proceeds to describe the latter (pp. 29ff) and enumerates the advantages each of its members derives from it: 'On the eldest, who carries a heavy burden of obligations, it (this system of inheritance) confers the respect attached to the ancestral home or workshop; to those members who marry outside the family, it gives the support of the "stem" house along with the satisfactions of independence; to those who prefer to remain in the paternal home it gives the tranquillity of bachelorhood as well as the joys of the family; and to all it affords the happiness of reliving in their paternal home the joys of early childhood, even in advanced old age'

162

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(pp. 36-7). 'By instituting one heir in every generation, the landowning stem family does not sacrifice the interests of the younger children to those of the eldest. On the contrary, it obliges the latter to renounce the net profit of his work throughout his life, first in favour of his siblings, then in favour of his children. The family can only obtain this material sacrifice by granting him a compensation of a moral order, namely the respect attached to the possession of the ancestral home' (p. 114). The second part of Le Play's book is a monograph on the Melouga family, an example of the stem family of the Lavedan in 1856. An epilogue by E. Cheysson describes the end of that family under the impact of the law and the new mores: 'Until very recently, the Melouga family had continued to exist; it was like a living remnant of a once powerful and fruitful social organization. But it, too, finally succumbed to the influence of the law and of the new mores that had spared it owing to an exceptional combination of favourable circumstances. The Code is doing its work; the levelling process continues; the stem family is dying; the stem family is dead' (p. 298). The claims of the theoreticians of the Le Play school are not borne out by the data of ethnographical studies. They are also contradicted by the work of Saint-Macary [14] who, on the basis of the notarized documents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showed the persistence of inheritance and marriage patterns that do not conform to the Civil Code.

1 De Maria, 'Memoires sur les dots de Beam', with appendix: 'Memoires sur les coutumes et observances non ecrites de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 2 De Maria, 'Memoires et £claircissements sur le for et coutume de Beam', MS, Archives Departementales des Basses-Pyrenees. 3 Labourt, 'Les Fors et coutumes de Beam', MS, Pau municipal library. 4 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des dots suivant les principes du droit romain, confere avec les coutumes de Bearn> de Navarre, de Soule et la jurisprudence du Parlement (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below], p. 15. 5 J.-F. Mourot, Traite des biens paraphernaux, des augments et des institutions contractuelles avec celui de Vavitinage (quoted by L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam [9 below]). 6 A. Mazure and J. Hatoulet, Fors de Beam, legislation inedite du Xle au XIHe siecley with facing translation, notes and introduction (Pau: Vignancour; Paris: Bellin-Mandar, Joubert, n.d. [1841-3]). 7 P. Roge, Les Anciens Fors de Beam (Toulouse and Paris, 1908). 8 J. Brissaud and P. Roge, 'Textes additionnels aux Anciens Fors de Bearn\ Toulouse, 1905 (Bulletin de I'Universite de Toulouse, memoires originaux des facultes de droit et des lettres, serie B, no. III).

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163

9 L. Laborde, La Dot dans les fors et coutumes du Beam (Bordeaux, 1909). 10 G. Dupont, 'Du regime successoral dans les coutumes du Beam', thesis, Paris, 1914. 11 A. Fougeres, 'Les droits de famille et les successions au Pays basque et en Beam, d'apres les anciens textes', thesis, Paris, 1938. 12 P. Luc, 'Vie rurale et pratique juridique en Beam aux XlVe et XVe siecles', thesis, Toulouse, 1943. 13 F. Le Play, L 'Organisation de la famille selon le vrai modele signale par I'histoire de toutes les races et de tous les temps, with an epilogue and three appendices by E. Cheysson, F. Le Play and C. Jannet, 3rd edn, augmented by new documents by Ad. Focillon, A. Le Play and Delaire (Paris, 1884). 14 J. Saint-Macary, 'Les regimes matrimoniaux en Beam avant et apres le Code civil', thesis, Bordeaux, 1942; 'La desertion de la terre en Beam et dans le Pays basque', thesis, Bordeaux, 1942. 15 J. Bonnecaze, La Philosophie du Code Napoleon applique au droit de la famille. Ses destinees dans le droit civil contemporain, 2nd edn (Paris, 1928).

Part Three Reproduction Forbidden: The Symbolic Dimension of Economic Domination

Peasants become 'dumb' only where they are harnessed into and face a presumably strange, bureaucratic, or liturgical machine of a great state. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism

The invitation to return, after so many years, to the problem of peasant bachelorhood both delights and troubles me. I do indeed have a particular affection for that early work,1 which, although it shows all a beginner's uncertainties, seems to me to contain the seeds of several major developments of my subsequent research. I am thinking for example of notions like habitus, strategy, or symbolic domination, which, without always becoming fully explicit, orient the whole text; or the effort at reflexivity which runs through it and which is expressed, not without some naivety, in its conclusion. And if I were not held back by the fear of seeming to be self-indulgent, I could show how the reappropriation of a more or less repressed social experience that it favoured no doubt made possible, as a preliminary socio-analysis, the setting up of a relationship to culture, whether 'high' or popular', that is both less tortuous and less tortured than the one that intellectuals, of whatever origin, normally have with everything that relates to ordinary people and culture. But I cannot deny a certain unease as, without having the taste or the time to immerse myself completely in them, I reopen files where the scraps and fragments that I wrote in the 1970s - with a view to publishing in English (at the kind invitation of Julian Pitt-Rivers) a revised and expanded version of the article in Etudes Rurales - slumbered for so long. How does one decide, in the chaos of this abandoned worksite, what is still valid, after so many major undertakings, in the forefront of which are those that are assembled here? How, without entirely recasting the initial article, as I initially intended, can I convey the fundamental principles of the corrections and additions that I would have liked to make? P. Bourdieu, 'Celibat et condition paysanne\ £tudes Rurales, 5-6 (Apr.-Sept. 1962), pp. 32-135.

Addenda and corrigenda

I shall not further discuss the first part, in which I endeavoured to describe the logic of matrimonial exchanges in traditional Beam society. The article entitled 'Les strategies matrimoniales dans le systeme des strategies de reproduction' (Annates, 4-5 (July-Oct. 1972), pp. 1105-270) was intended to take the place of the old description of the logic of matrimonial exchanges as it presented itself before the crisis that the non-marriage of the eldest son most visibly manifested. Although it was conceived against the then dominant way of understanding the relations between kinship structures and economic structures, this analysis failed to grasp the practical logic of the strategies with which agents sought to make the most of their specific advantages (size of their property, birth rank, etc.). Comparison between the initial attempt to contain in a formal-looking formula the relationship, materialized by the adoty between the economic structures (apprehended through the distribution of properties by size) and the matrimonial structures, and the final reconstruction of the whole set of constraints (or determining factors) which orient matrimonial strategies, provides a good opportunity to observe, in the concrete detail of research, the break that had to be made with the structuralist vision, particularly in the procedures of questioning and observation and in the language used, in order to produce an adequate theory of practice and to understand the matrimonial 'choices' of the agents as products of the reasonable but not intentional strategies of a habitus objectively adjusted to the

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structures.1 Theoretical and methodological progress is itself inseparable from a conversion of the researcher's subjective relation to his object, with the somewhat lofty externality of the objectivist observer giving way to the (theoretical and practical) proximity facilitated by theoretical reappropriation of the native relation to practice. It is no accident that the introduction of a point of view that places agents and their strategies in the central position, in place of the structures hypostatized by the structuralist vision, has become accepted with respect to societies which, like the peasant communities of Europe - long excluded from the central ethnological tradition are sufficiently close to make possible (once the social distance has been surmounted) a relationship of theoretical proximity to practice that is opposed both to the fusionist participation in the lived experience of the agents that is pursued by one variety of populist mystique and to the distant objectivation that a certain anthropological tradition, making a virtue of necessity, has turned into a deliberate methodological stance. As for the statistical analysis of the differential chances of marriage or non-marriage, for greater rigour it was necessary to recalculate, taking as the base population not (as in the 1962 article) the whole population resident in Lesquire at the time of the study, but the set of cohorts concerned (cf. appendix table on p. 192). This provided the means of calculating the differential rates of emigration according to different variables (sex, year of birth, father's socio-occupational category, birth rank, place of residence - bourg or hameaux) and also the chances of marriage of the migrants and those remaining in rela1 Scientific discoveries often have the ambiguous privilege, in anthropology-, of becoming self-evident as soon as they are made, and, short of evoking the (purely subjective) experience of the effort they required, one cannot find better evidence, at least for pedagogic purposes, of the distance that has been travelled than the successive states of the work that was necessary in order to obtain them or the apparentlyminor corrections and additions which, better than dramatic self-critiques, show the slow advance of an intellectual conversion. One can also give an idea of the movement of research by evoking the historical state of the problematic in relation to which it was set in motion (cf. P. Bourdieu, 'From rules to strategies', Cultural Anthropology, 1, no. 1 (1986), pp. 110-20). It is noteworthy that, in a response to an article that described the emergence and recent diffusion of the concept of strategy while limiting itself, as usual, to Anglo-American production (G. Crow, 'The use of the concept of "strategy" in recent sociological literature', Sociology, 23, no. 1 (Feb. 1989), pp. 124), David H. J. Morgan, who himself works in this area, points out that the first uses of this concept and the new 'paradigm' that they introduce into anthropology and sociology appeared in the sociology and history of the family and the household (D. H. J. Morgan, 'Strategies and sociologists: a comment on Crow', Sociology, 23, no. 1 (Feb. 1989), pp. 25-9).

Addenda and corrigenda

171

tion to these same variables. In fact, these statistics, which were very difficult and time-consuming to establish (information about emigrants had to be gathered orally from a whole series of informants), confirm, and make more specific, the conclusions already reached: it is indeed possible to say (with the prudence required in view of the small population involved) that the likelihood of leaving is much greater for women than men, especially in the hameaux, where the surplus of men attains striking proportions; that, for men, the likelihood of remaining on the land rises with the size of the property; and that, while the overall probability of emigrating is distinctly lower among eldest sons than younger sons (61 per cent as against 42 per cent), the effects of the right of the firstborn are no longer perceptible among small landowners. For women, no significant correlation is found between emigration and size of property or birth rank; women from richer families even leave the land slightly more often than others. As for the likelihood of marriage, other things being equal it is significantly greater for men who leave than men who stay,2 and, among the latter, greater in the bourg than in the hameaux? But the most important fact, which strikes those concerned as a scandal, is that, among those who stay, the probabilities of marriage scarcely vary, in the hameaux, as a function of the size of the property or birth rank, so that 'great eldest sons' or at least the inheritors of large estates may thus be condemned to bachelorhood.4 In fact, emigration and bachelorhood are closely interrelated (in particular because the likelihood of remaining unmarried is 2

This is not the case for women: those who have stayed on the land have a slightly lower rate of non-marriage (16% overall, 22% in the bourg, 17.5% in the hameaux) than those who have left (24%), which is understandable since they face a less difficult market. 3 A series of statistical tables based on lists of named individuals for the years 1954, 1962 and 1968 for the various communes of the canton of Lesquire reveal the same regularities as already observed in Lesquire. As in the hameaux of Lesquire, the failure to marry is particularly high among men in remote, isolated communes which are very similar to the hameaux in their distance from any urban centre, their scattered housing and their socio-occupational structure, whereas it is lower in the one commune which is close to a town (Oloron) with an industrial working-class population and which contains a relatively high proportion of industrial manual workers. 4 The notion of eldest son or inheritor must be taken in the social and not the biological sense. In the traditional situation, the arbitrariness of the social definition could be masked: it was almost inevitably the biological eldest who was treated as and behaved as the social eldest, i.e. as the inheritor. Nowadays, with the departure of the eldest, a son who is younger by birth may be invested with the status of inheritor. The inheritor is no longer just the one who stays because he is the eldest but also the one is eldest because he has staved.

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Proportion remaining, and, of those, the proportion unmarried, by place of residence, sex and size of property, among persons born in Lesquire before 1935 Bourg

Small owners (and servants) Medium owners Large owners Other occupations All

Hameaux

Remaining

Remaining unmarried

Remaining

Remaining unmarried

M F M F M F

28.5 50* 75* 100* 100* 40*

* * * * * *

43 33.5 70.5 50 82 43

57 15.2 61.5 22 55.5 33.5

M F M F

58.5 23.5 54 33.5

14 50 15.5 22

33.5 36.5 49.5 37

* * 56.5 17.7

The choice (in 1970) of 1935 as the upper limit for the cohorts examined gives a range that extends beyond the average age of marriage for men (29) and women (24) and close to the upper limit of 'marriageability' (there are only four or five cases of marriage after age 35). * Figures zero or too small (% is only indicative).

considerably increased by the fact of remaining, especially in the hameaux) and closely linked to the same system of factors (sex, initial socio-occupational category and, for farmers, the size of the farm, birth rank and, finally, place of residence - in the bourg or the hameaux). What is captured in the statistics of the relationships between this system of more or less closely interconnected factors and the probabilities of emigrating and of marrying (at a more or less young age) is the effect of the overall transformations of the social space and, more precisely, of the unification of the market in symbolic goods as it is exerted differentially on the various agents according to their objective attachment (greatest among the first-born sons of 'great' families) and subjective attachment (inscribed in their habitus and bodily hexis) to the old-style peasant mode of existence. In both cases, one is in a sense measuring the tangible resultant of the force of attraction exerted by the social field which is now unified around dominant urban realities, with the opening up of isolates, and the

Addenda and corrigenda

173

force of inertia that the various agents exert against it on the basis of the categories of perception, appreciation and action that are constitutive of their habitus. The unification of the social field, of which the unification of the symbolic goods market, and therefore of the matrimonial market, is one aspect, takes place both in objectivity - under the effect of a whole set of factors as different as the increased movement encouraged by improved means of transport, generalized access to a form of secondary education, etc. - and in representations. One would be tempted to say that it takes place in objectivity leading to phenomena of differential elimination, of which the nonmarriage of the heirs is the most significant example - only because it takes place in and through the subjectivity of the agents who grant a recognition that is at once extorted and accepted to processes oriented towards their own submission.

'From the closed world to the infinite universe'

In borrowing the title of Alexander Koyre's famous work, my intention is simply to evoke the set of processes which, in the economic order but also and especially in the symbolic order, have accompanied the objective and subjective opening of the peasant world (and, more generally, the rural world), progressively neutralizing the efficacy of the factors which tended to ensure the relative autonomy of that world and to make possible a particular form of resistance to the central values. These factors (to mention only the most important ones) included: a low level of dependence on the market, especially as regards consumption, thanks to the role given to ascetic selfsufficiency (which is linked to homogamy); and geographical isolation, intensified by the precarious nature of the means of transport (roads and vehicles), which tended to reduce the area of travel and to favour enclosure in a locally based social world, imposing both interdependence and mutual acquaintance in spite of economic and cultural differences. This objective and subjective enclosure made possible a form of cultural particularism^ based on a more or less self-confident resistance to urban norms, particularly as regards language, and a kind of localocentrism, in religion and politics. For example, ordinary political choices were to a large extent made by reference to the immediate context, that is, on the basis of the position occupied in the hierarchy within the closed microcosm which tended to block out the social macrocosm and the relative position that the microcosm occupied within it (for example, above a certain

rrom me ciosea woria w we injinne universe

i /,>

level in the local hierarchy, one 'had', so to speak, to be church-going and conservative, and, for a well-off peasant, regular church attendance, and providing the priest with the communion wine, was a question of pourtale, the 'entrance gate', social standing). In other words, the position occupied in the social space by this microcosm, with its own social hierarchies, its dominant and its dominated agents and its own 'class' conflicts, had no practical effect on the representation that the peasants had of their world and their place in it.1 The unification of the market in economic and symbolic goods has the primary effect of sweeping away the conditions of existence of peasant values capable of presenting themselves, in the face of the dominant values, as antagonistic, at least subjectively, and not simply as different (to evoke the old Platonic opposition between enantion and heteron, which would suffice to clarify many confused discussions about 'popular culture'). Limited and masked dependence progressively gives way to a deep, perceived and even recognized dependence. There have been many descriptions of the logic and effects of the reinforcement of the domination of the market economy over small-scale agriculture (which would include the 'biggest' among the peasants of Lesquire). For its production, an agricultural undertaking depends ever more on the market in industrial goods (machines, fertilizer, etc.) and it cannot muster the investments needed to modernize the productive equipment and improve yields except by resorting to loans that are likely to jeopardize its financial equilibrium and confine it to a particular type of products and outlets. To market its products, it again depends more and more closely on the market in The categories 'right' and left', which are characteristic of the central political field, do not have at all the same meaning in the macrocosm and in the local microcosm (if indeed they have any meaning at all in that context). It is the structural allodoxia which results from the relative autonomy of the locally based units, and not spatial dispersion (as Marx suggests, with the metaphor of the sack of potatoes) that explains the constant singularity of the political positions taken by peasants, and more generally by country-dwellers. To account fully for that allodoxia, the effects of which are far from having disappeared, one has to consider a whole set of characteristics of the peasant and rural condition, which can only be sketched here: the fact that the constraints inherent in production present themselves in the form of natural relationships rather than through social relationships (the schedules and rhythms of production are determined exclusively by the rhythms of nature, and independently of any human will; the success of the farming enterprise seems to depend on climatic conditions more than on structures of ownership or the market, etc.); the fact that the universal dependence on the judgement of others takes a very particular form in these closed worlds in which everyone feels constantly under the gaze of others and condemned to coexist with them for life (this is the argument 'You have to learn to live with it', invoked to justify prudent submission to collective verdicts and resignation to conformism). etc.

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agricultural products and, more precisely, agribusiness (in the particular case, the milk distribution industry). Because their operating costs depend on the general movement of (mainly industrial) prices, over which they have no control, and particularly because their income increasingly depends on guaranteed prices (such as those for milk or tobacco), the ups and downs of the economic situation tend to take the place, both in reality and in their world view, that was formerly occupied by the vagaries of nature: through the economic intervention of the authorities - in particular, price indexation - a political action, tending to arouse political reactions, has made its appearance in the quasi-natural world of the peasant economy.2 This has the effect of inclining the peasants to a more politicized vision of the social world, but one whose anti-state colouring still owes much to the illusion of autonomy which is the basis of self-exploitation. The split and even contradictory representation that these small landowners, now converted into quasi-wage-earners, have of their condition and which is often expressed in political position-takings that are simultaneously in revolt and conservative, is rooted in the objective ambiguities of a profoundly contradictory condition. Having remained, at least in appearance, the masters of the organization of their activity (unlike the industrial worker, who brings his labour power onto the market, they have products to sell) and also the owners of means of production (buildings and equipment) which may represent a very large invested capital (although it can never in fact be turned into cash), they often secure an income less than that of a skilled industrial worker from work that is hard, demanding and symbolically unrewarding, although more and more skilled. Through an unintended effect of technocratic policy, particularly as regards aid and credit, they have been led to contribute, through their various investments, to the establishment of a production system that is in practice as strongly socialized as those of what are called socialist 2

Although it is always masked, even in the eyes of those responsible for it, under technical justifications, price policy fundamentally depends on the weight of the peasantry in the balance of political forces and the interest that the dominant may have in the existence of a pre-capitalist agriculture that is expensive but politically reliable and therefore profitable in another sense (and necessary, as was discovered in the 1990s, in order to maintain the aesthetic charm of the countryside). Would the technocratic desire to accelerate the rural exodus so as to reduce waste and to throw onto the labour market the workers and capital now 'diverted' into small-scale agriculture be so brutally asserted if the urban petite bourgeoisie, eager for upward mobility and concerned for respectability, had not taken the place, in the system of political alliances, of a peasantry which is thus thrown back into forms of protest, both violent and localized (in particular because of its isolation from other social forces), in which all its contradictions are expressed?

'From the closed world to the infinite universe'

177

economies, particularly through the constraints that bear on prices and on the production process itself, while conserving nominal ownership of and also responsibility for the production apparatus, with all the incitements to self-exploitation that flow from this. The growing subordination of the peasant economy to the logic of the market would not have sufficed, in itself, to determine the profound transformations of which the rural world has been the site, starting with massive emigration, if this process had not itself been linked, in a relation of circular causality, to a unification of the market in symbolic goods which tends to induce the decline of the ethical autonomy of the peasants and, thereby, the withering away of their capacities for resistance and refusal. It is acknowledged that, in a very general way, emigration from the agricultural sector is a function of the relationship between wage-earners in agriculture and in non-agricultural sectors and of the supply of jobs in these sectors (measured by the rate of industrial non-employment). One might also put forward a simple mechanical model of the migratory flows by positing on the one hand that there is a field of attraction with differences of potential which vary with the gap between the economic situations (income level, rate of employment), and on the other hand that agents present an inertia or resistance to the forces of the field which varies according to various factors. But this model cannot be found completely satisfactory unless one forgets the preconditions for its functioning, which are in no way mechanical. For example, the gap in incomes between agriculture and non-agricultural activities exerts an effect only in so far as comparison, as a conscious or unconscious act of seeing one thing in relation to another, becomes possible and socially acceptable, and in so far as it works to the advantage of the urban way of life, where income is only one dimension among others - in other words, in so far as the closed, finite world opens up and the subjective screens which made any kind of comparison between the two worlds impossible progressively fall away. To put it another way, the advantages associated with urban life exist and attract only if they become perceived and appreciated advantages - only if, therefore, they are apprehended through categories of perception and appreciation such that they cease to be unnoticed, passively or actively ignored, and become perceptible and appreciable, visible and desirable. And indeed, the attraction of the urban way of life can only work on minds converted to its attractions: it is the collective conversion of the world view that confers on the social field that is drawn into an objective process of unification a symbolic power grounded in the recognition unanimously accorded to the dominant values.

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The symbolic revolution is the cumulated product of countless individual conversions, which, beyond a certain threshold, drag each other in an ever faster race. The banalization induced by familiarity causes one to forget the extraordinary psychological labour presupposed, especially in the initial phase of the process, by each departure from the land and the house; and one would need to describe the effort of preparation, the occasions tending to favour or trigger the decision, the stages of a mental distancing that is always difficult to achieve (a part-time job in the bourg as a postman or driver providing for example the jumping-off point for departure to the town) and sometimes never completed (as shown by the lifelong efforts of forced emigrants to 'get closer' to the homeland). Each of the agents concerned passes, simultaneously or successively, through phases of self-certainty, of more or less aggressive anxiety and of crisis in self-esteem (which is expressed in the ritual laments of the end of the peasantry and the 'land' ('the land is blighted'). The propensity to move more or less quickly through the psychological trajectory that leads to the reversal of the table of peasant values depends on the position occupied in the old hierarchy, through the interests and dispositions associated with that position. The agents who put up the weakest resistance to the external forces of attraction, who perceive earlier and better than the others the advantages associated with emigration, are those who are subjectively and objectively least attached to the land and the house, because they are women, younger sons, or poor. It is again the old order that defines the order in which people move away from it. Women, who, as symbolic objects of exchange, circulated upwards and therefore found themselves spontaneously inclined to be eager and compliant towards urban injunctions or seductions, are, together with younger sons, the 'Trojan horse' of the urban world. Less attached than the men (and the younger sons themselves) to the peasant condition and less involved in work and the responsibilities of power, therefore less restrained by concern for the patrimony to be 'kept up', better disposed towards education and the promises of mobility it contains, they bring into the heart of the peasant world the urban gaze that devalues and disqualifies 'peasant qualities'. Thus, the restructuring of the perception of the social world that is at the heart of individual and collective conversion is interlinked with the ending of the collectively maintained psychological autarky that made the closed world of familiar existence an absolute reference - a reference so totally undisputed that the selective distancing of those who, as poorer younger sons or daughters, had to abandon the soil for and through work and marriage was still a homage paid to

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the central values and recognized as such.3 The collective conversion that leads to an ever growing number of departures and which will eventually affect the survivors themselves is inseparable from what has to be called a Copernican revolution: the central, immutable site, the seat of a hierarchy no less immutable and unique, is now merely a point like any other in a larger space, indeed, worse, a low, inferior, dominated point. The commune, with its hierarchies (for example, the opposition between the 'big' and 'small' peasants), is recreated in a larger social space within which the peasants as a whole occupy a dominated position. And the very ones who held the highest positions in that suddenly relegated world will end up - having failed to perform the necessary conversions and reconversions - bearing all the costs of the symbolic revolution which strikes at the old order in a strategic point, the matrimonial market; because farming is situated in an economic market and a labour market that condemns it to have only domestic labour as its labour-power, this market does indeed very directly govern the reproduction of agricultural labour-power and, through it, the peasant enterprise.

3 The symbolic rout of peasant values is now so total that one needs to recall some typical examples of their triumphant assertion: for example, this denunciation of loss of status uttered just before the First World War by the wife of a 'great inheritor' in Denguin, referring to another 'great inheritor': 'X. is marrying his daughter to a factory worker!' (in realty a smallholder from Saint-Faust employed as a clerical assistant at the Maison du Paysan); or another cri du coeur with reference to a great family in Arbus whose daughter had been married to a civil servant: 'Dop u emplegatV (To a clerk!').

The unification of the matrimonial market

As a quite particular market, in which it is persons, with all their social properties, who have a price directly set on them, the matrimonial market constitutes, for the peasants, a particularly dramatic occasion to discover the transformation of the table of values and the collapse of the social price that is assigned to them. That is what was revealed, in a particularly dramatic way, by the Christmas ball, the starting-point for the whole research undertaking, which appears - at the end of a long effort of theoretical construction, broadened as it proceeded to empirical objects that phenomenally are quite different - as the paradigmatic realization of the whole process leading to the crisis of the peasant order of the past.1 The ball is indeed the visible form of the new logic of the matrimonial market. Being a culmination of a process through which the autonomous and self-regulated mechanisms of a matrimonial market whose limits extend far beyond the peasant world tend to take the 1 In relation to this example, one needs to try to clarify what is ordinarily called intuition. The concrete scene through which the problem presents itself is a veritable behavioural paradigm which condenses the whole logic of a complex process in a perceptible form. And it is not without importance that the highly significant character of the scene only offers itself, initially, to an interested perception, a perception that is even profoundly biased, as the treatises on methodology put it, because it is charged with all the affective resonances and emotional colourings that are implied in sympathetic participation in the situation and in the painful point of view of the victims.

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place of the regulated exchanges of the small local market subordinated to the norms and interest of the group, it manifests, concretely, the most specific - and most dramatic - effect of the unification of the market in symbolic exchanges and the transformation which, in this area as elsewhere, accompanies the transition from the local market to the market economy.2 As Engels puts it, the agents have 'lost control of their own social interrelations'; the laws of competition impose themselves on them 'in spite of anarchy, in and through anarchy'.3 The great inheritors condemned to bachelorhood are the victims of the competition which now dominates a matrimonial market previously protected by the (often resented) constraints and controls of tradition. By inducing an abrupt devaluation of all the products of the peasant mode of production and reproduction, of everything that peasant families have to offer, whether land and country life or the peasant's very being, his language, his attire, his manners, his bearing and even his 'physique', the unification of the market neutralizes the social mechanisms which, within the confines of a restricted market, ensured him a de facto monopoly that could provide him with all the women necessary for the social reproduction of the group, and only those. In marriage as in any other form of exchange, the existence of a market in no way implies that transactions only obey the mechanical laws of competition. iMany of the institutional mechanisms tend to give the group control over exchanges and to protect it against the effects of the 'anarchy' to which Engels refers, and which is often forgotten, because of the sympathy spontaneously accorded to the 'liberal' model, which, as in classical comedy, liberates lovers from the dictates of domestic raison d'etat. Thus, under the old matrimonial regime, because the initiative in marriage lay not with the interested parties 2

The informants explicitly contrast the two ways in which the relationships leading to marriage are set up: negotiation between the families, often on the basis of previous links, and direct contact, which almost always takes places at dances. The price of the freedom that results from direct interaction between the parties, who are no longer subject to family pressures and economic or ethical considerations (such as the girl's 'reputation'), is the submission to the laws of the market of individuals abandoned to their own resources. 3 The distinction that Karl Polanyi makes between 'isolated markets' and the 'market economy', and more precisely between 'regulated markets and the 'self-regulating market' (K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (1944), 7th edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 56-76), brings an important refinement to the Marxist analysis of the 'anarchy' of 'socialized production' in which 'the product governs the producers': the existence of a market is not sufficient to make a market economy so long as the group retains control of the mechanisms of exchange.

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but with their families, the values and interests of the 'house' and its heritage had more chance of prevailing over the whims and accidents of sentiment.4 All the more so because all familial education predisposed young people to comply with parental injunctions and to evaluate potential suitors in accordance with specifically peasant categories of perception: a 'good peasant' was identified by the rank of his house, inseparably linked to the size of his property and the standing of his family, and also by personal qualities such as authority, competence and aptitude for hard work, while a 'good wife' wasfirstand foremost a 'good peasant woman', industrious and willing to accept the position she was offered. Never having 'known anything else', the girls of the neighbouring bameaux and the whole area of the hills were more disposed to put up with the lot that marriage held out for them; born and brought up in a zone relatively cut off from external influences they were less likely to judge their potential partners in accordance with heterodox criteria. Thus, before 1914, the matrimonial market of the peasants in the bameaux around Lesquire extended to the region between the Gave de Pau and the Gave d'Oloron, an economically and socially very homogeneous set of communes consisting, like Lesquire, of a small bourg with a still strongly peasant character and farms scattered on the hillsides and the lower slopes of the mountains.5 The group's control over exchanges was asserted in the restriction of the size of the matrimonial market measured in geographical distance and, more importantly, social distance. Although, in this domain, like others, the peasant world never had the total autonomy and autarky that ethnologists have often attributed to it, if only by taking the village as their object, it had been able to retain control of its reproduction by making almost all of its matrimonial exchanges within an extremely narrow and socially homogeneous 'pertinent market'; homogeneity of the material conditions of existence, and therefore of habitus, is indeed the best guarantee of the perpetuation of the fundamental values of the group. 4

The most typical institution of the old matrimonial regime was of course the quasiinstitutionalized matchmaker (called the trachur or talame). In a universe in which the separation between the sexes, which was always very marked, probably only grew stronger as a result of the weakening of traditional social bonds, especially in the bameaux, and the declining frequency of the traditional opportunities for meeting, such as all the collective work, the laissez-faire of the new matrimonial regime could only strengthen the advantage of the urbanites. 5 The different neighbourhoods of Lesquire had, within the common area, specific sectors defined by a tendency to shop in the same markets and attend the same festivities, or, more precisely, to use the same buses (which took the inhabitants of the different neighbourhoods in different directions and gave rise to contacts among the passengers).

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This closed world in which people felt themselves to be among like-minded people has gradually opened up. In the hameaux of the main area of marriages, as in the hameaux around Lesquire, women increasingly look to the town rather than their own or neighbouring hameaux. Being quicker than men to adopt urban models and ideals, they are reluctant to marry a peasant who offers them exactly what they want to escape from (among other things, the authority of the parents-in-law 'who will not let go' and more especially the tyranny of the old daune who intends to keep the upper hand in the household, particularly if the father lacks authority because he has married upwards). Finally, and most importantly, they have more chance of finding a match outside the peasant world, first because, in accordance with the very logic of the system, they are the ones who circulate, and who marry upwards. It follows that matrimonial exchanges between the peasant hameaux and the bourgs or towns can only go in one direction. As is shown by the presence in the small country balls of young urban males whose ease and charm give them an incalculable advantage over the peasants, the matrimonial market that was formerly controlled and quasi-protected is now opened up to harsh and unequal competition. Whereas the urbanite can choose between several hierarchized markets (towns, bourgs, hameaux), the peasant in the hameaux is confined to his own area and has to compete even here with rivals who are better endowed, at least symbolically. Far from the recent extension of the matrimonial area of the peasant men giving access to a greater degree of freedom and leading, through the enlarged space of possible marriages, to increased chances of marriage, it quite simply expresses the need that the least well-endowed have to expand the geographical area of prospection, but within the limits of social homogeneity (or, rather, to maintain that homogeneity) and to direct their expectation, unlike their sisters, to the remotest hameaux of the Basque country or Gascony.6 6

Without claiming here to offer a general theory of matrimonial exchanges in socially differentiated societies, I would simply like to indicate that the description of a process of unification of the matrimonial market in no way implies subscribing to the model of the unified matrimonial market that is at work, in the implicit state, in common theories of the 'choice of spouse'. This model, which assumes the homogeneity of the functions of homogamy, without seeing that it can have opposite meanings depending on whether it takes place among the privileged or the dispossessed, makes the attraction of like for like, as suggested by common-sense intuition ('birds of a feather flock together'), i.e. the pursuit of homogamy, the universal but empty principle of homogamy. But nor should one succumb to the opposite illusion of treating the different matrimonial markets (for example, the 'peasant' market, which continues to function, more or less well) as so many separate worlds, free of any dependency. Just as one can account for the variations in wages by region, branch or occupation only by

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As regularly happens when a social order starts, often imperceptibly, to fall apart, the old-timers contribute to their own decline. Either they comply with the sense of statutory dignity which forbids them to demean themselves and to make the necessary concessions in time, or indeed to resort to the strategies of despair that the crisis forces on the most disadvantaged - this is the case with those heirs to good families who resign themselves to bachelorhood after several fruitless attempts to marry girls of their own rank or those who, while they are still sought after and courted, miss their moment, the turningpoint of the 1950s when marriage was still an easy matter for 'big' peasants ('Many girls he disdained would suit him very well now,' an informant said of one of them); or they confront the new situation with old principles that lead them to act out of phase. This is true of the mothers who busy themselves with finding a husband for their daughter when they should be thinking of their son, or the even larger number who reject as misalliances marriages that they should have welcomed as miracles. The responses of the habitus, which, when it is in phase with the world, are often so marvellously adjusted to that they can make one believe in rational calculation, may on the contrary be quite inappropriate when, confronted with a world different from the one that produced it, the habitus runs, so to speak, in neutral, projecting the expectation of the objective structures of which it is the product on a world from which they have disappeared. The mismatches between the habitus and the structures, and the misfirings of behaviour that result from it, can no doubt sometimes trigger critical revisions and conversions. But the crisis does not necessarily provoke the awakening of consciousness; and the time needed to understand the new course of events is no doubt proportionate to abandoning the hypothesis of a single, unified labour market, and refusing to artificially aggregate heterogeneous data, and instead aiming to discover the structural laws of functioning specific to the different markets, so one cannot understand the variations observed in the chances of marriage in the different social categories, i.e. the price set on the products of their upbringing and education, unless one sees that there are different hierarchized markets and that the prices that may be assigned to the different categories of 'candidates for marriage' depend on their chances of entering the different markets and on the rarity, and therefore the value, they have on those markets (which can be measured by the material and symbolic value of the matrimonial goods for which they have been exchanged). Whereas the most advantaged may extend the geographical and social range of their marriages (within the limits of misalliance), the least advantaged may be condemned to extend their geographical area to compensate for the social restriction of the social area in which they can find partners. It is in terms of this logic, that of strategies of despair, that one can understand the 'bachelors' fairs', the first of which was held in Esparros, in the Baronnies, in 1966.

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the degree of objective and subjective attachment to the old world, the interests and investments in the stakes that it offers. This explains why, so often, privilege is reversed. In fact, at different speeds according to the interests they have invested in the old and the new systems, with forward and backward steps, the different agents pursue the trajectory that leads from the old to the new matrimonial regime, at the cost of a revision of the values and representations associated with each. And the most characteristic effect of the revolutionary crisis, which is expressed in prophylactic prophecies, forecasts intended as exorcism - in the form 'the land is blighted' - is that kind of doubling of consciousness and conduct which leads people to act successively or simultaneously according to the contradictory principles of the two antagonistic principles. Thus the statistics establish that when the sons of peasants manage to marry, they marry the daughters of peasants, whereas the daughters of peasants often marry non-peasants. These matrimonial strategies show, in their very antagonism, that the group does not want for its girls what it wants for its boys, or, worse, that it does not want these boys for its girls, even if it wants some of these girls for its boys. In resorting to strictly opposite strategies depending on whether they are giving or taking women, peasant families reveal that, under the effect of symbolic violence, the violence of which one is both object and the subject, each of them is divided against itself: whereas endogamy manifested the consistency of criteria of evaluation, and thus the agreement of the group with itself, the duality of matrimonial strategies brings to light the duality of the criteria that the group uses to assess the value of an individual, and therefore its own value as a class of individuals. In accordance with a logic analogous to that governing processes of inflation (or, at a higher degree of intensity, the phenomena of panic), each family or each agent contributes to the depreciation of the group as a whole, which is itself at the root of its matrimonial strategies. Everything takes place as if the symbolically dominated group were conspiring against itself. By acting as if its right hand did not know what the left hand was doing, it helps to set up the conditions for the bachelorhood of the inheritors, and for the rural exodus, which it elsewhere deplores as social calamity. By giving its daughters, whom it used to marry upwards, to town-dwellers, it shows that it consciously or unconsciously accepts the urban representation of the peasant and anticipated value of the peasant. The urban image of the peasant, always present but repressed, imposes itself even in the consciousness of the peasant. The collapse of the certitudo sui that the peasants had managed to defend against all symbolic aggressions, including those of the Republican 'school as an integrating force',

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reinforces the effects of the attack that provokes it: the crisis of 'peasant values', which finds the opportunity to express itself in the anarchy of the exchanges of the matrimonial market, intensifies the crisis of the value of the peasant, his goods, his products, and his whole being, on the market in material and symbolic goods. The internal defeat, felt at the individual level, which is at the root of these isolated betrayals, performed under cover of the anonymous solitude of the market, leads to this collective, unwanted outcome, the flight of the women and the bachelorhood of the men. The same mechanism underlines the conversion of the peasants' attitude towards the educational system, the main instrument of the symbolic domination of the urban world. Because the school is seen as the only agency capable of teaching the aptitudes that the economic market or the symbolic market demand with ever-increasing urgency, such as the manipulation of standard French or mastery of economic calculation, the resistance previously put up against schooling and scholastic values is fading." Submission to the values of the school reinforces and accelerates the renunciation of the traditional values that it presupposes. In this way, the school fulfils its function of symbolic domination, helping to win a new market for urban symbolic products. Even when it does not succeed in giving the means of appropriating the dominant culture, it can at least inculcate recognition of the legitimacy of that culture and of those who possess the means of appropriating it. The correlation that exists between the rates of school enrolment and the rates of bachelorhood among farmers (aggregated at the level of the region) should not be read as a causal relationship. That would be to forget that the two terms of the relationship are the product of a single principle, even if education can in its turn play a part in reinforcing the efficacy of the mechanisms that produce bachelorhood.8 The 7

The steady decline in the value of the vernacular languages on the market of symbolic exchanges is only a particular case of devaluation affecting all the products of peasant upbringing: the unification of this market has been deadly for all these products, manners, objects, garments, which are cast into the order of the old-fashioned and vulgar or artificially preserved by local scholars, in the fossilized state of folklore. The peasants go into the museums of popular arts and traditions or into 'ecomuseums' resembling exhibitions of stuffed yokels, as they fade from the reality of historical action. 8 At the level of the region it is barely possible to apprehend the system of explanatory factors that determine the matrimonial strategies of the farmers. Given the heterogeneity of the farming units, even within the region, one would need to be able to take into account all at once the size of the property, the life-cycle of the family, the number of children, their distribution by sex, their respective scholastic success, etc. Thus a farmer with a 25-year-old son, owning 20 hectares of land, cannot retire at 60 and leave the farm to his son, who would willingly have taken it on. If he

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unification of the economic and symbolic market (of which the generalized recourse to the educational system is one aspect) tends, as has been seen, to transform the system of reference through which the peasants situate their position in the social structure. One of the factors of peasant demoralization, which is expressed as much in the school enrolment of their children as in emigration or the abandonment of the local languages, is the collapse of the screen of locally based social relations which helped to mask the truth of their position in the social structure - the peasant apprehends his condition by comparison with that of the junior civil servant or the factory worker. The comparison is no longer abstract or imaginary, as it once was. It arises in concrete confrontations even within the family, with the emigrants and, perhaps especially, in the relations of real competition in which the peasants find themselves measured against non-peasants, at the time of marriages. By giving practical preference to town-dwellers, the women underline the dominant principles of social hierarchization. Measured by that standard, the products of peasant upbringing, and particularly of peasant ways of behaving towards women, are of little worth: the peasant becomes a 'peasant' in the pejorative sense that the urbanite gives to the word. In accordance with the logic of the racism that is also observed between the classes, the peasant is constantly obliged to reckon, in his practice, with the representation of himself that urbanites present to him; and he still recognizes himself in the denials with which he counters the devaluation that the townsman forces on him. It is immediately clear how the educational system can accelerate the circular process of devaluation. First, there is no doubt that it possesses in itself a capacity for diversion which can suffice to defeat the reinforcement strategies through which families seek to direct their children's investments towards the land rather than the school - if the school itself has not been sufficient to discourage them through its negative sanctions. This effect of deculturation is brought about not so much through the pedagogic message itself as through the experience of study and the condition of quasi-student. The raising of the school-leaving age and the prolongation of study turn farmers' children into 'high-school pupils' and even 'students', cut off from peasant society by their whole lifestyle and especially by their temporal rhythms.9 This new experience tends to de-realize had a larger farm, he could divide it temporarily in two; if there were a greater age gap with his son, he could leave it to him at 60. 9 The longer that farmers' children remain in the educational system, the more likely they are to leave the farm. Among farmers' children, those who have pursued technical or general, secondary or higher education are those most inclined to turn away from farming, as opposed to those who have only received primary schooling or

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practically the values transmitted by the family and to direct affective and economic investments away from reproduction of the lineage to reproduction by the singular individual of the position of the lineage in the social structure. Here too, it is above all through the effects on the daughters that the school affects the farmers' sons who have to reproduce the peasant family and property: the action of deculturation finds a particularly favourable terrain among the girls, whose aspirations always tend to be organized around marriage and who are consequently more attentive and more sensitive to urban fashions and manners and to the whole set of social markers defining the value of potential partners on the market in symbolic goods, and therefore inclined to derive from scholastic education at least the external signs of urban civility. And it is significant that, as if, once again, the peasants were acting as the accomplices of their objective destiny, they send more of their daughters to school and for longer.10 As well as having the effect of cutting off farmers from their means of biological and social reproduction, these mechanisms tend to favour the appearance, in the consciousness of the peasants, of a catastrophic image of their collective future. And the technocratic prophecy which announces the disappearance of the peasants can only reinforce this representation by giving meaning and coherence to the countless fragmentary indices provided by everyday experience. The effect of demoralization exerted by a pessimistic representation of the future of the class contributes to the decline of the class which produces it. It follows that the economic and political competition between the classes also takes place through the symbolic manipulation of the future: forecasting, the rational form of prophecy, tends to help bring about the future that it predicts. There is no doubt that,

agricultural training. Not only have they been explicitly or implicitly prepared to enter a non-agricultural occupation or live in an urban environment, but they suffer economically if they enter farming below certain thresholds of surface area or capital. Finally, they are the ones best placed to be well aware of the opportunities for nonagricultural employment and to move to areas where the income prospects are greatest (cf. P. Dauce, G. Jegouzo and Y. Lambert, La Formation des enfants d'agriculteurs et leur orientation hors de Vagriculture. Kesultats d'une enquete exploratoire en Uleet-Vilaine (Rennes: INRA, 1971)). 10 In 1962,41.1 % of farmers' daughters aged 15-19 were in education, as against just 32% of the boys (cf. M. Praderie, 'Heritage social et chances d'ascension', in Darras, Le Partage des benefices (Paris: Minuit, 1966), p. 348). While the rates of schooling for boys and girls are fairly close for those aged 10-14 and 20-24, one notes that girls aged 15-19 and especially those whose father runs a farm of more than 10 hectares are much more likely to be in school than the boys (cf. 'Environnement economique des exploitations agricoles franchises', Statistiques Agricoles, 86 (Oct. 1971) (supplement, £tudes series), pp. 156-66).

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through the effect of the dialectic of the objective and the subjective, simply by bringing to light the laws of the economic market which condemn small farmers, small craftsmen and small shopkeepers, and making them widely known even among those most directly 'interested', economic information helps to produce the phenomena it describes. Demoralization is never anything other than a particular form of self-fulfilling prophecy. The peasantry is a limiting case, and, as such, a particularly interesting one, of the relationship between objective determinisms and the anticipation of their effects. It is because they have internalized their objective future, and the representation that the dominant, who have the power to bring it about through their decisions, have of it, that the peasants behave in ways that tend to threaten their reproduction. What is at stake in the conflict over representations of the future is nothing other than the attitude of the declining classes to their decline - either demoralization, which leads to a rout, a sum of individual escapes, or mobilization, which leads to the collective search for a collective solution to the crisis. What can make the difference is, fundamentally, the possession of the symbolic instruments enabling the group to take control of the crisis and to organize themselves with a view to a collective response, rather than fleeing from real or feared degradation in reactionary resentment and the representation of history as a conspiracy.11 11 In general terms, the economic alienation that leads to the reactionary violence of conservative revolt is at the same a logical and philosophical alienation: agents in decline turn towards racism and, more generally, towards the false concretization that locates the source of their present and potential difficulties in a scapegoat group (Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, Communists, etc.), because they do not possess the explanatory schemes that would enable them to understand the situation and mobilize collectively to change it rather than falling into the panic of individual subterfuges. In the particular case, it is clear that regionalist or nationalist demands constitute a specific and sensible riposte to the symbolic domination resulting from unification of the market. I say this in opposition to the various forms of economism which, in the name of a restricted definition of the economy and of rationality, and having failed to understand as such the economy of symbolic goods, reduce the specifically symbolic demands that are always more or less confusedly involved in linguistic, regionalist or nationalist movements to the absurdity of passion or sentiment (cf. for example this typical declaration by Raymond Cartier in Paris-Match, 21 August 1971, on the demands of the Irish Catholics: 'Nothing is more absurd, the departure of either would mean economic disaster. But it is not self-interest, alas, that drives the world. The world is driven by passion'). In fact, what is absurd, and what casts three-quarters of human behaviours into absurdity, is the classic distinction between passions and interests, which ignores the existence of symbolic interests that are quite tangible and capable of giving a (symbolic) rationality to behaviours seemingly as perfectly 'emotional' as linguistic struggles, some feminist demands (such as the battles over pronouns in English) or some forms of regionalist demands.

'Sound opinions of the people'

Having said often enough that spontaneous sociology should be regarded with suspicion, and being more than ever inclined to reject all the forms of everyday chatter on everyday life that have again become current in a cycle of intellectual fashion, I feel entitled to point out that the despair or indignation of those most directly involved often points to problems that research frequently ignores or avoids. This is true of the bachelorhood of elder sons, which, in the 1960s, when some populist discourse was proclaiming the emergence of a new peasant elite, seemed to focus all the anxiety of rural families. Indeed, if one accepts the argument that the biological reproduction of the farming family is one of the conditions of the functioning of the farming enterprise in its traditional form,1 then it can be understood that the crisis of the matrimonial institution, the keystone of the whole system of reproduction strategies, threatens the very existence of the peasant 'house', that indissociable unity of a heritage and a household. Many of the middle-ranking landowners who, according to the national statistics, have been the great beneficiaries of the slight concentration of land ownership made possible by the decline 1

Cf. A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy> ed. D. Thorner, B. Kerblay and R. E. F. Smith (Homewood, 111.: Irwin, 1966), esp. the introduction by B. Kerblay, also published in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, 5, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1964), pp. 411-60; D. Thorner, 'Une theorie neo-populiste de Peconomie paysanne: l'£cole de A. V. Gajanov', Annates, 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1966), pp. 1232-44.

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191

of smallholdings and who have shown themselves to be the most modern-minded, both technically and in their involvement in associations or unions, have been affected by enforced bachelorhood. In leaving so many properties without heirs, the bachelorhood of eldest sons has brought about what the effects of economic domination and the (at least relative) decline in farming incomes could not have achieved on their own.2 If, having read these analyses, one is persuaded that the symbolic domination that occurs as a result of the unification of the matrimonial market has played a decisive role in the specific crisis of the reproduction of the peasant family, then one must recognize that the attention given to the symbolic dimension of practices, far from representing an idealistic flight towards the ethereal spheres of the superstructure, constitutes the condition sine qua non, and not only in this case, for a real understanding (which one may call, if one wishes, materialist) of the phenomena of domination. But the opposition between infrastructure and superstructure or between the economic and the symbolic is simply the crudest of the oppositions which, by confining the analysis of power to fictitious alternatives constraint or voluntary submission, centralist manipulation or spontaneist self-mystification - make it impossible to fully understand the infinitely subtle logic of the symbolic violence that is set up in the self-obscure relationship between socialized bodies and the social games in which they are engaged.3

2

At the end of a study of the factors in the disappearance of farm enterprises, Andre Brun concludes that 'the "exits" of farmers are essentially the result of mortality and retirement' ('Perspectives sur le remplacement des chefs d'exploitation agricole d'apres l'enquete au l/10e de 1963', Statistique Agricole, supplement 28 (July 1967). In Lesquire, in 1968, 50% of the farmers were over 45, more than half of them were unmarried, and the peasant population showed a net decline due to the birth deficit resulting from non-marriage and late marriage. In 1989, the generation directly affected by the crisis of the 1960s is beginning to die out, and a very large proportion of the properties will disappear with their owner. 3 Although I do not much like the typically scholastic exercise of reviewing, so as to distinguish oneself from them, all the theories competing with the argument that is proposed - among other reasons, because it can suggest that the latter may have had no other principle than the pursuit of difference - 1 should like to point out all the difference that separates the theory of symbolic violence as a misrecognition based on the unconscious adjustment of the subjective structures to the objective structures, from Michel Foucault's theory of domination as discipline and training - or, in another order, the difference between metaphors of an open, capillary network and a concept such as that of the field.

Men Women All

Unmarried women Married women All women All

4 12 16 23 30 14 8 22

3 3 7 2 5 7

3 1 4

n.a.

3 4

1 7 8 34 4 12 16 1 9 10 26 60

14 12 26

Eldest

170 275 27 21 48

16 72 88

105 14 68 82

64 8 51 59

11 51 62 121 185 12 10 22

35 27 62 7 36 43

All

18 14 32 6 26 32

Younger

Small (<15 ha.)

1

1

-

n.a.

31 1 9 10

13

10 10 20 51 2 2 4

8 8 9 22 1 1

1 1

2 2

11 4 15 4 12 16

Younger

5 6 11

Eldest

Medium (15-30ha.)

Farmers

18 18 29 73 4 2 6

1 10 11

44

16 10 26 4 14 18

All

n.a.

1

3 10 1

2 2

1

1 1 7

3 3 6

Eldest

6 6 7 15 1 2 3

1

8

2 1 3 2 3 5

Younger

Large (>30ha.)

8 8 10 25 2 2 4

2 2

15

5 4 9 2 4 6

All

15 3 10 13 2 10 12 25 40 8 10 18

8 8

7

5

2

Other1

The data for domestic servants and farmhands, craftsmen and shopkeepers, and civil servants (postmen, gendarmes, etc.) could not be analysed here.

Deceased

Stayed+left

Left

Stayed

Unmarried men Married men All men Unmarried women Married women All women All Unmarried men Married men All men

Father's occupation

58 46 104 13 62 75 179 18 90 108 18 108 126 234 413 41 35 76

Distribution of persons born in the hameaux of Lesquire before 1935 by place of residence in 1970 (Lesquire or elsewhere), sex, father's occupation (and, for farmers, size of farm), birth rank and marital status

Appendix

POSTSCRIPT

A class as object

Pague paysa! (Pay up, peasant!) If there is a truth, it is that the truth of the social world is at stake in struggles- because the social world is, in part, will and representation; and because the representation that groups make of themselves and of other groups plays an important part in shaping what groups are and what they do. The representation of the social world is not a given, or (which amounts to the same thing) a recording or a reflection, but the product of countless acts of construction, always already made and always to be remade. It is deposited in common words and phrases, performative terms that make the meaning of the social world as much as they record it, watchwords [mots d'ordre] which help to produce the social order by informing thought about that world and producing the groups they designate and mobilize. In short, the social construction of social reality is carried out in and through the innumerable antagonistic acts of construction that agents perform, at every moment, in their individual or collective, spontaneous or organized struggles to impose the representation of the social The Bearnais expression in the opening subheading is used in very varied contexts simply to mean that breakages have to be paid for, or more specifically, that it is always the little man, the peasant, who foots the bill. According to the folk etymology, which is probably right in this case, it is the exclamation uttered when the state levies new charges.

194

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world that best corresponds to their interests. These are very unequal struggles, of course, because agents have a very variable mastery of the instruments of production of the representation of the social world (and, even more so, over the instruments of production of these instruments); and also because the instruments that are available to them ready-made - in particular, ordinary language and the words of common sense - are, through the social philosophy they convey in the implicit state, very unequally favourable to their interests, depending on the positions they occupy in the social structure. This is why the social history of social representations of the social world forms part of the critical preliminaries of the science of the social world, which - particularly in the oppositions it brings into play (GemeinscbaftlGesellschafty folk/urban, etc.) in order to think the social world or in the divisions through which it organizes itself (rural sociology and urban sociology, etc.) - brings in the whole social philosophy that is inscribed in the most ordinary oppositions of ordinary experience of the social world (town/country, rural/urban, etc.). The unconscious is history, as Durkheim more or less said; and there is no other way of fully appropriating one's own understanding of the social world than by reconstituting the social genesis of concepts, historical products of historical struggles which the amnesia of genesis reifies and eternizes. Social history or historical sociology would (perhaps) not be worth an hour of one's time if it were not inspired by the intention of a reappropriation of scientific thought by itself which is constitutive of the most contemporary and most active scientific intention.1 This historical sociology of the schemes of thought and perception of the social world is opposed, as much in its intentions as in its methods, to the different variants, according to the taste of the day, of the history of ideas and particularly the one which gives itself airs of critical radicalism by flaying dead and buried adversaries. 'It is very easy to inveigh against slavery and similar things in general terms, and to give vent to high moral indignation at such infamies. Unfortunately all that this conveys is only what everyone knows, namely, that these institutions of antiquity are no longer in accord with our present conditions and our sentiments, which these conditions determine. But it does not tell us one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they played in 1 Concretely this means that when it is reduced to a positivistic accumulation of more or less anecdotal information about the specialists of former times, outside of any reference to the works they produced, the social history of the social sciences is almost totally devoid of interest.

Postscript: A class as object

195

history.'2 If it is unable to grasp the necessities which endow institutions and behaviours with their historical necessity, the historical 'research' that ought to be able to provide the means of tracking down the class unconscious merely provides it with a mask, one which moreover becomes somewhat transparent when, for example, a writer seeks to show that the educational system, an invention of priests and pastors, perfected by petit-bourgeois, functions with the aid of repressive petit-bourgeois to transform the workers into bourgeois more bourgeois than the bourgeois.3 In this case as elsewhere, bourgeois indignation against the petit-bourgeois and against the proletarians whom they bourgeoisify with their schools or their trade unions is made possible and, whatever one may think of it, necessary, not only by the dispositions of the bourgeois habitus but also by an ignorance of the social conditions of production of the agents and of the institutions that they serve, or, more precisely, an indifference to the specific forms that exploitation takes in the different categories of the exploited and in particular among the petit-bourgeois whose specific alienation resides in the fact that they are often led to make themselves the accomplices, at once constrained and consenting, of the exploitation of others and of themselves.4 So it is that the horror stories of bourgeois grandmothers become the cock-and-bull stories of granddaughters at odds with the bourgeoisie. But this is not all: retrospective indignation is also a way of justifying the present. Indeed, by denouncing - as another author 1

F. Engels, Anti-Diihrmg, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), vol. 25, p. 168. One might also have cited Antonio Gramsci on this point. •' Cf. A. Querrien, Genealogie des equipements collectifs, les equipements de normalisation, Vecole primaire (Paris: CERFI, 1975). Those who think this a facile resume might consult pages 111 and 135 for the portrait of the primary teacher as a scribbler stultified by filling out registers or as an onanistic and sado-masochistic petitbourgeois; or pages 140 and 145 for the lesson in bourgeois deportment offered to petit-bourgeois primary teachers and their dreams of power. 4 The very intention of grasping 'the reasons why' \les raisons d'etre], as well as being excluded by class contempt, presupposes something quite different from the consultation of a few picturesque texts encountered while browsing the catalogues of the Bihliotheque Nationale. One only has to know what efforts it cost the historians (cf. J. Ozouf, Nous les maitres d'ecoles. Autobiographies d'instituteurs de la Belle tpoque (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1967), and F. Furet and J. Ozouf (eds), Lire et tLcrire. L'Alphabetisation des Fran$ais de Cabin a Jules Ferry (Paris: Minuit, 1977)) to answer a question that is peremptorily settled in passing (Querrien, Genealogie, p. 151), to be persuaded that, as with Jean-Baptiste de la Salle and Freinet according to Anne Querrien, innovation is, for Querrien and all authors in the same vein, lthe product of the will not to fatigue oneself {Genealogie, p. 145).

196

Reproduction Forbidden

does5 - brutal methods in the age of gentle methods, the charitable lady who read Baron de Gerando in the age of the social worker who quotes Lacan, this liberated history (history liberated from the labour of historical research) helps to legitimate the latest state of the institutions of domination that owe the most specific part of their efficacy to the fact that they remain profoundly misrecognizable - among other reasons because they define themselves precisely against the 'superseded* rearguard.6 In order for social history to have the value of a psychoanalysis of the scientific mind and of the social consciousness, it must recreate completely, that is to say through an effort that is strictly speaking interminable, the social conditions of production of the social categories of perception and representation of the natural or social world that may be at the root of the very reality of this world when, transformed into an artistically constructed tableau and an architecturally organized landscape, nature itself imposes the norms of its own perception, its own appropriation, and when perspective ceases to be an ordering point of view on the world in order to become the very order of the world. In his admirable book The Country and the 5

Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1979); originally La Police des families (Paris: Minuit, 1977). 6 'And, of course, as in the past, it was upon working-class families that they were to perform their mission of propagating these new norms that had done so well by them. "Sexual freedom", birth control, the relational demand, and pedagogy were to be spread along the same lines, according to the same technocratic interventionism that was once used to sell savings banks and schooling; the promotional goading and attendant blaming of families who, through their resistance, were ruining the members' chances. The launching of Family Planning echoed a discourse that was more than two centuries old...' (Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 221, italics added). This lofty history brings together all the conditions for high symbolic yield on the market in cultural products: the incessant to-and-fro between complicitous references to the present - tending to produce the effect of a 'radical critique' - and disconnected, decontextualized references to the past - tending to lend an air of 'scholarship' - and the consequent confusion of demands dispenses the author both from any systematic inquiry into the present - which would only rob the discourse of its philosophical elevation - and from any in-depth research into the past - which, by resituating institutions and practices in the system from which they receive their meaning and their sociological necessity, would constitute the past as past and nullify the object of retrospective indignation. And, to ground the objectivist overview which completely evacuates study of the agents and the sometimes interminable research that it requires, one only has to hand over to that kind of negative finalism which reduces history to the mechanical process of timeless, impersonal agencies [instances] with allegorical names: i n shon, we must try to understand the socially decisive effect of social work [elsewhere called 'the assistantial'] from the standpoint of the strategical disposition of the three agencies that compose it: the judicial, the psychiatric, and the educative* (Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 99 [italics in original]).

rosiscripi: A class as ovject

ly/

City J Raymond Williams points out not only that the perception of the natural world itself has nothing natural about it - which has long been known, in particular thanks to the veritable social genealogy of the categories of perception of the natural world given to us to Erwin Panofsky8 - but also that it is indissociable from a relation to the social world; that the view of the natural world and, a fortiori, of the social world depends on the social height of the viewpoint from which it is taken. Thus the bourgeois representation of the social world, whether it be the 'natural landscape' of landscape gardening or the apparently ahistorical psychology of the novels of Jane Austen or George Eliot as analysed by Raymond Williams, delivers in an objectivated form the truth of the bourgeois relation to the natural and social world which, like the distant gaze of the stroller or tourist, produces the landscape as landscape, that is, as a decor, a countryside without country-people, a culture without cultivators, a structure structured without structuring labour, a purposefulness without purpose, a work of art. The mystery of the 'eternal charm' of bourgeois art vanishes if one sees that everything which, in literature or painting (not to mention music), functions as a denegation (in Freud's sense) of social relations predisposes the work of art to be reactivated, if not indefinitely, at least so long as it is asked for nothing more than it was originally predisposed to offer, that is, a neutralized evocation of the social world which speaks of that world in a mode such that everything takes place as if it were not speaking of it. The dominated classes, dominated even in the production of their self-image and therefore their social identity, do not speak, they are spoken. Among other privileges, the dominant have the privilege of controlling their own objectivation and the production of their own image - not only inasmuch as they possess a more or less absolute power over those who contribute directly to this work of objectivation (painters, writers, journalists, etc.); but also inasmuch as they have the means of prefiguring their own objectivation through a whole labour of representation, as it used to be called, that is, a theatricalization and aestheticization of their persons and their conduct which are directed towards manifesting their social condition and above all imposing the representation of it. In short, the dominant is the one who manages to impose the norms of his own perception, to be perceived as he perceives himself, to appropriate his own objectivation by reducing his objective truth to his subjective intention. By contrast, one of the fundamental dimensions of alienation lies in the 7

R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). " E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone, 1991).

198

Reproduction Forbidden

fact that the dominated have to reckon with an objective truth of their class that they have not made, with the class-for-others that is imposed on them as an essence, a destiny, fatum, that is, with the force of what is said with authority. Endlessly invited to adopt others' point of view on themselves, to bring to bear on themselves the gaze and judgement of strangers, they are always liable to become strangers to themselves, to cease to be the subjects of the judgement they make on themselves, the centre of perspective of the view they take of themselves. Of all the dominated groups, the peasant class, no doubt because it has never given to itself or has never been given the counter-discourse capable of constituting it as the subject of its own truth, is the example par excellence of the class as object, forced to shape its own subjectivity from its objectivation (being very close in that respect to the victims of racism). These members of a class dispossessed of the power to define its own identity cannot even be said to be what they are, since the most ordinary word [paysan] used to designate them can function, even in their own eyes, as an insult; the recourse to euphemism (agriculteur, proprietaire terrien ['farmer', 'landowner']) testifies to this. Confronted with an objectivation that tells them what they are or what they are to be, they have no choice but to take on the definition (in its least unfavourable form) that is imposed on them or to define themselves in reaction against it. It is significant that the dominant representation is found at the heart of the dominated discourse itself, in the very language with which the peasant speaks of and sees himself: the [French] bouseux, cul-terreux, pequenot, plouc, peouze who speaks with an accent du terroir has his almost exact equivalent in Bearnais in the paysanas empaysanit, the 'empeasanted peasant' whose clumsy efforts to speak French (francimandeja) are mocked and whose heaviness, blundering, ignorance and lack of adaptation to the urban world make him the favourite hero of the most typically peasant comic stories. The formation of a fundamentally heteronomous, reactive and therefore sometimes reactionary identity is all the more difficult because the images with which it has to reckon are contradictory, as are the functions that those who produce them make them serve. It is certain the peasants are almost never thought of in and for themselves, and that the very discourses that exalt their virtues or those of the countryside are never anything other than a euphemized or indirect way of speaking of the vices of the workers of the town. Being a mere pretext for favourable or unfavourable prejudices, the peasant is the object of expectations that are by definition contradictory, since he owes his existence in discourse only to the conflicts that are fought out over him. Thus, at the present time, the various sectors

Postscript: A class as object

199

of the field of ideological production offer him at one and the same time the most incompatible images of himself. This paradox is particularly striking in the order of culture and especially language, where certain fractions of intellectuals, carried by the logic of their specific interests, are asking the peasants to return, for example, to their vernacular languages at a time when the tacit demands of the economic, matrimonial and scholastic markets are insisting, more brutally than ever, that they be abandoned. But perhaps the contradiction is more apparent than real, since the subjectively most irreducible divisions can organize themselves objectively as a division of the labour of domination: folklorization, which thrusts the peasantry into the museum and converts the last peasants into the guardians of a nature transformed into a landscape for city-dwellers, is the necessary accompaniment of dispossession and expulsion. It is indeed the laws of differential profit, the fundamental form of the profit of distinction, that assign to the peasants their reserves, where they will be free to dance and sing their bourrees and gavottes, for the greater satisfaction of ethnologists and urban tourists, so long as their existence is economically and symbolically profitable. It is clear that there are perhaps few groups whose relations with their own identity are less simple, who are more condemned, in a word, to 'inauthenticity' than these 'simple folk' in whom all conservative traditions seek the model of 'authentic' existence. There is nothing new in the fact that the peasants, unceasingly confronted with the inseparably economic and symbolic domination of the urban bourgeoisie, have no choice but to play out, for city-dwellers and also for themselves, one or other of the images of the peasant, whether it be the respectful peasant with a line in popular populism, speaking of his land, his house and his animals in the tones of a primary school essay; or the Heideggerian peasant, who thinks ecologically, who knows how to take his time and cultivate silence, and who astonishes the urbanites visiting their holiday homes with his deep wisdom, springing from one knows not where; or the empeasanted peasant who takes on, not without a hint of irony or contempt, the role of the 'bumpkin', or 'yokel', the good savage or even the poacher, sometimes something of a magician, who astonishes urbanites as much by his skill in finding mushrooms or setting snares as by his talents as a bonesetter and his archaic beliefs. Moreover, the constitution of the collective identity poses problems for the peasants (and for social science) that are no simpler than those of individual identity. One thinks of the exemplary history of those peasants in western France who were the bearers of the most radical demands in 1789 but who only a few years later provided the fiercest

200

Reproduction Forbidden

supporters of the Vendee counter-revolution.9 Obliged to constitute themselves 'against', first against the clergy and its properties, then against the urban bourgeoisie, the great swallower-up of lands and revolutions, the peasants (to whom one should add those fractions of the rural world who in a sense represent its limiting cases, such the forest workers, the absolute antithesis of the inhabitants of the bourg) seem condemned to these rearguard battles against the revolutions they have sometimes served, because the specific form of the domination that they undergo means that they are also dispossessed of the means of appropriating the meaning and the profits of their revolt. Without claiming to see in them invariants of a peasant condition whose immense variety only urban blindness can ignore, the fact remains that the narrowness of the field of social relations, which, by favouring false contextualization, often misdirects their revolt, the closure of the cultural horizon, the ignorance of all forms of organization and collective discipline, the demands of the individual struggle against nature and the competition for possession of the soil, and so many other features of their conditions of existence, predispose the peasants to that kind of anarchist individualism which prevents them from thinking themselves as members of a class capable of mobilizing itself with a view to imposing a systematic transformation of social relations. This is why, even when they play their role as a force of revolution, as in so many recent revolutions, they have every likelihood of appearing, sooner or later, as reactionary, because they have failed to impose themselves as a revolutionary force.10

9 P. Bois, Paysans de VOuest, des structures economiques et sociales aux opinions politique* depuis Vepoque revolutionnaire (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1960). >° P. Bourdieu, 'Une classe objet', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 17-18 (Nov. 1977), pp. 2-5.

Index

Tables are indicated by italic page numbers. adot calculation of 15-17, 141n as compensation 142 flexibility of rules regarding 1424, 146 impact on of inflation 44 and property value 139 right of return 21, 150 size of 151-2, 153 threefold function 21-2 agricultural fair, ball of 128-9 agriculture 175-7 alienation 189n, 197-8 authority of parents 20-1, 29-31, 45, 146-8 bachelorhood in Brittany 121-2, 122-3 changing views of 38-9 due to restructuring of system 51n effect on peasant farming 92-3, 190-1 and emigration 171-2

and excessive maternal authority 118-20 extent of 9-10, 10 of modern farmers 91 as social diminishment 91-3 of younger sons 156-7 see also marriage bachelors, at the Christmas ball vii, 82-3 balls 82-7, 128-9, 180 Beam description of by Arthur Young 103-4 distinctive economic and social order 104-5 £tats de Beam 101-2 history of 100-5 as independent state 101 land ownership 103 law of 97-8, 160-1 Middle Age institutions of 101-2 population changes (1936-54) 108-10, 109 population increase 102-3 stability of society 102

202 Bearnais language 74-5, 198 birth of daughters 19, 149 Bloch, Marc 100, 103 bodily hexis 84-6 body and gait of peasants 84-6 bourg differentiation from hameaux 72-5 family size 71-3, 72 food provision 68 houses in 66-7 language used 74-5 layout of 63-4 livestock and land ownership in 66 marital status of inhabitants 42 marriage area of men from 59 marriages with hameaux residents 54-62, 61 occupations in 64-5, 65 Sunday morning in 71 unmarried men in 40, 43 unmarried women in 43 views of Lesquire 126 Brittany, bachelorhood in 121-4, 122, 122-3 Christmas ball vii, 82-3, 180 church attendance 175 Civil Code 98-9, 162 civil servants 75-80 collective labours 69 cultural particularism 174-5 customary law of Beam 97-8, 160-1 dances and dancing 69-70, 82-7 daughters, birth of 19, 149 day labourers 155 dialogues villager and bachelor 115 villager and peasant 111-14 differentiation between families 26-9 domestic servants 33-4, 39-40n

Index Donzelot, Jacques 196nn downward marriages 22-4, 141, 151-2 dowry see adot Dumont, Louis 133 education 186-8, 195 eldest children, rights of 14—15 eldest sons as bachelors 29-31, 34, 47 lack of freedom of 146-8 opposition with younger sons 51-2 primacy over younger siblings 145 upward/downward marriages 141 emigration 47-50, 48, 49, 170-2, 177-9 emotions, expression of 88 Engels, Friedrich 181, 195n ethnologv, observations of 133^4n extended families 72-3 families contradictory objectives of 38 organization of 98-9, 161-2 principle of differentiation 26-9 size of 71-3, 72 farms, hill 64, 127 and bachelorhood 92-3, 190-1 feelings, expression of 88 fertility strategies 149,155 folklorization of peasants 199 food provision in the bourg 68 Fors de Beam 97-8, 160-1 Fortes, Meyer 136 Foucault, Michel 191n French language 74-5, 198 funerals 68-9 Furet, Francois 195n gait of peasants 84-6 genealogical trees and relationships 136-8

Index girls see women Gramsci, Antonio 195n habitus of the peasant 84-6 Halbwachs, M. 90n hameaux auberges (inns) 68 bonds of neighbourhood 68-70 car usage in 70-1 differentiation from bourg 72-5 family size 71-3, 72 farms of 64, 127 Lesquire 192 marriage area of men from 57 marriages between residents from 59-60 marriages in 52-3 marriages with bourg residents 43, 43, 54-62, 61 unmarried men in 39-40, 41 heiresses 52 historical sociology 194-200 house division of 15-17 name of the 15 permanence of as function of marriage 28-9 informants, list of 95-6 inheritance and stem families 99 instituting of the heir 144 juridism 133-6 kinship relations 136-8 Koyre, Alexander 174 labourers 155 Lacan, Jacques 196 land ownership in Beam 103 language 74-5, 198 law of Beam 97-8, 160-1 Le Play, Frederic 98-9, 161 legal system, increasing use of 142n

203

Lesquire 192 migration from 48, 48-50 views of 125-6 Levi-Strauss, Claude 2, 3n Maget, Marcel 2 market, unification of 175-9, 181 marriage based on strategies not rules 133-6 and continuity of lineage 12 factors disrupting system of 44-50 favoured types of 24 flexibility of rules 24, 146 and geographical location 40, 42, 42, 43-4n governing of by rules 11, 133-6 between heiress and younger son 24-6 between heirs 152 maintenance of patrimony 14, 18 opposition between bourg and hameaux 40, 42, 43 perpetuation of social hierarchy 34 prior investigations 11-12 probability of and size of property 171 restructuring of system 50-3 as safeguarding peasant qualities 36-7 social function of non-marriage 34-5 and social status 44-5 and socio-economic status 1820, 39-40, 41 statistical analysis of 170-3, 172 types of 51-2 upward/downward 22-4, 141, 151-2 see also bachelorhood marriage area 55 extension of 54-9, 57, 58 Marx, Karl 133, 175n matchmakers 35-6^ 45-6, 182n

204

Index

maternal authority and bachelorhood 118-20 Mauss, Marcel 84, 88 men bourg, marriage area of 59 hameaux, marriage area of 57 lack of attention to appearance 89 numbers in the bourg and hameaux 40, 41, 42, 43-4n primacy over women 144-5 upward/downward marriages 22-4 migration from hameaux 47-50, 48, 49 mothers, authority of 151-2

style of dress 79 Sunday morning in the bourg 71 and villagers 53-62 pedlars as matchmakers 35-6 ploughing 125 Polanyi, Karl 181n population changes (1936-54) 108-10, 109 power, domestic 151-2 price policies 176 priests as matchmakers 35-6 primogeniture, right of 14-15 property, division of 143n Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 63

name of the house 15 neighbourhoods collective labours 69, 70 distinguishing 64 funerals in 68-9 nephews 138 nepotism 138

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 133n relations between the sexes 35, 46 representation of the social world 193-200 rules, governing of marriage by 11, 133-6 rural life, history of 100-1

Ozouf,J. 196n

Saussure, Ferdinand de 134n schools 186-8 segregation of the sexes 35, 46 self-awareness of peasants 86-7 sexes relations between 46 segregation of the 35, 46 social density in the hameaux 68-70 social hierarchy 27-8, 139—41 awareness of 34 social history 194-200 socio-economic status 39-40, 41 sociology historical 194-200 primary task of 94-5 sport 84n3 stem families 98-9, 161-2 strategies, matrimonial not legal rules 133-6 and the patrimony 138

Panofsky, Erwin 197 parents, authority of 20-1, 29-31, 45, 146-8 peasants body and gait 84-6 and civil servants 75-80 economy, subordination to the market 175-7 encounters with girls 87 folklorization of 200 habitus of 84-6 identity of 198-200 internalization of body image 86 isolation of 70-1 language used 74-5 objectification of 198 opening of world of 174-9 qualities of 36-7, 46-7 self-awareness of 86-7

Querrien, A. 196n

Index as product of the habitus 157-9 Sunday morning in the bourg 71 unification of the market 175-9, 181 of the matrimonial market 180-9 of the social field 172-3 upward marriages 22-4, 141, 151-2 urban culture adoption of values from 46-7 attractions of 177 at dances 83, 84-5, 86 process of moving to 178 view of peasants from 187 values, rural v. urban 46-7 Van Gennep, A. 35n villagers attitude to peasants 78-80 as mediator between peasant and state 76-7 and peasants 53-62 villages dances in 69-70 see also bourg Weber, Max 153, 167 Williams, J. M. 71n

205

Williams, Raymond 196-7 women attention to appearance 89 causes of failure to marry 49n education of 90, 188 exodus of 47-50, 48 extension of marriage area 56-7 farm work of 125 jobs in the town 45 likelihood of leaving 171 numbers in the bourg and hameaux 42, 43 reluctance to marry into hameaux 60 upward/downward marriages 22-4 and urban culture 88-91 Young, Arthur 103-4 younger children, heritage rights 15-17 younger sons accounts from 116-17 as bachelors 156-7 as domestic servants 33-4 marriages of 154-6 marriages with heiresses 52 opposition with eldest sons 51-2 position of regarding the family 31-3