Domestic Enemies

Originally published in 1983. This book cuts across the class boundaries of traditionally separate fields of social history. It investigates the social origins of servants, their incomes, their marriage and family patterns, their career patterns, their possibilities for social mobility, their political activities, and their criminality. But it also investigates the history of the family and domestic life in France in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, for servants were, at least until the rise of the affectionate nuclear family in the middle of the eighteenth century, considered part of the families of those they served. Finally, this book is also an essay on the history of social relationships in the ancien régime, not only those between masters and servants but also the broader relationships between the ruling elite and the lower classes. The introduction gives basic facts about the composition of households during the Old Regime and explores the attitudes and assumptions that underlay the employment of servants. It also shows how both these attitudes and the households themselves changed dramatically in the last decades before the French Revolution. Part 1 is devoted to the servants themselves. One chapter deals with their lives within their employers' households: their work, their living conditions, their socializing and leisure-time activities. A second examines their private lives: their social origins, marriage and family patterns, their moneymaking and their criminality. And a third explores their relationships with and attitudes toward their masters. In part 2, the focus shifts to an examination of master–servant relationships from the masters' point of view. The first chapter deals with master–servant relationships in general by discussing the factors that determined how employers treated their domestics. The second and third chapters explore two special relationships: masters' sexual relationships with their servants and their relationships with the servants who cared for them in childhood. The epilogue traces the impact of the French Revolution on domestic service and sketches some of the changes in the household that were to come in the nineteenth century

Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640-1789

Originally published in 1976. This book is a study of the charitable institutions of one French town, Aix-en-Provence. It begins with their foundation during the Counter-Reformation and ends with their dissolution during the Revolution. It details the impulses behind their foundation and describes how they were financed and administered. It also explores the lives of the people they helped. The study is based primarily on surviving records of the charities. These are the same sort of records that charitable institutions today accumulate: entrance registers, minutes of board meetings, account books, and fund-raising pamphlets. Records of the local and central government and court records were also consulted. One purpose of this study is to bring readers closer to the reality of the problem of poverty in Old Regime France. Another purpose is to historicize contemporary perceptions of poverty in the minds of French historical actors.Chapter 1 outlines the social and economic makeup of Aix-en-Provence. Chapter 2 deals with the attitudes and assumptions behind the foundation of the charities. Chapter 3 describes how the institutions were administered and financed, and the many important roles they played in the community at large. Chapter 4 describes the types of assistance available to the poor and the types of people who received it. Chapter 5 discusses the most important alternatives to charity for the needy—beggary and crime. After 1760, the traditional charities entered a period of decline. Both the economic and social realities of poverty, and popular perceptions of those realities, changed drastically after 1760. Flooded by increasing numbers of the poor, paralyzed financially because of declining donations and general mismanagement, repudiated by public opinion, and subject to increasing control by the state, the charities were ineffective and indeed almost moribund after 1760. Chapters 6 and 7 detail these developments