Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Prerevolutionary France

Abstract

IN THE THIRD CHAPTER OF De la dkmocratie en Amerique, Alexis de Tocqueville undertook to explain the profound influence of the laws of inheritance. I am surprised, he said, ancient and modern political writers have not attributed a greater influence on the conduct of human affairs to laws dealing with successions. True, these laws belong to civil affairs, but nevertheless they belong at the forefront of political institutions because they exercise an incredible influence upon the social status of a people, of which political laws are but a reflection. Tocqueville's aim was to show how the principle of equal division among heirs had democratized America: last trace of ranks and hereditary distinctions is destroyed; the law of successions has hastened the process of leveling everywhere.' It would be interesting to know how Tocqueville would have handled the question of the old French laws of inheritance had he chosen to discuss them when he wrote L'Ancien Retgime et la Re'volution twenty years later. In the most populous and prosperous regions of France, the northern two-thirds where customary laws (coutumiers) prevailed, Tocqueville would have found that all but the nobility lived under laws which called for the same kind of equal division among heirs which he extolled in early nineteenth-century America. How would he have explained the rise of great bourgeois and office-holding dynasties in the two centuries before the Revolution? A charitable answer is to excuse Tocqueville from entering the realm of coutumier laws of succession because it is an exceedingly dense legal thicket. The initial impediment is the variety of ways in which like points of law were expressed in the scores of coutumiers as they were redacted in the sixteenth century. The entanglement