Intimacy, Community and Doing House in Old Regime France

Abstract

This article explores how shared multi-purposes spaces shaped the productive and reproductive lives of young men and women. The open house nature of their community as a physical and conceptual structure profoundly impacted the ways in which young people met, experimented with intimacy, and took steps towards marriage. The multi-purpose and multi-residence buildings in which they lived and worked fostered intense interaction with neighbours and employers through shared spaces and fluid use of those spaces. Court cases from Lyon between 1660 and 1760 reveal that the ‘open house’ allowed young couples and their communities to watch, calibrate, regulate, discipline and care for youthful intimacy and its (reproductive) consequences.