Longing for the Beheaded Father

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes French departmental statistical reports published under the Directory and the Consulate as a prism for tracing transformations in ideas about inheritance, from the Montagnards' radical egalitarianism to the Napoleonic Civil Code. By focusing on prefects, who provided statistical reports on the population of their respective departments, the article reveals their role in ushering in a return to patriarchalism. Not only did some prefects turn a blind eye to the fact that many families were ignoring the new egalitarian inheritance laws, but they also used novel social scientific vocabulary to defend practices of local, unequal property distribution. Paradoxically, those communities that the statisticians perceived as un-French and uneducated were also those that supposedly encapsulated the domestic values that would ensure social stability for the nation.