The Family, the State, and the Law in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century France: The Political Ideology of Male Right versus an Early Theory of Natural Rights

Abstract

During the late medieval era in France, when a royal domain, or public realm, was recognized and the polity was configured as a body politic, and through the early modern period, when family formation and state building moved apace, French political writers, many of them jurists, set forth contested precepts defining the authority to govern. One precept devised in the 1400s and put forward as a Salic law prohibited women from rule on juridical grounds, based on what was purported to be a founding law of the French kingdom. Another precept, created in the 1550s, a political ideology of “male right,” privileged men in the parallel governance of household and kingdom in France on metaphysical grounds, based on the notion that this was a dictate of the “law of nature.” The uneven odyssey of the Salic law, a gross forgery, is worth examining, as is the volatility of the theory of male right, which was publicly attacked in the extraordinary legal case of 1674 presented below. The ancient Salic Law Code (ca. 507–804), or law of the Salien Franks, did not contain an ordinance that excluded women from succession to realm and rule in any kingdom; consequently, the Carolingian text of the ordinance resurrected around 1409 in France would not sustain that allegation unless it had been tampered with. The cultural, legal, and political debate that sparked extensive tampering in the 1400s has been traced previously, along with the fortunes of the constitutional deceit perpetrated into the early 1500s. In 1404, Christine de Pizan defeated Jean de Montreuil in a bitter quarrel over the practice of female defamation witnessed in humanist, juridical, and royal circles. She castigated men who slander an entire sex, Woman, supposed incapable in body and mind. He upheld the incapacity of Woman and defamed Pizan (whom he likened to a Greek whore [“publican”]) for taking writings to the public. Straightaway in 1405, Pizan circulated a political treatise that challenged the attempts afoot to defame women