Une fratrie ou deux fratries ? La migration des frères et la migration des sœurs en France au XIXe siècle

Abstract

Brothers and sisters apart ? The effect of sibling composition on XIXth century France migration. The nature of French 19th century official sources makes it particularly difficult to trace migratory trajectories. This paper uses a sample of descending geneologies from 1800 to 1914 to reexamine the dassical question concerning the relation between birth rank and géographie mobility. A first set of results confirms the findings of work in historical anthropology. Individuals coming from regions subject to inhert tance laws based on a principle of free choice had markedly different trajectories than those setting out from areas subject to a regime of equidistribution. In the first so-called «liberal» areas, the eldest child and the younger children follow very different paths. First-borns were often more sedentary, and the later born were much more prone to undertake long distance migrations. Under the egalitarian System of partition, birth order was not associated with different migratory patterns. It is likely that «libéral» régions managed to maintain a System of transmission which favored the first-born despite the introduction in 1804 of a law forbidding such practices. While the practice eventually subsided, it nevertheless persisted into the late 19th century. The study of geographic mobility thus confirms the daims that, despite the introduction of the Code Civil, the ancient law, inherited from the Ancien Régime, continued to exercise significant anthropological effects throughout the century. The study of genealogical data also allows for an exploration of the interaction of this phenomenon with other less studied mechanisms. The distribution of sexes amongst siblings played a particularly important role in determining migratory patterns. On the one hand the degree of mobility varied considerably depending on whether an individual belonged to an ail maie set of siblings, an entirely female set, or a mixed sibling family. This effect was particularly marked for women : the propensity to migrate was much lowerfor women in a family of only female children than for those who had at least one brother, while the effect of sex composition on male movement was much less marked. On the other hand, whereas the eldest male child exhibited the same patterns as the eldest in general, the same was not the case for female children : the eldest female child was much more likely to migrate than her younger sisters. These results raise a number of more general points concerning migration as a phenomenon. They suggest that an explanation of migration patterns can not be confined to the study of either macro-level regularities or of individual level attributes. lnstead the researcher must take into account an intermediary level, that of inter-individual configurations which constitute the migrant's référence group at the moment of her or his departure.