ILLEGITIMACY AND CONCUBINAGE

Anne-Marie Sohn

From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the public view of illegitimacy and concubinage (or cohabitation) changed radically. Once marginalized and ostracized, these behaviors became common and tolerated. Thus abstinence gave way to the right to sexual fulfillment for all, and the bastard, once despised and condemned to an almost certain death among the poorest, became the illegitimate child who is both desired and cherished, as the boundaries between concubinage and married life disappeared.

FROM ABSTINENCE TO THE ACCEPTANCE OF ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS

If this long-term change is unquestionable, numerous national and regional exceptions reveal the complexity of factors that influenced sexual freedom.

Chastity established as an expected virtue. It is incontestable that the Reformation and especially the Counter-Reformation introduced a rupture in social perceptions and controls. Certainly, Christianity had always upheld the family as the sole venue for reproduction and fought unceasingly against extramarital sexuality, although it never succeeded in eradicating it.

In Catholic countries, the post-Tridentine reaction hardened the marriage doctrine of the church, devalued love except in marriage, and reinforced the repression of extramarital sexuality because the new solemnity of the sacrament of matrimony rendered transgressions more difficult. The effects were immediate. Around 1560 the rate of illegitimacy fell dramatically. In France it was on average 1 percent, and even less for the rural parishes; but it was higher in the cities, to which young peasant women, anxious to hide their "mistake," flocked in order to give birth. Prenuptial conception fluctuated between 3 and 4 percent in the countryside. In England, on the other hand, the decline came later, contemporary with Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth; the rates of illegitimacy in rural areas actually grew from 1560 to 1620, reaching between 2.3 and 3.5 percent. Beginning in the 1660s, the English and French situations were comparable, with illegitimate births not exceeding 1 percent. On the other hand, England distinguished itself by its frequency of prenuptial conceptions, which occurred in 10 to 40 percent of marriages, depending on the region.

Loosening constraints (1750–1850). Beginning in 1750 most European countries saw illegitimate births rise dramatically. In England the rate of illegitimacy reached 3.3 percent in 1741–1760 and 4 percent in 1761–1780; it exceeded 5 percent by 1781–1787. In France the rate increased fivefold in one century, and the rise, though coming later, was just as regular, reaching 1.8 percent in 1760–1769, 2.6 percent at the eve of the Revolution, 4.4 percent in 1810, 6.6 percent in the 1820s, and stabilizing at over 7 percent in 1860. The upsurge was even greater in the cities, where on the eve of the Revolution illegitimate births stood at between 8 and 12 percent, and at 30 percent in Paris. From 1790 to 1830, the average reached 16.2 percent for small cities, 20 percent for medium-sized cities, and 22.5 percent for large cities.

The phenomenon also reached Scandinavia and exploded in Germanic countries in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Austria the rate of illegitimacy wavered between 10 and 30 percent in 1870. It reached 40 to 50 percent in Styria and 68 percent in Carinthia; hence the expression "Carinthian marriage." In some districts it reached 60 percent. In short, Austria surpassed all European and urban records, with illegitimate births reaching 50 percent in Vienna and 69 percent in Klagenfurt. This peak was followed by a decline in the twentieth century.

Illegitimate birth in the twentieth century. The increase in illegitimate births in the twentieth century was real, although it occurred more or less early in the century. However, the statistics do not represent the phenomenon with complete accuracy because of contraception. Thus in France, for example, the recorded rate of illegitimacy does not reflect a sexual freedom that was increasing but was masked by the association, common since the BelleÉpoque, between coitus interruptus and, when that failed, abortion. Thus only 8.7 percent of children were illegitimate in 1900–1914, increasing to only 11 percent in 1978. But more revealing is the fact that between the two world wars 20 percent of newlywed women were pregnant and 12 percent were already mothers. In England from the 1840s to the 1960s the rate of illegitimacy, except for the periods just after the world wars, remained stable around 3.4 to 5.4 percent. Prenuptial conceptions never dropped below 16 percent, and prenuptial relationships increased rapidly: 16 percent of women born in 1904 had experimented with such relations, compared with 36 percent of the generation born between 1904 and 1914. On the other hand, in the Netherlands, where the power of religious parties was great and their influence reinforced by the practices of the coalition government, the prudish atmosphere restrained the liberalization of morals so well that in 1955 the rate of illegitimacy reached its lowest level. Likewise, in Ireland, where Catholicism shaped the national identity, the rate of illegitimacy stagnated at around 2 percent and in 1961 fell to its lowest level, 1.6 percent, even though contraception remained taboo.

During the 1960s, however, all European countries experienced a "sexual revolution," accompanied by the massive diffusion of contraception, which permitted the avoidance of unwanted pregnancy. Nonetheless, beginning in 1970 Europe saw a new explosion in illegitimacy. Denmark and Sweden were at the peak of this development, followed by Great Britain and also by France, where the change accelerated: in 1991 one-quarter of births occurred outside marriage, 37.6 percent in 1997, and 40 percent in 1998, with a rate of over 50 percent for firstborn children. Illegitimate births thus became a major component of demography, attesting to the overturning of traditional standards of behavior.

ILLEGITIMACY AND PREMARITAL SEX

The rate of illegitimacy reveals the degree of tolerance for nonmarital relationships, but it still needs interpretation. Edward Shorter imputes the "first sexual revolution" of 1750 to 1850 to industrialization. Capitalism overturned attitudes by valuing profit and by creating the autonomous worker whose choices were no longer subordinated to traditional rules and authorities. If the economy played a role, however, its role was much more complex than Shorter claims, and in any case the economy was not the only cause of change. The erosion of religion and the transformation of the family were also significant. The legal system also directly and indirectly influenced individual choices.

Historians have debated the various causes of the rise in illegitimacy, as they combined to produce some striking changes but also great regional and class variations from the late eighteenth century onward. A key issue involves gender: obviously, both men and women participated in premarital sex, but quite possibly for different reasons and from very different positions of power. Weaker job opportunities for women may have increased a woman's felt need to use sex to try to cement a link with a man, while men's concerns about eroding status may have made sexual conquest a more desirable expression of masculine prowess.

Illegitimacy and the law. In the early modern era laws prohibited extramarital sex. In Germanic countries the Reformation codified sexual norms through ordinances of morality (Sittlichkeitsordnungen). Catholic states, in the wake of the Council of Trent, criminalized concubinage and sexual relations between fiancés. In France the declaration of pregnancy, instituted in the edict of 1556 by Henry II, was intended to prevent infanticide but also sought to restrain passions by rendering the father responsible for his child and its upkeep. Similarly in England in 1733 women were given the right to bring suit against the father of their children, to secure marriage or the confiscation of his goods if he refused to pay alimony, and even to send him to prison if he was penniless. In the Germanic countries the legal framework of marriage hardened toward the end of the seventeenth century. Severe limits were imposed on the marriage of house servants.

Legislative restraints endured, and indeed grew, into the nineteenth century. In France the Civil Code (1804), in defining the legal obstacles to marriage, placed certain couples in inextricable situations. Dispensations accorded for marriage between an aunt and a nephew related by marriage, or between a stepfather and stepdaughter, were extremely rare and were the product of prolonged negotiations. Furthermore, until the Lemire law of 1898, the acquisition of the administrative documents necessary for marriage was difficult for peasants who moved to the city and who were often illiterate, and the cost was frequently prohibitive for the poorest of them. The society of Saint-François Régis was founded in Paris in 1826 in order to facilitate these procedures and to permit the legalization of stable concubinages. In Germany and Austria the legal restrictions inherited from the seventeenth century were reinforced into the 1820s and 1830s. Thus developed the policy called "consent to marry," which aimed at preventing concubinage and illegitimate birth but had the paradoxical effect of making them more widespread. Workers who were not landowners were required, in effect, to have a stable income, irreproachable conduct, and to possess some goods to be able to marry. These restrictive laws survived until the creation of the German Empire in 1870 and until 1868 in Austria, with the exception of the Tirol, which did not repeal them until 1921.

Socioeconomic structures and illegitimacy. While cities differed from the countryside in socioeconomic conditions, rural areas themselves were often quite distinct in their attitudes to illegitimacy. In France and Germany, for example, there were both permissive and restrictive regions. In France rural illegitimacy was particularly strong in the northeast half of the country, where it reached 5 percent by 1820–1829. In 1914 one-quarter of Alsatian marriages were celebrated after the conception of a child. The Hautes-Pyrénées and Basses-Pyrénées were second, always staying two percentage points above the national average. In the valley of Campan (Hautes-Pyrénées) the proportion of illegitimate births even reached 18.3 percent. Added to this is the fact that prenuptial conceptions were rarely lower than 5 percent. This phenomenon was even more accentuated in the German Alps.

Thus geographical contrasts often arose from different social structures. In regions like the Pyrenees, where the eldest son traditionally inherited the bulk of a family's wealth, the younger sons often remained bachelors in order to keep the family property intact, and the poorest younger daughters could not find a husband for lack of a dowry. The exclusion from inheritance explains the extramarital outlet before the rural exodus reduced the demographic pressure that reached its peak in 1848. But the ostracism that weighed on young single mothers persisted to the point that within three generations distinct lineages were established of single mothers, who were relegated to the bottom of the social ladder. The right of the eldest (Anerbenrecht) also existed in Germany and led to similar situations. Furthermore, in areas of large-scale farming, which in Germany and Austria beginning in the eighteenth century employed a large working class, servants and dispossessed youngest sons were too poor to marry. As they were also very mobile, they escaped the scrutiny of the neighbors and had elevated rates of illegitimacy.

On the other hand, in "democratic" societies such as Savoy, and even in regions like the Parisian basin, where the peasants were leaseholders and not landowners, the decision to marry rested on personal qualities. Consequently, all suitors were considered equal, familial pressure was weak, and the freedom accorded to the young was great. In 1910 Arnold van Gennep concluded that, at the most, 10 percent of young women of Savoy entered marriage as virgins. Kiltgang, the generic name given to the practices of youth in the French, Swiss, and Germanic Alps, as well as in Scandinavia and England, reveals the correlation between economic equality and premarital sex. In these regions, young men would prolong the evening by visiting young women in their homes. They could demand shelter and in that case would sleep next to the young women, fully dressed and generally on top of the covers. They could even go to a woman's room in a group and stay there alone or in turns without compromising her reputation. It goes without saying that when these young people got engaged, the Kiltgang gave way to proper and decorous courtships. This rite codified the freedom of youths, but under the double control of their peers and of adults, who remained vigilant though in the background. In effect, a young woman who mixed courting with debauchery lost her chance at matrimony.

In cities and villages dedicated to protoindustry, a similar situation produced the "immorality" of the working woman, denounced vehemently by both the French and the English bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Laborers, who were deprived of any inheritance and indifferent to the strategies of social status, became involved very early with their chosen loves, since at the age of eighteen a young man earned as much as an adult. Pairing off was thus a natural occurrence. In the principality of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, the increase in illegitimacy—31 percent of births after 1760—was a result of the flood of cotton textile manufacturing into the villages. The introduction of cotton manufacturing, which recruited its labor force from among poor peasants and proletarianized farmers, brought increased sexual freedom as cohabitation was based on salaries and hard work. Thus, the bonds that tied marriage to the inheritance of land were loosened.

Generally, illegitimate births were limited to the working classes until the twentieth century. A census of France during the Third Republic (1870–1940) confirmed that nearly 87 percent of young women who had had nonmarital relationships were wage earners: 35 percent were laborers, 29 percent were house servants, and 22.7 percent were agricultural day workers or farm servants. As under the ancien régime, servants, frequently uprooted to an unknown city, appear to be the primary victims of this system: they were 3 times less likely to marry and 2.5 times more likely to commit infanticide than workers. As for female agricultural workers, if they managed to obtain a shotgun marriage as often as factory workers, they were nonetheless twice as likely to commit infanticide. But economic constraints are only part of the story, and the comparative ease of city-dwelling women was due more to the attitudes that prevailed in the city than to their financial independence.

Attitudes toward illegitimacy. Wherever the teaching of the churches was respected, chastity was established as an absolute. Take for example the courtship practices of the early modern era. An engagement, also called don de foi (gift of faith) or promesse à main (promise of the hand), was common in England. It rested on a public agreement between families with witnesses and symbolic gestures such as the kiss and an exchange of gifts, most often a gold ring. Still, this agreement did not take effect until after sexual relations. The banns (official public announcement) of marriage therefore served only to confirm the engagement of the spouses and their parents. These engagement practices were not abolished until 1753 with the Hardwick Marriage Act, which had little effect on them. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, prohibited them as early as 1564. This explains the lower number of prenuptial conceptions on the Continent than in England.

Dechristianization also eroded moral prohibitions. Evidence shows that the development of concubinage and illegitimate births in Germanic countries beginning in the eighteenth century coincides with an erosion of the influence of churches. In France, where Jansenism and above all the Revolution were accompanied by a decline in religious practice, the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century no longer had the means to make its sexual standard respected. Priests were denounced for their rigidity and for the hidden influence they exercised in their confessionals over the lives of couples. Men turned away first from the confessional, then from the altar. The French who remained practicing Catholics freed themselves rapidly from sexual prohibitions, to the point that confessors opted for caution through the 1930s. Despite the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the exaltation of feminine virginity through sodalities such as the Enfants de Marie, the secularization of society permitted the emancipation of single men and women.

The value accorded to virginity, however, could be independent of religious precepts. To take the French example, in Flanders, Artois, and Picardy virginity was not valued in the least. In Gravelines a virgin could even be referred to as "rien qu'une merde sur une pelle" (nothing but shit on a shovel). In Burgundy the subject was never even taken up. As for the Normans, they did not criticize the unmarried mother, as they were happy to verify her ability to bear children. Peasants were always torn between a respect for chastity and a rejection of barrenness. There were, by contrast, until the period between the two world wars, areas that were hard on young women who had "erred." In these places even prenuptial conception was criticized, and weighed as an indelible stain on the wife. Furthermore, in certain southern rural regions masculine honor and feminine virginity were conflated. There, a prenuptial relationship was experienced as a dishonor that began with the first suspicion of immorality, and the punishment was public. The charivaris (noisy rituals that expressed communal disapproval of perceived violators of social norms) that targeted "loose women" were common in Charente and in Limousin until 1914, in Brittany during the period between the wars, and in Languedoc into the 1950s. The rejection of illegitimacy thus led either to rapid marriage or to infanticide, which is reflected in the statistics, although in the north both shotgun marriages and infanticide were rarer.

The geography of intransigence takes on the appearance of a mosaic. The laxity of the Basques, for example, contrasts with the rigidity of the Ossau valley and of the eastern Pyrenees. In Mâconnais girls were rarely scrutinized, while the reverse was true in neighboring Bresse. In Alsace, where, in the case of birth before marriage, they said "the papers were late," there were communes that conserved the Krönel-Hoschzit (virgin marriage crown) that was passed on with pride from mother to daughter. And in the Bas-Rhin, Catholic parishes, isolated in Protestant lands, were particularly cruel to "dishonored girls," who were relegated to a pew of infamy at the back of the church. The weight of regional attitudes could prevail over national trends, sometimes with unexpected reversals. Savoy, long indifferent to feminine virtue, aligned itself with the bourgeois model after World War I and required virgin marriage from then on.

In the cities, tolerance prevailed among the populace, which joked that one must lose one's virginity as quickly as possible to avoid being taken for a half-wit. Far from wanting to marry a virgin, many men preferred experienced women. An illegitimate child was better received and a single mother, if she was not promiscuous, could be wed. Shotgun marriages were common. But there were also workers and artisans, often from the south, who retained the ideology of honor from their village life, and who believed the virtue of the fiancée guaranteed the future wisdom of the spouse. And the middle-class cult of virginity remained unshakable at least until the 1920s among the lower middle class. Nevertheless, the transformations of the couple and the family prevailed over this resistance in the twentieth century.

From illegitimacy endured to illegitimacy proclaimed. In France patriarchy eroded in the nineteenth century. Maternal and paternal love bloomed, and a wave of tenderness washed over familial relationships. Unquestioned obedience to the father's command gave way to persuasion, and children gained more freedom. The reduction in parental authority went hand in hand with the rapid decline of arranged marriages. After World War I marriages of love triumphed even in the most resistant regions, if only because heavy demographic losses prohibited excessive restrictions. These marriages rested on the union of two individuals who took a chance at happiness with a freely chosen partner. In this framework, happiness depended on love. One had to seduce one's future spouse, and the progression from tender words to sexual relations became inescapable.

Certainly, young girls could say no, but refusal passed more and more often for frigidity. Between the two world wars 30 percent of couples consummated their union before their wedding night. Although it was still possible before World War II, refusal became archaic in the 1950s and 1960s, when the one-night stand became an obligatory rite of initiation. In 1959, 30 percent of women admitted to prenuptial relations, and 12 percent refused to respond to a question about them. Things then accelerated: from 1968 to 1989, the age at which a young person first had intercourse dropped five years for women and six years for men. By 1989, 90 percent of young women were no longer virgins by the age of eighteen. In Denmark, while 40 percent of female students were still virgins in 1958, only 3 percent were in 1968. In Sweden 68 percent of women born between 1905 and 1935 and 86 percent of those born between 1935 and 1950 were no longer virgins at the time of their marriage. Thus sexual relations became the norm for single young people between 1920 and 1968, but they resulted less frequently in unwanted pregnancy because of progress in contraception.

Beginning in the 1970s, the new phenomenon of the planned illegitimate child emerged, attesting to the dissociation of reproduction from marriage and contributing to a decline in marriage. The changes in concubinage were the ultimate proof of this.

CONCUBINAGE BY DEFAULT AND BY CHOICE

Concubinage (also called cohabitation) is not well understood because it is difficult to pinpoint. Its history is therefore a developing one. The French example, however, reveals that in the recent past concubinage changed from a marginal practice to an official way of life.

The social milieus of concubinage. During the Restoration in France (1815–1830), one out of five households in Paris lived outside the bonds of marriage. This was far less than alarmist contemporary witnesses claimed. Furthermore, Parisian cohabitants were not as overwhelmingly working-class as has been thought. Nonlaborers made up, depending on the quarter of the city, 33 to 40 percent of cohabitants. If concubinage was indeed one of the "forms of working-class civilization," it thrived equally on the anonymity and freedom that the capital offered.

The study of concubinage under the Third Republic confirms the change. Of recorded cohabitants, 80 percent lived in cities, with half in large cities, and 15 percent in Paris. A comparison of the maps of concubinage and industrialization is equally striking. Concubinage thrived in modern France along the Paris-Lyon-Marseille axis extended to the Belgian border. Conversely the west, the Alps, the Massif Central, and Languedoc had little cohabitation. Also, in villages cohabitants were less numerous—9 percent—and were generally day laborers. Rural France tolerated social mistakes, preferring prenuptial pregnancy to a barren woman, but unanimously rejected a public attack on the norm. Thus concubinage remained overwhelmingly a characteristic of the working class into the period between the two world wars: 60 percent of men were artisans or laborers, and 48 percent of women were laborers, 28 percent working in textiles. Generally, cohabitants also came from the urban lower classes, which mixed laborers and the lesser trades, from bread sellers to upholsterers and ragmen. Privileged circles represented at best 10 percent of male cohabitants, for while concubinage was unthinkable for a middle-class woman, it seduced certain middle-class men. One-quarter of the cohabitants of single young women came from well-to-do circles. That said, the working-class character of concubinage increased from 1840 to 1940.

A multifaceted concubinage. In the Third Republic concubinage involved partners with varied levels of sexual experience. Among women, 56 percent had been or were still married and only 44 percent were unmarried. Cohabitors who had been married were older, since 64 percent moved in with their partner after thirty years of age. They also controlled their fertility well: one-third had no children, 43 percent had one or two children, and 67 percent—72 percent among widows—had no illegitimate children. Unmarried cohabitors, on the other hand, were younger: 82 percent were younger than thirty-five, and 20 percent were minors. They were also less experienced: 54 percent failed to avoid pregnancy. The concubinage of unmarried women was thus similar to prenuptial relationships, although 30 percent of them lived with men at least ten years older than they and of a different social class.

When the motives that prompted couples to live together outside of marriage are taken into account, the situation becomes even more complicated. For 10 to 25 percent of couples, concubinage was lived as though it was a preface to marriage. This phenomenon concerned only marriageable couples, half at best of those living in concubinage. It was most often young single people who found themselves in this situation, sometimes because their parents disapproved of the union, sometimes because the promise of marriage, or engagement, was enough of a union, sometimes because the women involved secretly hoped to legalize their union. Without the pressures of society and especially the family, this situation could drag on for long periods of time. Young couples whose four parents were still alive were rare in the nineteenth century, at most one-quarter in Beauce near Orléans. Further, the parents of young cohabitants seemed particularly patient and tolerant, even agreeing to house the young couples. On the other hand, cohabitants who had previously been married, primarily women who were separated, divorced, or abandoned, were not always in a hurry to enter into a binding relationship, and remained satisfied with a situation that preserved their freedom. They did not discard the possibility of legalizing their union, however, primarily for reasons of inheritance; thus toward the end of their lives, older couples would often marry in order to settle legal questions of inheritance. On the other hand, after 1918 war widows remained inflexible for fear of losing their pension.

In one out of four cases, however, cohabitation resulted less from choice than from necessity or instability; 12 percent of cohabitations reveal marginality and poverty. Abandoned women with children agreed to concubinage because of a lack of resources. This was also true of unemployed women. Victims of their sex in the workplace, young underpaid women would live with a man just to survive, and would leave him when they found work. Concubinage between a servant and her master, in the city or in the country, was not always forced on the woman, and there were servant-mistresses who commanded respect, but that situation more often arose from the economic subordination of women; a servant who refused the sexual overtures of her master would be fired. Certain underprivileged and scorned professions existing on the margins of society, such as ragmen or fairground entertainers, made concubinage a way of life. Some cynical men preyed upon mildly disabled women, imposing themselves and taking advantage of these women who could not protest. Four percent of cohabitants came from the circle of ex-convicts, prostitutes, and pimps. Marginal society was frequently indifferent to moral norms.

But most cohabitants, at least half, moved in together as good spouses. The most common face of concubinage was that of cohabitants regarded as married couples. A shifting vocabulary was daily proof of this, particularly with the change from concubine and concubin to "wife" and "husband" and, for the woman, the use of "Madame" followed by the man's name. It was also common for neighbors to be ignorant of the legal status of cohabitants whom they believed to be married. Confusion was particularly strong in the case of young couples, couples who had been together five years or less, and women who had been married and retained their married name and behavior. In order for this assimilation to be possible the couple had to live quietly and project honorable conduct, without scandal. Contemporaries praised supposedly married couples for their good rapport, hard work, and the love they had for each other. Cohabitants were esteemed because they were respectable. They gauged their own conduct against that of married couples and concluded that their irregular situation with regard to legal status could in no way dishonor them. Since they conducted themselves as responsible and moral citizens, and were supported by the praise of their contemporaries, they had little reason to go before the mayor to be married. On the other hand, those who refused on principle to marry were rare. Until World War II concubinage was not the free union advocated by anarchists; it appeared more often as a substitute for married life.

Therefore it is not surprising that the behavior of cohabiting couples was similar in all points to that of legitimate couples of the same working-class circles. There were no more bad male cohabitants—violent, alcoholic, "bad providers"—than there were bad husbands. The tacit contract that made up concubinage seems even to have protected women from abuse because a husband could use his status as head of the family to exercise unchallenged tyranny. In particular, concubinage took women away from the domination of a jealous man or "master." It did not prevent love from blossoming, sometimes in forms more exalted than in the framework of marriage, nor did it prevent adultery from occurring with the same reactions as in married couples. Cohabiting women were judged like wives, according to their domestic and professional talents. They were not worse housekeepers than married women and did not complain more about serving their partners. They were not worse mothers. For example, they rarely abused their children. Their role was even more important than that of a mother in a legitimate family, in which attachments could be lukewarm compared to the love an unmarried woman had for her children. The only difference between legitimate and illegitimate couples was that cohabitants suffered, beginning in the interwar period, under the increasing spread of "social hygiene," a more particular scrutiny. Suspected a priori of immorality, and put at a disadvantage by their low income and poor living conditions, they were judged incapable of educating their children. Thus 47 percent of unmarried parents were deprived of their parental rights and authority on grounds of immorality, compared to 25 percent of married parents.

Although three-quarters of cohabitants lived peaceful daily lives, concubinage was not generally accepted, a fact to which public reprobation bears witness. Primarily verbal, this criticism denounced the "false household" and even became xenophobic when the cohabitants were ostracized foreigners, as were the Yugoslavs, Portuguese, and Algerians in the interwar period. It could even compel certain couples to hide their legal status. But in the twentieth century no one dared vilify the bastard child, whose interests had been protected by the authorities since the 1870s because of the collapse of the birth rate.

From prenuptial relationships to accepted concubinage. In the late twentieth century, as soon as a couple began an extramarital relationship, the question of living together arose.

In France, 12 percent of future spouses already lived together at the time of their marriage in 1965, 17 percent in 1968, 43 percent in 1977, and 87 percent in 1997. Living together served as the framework for prenuptial relationships, and marriage, which was no longer obligatory, often intervened only after the first birth. The rate of illegitimacy coincided thenceforth with the rate of concubinage. Further, the law confirmed these evolutions by giving any natural child, whether of a married couple or of a single person, the legal right to social services. More than two million couples, one out of ten, thus lived without legal ties. From 1985 to 1999 nearly all couples lived this way, at least at some point in their relationship. Also, public disapproval was no longer an issue. That said, the acceptance of concubinage undermined the institution of marriage. Couples thereafter had many options in choosing their social status: free union, marriage, PACS (pacte civil de solidarité). PACS, debated in Parliament in the late 1990s, created a contract, primarily aimed at establishing inheritance, between cohabitants, whether heterosexual or homosexual. On the eve of the year 2000, recognition of homosexual concubinage was the order of the day.

Thus the circle of a long history, beginning in 1750, is completed that allowed public opinion to tolerate and then to accept as normal both sexual relations outside of marriage and concubinage.

Translated from French by Sylvia J. Cannizzaro

See alsoOrphans and Foundlings (volume 3);Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce (in this volume); and other articles in this section.

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