Mechanisms of Collective Resentment: Gender Wars and Alteration of Patriarchy in Eighteenth Century Rural France

• Autores: Elise Dermineur
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 4
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • Historian Barbara H. Rosenwein has argued that people in the Middle Ages lived in "emotional communities", each community having its own very particular norms of emotional valuation, expression, and gestures. In this paper, I examine rural communities and their emotions with particular reference to the relation of debt/credit to the local economy from 1680 to 1789. The eighteenth century was a key period in the transition between precapitalism and capitalism when many structural changes occurred. Those changes can also be observed in rural areas. I am particularly interested in female peasants who did benefit from the new economic changes, as they gradually became essential partners in economic transactions in the credit market and the land market in particular.

    As these women became gradually more involved in economic activities, a reaction toward this breach in the patriarchal system followed. It is my contention that men (and also some women) became angry, sometimes humiliated, because they had to deal with the new economic position of female peasants, which undermined the traditional authoritative role of men as leading actors in the economy, and which also altered patriarchy as a social norm. Resentment toward women was particularly expressed in local courts, which testify to a rise in cases of ordinary violence against women.

    Peasants' emotions in the Old Regime constituted a set of complex and interrelated feelings and sentiments that shaped societal relations and regulated everyday life. Emotions did things as Sara Ahmed put it recently, and should be analysed as an historical object in their own right. Emotions had multiple meanings and effects, and were also manipulated in turn. They expressed the way people lived and interacted. It is my contention that emotions in rural communities in the Old Regime had social and economic functions and followed rules and norms invented and moulded by the peasants themselves. Resentment is one of these emotions and will be analysed as a historical object on its own in this paper.

    As a case study for this paper, I have selected a rural area located in the south of Alsace, on the border with the Swiss cantons, and only a few miles away from Basel. There, peasants traded, exchanged and lived together in an "emotional community" as described by Barbara Rosenwein. Thanks to the analysis of about 3000 civil judicial records of the seigneurie of Delle in Haute-Alsace running from 1680 to 1785, it is possible to examine the origins, signs, and effects of collective resentment toward women's new economic role within the community. The local justice records I have examined, called the 'registres d'audiences', are one of the best sources for the study of rural communities. Particular attention will also be devoted to the formation of a collective social identity in response to the threat to patriarchy. Civil judicial records from this period are under exploited, yet, in the absence of peasant self-narratives, these documents reveal interesting features about emotions.

    This paper will show how resentment, as a community emotion was triggered and worked in an early modern society. Women's new economic role within society did not correspond to the traditional system of patriarchy in which their economic and social role was significantly reduced, and, therefore, launched a complex set of emotions within the society -among which resentment can be distinguished.