French family

“ Every family, therefore, with its every connection in the whole empire of the French, was involved in scenes upon which hung prosperity or adversity, reputation or disgrace, honour or captivity ; yet at such a crisis the large assembled family met with cheerfulness, the many guests were attended to with politeness, and the goodly fare of that medley of refreshments called a djeuner in France was met with appetites as goodly as its incitements. ”

“ Why, look at the French; since the Code Napoleon, which chopped up the land into little blocks and gave each child his share, there have been no great families in France. Money a young fellow can squander, but he cannot get rid of his ancestral acres, when they are tightly tied up to come to his eldest son. ”

“ The domestics of the old families in France seemed to have been regarded as a part of the family. Service was almost hereditary, and a bond on both sides. In the French Revolution, nine out of ten of those proscribed by law who escaped were saved by the devotedness of their domestics. ”

“ In a French family of the middle or upper classes, the parent who desires to marry a daughter, for instance, takes pains to introduce and recommend young men of suitable station. No coercion is used on either side. ”

“ For an English resident in France to become an intimate in the home of a French family is a rare enough occurrence, and for a visitor to attempt to discover anything as to French family life first hand is generally a quest doomed to failure. In the vast mass of the middle classes the habit of mind is to remain as far as possible on the estate of one's ancestors or in the place in which one is known. There is no wish to live in foreign lands ”

“ Into some French family. That’s the only way to do—to go to some place where you can talk. If you’re after Art, you want to stick to the galleries; you want to go right through the Louvre, room by room; you want to take a room a day, or something of that sort. But, if you want to acquire French, the thing is to look out for a family. There are lots of French families here that take you to board and teach you. ”

“ Instead of the happy-go-lucky methods of the middle and lower class Anglo-Saxon, who will turn a family of sons and daughters loose upon the world with very little thought as to their future beyond the bare necessities of food, clothing, and shelter, the French parent regards it as his duty to see that [Pg 14] each daughter is provided with a dot suitable to her position, and the Civil Code requires a parent to leave a proportion of his property to each member of his family. ”

“ A family tradition, which goes back to we don't know when, ascribes a French origin to her family, and directs that a certain medal should be transmitted to the eldest son, without more than two persons ever knowing of its existence. ”

“ The French at last appear to find out that contentment with one's lot is an element of happiness, and that in their changes of government since February, 1848, they have changed nothing beyond the names of their masters. Frenchmen—since King Louis Philippe's abdication—exchanged the paternal rule of their Kings with the all-beneficial influence of the Royal Family of France for the yoke of fawning parasites ”

“ We must look at typical instances of the French system to understand what it has really been, and how many of the noblest and best women in a country distinguished for its women have entered upon congenial lives in this manner. In its practical rendering by the best people the mariage de convenance has always meant the marriage in which the conditions of family happiness were based upon high character, suitability of circumstances, and, if possible, old family friendships. ”

“ They could not afford to be idle; they had large families to support; they had their patrimony to keep in the family, and, if possible, to increase. All the customs that we are going to see unrolled before us, the sentiments expressed, the simple, dull, serious life led, are utterly alien from anything we call technically French. ”

“ In time, however, through the marriage of the daughters—for in savage life the young men usually roam off and take wives elsewhere, while the young women stay at home—instead of the original single family, we have the grown daughters, with their husbands, living still with their parents and rearing children, thus forming a group of families, closely united by kinship. ”

“ Whole families have come. One whole family we see clearly, of three generations: the father picking, the mother shovelling, the young ones wheeling assiduous; old grandfather, hoary with ninety-three years, holds in his arms the youngest of all: [297] frisky, not helpful this one ”

“ To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. ”

“ Jacques read:
To Mademoiselle Claire René: The soil of France now covers the bodies of your three brothers, Clément and Fernand and Alphonse Populet. The soil of France covers the Croix de Guerre upon their breasts. The sons of France, and of America, hold forever in their hearts the memory of their honor. We are all one family now—France and America—and so I send to you three brothers—not in place of, but in the stead of those others. They come to give you love and service in the name of America. ”

“ The family, which the fiercest blasts of the revolutionary tempest in the last century had left untouched, is, in our day, radically assailed in its two essential foundations, marriage and inheritance. ”

“ In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and every nobleman, cousin to a nobleman. As it says in the sublime pages of the biblical genealogies, in a thousand years, three families, Shem, Ham and Japheth, can cover the globe with their children. A family can become a nation, and, unfortunately, a nation can once more become a single, simple family. ”

“ Eliminating, and for obvious reasons, the greater and more powerful Houses, the record of most old English families is a contradiction in terms of the rigid but quite logical observance of a Continental noblesse. There is about an even chance that sooner or later you tap the root of the family and its fortunes in a woolstapler, a goldsmith, a vintner, an iron-forger, a flockmaster, a haberdasher, or a grocer, and last, but assuredly not least, in a successful lawyer. ”

“ At any rate it is of the highest importance that it should not be known that you are in France. If it is proved that your father is dead and your mother is secluded for life, we must then introduce you to her family, and try and get them to bring all their influence to bear to have you acknowledged openly as the legitimate heir of the marquis, and to obtain for you the succession to at least a portion of his estates--say to that of those which she brought him as her dowry. ”

“ But a far nobler arrangement was made by that greatest of modern legislators, Napoleon—whose code entitles the daughters of a house to share, equally with sons, in its property and bequeathments; and in France, a woman with a dowery is as sure of courtship and marriage, as of death and burial. Nay, so much is marriage regarded among the French as the indispensable condition of the human species, that parents proceed as openly to the task of procuring a proper husband for their daughter, as of providing her with shoes and stockings. ”

“ The family has ceased to exist; we have only individuals. In their desire to become a nation, Frenchmen have abandoned the idea of empire; in proclaiming the equal rights of all children to their father's inheritance, they have killed the family spirit and created the State treasury. ”

“ We have real grandmothers and real grandchildren, and our fathers are real heads of the family. I don’t think a Frenchwoman would want to have a husband who didn’t have authority, to whom she didn’t look up. ”

“ All these families were made up of persons who preserved a high tradition of courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech, with a family pride, and a squeamish sense of noblesse oblige which suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled with occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease to be accessories and take the chief place in existence. ”

“ Are there not also in France some of our young nobles, who, finding their family name too short, lengthen it out by the name of an estate, and surmount the whole with a knight’s casque, or a baron’s coronet: so that their seals or their carriages bear the evidence of belonging to some ancient family, quite delightful to reflect upon? ”

“ She came from nowhere more remote than Paris and her maiden name was that of a respectable family of teachers, a family which, though middle-class, yet seemed to contain a heritage of intellect, for it had enriched mankind for years, if not for centuries, with tutors and governesses, even as another family will breed clergymen, a third give the preference to men of business, a fourth supply the military element, and a fifth play-actors, civil servants, hairdressers, sailors, or what not. ”

“ To families divided by questions of money and inheritance he said: “Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years. Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find husbands.” ”

“ And it has become all the more oppressive since families in France have been reduced to the minimum: father, mother, one or two children, and here and there, perhaps, an uncle or an aunt. It is a cowardly, fearful love, turned in upon itself, like a miser clinging tightly to his hoard of gold. ”

“ In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father's house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. ”

“ The present condition of France, and the so far successful villainy of her perjured usurper, are in proof of this position, which was understood by one of her statesmen a few years ago, when he said with emphasis on his dying bed, "What France wants is family religion; what France wants is family religion." ”

“ Yet, as every intelligent traveller in France must have remarked, there is scarcely to be found, among the middle or upper classes (and seldom even among the working classes) , such a thing as a large family; very seldom more than three or four children. ”

“ Other ship-loads of maids followed, and with the establishment of these Virginian families was dealt, as is everywhere else that the family exists, a fatal blow at a community of property and interests, but the colony flourished, and the civilization of the new world was begun. For the unit of society may be the individual, but the molecule of civilization is the family. ”

“ Now every one knows how marriages are managed in France, not only in the time of Saint-Simon, but even to the present day. A mother or an aunt, or a grandmother, or an experienced friend, looks out; be it for son, be it for daughter, it is the business of her life. ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ The consideration of the house and its parts and furniture, and of the outward forms of domestic life, leads us naturally to that of the constitution of the family. It was the chief pride of the aristocratic class to live very extravagantly, and to support a great household, with an immense number of personal attendants of different classes. In the first place the old system of fostering, which was kept up to a comparatively late period, added to the number of the lord’s or knight’s family. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ The doctrine has been firmly held that the family, as we have it instituted in Europe and in European colonies, is the beau idéal, the sacred and immutable sociological type. Ethnography, however, and even history, teach us that the present familial type of Europe has not always existed, and that it is the result, like everything else, of a slow evolution ”

“ In our society the meal unites the members of the family; but the sacrificial repast has nothing to do with the family. Kinship is older than family life; the oldest families known to us regularly comprised persons who belonged to various bonds of kinship. The men married women of strange clans and the children inherited the clan of the mother ”

“ But I cannot bring myself to believe, that the hereditary principle, or, in more general terms, the sentiment of family, should be entirely excluded from the aristocratical part of the new social order, which, although yet wrapped in uncertainty and mystery, is now struggling into existence on both sides of the Atlantic. The sentiment of family is not becoming extinct. Like all other social institutions, the constitution of the family has undergone various changes, since the beginning of the historical period. ”