Celebrating the Père de Famille: Pronatalism and Fatherhood in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

Between 1760 and 1790, the French royal government awarded thousands of tax reductions and payments to fathers with ten or more children. The official purpose of the awards was to encourage population, but the correspondence between applicants and administrators dwells on the definition of a “good father” more than on population. Applicants and administrators agreed in general on a sentimentalized model of good fatherhood with roots in the Catholic Reformation; a good father provided sustenance, education, and a good moral example to his children in performance of his quasi-sacred paternal duty. The ideal of fatherhood emerging from pronatalist discourse confirms that the patriarchal-authoritarian model, which had in the past bolstered arguments for royal power, was displaced in the mid-eighteenth century by a newer focus on paternal obligation, even in the administrative discourse of the royal government.