Popular Classes and Cohabitation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris

Abstract

This article aims to show that we do not know what we believe we do about the extent and meaning of recourse to cohabitation among popular classes in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. Discourse on cohabitation and illegitimacy is deconstructed, revealing that analyses of popular behavior are based on problematic data and flawed methods. If cohabitation was widespread, this was because of the legal and economic constraints imposed on workers, particularly migrants, rather than a symptom of cultural breakdown or the emergence of a counterculture. The article interrogates serial data, and especially marriage records, as well as the archives of charity organizations, to argue that Parisian workers were anxious to marry, to marry in church, and to marry respectably. It suggests that we should dedramatize cohabitation and recognize that popular-class attitudes and behavior were more conformist and traditional than we have been led to think.