Between Paternal Right and the Dangerous Mother: Reading Parental Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century French Civil Justice

Abstract

With the enactment of the law of 25 July 1889 on the divestiture of paternal authority, French civil courts were for the first time allowed to divest parents they deemed "morally dangerous" of all rights over their children. These rights were widely perceived as belonging to fathers alone, in accordance with the provisions of Napoleonic civil law. Although the masculine foundation of parental rights appeared indisputable, the law's definition of moral danger was extremely am biguous. This ambiguity was most apparent in the instance of poor single women. In making cases about morally dangerous mothers, authorities constructed nar ratives that reconfigured gendered conventions defining the distribution of author ity and responsibility in the family. Only through these narrative reworkings could magistrates transform legislation centered on the codified authority of the male head of household into an effective means of regulating a feminine parental power that had no recognized status in nineteenth-century civil law .