This translation of five selected articles by the French historian Bernard Derouet, of the Annales school, serves to bring tangibility to the interrelation of law and family that is central to Derouet’s work. Derouet’s approach to the subject of land ownership does not adhere to Anglo-American concepts and traditions of thinking that otherwise prevail in the discussion of social and economic history issues. Instead, the focal point for Derouet lies upon the diverse regional forms of transfer of land to secure the social reproduction of peasant families in France in the time from circa 1400-1900. In this, the law does not appear as a determinant of social practice imposed on rural communities from above, nor as a prescriptive norm encouraging the negotiation of resistant or deviant solutions. Instead, it functioned as a civil law language into which familial practice was to be “translated”. The increasingly standardized national jurisprudence thereby adapted itself to the needs and requirements of the regionally highly disparate peasant communities and economies, not vice versa. Market, private ownership and family strategies augmented one another without the antagonistic contradiction that is frequently claimed to have existed. A constructed contrast between rural, moral economics and bourgeois-capitalist pursuit of profit bypasses the complex realities of the French Ancien Régime. An introduction by Michael Kopsidis positions the arguments of Derouet within the current development and institutional economic discussion.
The book has been published as printed version and is also accessible online as open access publication.
