« Cher cousin » : les usages matrimoniaux de la parenté proche dans la France du XVIIIe siècle

摘要

"Dear Cousin": The Uses of Close Kinship Ties in Marriage in Eighteenth-Century France. A. Burguière. A clear distinction was made by the Catholic Church until the 19th century between marriages involving an uncle and his niece (or an aunt and her nephew) or marriages of first cousins which required a dispensation that the Pope only had the power to give, and marriages of more distant kindred: in this case the dispensation might be obtained, if the claimers where "poor", directly from the Episcopal Court. But the small number of "fulminations" of marriage dispensations for a kin tie of the first and second degree in the files of the Episcopal Court of the diocese of Paris (for the 18th century) compared with the large number of "fulminations" for marriages of first cousins shows that the "popular" practice did not recognize the same frontier as the canonic Law did, between the less acceptable and the more acceptable degrees of incest. The representation of marriages between kindred in the works of fiction and in theatre pieces preferably, proposes an other way, and perhaps a better one, to observe the popular norms concerning incest and endogamic marriages. By analysing the narrative scheme of a sample of theatre plays performed in Paris during the 17th and 18th centuries, one can observe a strong contrast between the purpose of a match between cousins which is so constantly presented positively that it could be considered as the pattern of prefered marriage and the very negative image of uncles intending to marry their niece, always presented as perverse and ridiculous.