ABSTRACT
How do we understand the measure to which some notion of “blood” accounted for the tangled bonds-physical, legal, emotional-that were called familial at the end of the eighteenth century? What does it mean, precisely, that a bastard was not a rights-bearing citizen as long as birth was of consequence, as long as parentage determined a child’s identity?1 A connection was presumed between socially and legally sanctioned procedures of generation, and the societal value of the product. A bastard did not inherit social identity: this legal circumscription was designed to close out the illegitimates with some fi nality. Nevertheless, there was increasing attention paid to what children-including bastards-might inherit physiologically. This natural inheritance issued an epistemological challenge to the functioning legal fi ctions of transmission and the attention to physiological heredity accompanied its shift from the realm of folk knowledge to the domain of science, where it was subject to an arsenal of laws more regular-because “natural”—than those the state defended.
