ABSTRACT
Before the reform of the French legal system begun during the Revolution and completed by Napoleon, there were literally hundreds of distinct bodies of customary law for northern France. Even in the areas of civil, or statutory, law in the south, there was much diversity because of the influence of local customs. Moreover, as with most legal systems, there was often considerable distance between the theory of the law and common practice, and, of course, there was change over time. A general essay on “Women and property in ancien régime France” thus threatens to founder under the weight of contradictory evidence or to sink entirely from the holes in its generalizations. At the same time, a narrowly specific case study will be less useful in the context of this volume than one that adopts a broader view of the problem of women’s access to and management of property in pre-Revolutionary France. In an attempt to resolve these difficulties, I have chosen to incorporate a case study of the theory and practice of women’s property rights in the province of Dauphiné into a broader comparative framework that draws largely upon previous research into the practice of customary law in the region of Paris.
