ABSTRACT
The most fundamental social unit in the eighteenth century was the family. The tendency of urban artisan families to send newborn babies to rural wet nurses so that the mother could continue working shows how economic pressures dominated family decision-making. Historians who employ modern categories based on social class particularly the standard division into peasants, urban workers, bourgeois, and nobles to describe eighteenth-century French society, risk overlooking the important divisions within those groups, and the importance of the group identifications that mattered the most to the people of the time. It was as true of the ambitious noble royal official Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, writing to his father about the financial resources of his intended, as it was among the poor. Some migrated to other regions for part of the year, like the masons from the Limousin region who traveled regularly to Paris to work on construction projects. The village community controlled many important aspects of its members' lives.
