Sang des bâtards, sang de la noblesse : à propos des « contextes durables » en anthropologie historique de la parenté

In an article published in 2015 (« La France profonde. Relations de parenté et alliances matrimoniales (xvie-xviiie siècle) », Annales HSS), Gérard Delille used the massive and dense material he had accumulated on matrimonial alliances over several generations of provincials during the Old Regime to argue that the “structuring” figures of kinship should be considered as “enduring contexts”. In this fashion he addressed the classic criticism directed against structural anthropological approaches to kinship that they fail to address sufficiently diachronic dynamics in their concern to analyze enduring structures and unchanging elements. This article uses this notion of “enduring contexts” to explore permanences in the condition of illegitimate children of the nobility between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Can one explain the role that illegitimate children continued to play in noble lineages as an effect of the patrilineal inflection in the transmission of nobility as well as the exaltation of bloodlines that seem to characterize nobility over the longue durée? Drawing on recent scholarship in the history of kinship and that of bloodlines, the article develops this hypothesis through the historicization of filiation and the imaginary around blood considered a biological “given” of ties of filiation from the end of the Middle Age to the end of the seventeenth century. At another level of analysis, the substitution of the term “enduring context” for that of “structure” opens other sorts of questions: historiographic questions about scalar analyses of temporalities in which historical events occur, questions about the presuppositions, the hypothesis and the horizons of the historical anthropology of kinship