La mémoire familiale du bourgeois gentilhomme : généalogies domestiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

The family memory of the Bourgeois gentilhomme : private genealogies in France (17th and 18th centuries). In the early 17th century, the old nobility exalted the practice of genealogical memory as the emblem and proof of its excellence, but also as an unbreachable boun dary that of an illustrious past separating it from the new nobility that was promoting itself through the purchase of offices. The genealogical practice was professionally codified in the system used by the "genealogists of the King's Order" or by "judges of arms". However, rather than locking into this role of borderguard, the genealogical quest in fact became the subject of rivalry between the two groups, and indeed of imita tion an unauthorized or amateur genealogism was spreading, mainly by means ofintroductive or conclusive narrations appended to family chronicles. The narrative model of these -genealogies _whose authors belong to the middle and lower strata of the milieu robin _associates traditional values of nobility (antiquity of the family hereditary virtues etc.) with other values, more bourgeois or patriotic : attachment to city or region which is not the cradle of the family but rather the place in which it took root following the reception into high society of migrant ancestor who settled there and the preservation of respectability through solid insertion into circle of notables and maintenance wise domestic economyBurguière André. La mémoire familiale du bourgeois gentilhomme : généalogies domestiques en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 46ᵉ année, N. 4, 1991. pp. 771-788