The Aunt/Niece Relationship among Families in Eighteenth-Century France

The following paper carries out an analysis of the aunt/niece relationship among families in eighteenth-century Northern France by focusing on this specific link and on the avuncular relation, with the wider kinship networks. The aim is to understand the particular role played by aunts in their nieces' life, compared to that of their nephews, and what sort of privileged bond nieces and aunts could have created within a wider family circle. Through a cross-checking of demographic sources (obtained family reconstitution databases) with notary and qualitative sources (autobiographies and correspondences), the punctual role of aunts in their nieces' lives has been already mentioned, but in an indistinctive manner, without taking into account the gender difference between nieces and nephews. However, they are rarely involved as godparents in the marriage contracts of their nephews and nieces, though their role is more clearly established for the latter than for the former. As widows or as single women, aunts in Northern France could beat the equalitarian inheritance customs by bequeathing their property either to their nieces or nephews through a donation or a will. However, as it has been demonstrated in our sample, such bequests hardly happen. In fact, aunts stay away from the great moments of their nieces' lives, the only exception being the christening episode. To underline the specificity of the niece/aunt bond, one has to take a different view and consider the situation when both of them live together, especially in the case of a trusteeship. Qualitative sources provided us with more insight into the links created through cohabitation. This implies education as well as deep affectionate bonds, especially when the niece has lost her mother and when the aunt is still single or a widow without any children around. Such relationships go far beyond the avuncular link and resemble the mother and daughter bond. The aunt then turns into a surrogate mother and the niece into a surrogate daughter.