Introduction : illegitimacy and the political history of the family -- Bastardy in sixteenth-century French legal doctrine and practice -- Jurisprudential reform of illegitimacy in seventeenth-century France -- Royal bastardy & dynastic crisis -- State expansion, social practice, and the quandaries of legal unification -- Redefining social interest: the eighteenth-century foundling crisis -- Illegitimacy and legal change in the French Enlightenment
Summary
Tracing the historical evolution of legal debates over the rights and disabilities of children born out of wedlock in early modern France, this text offers a political history of the family from the oblique perspective of those who were theoretically excluded from it
