Pregnancy Declarations

If, in your research on your French ancestor, you find a baptism or birth record without a father named for the child, do not despair. There is another resource: the déclaration de grossesse, or the pregnancy declaration. Depending upon which historian you read, the requirement for unmarried or widowed women who fell pregnant to make a legal declaration before a notaire or judge was intended to:

• protect girls from rape and seduction
• combat infanticide 
• make sure as many children as possible would be baptized as Catholic
• reform women 
• reduce the number of babies abandoned 

  The first law to that effect was in 1556, under Henri II and it applied to all women, married or not, though it seems that was rather difficult to enforce. Over the next three centuries, there were modifications. In 1745, judges were required to stop all pregnant women and, if they could not provide proof of having made a pregnancy declaration, take them into custody. In 1748, in order to avoid "anonymous denunciations" by snooping neighbours, women were required to make the declaration before the sixth month of gestation. This was later changed to the eighth month. Even after the Revolution, until the 1830s, pregnancy declarations in some form were required of some women. Thus, in each commune and each city quartier, when a dead baby was discovered, prosecutors had a ready list of suspects. Infanticide, from the first law of 1556 through the penal code of 1791, was considered first degree murder, punishable by death. A woman who did not register was considered to be planning to kill her child.

The women who married, noble, rich, generally were ignored by these laws. Those who most were effected by them were servant women, for they were vulnerable at all hours to the advances of the men of the places where they worked. The declarations make sad reading at times, for they tell of rape, of humiliation, of seduction and betrayal, of prostitution. They also show that local officials were often kind and tolerant, assigning public money to support the child, prosecuting rapists when possible, promising to protect the privacy of the woman making the declaration, unless she needed the document in court.  Lots of material here for graduate theses.

The two main places to look for pregnancy declarations are the Archives Départementales, where they can be found in three different series:

• Series B, if before 1790
• Series L 238-406 and supplements 1 and 2 to Series L, and Series U, if from 1790-1800
• Subseries 4 U, if from 1810- 1830

  

and in the archives of the Justices Seigneurials. The justice seigneurial was often the local lord acting as the justice over his tenants.  These archives are located inconsistently. In some places, they are in the archives of the commune, in others, in the departmental archives.

©2009, Anne Morddel

French Genealogy

Comments

[Anne]

Hello Dominique,

Not much is written in English. If you google the french term, quite a lot comes up.

So far as I know, the requirement stopped, not abruptly, around 1830. French genealogists bemoan this as it means that it is almost impossible to trace the fathers of illegitimate children during the years of no déclarations de grossesse.

The term is used today for a woman's need to register her pregnancy to the health system (France has a national health system with lots of bureaucracy) in order for her doctor to be able to order all of her necessary care on the system (e.g. so that she will not have to pay for it.)

As for numbers, I should think there are many thousands of these documents, for nearly every departmental archive lists them among their holdings. There does not seem to have been any standard of entry, but most have the mother's name and origins and her testimony. If necessary, a judicial decision is included.

Here is a good article:

http://users.skynet.be/maevrard/declaration_grossesse.htm

If people would like, I can do another post with examples.
A

[Dominique]

Hi Anne,

Thanks for this information. Did this practice continue past 1830? A quick search of the internet did not produce an example to get an idea of the amount of content. Were these declarations standardized, similar to post revolutionary civil records?

Dominique