Parenté, alliance et marché dans la france rurale traditionnelle. essai d'application de l'analyse de réseaux au marché foncier et immobilier de saint-marcel (normandie) 1760-1824

Abstract

This paper's objective is to propose some answers to the debate on the role of kinship and wedding alliances in the functioning of the land market in traditional rural societies. Towards this perspective, I have used a specific technique of network analysis as conceived by sociologists. I attempt to apply this to the land market of the village of Saint-Marcel, on the limits of the small town of Vernon in the Seine valley in Normandy, between the middle of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. How were land and properties marketed? The question of the market's "modernity" is raised across kinship and wedding alliances. Did economic factors (social power struggles, price conjunctures, laws of supply and demand) structure the market or was there a submarket in which kinship and alliance determined a lot of dealings, because of the will to keep goods within the family (in the strict and broader sense of the word)? Results demonstrate that the logic of residence prevailed. Kinship, whether parental lineage or through alliance had no significant effect on the function of the market and on the fact of buying a lot of land. This residential logic was the most decisive in a context of farm owning.