This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. I wish to thank my colleague at Syracuse University, Edward Muir, for this reference. Examples are Franklin L. Ford, Robe and Sword Cambridge, Mass. The rise of these new fields incidentally turned the former liabilities of servants as topics the fact that so many servants were women, and they lived and worked within the private and domestic rather than the public and productive spheres into assets.
My work draws heavily on these studies, and I thank M. Botlan and Professor Maza for generously making copies of their work available to me. But my approach differs from these largely prosopographical studies in its attention to the psychology of master-servant relationships. Alert readers will notice that I borrowed not only the use of memoirs but also much of my interpretation of the timing and causes of changes in family life from Stone. For the estimate of , see J.
This is undoubtedly exaggerated. But there were probably 75, to 80, servants in Paris by the eve of the Revolution. Fanny Cradock, Journal de Mme. Cradock: Voyage en France — , trans. Delphine-Balleyquier Paris, , For the exportation of French servants to foreign countries see Barbara Wheaton, Savoring the Past Philadelphia, , — A higher figure, 17 percent for the city as a whole, is often cited eg.
Abbiateci et al. But marriage contracts are a source weighted to favor servants over less prosperous and sophisticated members of the lower classes like gagne-deniers, who were much more likely to marry without a contract. Therefore the figure is probably slightly inflated, and 15 percent is a more realistic estimate. The figures for Toulouse are my calculations based on the number of servants listed in the capitation rolls for these years; they will be explained at length later.
Pariset, ed. In minor commercial centers the proportion of servants was even smaller. In Elbeuf, a Norman textile town, there were only servants in a population of 4, to 5, Jeffry Kaplow, Elbeuf during the Revolutionary Period: History and Social Structure [Baltimore, ], In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say what factors determined the employment of farm servants, rather than sharecroppers or hired day laborers, as agricultural laborers.
