Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 340

The author calls this book an ‘ethnographically-focused account of the life of property in Béarn’ (p. 162). This review can give a glimpse only of the wealth of relations, connections, ideas and overviews presented, that range from local inheritance traditions in Béarn from the Middle Ages onwards, to the origins of the ideas of the famous French sociologist of the family, Frédéric LePlay (1806–82), to the more recent development of theories and concepts of the Béarn-born Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) and finally to national and European Union political debates.

Jenkins describes the ‘house’, encompassing dwelling, property and family, as the most important organizing principle (p. 7) of French Pyrenean societies. One family member of each generation inherits the entire property (land), as well as the authority, reputation and status as the new head of the family. Non-heirs receive only limited compensation or dowries in order to avoid the division of the ‘house’, the most important aim in this society. In his description of Béarn, LePlay coined the phrase ‘stem family’ system, in which three generations lived in one house. Except for the parents and the designated heir and his partner, all other family members in the household remained unmarried. Marriage strategies were a function of the inheritance system. For almost two centuries now, this traditional system has been depicted by authors like LePlay and Bourdieu as being on the eve of extinction or as having vanished some years before, under the perceived threat of outside modernizing incentives, like the legally enforced equal division of inheritances, individualistic ‘cosmopolitan’ views on family, property and authority, and technological developments in agriculture.

Jenkins stresses the incompatibility of all these different views, and he concludes that the ‘house’ system of farms remains viable because its flexibility has allowed it to cope with the threats of the last two centuries, at least in the largest ‘houses’. Even today, large farmers are still at the centre of local values, and Jenkins describes them very positively as the main agricultural innovators and most successful political leaders, serving as a model for others. In fact, Jenkins distinguishes two organizing concepts in social life: a seemingly archaic one resting on authority within the family and connected to the large farms; and a supposedly modern one with room for individual initiative, that was of most importance for small farmers and villagers, and also to some extent for mothers and younger non-heirs. ‘Their co-inherence permits a distinctive, flexible and complex social life’ (p. 160), but this combination also triggers the idea that the preferred concept has repeatedly to give way to more ‘modern’ attitudes. In addition, Jenkins points out the influence of ideas about the family system in Béarn on debates on social reform (civil society) and on sociological and anthropological concepts (symbolic capital, habitus) through LePlay and Bourdieu.

As an economic historian interested in the countryside it proved difficult for me to appreciate the content, methods and arguments in The life of property. Take, for example, the lack of empirical evidence about aspects of the functioning of the ‘house’ system, and its overall aim to transmit the property to a single heir. Bourdieu is criticized for the way he uses statistics, but Jenkins’ work also lacks figures. He mentions that he has conducted an in-depth study of 60 farmsteads from 1780 onwards, but fails to present any systematic survey of the results; all we get is a few examples. Jenkins blames Bourdieu for building his analysis on old men as his main informants, yet he devotes a whole chapter to an analysis of a novel about the ‘house’ of a minor noble/large farming family around 1850, written in 1914, by someone born in 1874 of artisan origins! Elsewhere, Jenkins describes in detail how another ‘house’ survived the division of the property forced by the Civil Code, and the ‘urban’ ambitions of a younger son in 1848. However, he overlooks the fact that the same ‘house’ was sold in 1870, when the male heir died as a soldier and his sister married and moved away. If the main aim was the continuity of the house, then why did the daughter not succeed, and why did the only son, whose presence was essential on the large castle–farm, put the continuity of the house at risk by entering the army?

Jenkins repeatedly stresses the long-term continuity of the ‘house’ as the foundation of the local value system in Béarn, without giving any clue about the actual importance of the ‘house’ system to the different social groups, whether in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1950 or in 2000; figures on the incidence of transfers of ‘houses’ inside and outside the family are not provided. Regrettably, the thinness of the empirical evidence is not compensated for by an extensive knowledge of the literature in the field of family and rural history. The numerous recent publications of Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga and Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux on the stem-family in the Pyrenean region are not cited (expect for one dating from 1984), while references to recent publications on the concept of family strategy are limited.

In conclusion, Jenkins’s book could be very attractive for anthropologists and researchers interested in the history of ideas. However, rural historians wanting to get a real grasp of the nature, the working, the motivations and the development of the Pyrenean stem family system would do better to turn to the work of Arrizabalaga and Fauve-Chamoux.