Estrategias patrimoniales excluyentes. Un caso francés.

Abstract

Auvergne was a stem-family country where property was passed on in its entirety. My purpose is to show how the emigration towards Spain of the people from Haute Auvergne (the region called Cantal) influenced, until the twentieth century, the unequal sharing-out of the patrimony. In that stem-family society, what fate was in store for those excluded from the inheritance of family property? The kind of emigration we are concerned with is a rural one, carried out in groups several times year on a rota basis, that is to say the migrants went to Spain in rotation for two or three years and came back to their farms for about a year. These to-ings and froings entailed cyclic redistributions of responsibility in the family. These people realized that one of the answers to this unstable pattern was to make one of the daughters the heiress. In this precise centre of emigration, the women brought the land: the rate can reach 60% of the cases; such a rate is very uncommon in rural France and can be found only in the Basque country. The youngest sons, if they emigrated and were moreover bachelors, were the deprived of that period.