le parallélo- gramme

i promised myself that i wouldn’t post any more about france until i’d finished reading robb’s The Discovery of France (and some other materials on that nation), but i’m too impatient, so here goes.

here from Fréquence et répartition des mariages consanguins en France is a map of consanguineous marriages among catholics in france between 1926 and 1945 (this map made a previous appearance on the blog in this post):

last week i posted a couple of maps showing how the distributions of these historic cousin marriage rates in france and the various regions in which different crops are grown are largely congruent — historically there was (prolly still is) a greater avoidance of cousin marriage in the wheat growing areas of the country versus the grass covered areas of the pastoralists (and even those areas inhabited by olive and grape growers!). this is undoubtedly a legacy of medieval manorialism since, as mitterauer has convincingly argued, manorialism was all tied up with wheat/grain growing AND the institution also helped to promote the avoidance of cousin marriage.

normally i don’t like to use a population’s modern cousin marriage rates to try to guess what their past rates might’ve been — it’s dangerous and one shouldn’t make assumptions. mating patterns change. however, in this case, based upon what i know about the history of medieval france, especially the franks and their adoption of christianity, and the patterns of manorialism in northern europe, i think it’s probably safe to assume that the regional differences in the cousin marriage rates on the map above probably do reflect cirumstances on the ground in france for the last few hundred years — perhaps even one thousand. note that i’m not saying that the cousin marriage rates were the same in france in the past as in the early twentieth century, just that these same regional differences probably existed — i.e. that those areas with lower cousin marriage rates in the 1920s-1940s probably had lower rates than the rest of the country for a very long time, etc. going forward, this will be my working assumption for france, but please keep in mind that it is an assumption. could be wrong. if i come across any data contradicting — or supporting! — this assumption, i’ll let you know!

something robb says early on in The Discovery of France [pg. 12] caught my eye:

“Tales of isolation and ignorance tend to be associated with spectacular exceptions and with regions that lie beyond what some French historians have termed ‘an enlarged Paris Basin’, which accounts for more than one-third of the country — an enormous parallelogram [sic] stretching from Lille to Clermont-Ferrard and from Lyon to Le Mans, where ‘men, ideas and merchandise’, all identifiably and self-consciously French, had supposedly been pumping through the system since the Ancien Regime.”

if we map that…

…sacrebleu! that’s not far off…

and here overlaid onto todd’s family systems (as best i could =/ )…

my guess is that robb’s paralleogram — the “enlarged paris basin” — represents the most manoralized, most oubred region of france. (i guess, too, that it prolly can be extended a bit to the east). this is “core” france, and the peripheral regions like brittany (where the le pen family is from) and the massif central area further south have experienced more inbreeding (or less outbreeding, depending on how you want to look at it) and so those subpopulations will be more clannish than the population originating from inside le parallélogramme. in other words, brittany and the massif central areas should be thought of as france’s scottish highlands or english borderlands.

indeed, a report from transparency international seems to indicate that, looking away from paris which has no doubt attracted all sorts, there is more corruption in peripheral france than in core france. (i know that it’s also difficult to say much about southern coastal france since there are so many immigrants there.) [source]:

also, i previously found, using the world values survey data, that the population in the area officially categorized as “paris east” is the most civic in france. part of paris east falls within le parallélogramme, but much of it lies further to the east, perhaps indicating that robb’s parallelogram should also be extended further to the east. the cousin marriage rates certainly suggest that. we shall see.

and, as we’ve already seen, there are some pretty clannish sounding populations in peripheral france in places such as the auvergne and the greater roquecezière metropolitan region. (~_^) still, Further Research is Required^TM.

btw, the ancestors of french canadians came mostly from regions bordering on or outside of le parallélogramme and acadians (cajuns) originated entirely from outside this “core” france (see here).

vive la france! (^_^)

previously: meanwhile, in france… and mating patterns in france and topography (and history) and crops and cousin marriage in france and civicness in france by region and the auvergnat pashtuns and the battle of roquecezière and big summary post on the hajnal line and what’s up with french canadians?

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