Dan Snow's History Hit - One Normal Family, 300 Years of History

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Every family has a history and delving into the history of one ordinary French family over three centuries provides a remarkable picture of deep social and economic changes. Accounts of the lives of the rich and powerful families of history are commonplace. We have all read about the Kennedy's, the Windsors or the Habsburgs but what about an ordinary family? Dan is joined by Emma Rothschild, Professor of History at Harvard University and herself a scion of the Rothschild family, who has set out to prove that any family, however ordinary can be just as fascinating. She chose at random Marie Aymard, an illiterate widow, who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France in 1764 and traced her family's history down five generations and it's quite a ride! This episode charts the history of the family, why Emma chose this subject matter and acts as a reminder that families are intriguing and complicated with an infinite number of different outcomes.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We all know that big, posh families have got illustrious histories. We have read accounts of the Kennedys, the Windsors, the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns. We've seen a lot of those. But what Emma Rothschild herself, a sign of one of those families, but more importantly a professor of history at Harvard University, set out to do was prove that every family, yours, mine, have just as much fascination if you do a proper historical survey into their past. She chose at random a family living in the provincial

town of Angoulême in southwest France. The year was 1764 and she chose chose Marie Emald, an illiterate widow who lived there. She left no diaries. She left no archive. No beautiful account of her life was written by an interested neighbour. Nothing. She's just normal. And from that moment in December 1764, Emma has traced generations of that family's history. And it's a hell of a ride, everybody. It's a reminder that your family, my family, it's complicated. There are different outcomes. It's extraordinary. Individuals might be bound by blood, but boy, their behaviour, their habits, their ideas, their personality, their characteristics, pretty darn different.

So this is a wonderful history. It's such a clever idea and it was great having Emma Rothschild on the podcast to talk about it. If you want to go and listen to other podcasts without the ads, you just pay a very small subscription, you go to historyhit.tv, you listen to all the podcasts without the ads, watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries, you can take your fill. It's the place to be for true history fans. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy Professor Emma Rothschild. Emma, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Who is this family that you have identified? And why did you pick them of all people? It was really curiosity. I think the document that was the point of no return was a prenuptial contract from 1764. They were a completely unknown family. But the daughter, she was the daughter of a carpenter, was married to the son of a tailor. And 83 people signed their prenuptial contract.

83 people signed their prenuptial contract. So I was just carried away by curiosity. Who were all those 83 people? Why did they have so many friends and acquaintances? And one thing led to another. I came upon this prenup almost by accident in the archives. I was interested in the family because the bride's mother, who was illiterate, was trying to find what had happened to her husband, the carpenter, who'd gone as an indentured servant to the West Indies. And then there was this extraordinary document. I turned the page over and there were all the signatures. And I started thinking, well, maybe I can find out who all these people were and why they were there. Your book reads like a kind of Marquez novel of generations of drama and echoes back to previous people. I mean, it was a wonderful document that

piqued your interest, but it's not like there's a particular diary or set of archives. It is just a totally normal family, is it? That was the point. There aren't any diaries. There are no personal archives till the fifth generation. So I was curious as to whether there were stories in ordinary people's lives. And oh, were there stories? There were so many. And I just got intrigued by following them. And one thing led to another. And I thought, maybe there is a book here. Was there ever a moment when you'd got so deep into researching this family and then went, I just don't think there's enough for a book? There must have been a moment of absolute panic. No, that's why it's called an infinite history. I had the opposite anxiety that I could go on and on forever tracing them. I didn't want to go anywhere near the present. And there's an interesting

relationship to the kind of family history that people do of their own families. This uses many of the same sources as ancestry and genealogy, but I wanted to keep a distance from that. And I also was very interested in the kinds of people who are left out of family histories often because they don't have children. Like at one point in the book, the central figures are five unmarried great aunts who lived together throughout their lives. So you've kind of arbitrarily plucked out this family. You said there were no diaries. These five great-aunts, have they left a big archival footprint?

Can we know things about them? Well, one of them had a shop and did quite well. So she had to declare her income in a tax register. And then they saved their money and they got a mortgage and bought a house and started a school. And then they left wills, which were extremely sort of matrilineal. They left their property only to their female relations. At one point, the house they bought was left to 15 female descendants of their grandmother. You can get a sense of people without there being letters or the kind of materials that biographies of great families or great individuals leave. The book has tons of end notes, and I wanted to show that even an ordinary family could have a historical record, could be

documented in the way that great families are. So that was important. And I suppose you had a little bit of wind in your sails because this period in French history was extraordinarily turbulent within France and French people, like British people, were at the heart of an empire that means that there was a good chance you were going to take people abroad or have investments abroad or engagements, entanglements around the rest of the world. The context for your book is presumably quite important. Yes, and I wanted to show that even in a small, according to Balzac, really boring town in the middle of France, there were a lot of connections to overseas. And it started with Marie-Emma, who was looking for what happened to her husband in the West Indies for a reason. She was a connection to the overseas world of slave colonies. generation when there's at last someone who's very famous. The grandson's grandson became a famous

cardinal at the end of the 19th century and an opponent of the Trans-Saharan slave trade. But the French Revolution is very important in the story because I was interested in what happens to people who weren't famous, but whose lives were profoundly transformed by everything that happened. Quick question. Did you know you were going to get to the famous person when you started the project? Was he a bonus? Absolutely no idea. He was the opposite of a bonus. He was a rather large figure physically. He was said to be very handsome. He was a great connoisseur of food and wine. He was larger than life. And I thought, is he going to take over the entire book, which he didn't entirely. But it is something very strange about knowing so much about a family

so long ago. At one point, I was worried that I was going to be able to find out something that Marie-Emma, the woman at the beginning of the book, was not herself able to find out, namely what happened to her husband. And I was in the National Archives in Kew because the island he was in was captured by the British. And I thought, maybe I'm going to find out that he wasn't dead at all, and he was living happily with his slave and had many more children. Well, I didn't find that out, but it's a rather peculiar feeling. One's almost like a rather seamy private detective looking at the lives of people 200 or 250 years ago. Well, that's what historians do. They dig up

dirt on dead people. I mean, come on. So remind me, how many generations do you go through? I go through five generations. And you start at the end of the Seven Years' War in the 18th century. What are some of the big observations? Are our little lives, people like you and I, are they affected by the great eruptions that go on in the distant capital city? Well, Paris was a tremendous magnet for the family in later generations. And this is something else that I was really fascinated by in the 19th century story. There were two branches of the family who settled in Paris, and their lives were extraordinarily disparate. In that respect, it really is a story of economic inequality and also spatial inequality in

a way. One of the branches were the descendants of a son who himself emigrated to Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue, came back as a destitute refugee. And they essentially got poorer and poorer and poorer throughout the 19th century. And I can find a lot of things about them because they kept petitioning for relief. So they show up in those sorts of archives. They show up in the births, marriages, and deaths records. Another part of the family went into business and into banking and for a time became extremely rich. Then there was the family of the cardinal who became, if not rich, very famous. And it turns out that all these third cousins were living very near each other in Paris.

So did they know of each other's existence? They probably did in the generation of the parents, but did they pass each other in the street? With the help of colleagues, I've done a little website for the book, which is meant to be continuations in part, but it's got a lot of maps. Paris and sort of trying to find a spatial pattern of them moving to poorer and poorer districts in one case? And did families cluster together? And how much did they know about each other? You're listening to Dan's News History. We're tracing one normal family through three centuries of French history with Emma Rothschild. More after this. Okay, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast.

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There are new episodes every week. I'm wondering also though you mentioned Saint-Domingue the upheavals there the revolution the loss of that French colony are you struck by how big historical events the great national actors on the national stage the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, did it radically change the lives of people? The interplay between the big history and these people's actual lives? That's what I really wanted to show in the middle part of the book. There are three chapters really about the French Revolution. And to give you an example, one way in which their lives changed absolutely profoundly was in relation to who they married. Until the French Revolution, most people married someone who lived two streets away from them in this small town or in another village, most people in the family. By the 1790s, the boys

were going away to be in the army and marrying people in far-flung parts of France. Strange, itinerant professors of design were coming to the small town and marrying the daughters. So the pattern of what demographers call notchiality was completely changed. I also know where they lived because of all the various registers and censuses. And I tried to convey what it was like to live during the revolution by looking at things that happened in those streets. And one of the things that happened was enormous physical turmoil because the monasteries and nunneries were being closed down and all their property was being trundled from one end of the street to another and put on public sale.

So I tried to get a sense of what it sounded like and looked like. And there were processions that started near where they lived, where women dressed in white were going to the former cathedral to celebrate the triumph of reason with a band playing and denunciations of Edmund Burke. So I tried to get to something of a sense of what life felt like, even for people who were so obscure. I mean, the other thing is that I'm interested in the book, not just in the family, but in their neighbours and to some extent their friends. And there were two people from Angoulême who went to Paris and played a sort of modest political role in the revolution. One pro-revolutionary, the other

anti-revolutionary. And I talk about them. It sounds to me like this family experienced quite dramatic social mobility over five generations. Does that tell us something about us as humans, or is it very specifically because of the context of what France went through at this time? War, colonial advance and dramatic retreat, revolution. Did that mean that conditions were right for families like this to kind of rise and fall at the socioeconomic scale. Yes, and it was downward social mobility as well as upward mobility. And it sometimes happened very fast. And there was a tremendous amount of geographical mobility, both within and outside France. So I do think it shows, in a way, it shows in a way how many opportunities there were for individuals in France, even in the parts of France that were thought of as most sort of archaic and immobile to change their lives.

And even for people in professions like the church or the office of the collector of taxes or girls schooling to do very well. In some ways, these are rather economic characters, as in Adam Smith, who are kind of trying to get ahead and change their lives. And I certainly don't think they are a representative family. And I don't even know what it would mean to say that a family is a representative family. And I don't even know what it would mean to say that a family is a representative family. But I do think it shows that things happened and you can tell stories about people who are apparently obscure. At some stage, you must have got in touch with descendants, did you? The current living descendants? And did their heads nearly fall off with excitement that one of the world's

great historians was making a minute study of their family history? No, I was absolutely terrified that I would ever run into a descendant. And in fact, I deliberately stop the bookstops in 1906, which is well beyond conceivable living memory. And I don't know what the descendants would think. So you've got no contact with them at all? Absolutely zero contact. I'm terrified that a descendant will appear. I mean, I know who some of them are. And actually, the cardinal has an archive in Rome where I spent many, many happy days. And there are some letters from earlier

20th century descendants. So they're going to be walking along the street one day in Paris, and they're going to see you have written a gigantic book about their family. I mean, that's going to be a real treat for them. But they're going to be absolutely shocked, some of them, to know from whom they descended. And they're people who I hope one day I'm going to find. I mean, one of the grandsons became a priest. He left the priesthood during the French Revolution and married a parishioner. And I've totally lost any trace of him. People did cover their traces in the restoration, but I'm sure at some point I'm going to find him and his wife nestling in some record having changed their name.

Now, what about, if you don't mind me asking, the fact that you are from one of the most famous and storied families on earth? Is this part of your desire to say that it's not just families like mine that have got these wonderful histories, that is every single family out there? I wondered whether I was particularly drawn to complicated families. And I come from large and complicated families on my mother's side, as well as my father's side. I think actually, in my case, it comes from having written a book, Actually, in my case, it comes from having written a book, The Inner Life of Empires, about a Scottish family who did write many, many letters and kept many diaries. And I told a story about their political and other ventures around the world. And I thought, is it only because they were literate and relatively prosperous and left a lot of

written material that I could write a family history? And so I was intrigued by the possibility of writing on the basis of only completely ordinary and universal records. And I describe the book as being made up of 98 stories. And there are stories to be found in birth, marriage and death records, and of course, in divorce records. One of the grandsons was one of the early people to be divorced in the town when divorce was allowed in the French Revolution. So yes, I felt this was a way of telling a large story through a small story of an unfamous family. And it was a way of perhaps showing to people who are interested in their own family history, that it's not only their own grandparents or their great-grandparents who were worth investigating, but also who were their grandparents' neighbours, who were their friends. Did their grandmother have an unmarried sister

who didn't have children of her own, but who was really important because she provided a home to her nieces, something like that. The sort of people who are there in history and have intriguing lives, but aren't there in the family tree that goes back. Because you're dealing with official documentation, archival records, have you hit a buffer? Could you go back further? What are French archives like? Susanna Lipscomb just found a wonderful archive around church conflict resolution trials in the 16th century in France, but would you struggle to go back much further? One of the reasons that French history is such a joy is because of notarial records. And these are semi-official. Notaries wrote down detailed descriptions of everything from wills to disputes to inventories.

The marriage contract was a notarial document. And they, in fact, go back to the 14th century. And many of them have now been digitized and are available online in the French departmental archives. So in that sense, I think one could go back further. One of the things I was curious about was how long had the family lived in this town? Did they, like so many others, grow up in a rural setting and move into the town? I could find that easily by going into 17th century records. But the handwriting is pretty dire, and it's a lot direr in the 17th century. Well, thank you so much. What a wonderful adventure you've been on.

The book is called? An Infinite History, the Story of a Family in France Over Three Centuries. Emma Rothschild, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about it. Thank you very much. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all work out and finish. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make

a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.