Page 166 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Sandro Guzzi-Heeb

not unblemished (from the Church’s point of view), they were not excluded
from the devotional societies. On the contrary: in 1791, Marie Madeleine
Beth gave birth to a child conceived seven months before her marriage
to Pierre Nicolas Exquis, and she joined the Confraternity of the Blessed
Sacrament that same year. Incidentally this was a few months after Mu-
rith’s departure. Wasthisjustacoincidence?
In the period 1840–1850 the situation had not fundamentally changed:
illegitimacy and prenuptial conceptions had increased further, and the
members of the holy confraternities did not behave much better – from
the Church’s point of view – than others. A statistical approach focusing
on averages among couples married in the period 1840–1850 does not pro-
duce very conclusive results. Illicit sexuality does indeed seem to have been
practiced a little less among the members of the brotherhoods, but the dif-
ferences are not significant. Certainly, the most serious offenses from the
point of view of the Catholic Church – adultery or relationships that give
birth to illegitimate children – are only rarely committed by ‘confrères’ or
sisters.
As far as premarital conceptions are concerned, however, the differences
between the members of the brotherhoods and the rest of the population
were not very significant, neither in the eighteenth nor in the nineteenth
century. This view confirms the impression that the bonds forged by be-
longing to a brotherhood were ‘weak,’ in the sense attributed to this ex-
pression by M. Granovetter: social relations that were important but not
too restrictive for the individuals concerned (Granovetter 1973).
Whether a coincidence or not, by the mid-eighteenth century the confra-
ternities were no longer able to ensure sexual discipline. This was especial-
ly evident in Bovernier, a small parish where unlawful sexual activity was
frequent. In the Bourgeois/1 branch (according to my genealogical classifi-
cation) from Bovernier, for example, there was a clear concentration of un-
lawful sexual behaviour from the late eighteenth century onwards. These
were the descendants of the Joseph Bourgeois mentioned above, who was
an influential métral for the Canons of Grand-Saint-Bernard and was cit-
ed by parish priest Cavé in the late eighteenth century as one of the main
protagonists of the conflict between him and the community. Each gen-
eration of Joseph Bourgeois’s descendants are distinguished by relatively
liberal sexual behaviour, premarital pregnancies and, sometimes, illegit-
imate children. This did not prevent them from playing a major role in
the parish confraternities, however. Marie-Elisabeth Bourgeois, Joseph’s
daughter, even held the position of sub-prioress in the Confraternity of

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