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BackgroundAlthough culturally very different, Europe and Japan have much more in common than many researchers in these countries thought. 1 Recent research and scientific collaborations in the context of Eurasian projects clearly show that succession strategies and inheritance practices in the historical past of Japan and Europe have so many similarities that a comparative study could be fruitful. 2 These strategies and practices were in some ways different and evolved similarly or differently for reasons that

Land-owners in Sare continued to practice impartible inheritance in the nineteenth century in order to protect the family house and the eco-demographic equilibrium of the community. But these practices, which in the Ancien Régime prescribed the selection of the first-born male or female child (aînesse intégrale), evolved in the nineteenth century as a great number of household heads opted for the selection of any male or female child to inherit the family house and property.These new practices perpetuated a stem-family system in which two conjugal units, with or without unmarried siblings, coresided in the earlier and later stages of the life cycle of their households, and sometimes changed into conjugal units halfway through the cycle. Stem-family households thus continued to evolve in three phases, from stem to conjugal to stem—the stem-family phases being longer among the wealthier households that could afford to support one or several unmarried siblings, and shorter among the poorer households whose farmstead was too small to feed more than two conjugal units.

Marriage strategies in the rural Basque country of the nineteenth century differed according to social background and gender. Propertied families had more diversified strategies than landless families as a result of persistent single inheritance practices, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization which generated massive emigration. Propertied families helped some of their children to settle in local rural villages and others to emigrate to cities (women) or to America (men). Landless families, by contrast, continued to settle most of their children in local rural villages, others emigrating to America only later in the century, avoiding the cities at all cost. Men, no matter their social background, benefited the most from new economic opportunities because most of them married into families of equal or higher status. Women, by contrast, did not have equal opportunities because few married upward and outside their professional group. When women did not marry within their socio-professional group or remain single, they married into families of lower status (more often than men).

Cet article tente de faire la synthèse des évolutions majeures qui touchent les travaux relatifs aux structures familiales depuis la fin du Moyen Âge jusqu’à la fin du xix e siècle. Il tente de montrer comment cette historiographie, qui s’est d’abord attachée à cartographier les systèmes d’organisation familiale et d’héritage est, depuis une trentaine d’années, plus attentive, à la fois à l’analyse des évolutions diachroniques de ces systèmes et aux dynamiques de la reproduction sociale. L’article examine également les tensions qui traversent cette historiographie entre études de cas et approches monographiques d’une part, et volonté de proposer des modèles généraux d’explication d’autre part.