Suchergebnisse

Jean-Pierre Lethuillier, Male First Names in Rennes during the Revolution (1 785-1805).
Confining the search to « revolutionary first names » runs the risk of unevenly illuminating the way names react to political events, to the upheavals of Year II, and when they are few, it may give the impression that the corpuses are more or less inert. The author shows there is a need to widen the angle and include the entire stock of forenames. In Rennes, where the register of Christian names offers strong resistance to the years of Revolution, Year II yields an unusual crop of short forenames, as if, conversely, the long forename were « aristocratic ».

This study is based on the use of a sampling of more than two thousand testimonies collected from the years 1660 to the Revolution in the archives of the criminal baillage of Caen concerning the rural areas. Especially precious source material because the witnesses were asked to state their age: the project has therefore aimed to measure the progress made in the domain of the individual's self- awareness and thereby to underline the turning point which appeared in mental attitudes through a clearer and clearer comprehension of time on the level of the individual's life-span. After the period in which round figures and large areas of error were the rule, a growing precision appeared throughout the Eighteenth Century. The author measures the forms of this transformation in different social groups and takes into account various factors (actual age, the degree of alphabetization); this makes it possible to come to a conclusion which goes well beyond the history of a single detail since it unveils the disappearance of a whole system of age evaluation, doubtless very ancient, based on approximation. After 1760, the Normans "entered the universe in which the number is king", thus expressing a new conscienciousness of being and writing down one's own life-span in terms of time.