Pregnancy Declarations in 18th-Century France: The Judge, the Maid and Her Seducer examines pregnancy declarations (déclarations de grossesse) in 18th-century France, analysing how unmarried pregnant women navigated legal requirements established by Henry II’s 1556 edict that made concealing pregnancy a capital crime and created a legal presumption of infanticide if a newborn died without prior declaration.

Drawing on evidence from bailliage courts in Nevers and Evreux, supplemented by digitised archival documents from multiple French sites, the study reveals how these legal documents provide unique insights into gender relations, sexual violence, and the intimate lives of lower-class men and women. The analysis demonstrates how women’s brief ‘seduction narratives’, miniature ego-documents embedded within legal declarations, illuminate contemporary assumptions about sexual behaviour, female honour and shame, and the vulnerability of young women in Ancien Régime society. The book explores both the protective function of declarations as insurance against infanticide accusations and their role as preliminaries for plaintes de grossesse, legal suits for maintenance payments that positioned women as active agents seeking financial support from fathers.

This engagingly written book will interest students and specialists in 18th-century French history, early modern European history, gender and sexuality studies, legal history, and social history.

Martyn Lyons is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. His work on French revolutionary and Napoleonic history included Revolution in Toulouse (1978), France under the Directory (1975), and Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994). He has published several books on the history of reading and writing in Europe and Australia, including The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c.1860–1920 (2013), and a short history of illiteracy (The History of Illiteracy in the Modern World Since 1750, 2022).