Adoption for transmission
In families where there was no male child to whom an aristocratic title could be transmitted nobles could pursue the adoption of another male to become the heir. Prior to the French Revolution the legal mechanism that nobles had relied upon was called substitution, which allowed for titles and other property to pass to collateral members of kin. In nineteenth-century France an act of adoption served in a similar way as a solution for the transfer of aristocratic patrimony. To understand the nobility’s recourse to this strategy the chapter examines revolutionary laws concerning family relationships in the areas of adoption and illegitimacy. It provides archival case studies of the application of the law with particular attention to the emotional ramifications in families where adoption occurred.