Entrepreneurs, formalization of socialties, and trustbuilding in Europe
(fourteenth to twentieth centuries)1
By GUIDO ALFANI and VINCENT GOURDON*
The establishment of trust is a key component of economic activity and social ties canmake business dealings work better. However, we do not know much about howeconomic actors created new social ties deliberately in order to pursue their objectives.This article analyses the way in which merchants and entrepreneurs used specificrituals to establish formal social ties, with the intent of protecting their businessrelationships. It focuses on relational instruments that until now had been neglected,particularly godparenthood and marriage witnessing. It shows that formalization,ritualization, and publicity of ties were used by entrepreneurs to establish trust withtheir business associates, for example when information was asymmetric or wheninstitutions were perceived as inefficient in guaranteeing mutual good behaviour.Theanalysis covers a long period, from the late middle ages to today. It pays particularattention to the consequences of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies and of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth. Contrary to the receivedwisdom, it suggests that formal social ties such as godparenthood continued to play animportant role in economic activity during and after the industrial revolution. Newdatabases on early modern Italy and nineteenth-century France are used.
Recent developments in network analysis, applied to history, are leading to anew way of considering how social and economic actors interacted in the past.
In particular, a new focus on the ‘social tie’ has led to increased interest inrelational instruments, which were not taken into much consideration when thefocus was on ‘families’ or ‘kinship groups’. A number of new characters haveappeared on the scene: godparents, marriage witnesses, neighbours, and evenfriends are being studied from a different perspective. It is useful to think of allthese ‘new’ ties as weaker ties compared to the more frequently studied relation-ships established by kinship or marriage alliance.2 It is important to put in a clear
* Author Affiliations: Guido Alfani, Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and UniversitàBocconi; Vincent Gourdon, Centre Roland Mousnier (CNRS).
1 We thank Beppe Berta, Andrea Colli, Cyril Grange, Phil Hoffman, Jane Koblas, and seminar participants atBocconi University and Institut National Etudes Démographiques for helpful comments. Cyril Grange providedus with relevant genealogical information about Protestant business dynasties in Paris and AgneseVitali providedadditional help. Sections I to IV were mostly written by Guido Alfani, and V and VI by Vincent Gourdon, whilethe introduction and sections VII and VIII were written together.
2 These ties are not ‘weak’ in the same sense as used by Granovetter in his original article ‘Strength of weakties’, and in the follow-up article, ‘Strength of weak ties: a network theory revisited’. Granovetter includes amongthe ‘strong’ ties both kinship and friendship so, for example, spiritual kinship would be considered a strong tie.On the other hand, it is difficult to establish an exact hierarchy of the ‘strength’ of various types of ties. What ismost important is to distinguish clearly between very strong relationships like close ‘natural’ kinship and affinity,and ties that in comparison with them are ‘weaker’, such as marriage witnessing or spiritual kinship. To avoidconfusion with Granovetter’s terminology, in this article we will use the notion of ‘relative weakness’, referring tothe strong ties of godparenthood and marriage witnessing.
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Economic History Review, 65, 3 (2012), pp. 1005–1028
historical perspective the way in which these weaker ties were used by merchantsand entrepreneurs, because relative weakness is not synonymous with ineffective-ness.These ties had their own specific strength that is shown not only in how theyregulated the flow of information, but also in less immaterial consequences.Relative weakness, indeed, also means flexibility and the opening of possibilities.
Some of these ties also present a degree of formalization. By this we mean theway in which a rite, such as baptism or marriage, could be used to provide a socialrelationship (pre-existing or established by the ritual itself) with a ‘form’ or shape,subjecting it to specific rules of conduct. Key to this was the markedly publiccharacter of many rites. Baptisms and marriages took place in the presence ofmany people, indeed of the entire community when possible. They were followedby feasts that made clear to everyone that new ties had been established and thatnetworks had been reorganized.3 The fact that a new formal tie was publiclyestablished meant, firstly, that it could be opposed to others (for example, when itwas the sign of a vertical relationship of patronage it made clear to everyone thatone of the parties was under the protection of the other). Secondly, it meant thata mutual responsibility was assumed in facie communitatis (in front of the commu-nity), and that the misbehaviour of one of the parties could lead to social sanctionsand consequently to economic damage.
Publicity, however, is only one of the aspects of a formalized social tie. Another,the ritual protection of the tie, was equally important. Generally, this is related tothe way in which a rite was thought to be able to change the very substance ofthings. More specifically, when a rite established ties that were considered ‘holy’and blessed by God (as in the case of baptism creating ties of godparenthood), notonly was the social sanction against whoever misbehaved greater, but the ritualestablishment of the tie could lead the parties to have greater confidence in oneanother. In other words, ritualizing a tie also meant bringing about trust where itwas lacking, for example, when information was asymmetric or when institutionswere inefficient in guaranteeing good behaviour.4 As social and economic theorysuggest, if the parties do not know each other and cannot rely on institutions, theymay choose not to cooperate or may have to pay large transaction costs to obtainguarantees (see section II). In Europe during the medieval and the early modernperiod, and even later, a tie of godparenthood could greatly ease economic trans-actions. For example, a borrower could be introduced to a lender by a commongodfather or, more importantly, could invite the lender to be godfather to his child,subjecting their transactions to social and divine scrutiny and thus inducing thelender to trust him.5
Both from the point of view of ritualization and of publicity, there were manyimportant changes during the very long period of time considered here. TheReformation questioned the way in which rituals operated, and possibly intro-duced a divide between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Between the late eigh-teenth and early nineteenth century, the new ideology of the family developingamong the bourgeoisie greatly reduced the public nature of ceremonies andrituals, which became increasingly confined to a social space defined by family,
3 Alfani and Gourdon, ‘Fêtes’.4 On ‘ritualization’, see also Bell, Ritual theory.5 This article will provide some examples of these behaviours. For others, see Alfani, Fathers, pp. 187–91.
kinship, and friendship. How did these processes influence the way in whichentrepreneurs made use of the formalization of social ties? More generally, why didentrepreneurs need to formalize social ties? An answer will be provided in sectionsI and II, in which the late middle ages and the first part of the early modern ageare considered.The following sections will make it clear how the situation changedover time, and especially after the Reformation and the Council of Trent (sectionsIII–IV) and at the time of the industrial revolution (sectionsV–VI).The concludingsections (VII–VIII) will recapitulate and briefly discuss how during the twentiethcentury these practices were increasingly suspected of being morally questionable.The existence of important factors of continuity both in actors (from ‘old regime’economic elites—mainly merchants—to entrepreneurs) and in behaviours couldcome as a surprise to anyone who is used to thinking of ‘modern’ entrepreneurshipas a key innovation of the industrial revolution.While it is not the aim of this articleto challenge such a view directly, its very specific angle means focusing on little-known social customs that changed only slowly, and on spheres of social interac-tion in which sticking to tradition could be helpful, rather than detrimental, tobusiness activity.6
I
During the middle ages and the early modern period, merchants and tradepartners in general established a great number of formal and public ties, usuallyinvolving a ritual, with people with whom they were doing business. At the sametime, they completely avoided members of their family and kinsmen, who werevery rarely chosen for such roles.7 Sometimes, such behaviour resulted from adesire to strengthen and, in the case of godparenthood, ‘make holy’ a tie offriendship, such as when Francesco Datini, the famous fourteenth-century mer-chant from Prato, wanted to act as godfather for a child of his close friend LapoMazzei. Lapo refused, on two grounds: firstly, that the principle of caritas (charity)required Christians to go ‘towards the others’, and in particular the poor anddestitute, and secondly, that when true friendship existed, adding a relationship ofcompaternitas (the tie established between a godparent and the parents of his or hergodchild8) was not necessary. In the end Lapo had to give in to Datini’s requests,but only after his friend had promised not to offer too great a gift, thus coming tothe ceremony ‘as a poor pilgrim’.9
It was difficult for Lapo to make his friend understand why, from a ‘pure’Christian point of view, a godparent should not bring great gifts, and the choice of
6 See Landes, ‘Bleichröders and Rothschilds’, for another perspective on the advantages of preserving familysocial traditions.
7 Alfani, ‘Geistige Allianzen’; idem, ‘I padrini’.8 In Latin the compater, literally ‘co-father’, is the godfather viewed in relation to the father of the baptized child,
and vice versa.The word has a feminine equivalent: comater.To indicate the social institution corresponding to therelationship between compatres, the word compaternitas is used. All these Latin words have close equivalents inRomance languages. Unfortunately, while the word ‘godparenthood’ can be used as a general term for all ties ofspiritual kinship, the more specific words compater, comater, and compaternitas have no equivalent in modernEnglish; sometimes we will use them without translation. In ancient times a close English equivalent ofcompater/comater existed: godsib, which meant more or less ‘spiritual brother/sister’.The word is the etymologicalantecedent of the modern word ‘gossip’, but has long disappeared from the English language; Coster, Baptism,pp. 93–7.
godparent should not be motivated by self-interest. His position seemed odd toDatini, who came from a merchant milieu where the custom was quite theopposite. For example, the fourteenth-century Florentine merchant MatteoCorsini chose most of his children’s 34 godparents from among business partners,guild colleagues, or artisans and tradesmen whom he patronized. Most of thesewere also his neighbours living in the same parish.10 In the sixteenth- andseventeenth-century Veneto, compaternitas ties were established by merchants withtheir closest business partners. Such was the case of Francesco Montagnana andPietro Pizzoni, traders inVicenza. Pietro asked Francesco to be the executor of hiswill. When Francesco was later required by the judge to describe his relationshipwith Pietro, he stated that their respective trades were well known to one another,including in such instances as when a bankruptcy had occurred, and informationwas not to be disclosed. He explained this intimacy by pointing out that they werecompadri.11 In Piacenza in Lombardy, during the sixteenth century, merchantschose other merchants to act as godfathers. Between 1591 and 1600, this kind ofchoice accounted for 80 per cent of all the godfathers taking part in baptisms ofmerchants’ children; most of the rest came from the nobility (10.1 per cent). Later,the incidence of merchants’ compatres coming from the world of trades shrank tolittle more than 60 per cent, with a concomitant increase in the share of noblegodfathers.12 Given that there was no significant variation in the number ofmerchants and nobles residing in Piacenza at that time, this was the consequenceof a real change in strategies of selection. The transformation reflects two impor-tant social and economic changes affecting all parts of Italy as well as other areasof Mediterranean Europe. Firstly, wealthy merchants increasingly aspired tobecome nobles themselves, or to assure noble status to their descendants. Thisusually implied investing in land capital previously used in trades, as well asestablishing stronger social ties with the nobility by means of marriage or godpar-enthood. Secondly, the transformation mirrors the general verticalization of god-parenthood, an unintended consequence of the Council of Trent (see section III).
If merchants and traders systematically established formal social ties by meansof godparenthood, marriage witnessing, and so on (not only in Italy but all overEurope), and if this was not solely due to friendship, given that more often than notsuch ties (especially godparenthood) were established outside the group of rela-tions or of close friends, what were the reasons for such behaviour? The evidenceavailable suggests that merchants and other early entrepreneurs were acting in thisway in order to strengthen business ties by adding ritual protection, which wasmeant both to bless the venture and to make it publicly known to the community,and thus increase social sanctions resulting from misbehaviour. Concerning ritu-alization, before the Reformation the whole of Christian Europe accepted thenotion of a ‘rite’ as something that was able to change the very substance ofthings.13 The fact that the tie became one of ‘holy compaternitas’ not only carriedsymbolic implications, but altered the nature of the tie, calling down divinepunishment on anyone who broke the rules of respect, goodwill, and trustworthi-
10 Weissman, Ritual brotherhood, pp. 16–19.11 Vianello, ‘Tra commercio’, p. 79.12 Gariboldi, ‘Mercanti’, pp. 8–10.13 Muir, Ritual, pp. 163–73.
ness that regulated the relationship between compatres.14 At the same time, theseties, newly established or given ritual protection by the ceremony, were public andwere made known to the community. By being the godparent of another man’schild, or acting as his witness or best man at his marriage, a merchant was publiclyaccepting a kind of social duty to help the other, and to refrain from morallyquestionable actions against him.
In the case of godparenthood, we know from medieval and early modernliterature, private letters, family books, and memorials that the duties of trustwor-thiness between compatres were clearly established across Europe.15 It is not sur-prising, then, that merchants and early entrepreneurs made use of them to handleproblems arising from lack of information or from asymmetry in information,especially when institutions for the protection of businesses and trades werelacking or were inadequate and unreliable. In other words, they chose theirbusiness associates to act as godparents not because they were also their friendsand because they trusted them, but precisely because they did not trust them.
The problem of lack of trust was very apparent in the case of lending money andbanking in general. As Weissman has suggested, in late medieval Florence‘exchanges between strangers were considered to be quite hazardous’: this is whythese economic relations had to be ‘converted into personalized relations’, wheremoral obligations were felt and trust could be established.16 Godparenthood wasone of the main instruments used to achieve this end.17
II
A case study, based upon original archival research, will help to demonstrate moreclearly both that merchants and early entrepreneurs established formal ties amongthemselves according to specific strategies, and that the building of trust was keyamong these strategies.We will focus on the city of Ivrea in north-west Italy where,during the sixteenth century, there lived a large community of immigrant mer-chants coming from the Tarentaise in Savoy.They settled in Ivrea because this citywas strategically placed to control the trade between northern Italy and Savoy,France, and Switzerland which was routed through the Aosta valley.18 Carefulfamily reconstruction through record linkage of registrations of marriages andbaptisms enabled us to analyse in detail their strategy of formalization of social ties.All ceremonies celebrated in the parishes of St Ulderico and St Maurizio in theperiod 1588–1610 have been considered. These parishes are those for which thebest documentation has survived, and cover most of the city centre where com-mercial and artisan activities were concentrated. Their population constitutedabout a third of the 4,000–4,500 inhabitants of the city. Overall, the database
14 Alfani, Fathers, pp. 53–61, 180.15 Ibid.; Klapisch-Zuber, La maison, pp. 109–33.16 Weissman, Ritual brotherhood, p. 40.17 Godparenthood played a useful financial role not only from the perspective of trustbuilding, but also with
regard to gathering information (thus contributing to solutions to issues of asymmetry in information). On theimportance of information in pre-industrial finance, see Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, Priceless markets.On the choice of godparents for securing access to information, Haas, Renaissance man, p. 7; G. Alfani, ‘Not justgossip: private and public circulation of information between spiritual kinsmen’, paper presented at the 77thAnglo American Conference of Historians, London (2008).
18 See Alfani, ‘Spiritual kinship’; idem, ‘Wealth’, for further information about this city.
consists of 412 marriages at which 824 spouses and 1,021 witnesses were present,and of 2,210 baptisms, at which 2,224 godfathers and 2,160 godmothers werepresent.19
In 1588–1610, two men from the Tarentaise married in Ivrea. In both casesthey chose a wife who also came from the Tarentaise. Ivrea had a large marriagemarket so this was probably the result of choice and not constraint. More inter-esting is the case of baptisms for which statistical significance can be tested.Immigrants from the Tarentaise baptized 44 children in Ivrea, the issue of 27different couples. In these ceremonies, they opted for very ‘closed’ strategies ofselection of godparents. As shown by table 1, this was the result of strategicchoices among a large set of possible candidates. Despite having a large localpopulation to choose from, this community of merchants preferred to reinforceinternal ties. Other immigrant communities behaved similarly; the table includesa comparison with people coming from the city of Biella (mostly merchants andskilled artisans). Biella, however, was much closer to Ivrea than the Tarentaise.The latter, then, is a more interesting case considering both the isolation ofmigrants from their original community and differences in language and culturefrom the host community.
Immigrants from theTarentaise chose 60 per cent of godfathers and 72 per centof godmothers for their children from among other foreigners and migrants. In thevast majority of cases (63 and 74 per cent, respectively) these godparents were alsofrom the Tarentaise. Similar inward-orientated strategies are to be found in thechoice of marriage witnesses, suggesting that this large community of wealthyindividuals had a limited interest in integrating with the host community andinstead preferred to keep its distance and even highlight its ‘diversity’. Theyavoided choosing citizens of Ivrea to take an active part in their rituals, and alsokept up certain foreign social customs, for example, in namegiving.20 Let us takethe example of Ioannes Trisaleto, from the Tarentaise, who, in Ivrea on 15 June1595, married Ioanna, daughter of Martinus de Baudino, also from theTarentaise.
19 Parish books of St Ulderico, Parish Archive of St Ulderico, Ivrea; Parish books of St Maurizio, DiocesanArchive of Ivrea, Ivrea.
20 In France, it was common for godparents to give their first names to godchildren. In Italy, though, no suchcustom existed; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Parrains’, p. 51; Alfani, ‘Naître’, pp. 261–2.The merchants from the Tarentaiseshowed a desire to apply their French, or better ‘Savoiard’, onomastic customs even in the host community, apractice that surely seemed strange, and probably inconvenient, to original citizens of Ivrea.
Table 1. Choice of godparents: selected communities of immigrants and overallpopulation, Ivrea, north Italy, 1588–1610
Notes: t distribution, null hypothesis = same distribution between specific communities of immigrants (or all the immigrants) andthe rest of the population. ***p < 0.01 (significance at the 1% level); **p < 0.05.Sources: Parish books of baptisms of St Ulderico, Parish Archive of St Ulderico of Ivrea; parish books of baptisms of St Maurizio,Diocesan Archive of Ivrea.
Following their activities as parents, godparents, and (in the case of Ioannes)marriage witness over the years,21 we find a striking tendency to focus theirrelational efforts on the Tarentaise micro-community of migrants.With few excep-tions, almost all of their formal social ties, established at their own ceremonies(they had seven children, born between 1596 and 1605, all baptized in Ivrea) or byparticipation in others’ ceremonies, involved people from the Tarentaise. Giventhis premise, the exceptions are even more striking because they mirror closely theeconomic interests of Ioannes in ritually protecting some crucial economic chan-nels that he was forced to establish outside the group of his fellow Tarentaisemerchants. Already at the time of his marriage, Ioannes sought the presence ofguild masters to act as marriage witnesses: magister Dominicus Cresto, a leatherworker, and magister Iacobus Barbaroto, a shoemaker. In this way, Ioannes becameconnected with the artisan milieu of Ivrea, which produced goods that wereimportant in Ioannes’s trade activity or that he was bound to need during his stayin the city. Later, Ioannes established particularly strong ties with a fellow mer-chant, Franciscus Fecia. Franciscus was a citizen of Ivrea and probably the mostimportant non-Tarentasian business associate of Ioannes. It is not by chance thathe was godfather to the three older daughters of Ioannes: Francisca, Maria, andCaterina. All the merchants in Ivrea and all Ioannes’s neighbours, who attendedthe same church (St Ulderico), knew not only that Franciscus and Ioannes werebusiness associates, but that they were very close, probably knew everything abouteach other’s trades, had preferential access to each other’s help in the form of bothresources and social connections, and that, by establishing godparenthood, theyhad publicly declared themselves bound by reciprocal trust and goodwill, and hadplaced such an oath under divine scrutiny. The case of Ioannes is typical ofbehaviour that was widespread among the Tarentasian merchants. Anotherexample is that of Nicolaus Ro, who when baptizing the three children he had byhis wife Ioana, only selected godparents originating from the Tarentaise, with asingle exception: Ioannes Baptista Tabia, an immigrant from Biella, also a mer-chant.Tabia traded in woollen cloths, the main export of his native city. By movingto Ivrea, he could organize the distribution of these products in Piedmont andabroad. By associating with the Tarentasian merchants, he secured access to awell-established trade route towards Savoy and France. In this and other cases,stategies of formalization of social ties closely matched the building and manage-ment of trade routes.
Tarentaise merchants in Ivrea, then, lived inside their small community, in whichfamilial ties and friendships were strong and continuously reinforced.They did notwish to integrate fully with the host community, preferring to stick to their customsand to their cultural peculiarities, probably expecting that they would, in time, goback to their places of origin. Such behaviour was not uncommon. In the case ofTurin at about this time, migrants from nearby areas flocked together, intermarried,were godparents to one another’s children, and so on.22 A similar use of godparent-hood is to be found in Lyon in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, where it alsoallowed the families of immigrant traders to maintain contact with their place of
21 Women never acted as witnesses to marriage.22 Cerutti, La ville, pp. 48–59, 162–79.
origin.23 It should come as no surprise, then, that when Tarentaise merchantsneeded to establish business ties with the original inhabitants of Ivrea they tried toprotect them by all available means, including resorting to the formalization andritualization of economic interaction.This was even more important since their lackof integration, clearly shown by the high rates of in-group endogamy, inevitably ledto a lack of information and required trust to be built, on an individual basis,between groups that had no reason to trust each other.
Similar behaviours are consistent with predictions made on the basis of socialtheory, the economic theory of information, and the neo-institutional theory oftransaction costs. According to Coleman, ‘the placement of trust allows an actionon the part of the trustee that would not have been possible otherwise’, given thetrustor’s condition of incomplete information and the absence of institutionsproviding guarantees.24 If the trustor places confidence in the trustee (his businessassociate, in our case) then a kind of prisoner’s dilemma finds a solution, with bothtrustor and trustee profiting from their common endeavour. Should trust belacking, then the trustor, who has incomplete information, would fear so muchthat the trustee might cheat him that he would prefer to minimize the risk of losingthe resources he invested by renouncing the enterprise.25 In addition to permittingan action that would otherwise be impossible, trust can make an action possiblethat in a no-trust situation would require a ‘device’ to provide the necessaryguarantee: for example, a contract or, at least in the medieval and early modernperiod, an oath taken in front of the notary. Both of these solutions requiredtransaction costs to be paid.26 In this perspective, spiritual kinship (established bybaptism among godparents on one side, and the child baptized and his/her parentson the other side) could be a cheaper device.27 While not being entirely without
23 E. Couriol, ‘Spiritual kinships in the old Regime. Lyons compared with other European cities’, paperpresented at the European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon (26 Feb.–1 March 2008).
24 Coleman, Foundations, p. 97.25 Ibid., pp. 91–116. Social and economic sanctions incurred by those violating the tie of godparenthood would
have been key in establishing, within specific business communities (such as that of foreign merchants in Ivrea),mechanisms similar to the ‘reputation-based community enforcement mechanism’ analysed by Greif (Institutions,pp. 62–71) on the base of data related to the medieval Maghribi traders, and even more so, if we consider the caseswhen merchants established godparenthood ties with their agents in other cities. Also, the nature of ‘trust’, itsdefinition, and even its usefulness continue to be the object of debate. See, for example, Gambetta, ed, Trust, fora variety of positions, and recent criticism of the use of the concept of trust in historical research by T. W.Guinnane, ‘Trust: a concept too many’,Yale Univ. Economic Growth Center discussion paper, 907 (2005).
26 Transaction costs are all costs incurred in making an economic exchange, or in reaching an economicagreement. Here we are suggesting that social institutions like godparenthood, by providing ritual protection andsacred scrutiny to a business relationship, allowed transactions to be agreed upon more cheaply than by appealingto other institutions for guarantees, or by drawing up complex formal contracts. Godparenthood would have beenmost useful when two parties (merchants or entrepreneurs) have the need to organize a long-lasting cooperation.The ‘cost’ then of formalizing a relationship in front of the public (the community), of accepting constraints toreciprocal behaviour, and of exchanging gifts could be deemed to be inferior to the cumulative cost of drawingup contracts for all future economic interactions, and so on. From this perspective, spiritual kinship would haveworked in a way similar to marriage alliances (similar, but not entirely analogous, because it did not involve theinter-generational transmission of patrimonies). On the economics of transaction costs in general, seeWilliamsonand Masten, eds., Economics. On the role of marriage in nineteenth-century enterprises, see Davidoff and Hall,Family fortunes, pp. 215–25.
27 Before the Council of Trent (1545–63) the ties of spiritual kinship arising from baptism and officiallyrecognized by the Church were even more numerous, involving for example the husbands and wives of thegodmothers/godfathers; Alfani, Fathers, pp. 20–1. Spiritual kinship brought with it impediments to marriage. Onthis and on the religious and social meaning of late medieval baptism, see Bossy, Christianity, pp. 14–19; Alfani,Castagnetti, and Gourdon, Baptiser.
cost given the need to exchange gifts, such exchanges could be regulated over timein complex ways bringing some compensation and a reduction in total costs foreach individual involved.28 Furthermore, once established, a tie of spiritual kinshiplasted forever, thus reducing the expense of time and labour required if manycontracts over a length of time had to be stipulated.
People exchanging godparenthood and marriage witnessing services can befound in every sector of production, and not only among merchants and earlyentrepreneurs. In urban environments, this happened in the artisan world, whereprofessional ties were formalized both inside and outside the social community ofthe guild. This was the case in Florence during the fourteenth century,29 in Turinduring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,30 and in Ivrea and northern Italyin general from at least the fifteenth century.31 In the countryside, godparenthoodand marriage witnessing were used to reinforce asymmetric economic ties betweenthose who owned the land, and those who cultivated it. Such was the case of Italiansharecroppers from the early modern period,32 of the ‘Heuerlinge’ workers inGermany between the seventeenth and the nineteenth century,33 and of Frenchfarm labourers in Brittany during the nineteenth century.34 In the Île-de-France in1540–1600, the fermiers (rich farmers working land owned by abbeys or thenobility) had their children baptized by their landlords.The same fermiers acted intheir turn as godparents for the poorer peasants, thus playing the important role ofmediators between the top and lowest ranks of society.35 Such a situation wasapparently common in the European countryside of the Old Regime, and was stillto be found, for example, in the Piedmontese village of Bassignana (Italy) in theeighteenth century.36
These examples highlight two important points: firstly, the ‘longue durée’ of thephenomena described here and their ability to adapt to the different periods. Aswill be shown, the formalization of social ties among entrepreneurs was stillenthusiastically practised in the nineteenth century, and even today has far fromdisappeared. Secondly, we can see that it was possible to make use of the formal-ization and ritualization of ties not only in a ‘horizontal’ way, between peers, as wasmostly the case in the merchant and entrepreneurial world, but also in a ‘vertical’way, between people of very different social ranks.While both practices have alwaysbeen possible, in the case of godparenthood, in Catholic Europe at least, a markedshift of balance occurred at the end of the sixteenth century, at the peak of theso-called Counter-Reformation.This process led to a differentiation between areasof Europe practising different versions of the Christian religion.
III
Like most other aspects of the religious life of European societies, godparenthoodwas affected by the Reformation. Luther himself stated that the notion of ‘spiritual’
28 Alfani, Fathers, pp. 180–4; Alfani and Gourdon, ‘Il ruolo economico’, pp. 134–54.29 Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Compérage’.30 Cerutti, La ville.31 Alfani, Fathers.32 Alfani and Gourdon, ‘Il ruolo economico’, pp. 159–60.33 Schlumbohm, ‘Quelques problèmes’.34 Segalen, Quinze générations.35 Moriceau, ‘Les fermiers’.36 Bigi, Ronchi, and Zambruno, ‘Demografia’.
kinship did not make sense on the grounds of the Holy Scriptures and had to becancelled, with all the impediments to marriage it implied. However, he alsosuggested that godparents should be kept: even if their presence at baptism was notestablished by the Scriptures, they played an important role as witnesses of theceremony and, more importantly, as tutors of the Christian education of theirgodchildren. Other reformers, and particularly Calvin, would have gladly elimi-nated godparents—to replace them at the font by the parents of the infant—buthad to reconsider due to fierce opposition from the communities where theyministered.37 Such opposition both shows the affection of European societies fortheir ancient customs, and suggests that godparenthood was important to them.
The fact that godparenthood was no longer a ‘holy’ tie officially recognized bythe Church did not prevent people linked by it from continuing to feel compelledto help and respect each other, nor did it keep them from believing that they couldtrust their compatres and that they would face social sanctions if caught acting inmorally questionable ways against them. Indeed, everything we know of godpar-enthood among Protestant merchants and early entrepreneurs during the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries suggests that they were making use of theirno-longer-holy ties in ways that are exactly the same as those known for thecenturies preceding the Reformation. For example, the seventeenth-centuryGerman merchant Matheus Miller, from Augsburg, while pursuing a strategy ofreinforcing familial ties with his own and his wife’s kinsmen by inviting them tohold his children at the baptismal font, and while never failing piously to includea Lutheran minister among the godparents, usually completed the group with acolleague or business associate.38 Of course, such strategies were possible becausein Protestant Europe choosing many godparents was permissible (three to four inthe case of Matheus’s offspring).39 In the countryside too, godparenthood was stillbeing used as a means of building trust. In the German village of Neckarhausenduring the eighteenth century, godparents played a key role in the land market,acting as mediators or, more precisely, as trust-bringers between parties that wereunrelated save for the fact of sharing formal and ritualized ties with the samecompater.40
All these considerations suggest that godparenthood under the Reformation wasstrikingly un-reformed. Deep changes in theology did not affect social customs,which stayed unchanged over time, so that we find in Germany as well as in otherparts of central and northern Europe behaviours and practices remaining almostunaltered from the middle ages into the nineteenth century. Such is not the casein Catholic Europe. The Council of Trent, while only slightly reforming spiritualkinship by reducing the number of impediments to marriage, stated that amaximum of two godparents could be given to each child: one godfather and one
37 Bossy, Christianity, p. 117; Alfani, Fathers, pp. 69–70; idem, ‘Geistige Allianzen’, pp. 36–7; Spierling, Infantbaptism, pp. 105–40.
38 Safley, Matheus Miller’s memoir, p. 112.39 In Germany, as well as in Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and other parts of Protestant Europe, sumptuary
legislation tried to moderate the number of godparents per baptism; Alfani, ‘Geistige Allianzen’, pp. 50–1;Gunnlaugsson and Guttormsson, ‘Cementing alliances?’, p. 262. Such prescriptions, together with others limitingthe maximum value of baptismal gifts to be offered, apparently were not respected. The same is true in the caseof similar laws to be found in Catholic Europe from the middle ages; Alfani and Gourdon, ‘Il ruolo economico’,pp. 137–42; Lynch, Godparents, p. 26.
godmother. The large groups of godfathers that were customary in much ofEurope had to be dramatically reduced in the Catholic part of the continent.Thisloss of size implied an abrupt reduction in the strategic scope of godparenthood,given that it prevented the pursuit of the kind of complex choices common in thepast. In spite of fierce opposition to the canon law in some communities, all ofCatholic Europe finally had to accept the new rules. While traditional strategieshad favoured variety in the composition of the group of godparents, now the onlysurviving godfather was the highest-ranking man who could be induced to takepart in the ceremony, and similarly for the godmother.This development suggeststhat formal ties with the upper strata of society were considered the most impor-tant, given that it was the ‘horizontal’ side of godparenthood (with social peers)which tended to be sacrificed. Recently this development has been demonstrated,with statistical significance, for a sample of Italian communities.41 These includeIvrea, where the share of high-ranking (titled, usually noble) godfathers at thebaptisms of the children of low-ranking (untitled) people increased from 20 to42.2 per cent from 1540–9 to 1600–9, and Turin, where the increase was from 6.5to 36.9 per cent (p < 0.01).42 Overall, godparenthood became a markedly morevertical social institution than it had previously been, often acquiring the characterof an instrument for establishing social clienteles. As a public and formal tie, in thisrole godparenthood was both a statement of submission to a patron (the godfa-ther) made by the father of the child, and a way for a patron to show the extent ofhis power: the larger his clientele, the greater his power.43
Vertical choices of godparents had always been a possibility, and actually beforethe Council of Trent high-ranking godfathers were part of a ‘good’ strategy ofselection, along with lower-ranking people.44 Also, after the Council it was stillpossible to choose godparents who were of the same rank as the parents of thechild baptized, or even lower, and similar choices were not unusual. However, it isapparent from data from all over Europe that the Catholic reform of godparent-hood caused a shift in balance, from the prevalence of horizontal ties to that ofvertical ones.What were the economic consequences of such a transformation? Inthe case of merchants and early entrepreneurs, the reduction in the number ofgodparents made it more difficult, and often impossible, to establish the kind offormal networks of social ties described for the late middle ages.The crisis of thisancient economic behaviour came when Mediterranean economies started to facefiercer competition from northern Europe.Together with the changing conditionsof international trade (with the oceanic routes becoming increasingly importantduring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), this suggested to many that thetime had come for trying to preserve the huge patrimonies they had accumulated,by reducing risk and focusing on less volatile investments (land) and social pro-motion (ennoblement). Should we read in this light the abovementioned case ofPiacenza, where at the beginning of the seventeenth century the instances of
41 Alfani, Fathers, pp. 120–31.42 Null hypothesis = same distribution in the two periods. Nobles, in their turn, stopped selecting godparents
of low rank, as they quite frequently had done in the past, and almost exclusively selected other nobles. Forexample, in Turin the share of titled godfathers of titled fathers rose from 45.8% in 1540–9 to 92.5% in 1600–9(p < 0.01).
godparents whom merchants chose from among their own ranks were reduced by20–5 per cent in a few years, while that of noble ones doubled?45 Should weremember that the guild masters of northern Italy almost stopped exchanginggodparenthoods, while increasingly seeking godparents from the nobility whoseparticipation in this activity increased, between the 1540s and the 1600s, by 23 percent in Mirandola and 80 per cent in Voghera (p < 0.01)?46
The vertical choice of a godparent still had an economic character. But com-pared to what had been the case in the past, it was now a choice more orientedtowards securing protection, and maybe assuring oneself a steady flow of ordersfrom wealthy patrons. In the long term, vertical godparenthood might have con-tributed to establishing what are widely thought to be deeply rooted characteristicsof southern European societies. Surely, the vertical character of godparenthood inthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a premise for some morally question-able practices that developed during the nineteenth century and are still to befound today in many Mediterranean countries; for example, the ‘political’ use ofcompaternitas (see section VII).
IV
Godparenthood is not the only way of establishing formal and ritualized social ties.Others, especially marriage witnessing, did not undergo reforms, either in Catholicor in Protestant Europe, and continued to allow the pursuit of horizontal relation-ship strategies in much the same way as in the late middle ages. Godparenthood,though, being the only institution apart from marriage capable of engendering‘real’ (officially recognized) kinship, at least in Catholic Europe, is by far the mostimportant. It is interesting, then, to underline the unique character of the devel-opments involving it. If we adopt a general ‘Weberian’ perspective, we wouldexpect to be able to link the strengthening of the northern European economies tothe development of a ‘capitalistic spirit’ induced by the new Protestant ethics.However, looking at the changes introduced by the Reformation and the CatholicReformation (or Counter-Reformation) from the point of view of godparenthood,we are faced with a different situation. In Protestant Europe, a very un-reformedgodparenthood allowed entrepreneurs to continue to make use of this socialinstitution in the way that had been established since the middle ages.This allowedpeople to create ties capable of bringing trust, thus reducing transaction costs andalso limiting the risks perceived in joint entrepreneurial endeavours. Meanwhile inCatholic Europe, the reform of godparenthood imposed by the Council of Trentcame into play as a force for the closure of societies which, working together withothers, led to increasing rigidity in socio-economic structures, especially in Medi-terranean countries.
In other words, at least in the case of godparenthood, the greater stimulus toeconomic development is seemingly to be found where things changed less, notmore. During the nineteenth century, Protestant entrepreneurs were still acting asthey had done in the past, any variations being due to the rise of the new bourgeoisideology of the family, to which godparenthood as well as marriage witnessing had
45 Gariboldi, ‘Mercanti’, pp. 8–10.46 Null hypothesis = same distribution in the two periods. Data from Alfani, Fathers, pp. 122–3.
to adapt. Catholic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, developed a tendency toestablish vertical godparenthood with new kinds of ‘patrons’ such as politicians orwealthy businessmen. While this is not in itself a juridically or ethically sanction-able course of action, it surely presents the risk of developing into a morallyhazardous situation.
The theory originally proposed by Weber, and later used (and abused) by manyscholars of different disciplines, that the Reformation would have produced a newethic more favourable to the accumulation of capital and to economic develop-ment while Catholic Europe continued with its outdated economic practices,47
finds no confirmation in the history of godparenthood. The older way of doingthings (the Protestant way) proved to be much more favourable to economicdevelopment than the new one (the Catholic way).The godparenthood perspectiveis surely a very limited one from which to look at such a complex phenomenon asthe Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. Furthermore, the ‘naïve’ inter-pretation of Weber’s theory has already been the object of much criticism, both asregards empirical support for its implications and the actual teaching of Protestantleaders.48 However, godparenthood offers a novel perspective from which the roleplayed by religious innovation is seen to be the opposite of what recent studies havehypothesized. These studies suggest that the Weberian thesis can be strengthenedby taking into consideration the supply side (that is, the Reformation would havewon souls by offering lower-cost religious services and more varied ‘products’).49
In the case of godparenthood, Catholics had to tolerate an unwanted change in theold services, while the Europeans accepting the Reformation were very successfulin protecting their ancient customs, as shown by the somewhat surprising defeat ofCalvin in Geneva.50
The next section provides arguments to support the thesis that Protestantentrepreneurs continued to make effective use of godparenthood to reinforce trustwithin their economic networks during the nineteenth century and later.While thiswas not unknown to Catholic entrepreneurs, their behaviour was characterized bya markedly greater tendency to establish vertical ties that were directly descendedfrom the social relationships of patronage unintentionally promoted by theCouncil of Trent.
V
From the point of view of the forms of sociability, the period of commercial andindustrial economic expansion that began in western Europe during the eighteenthcentury and consolidated in the nineteenth took place in a new context. The riseof the industrial society is related to what has often been called, in a general andnecessarily schematic way, the advent of the ‘bourgeois’ culture. From Paris51 to
47 Weber, ‘Die protestantische Ethik’.48 See Delacroix, ‘Religion’, and Delacroix and Nielsen, ‘Beloved myth’, for a survey. Also see the classic
contributions by Fanfani, Cattolicesimo, and Braudel, Afterthoughts, as well as the controversial book by Stark,Victory. Stark rejects Weberian and post-Weberian theses suggesting that it was Christianity in general thatfavoured capitalism, rather than a specific brand of it.
49 Ekelund, Hébert, and Tollinson, Marketplace, pp. 105–34.50 Spierling, Infant baptism, pp. 105–40.51 Garrioch, Neighbourhood.
rural Germany,52 vertical integration within communities weakened at the end ofthe Old Regime and during the nineteenth century. This was due to a ‘retreat’ ofthe elites that left space for the strengthening of horizontal social ties.53 Amongthese, kinship and family relationships would come to dominate.
This process, particularly striking among the urban bourgeoisie, also affectedmarriage witnessing and godparenthood (both Protestant and Catholic). A‘modern’ model of godparenthood, characterized by a tendency to make verticalchoices, was slowly but surely replaced by a ‘contemporary’ model characterizedby a tendency to choose godfathers and godmothers from among family and kin.This was also different from the ‘medieval’ model, which was mainly horizontal butalmost entirely excluded kinsmen from godparenthood.54 A survey on legal wit-nesses to civil marriage in those European countries that were influenced by theNapoleonic code showed an increase in intra-family choices during the nineteenthcentury and especially after 1850.55 In Leuven in Belgium, the number of wit-nesses chosen from among relatives grew from an average of 1.7–1.8 out of four in1830–55 to 2.9 in 1900–5.56 It was mostly the urban elites who favoured thispractice. InThe Hague in 1858–1902, in 45.5 per cent of the civil unions involvinga husband belonging to the local elite, at least three out of four witnesses were kinto the couple.When the groom was an unskilled labourer, the figure fell to 10.9 percent.57
Given this premise, one could conclude that formalized social ties lost theirsocial relevance and their economic role, especially in the world of managers ofindustrial, commercial, or financial enterprises who represented a large share ofthe urban bourgeoisie. Godparenthood and marriage witnessing lost their speci-ficity, and instead doubled pre-existing relationships of blood or affinity. Thereorientation towards the family—that is, towards a circle described by the litera-ture and the dominant ‘bourgeois spirit’ of the time as that within which affectionis mandatory and altruism a necessity—could be interpreted as a transformation ofthe ties of godparenthood or marriage witnessing. These would convert intomanifestations of affection or into recognition of a ‘debt of identity’ with one’sancestors, for example, when choosing grandparents as godparents of firstborninfants. This interpretation is entirely compatible with the vision of the economicand entrepreneurial transformations during the last three centuries inspired by thetraditional concept of ‘economic modernization’: the industrial revolution wouldalso be founded upon a desocialization of work relationships, of mobilization ofcapital, and of access to credit and markets. These four phenomena tended tomake it unnecessary to activate social networks by means of formalized ties, andwould ‘authorize’ these to re-focus (as if by default) on the sphere of intimacy,familial or not.
52 Sabean, Kinship.53 This process is also related to the establishment of a class society in which personal wealth, rather than title
or honour, was the main discriminating factor.54 As specified in section I. See Alfani, ‘Geistige Allianzen’, p. 55, and idem, ‘I padrini’, for details about the
models.The change in selection strategies marking the passage from the modern to the contemporary model hasbeen studied empirically by Alfani, ‘I padrini’; idem, ‘Parrains’; G. Alfani, V. Gourdon, and A. Vitali, ‘Socialcustoms and demographic change: the case of godparenthood in Catholic Europe’, Dondena working paper, 40(2011).
55 Gourdon, ‘Les témoins’.56 Matthijs, ‘Demographic’, pp. 392–3.57 van Poppel and Schoonheim, ‘Measuring’, p. 184.
Historical analysis of social practice is far from supporting these interpretations.First, the process of ‘familialization’ of the choice of godparents was very slowacross Europe. If in France many studies show that in the nineteenth century itwas already quite advanced,58 elsewhere it took place only at the beginning of thetwentieth. This was the case in Italy, though modern economic development hadbeen well underway there since the last decades of the nineteenth century. On theother hand, some studies suggest that in the most advanced (northern) part ofItaly, familialization of godparenthood could have begun earlier in the countrysidethan in the cities where the new, advanced enterprises clustered.59 Furthermore,the establishment of sizeable manufacturing industries did not automaticallycancel vertical relationships of patronage. In the textile industry of the Veneto innineteenth-century Follina, it was common for weavers to choose the owners ofthe factory as godparents.60 In this case, godparenthood was being used both as ameans of managing the workforce, and as a more traditional means of maintainingor increasing social prestige. Godmotherhood by the wife or daughter of theowner-entrepreneur corresponded to the desire to establish a tie of dependence/protection between employer and employee.
Other cases show a close relationship between the ‘corporative’ structure ofcertain occupations within large firms and the practice of exchanging godparent-hood services. In the metalworking industry of Strömfors (Finland) in 1880–1900,the elite represented by qualified workers (smiths) used to choose godparentswithin their own social and professional group.They avoided ties with the peasantsof the area entirely, save for agreeing to be godparents to the ‘craftsmen’ workingin their own enterprise—but never the other way around.61 A similar situation is tobe found among the Italian smiths of the Lecco valleys, who between 1815 and1906 chose 48.1 per cent of their godfathers from within their own group.62 Thesebehaviours were common among skilled workers both in Catholic Europe and inthe Protestant part of the continent. In Umeå in Sweden, as late as 1850–5 masterartisans exchanged godparenthood services with one another.63 This reminds usthat these practices were no different from those already described for the middleages and the early modern period.The change in actors (skilled industrial workersinstead of master artisans) only reflects the progressive decline of the guild system,replaced by modern industry. The rationale of this behaviour stays basically thesame and is twofold: reinforcing solidarity ties within the group, and marking adifference between skilled workers and unskilled ones. The first sometimes actedas godparents to the second (as in Strömfors) but never the opposite, so thatformalization of social ties helped to build new steps in the social ladder or topreserve social and economic differences.
The use of godparenthood or of marriage witnessing to gain economic advan-tages or to ease one’s career is a recurrent subject in nineteenth-century literature
58 Burguière, ‘Prénoms’, pp. 30–1; Minvielle, ‘La place’, pp. 245–52; Bardet, ‘Angelots’, p. 183;V. Gourdon, ‘Lechoix des parrains et marraines à Paris au XIXe siècle’, paper presented at the European Social Science HistoryConference, Lisbon (26 Feb.–1 March 2008).
59 Alfani, ‘Parrains’, pp. 309–15; idem, ‘I padrini’.60 Munno, ‘Prestige’; idem, ‘Reti’.61 Marttila, ‘Beyond the family’.62 Colli, Legami, pp. 74–7.63 Ericsson, ‘Godparents’, p. 281.
(for example, in realist novels and plays). In the novel by Guy de Maupassant, Unhéritage (1884), an employee of the Navy Ministry makes a career thanks to theprotection of his compater and chief-of-service. In the comedy Le baptême du petitOscar by Eugène Grangé and Victor Bernard (1873), a Parisian perfume-makerplots to gain as compater an influential colleague instead of choosing (as wasdeemed correct) his own cousin who worked as a simple shop assistant. Thisrecurring theme, even though usually presented in a perspective of social criticism,calls into doubt the idea that similar practices were slowly and peacefully disap-pearing by themselves. Instead, the abovementioned literature is the expression ofa cultural topos of the bourgeoisie, which attempted to oppose the sphere ofinterest (rational/economic/masculine) to that of emotion (moral/familial/feminine). As can be seen in the following section, this socially and culturallyestablished dichotomy should not be confused with the reality of everydaypractice.
VI
Examples of an entrepreneurial use of godparenthood and marriage witnessinganalogous to that described for earlier centuries are easy to find in the mostdynamic and advanced sectors of the economy during the industrial revolution.Wewill take as an example the Protestant economic elites of Paris in the late eigh-teenth to early nineteenth century. These were a fundamental component of thefirst bourgeois dynasties emerging in France in innovative sectors such as inter-national trade, banks, and large-scale textile or metal industries.These pioneers ofthe French industrial revolution often came from families with Swiss origins andwere willing to move part of their activities into a new economic space.They wereProtestant (Calvinist or Lutheran) and thus usually were perceived as the heraldsof modernity, contrary to the Catholics. Indeed most of these families adoptedideological positions that could be qualified as ‘modern’, that is, liberal in mattersof religion or of politics, generally favourable to the Revolution, and always closeto the Napoleonic imperial government.This is the case of the Swiss Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf who in 1760 founded near Paris what would become themain manufacture of ‘indiennes’ of France: the famous ‘toiles de Jouy’. His first-born, a daughter born in 1775, received as godfather the seigneur of Jouy-en-Josaswhere the factory was located.The favour of the seigneur de Jouy guaranteed manyadvantages at the local level (such as access to water).The second daughter and thefirstborn male received as godparents Oberkampf’s main business partner, Sarra-sin de Maraise, his wife, and their eldest son. Reciprocally, Oberkampf wasgodfather to the first daughter of his partner, Madame de Maraise who, as a dutifuldaughter of a Rouen trader, was charged with keeping the accounts of thecompany. She regularly informed Oberkampf of the situation regarding theaccounts. On these occasions, she often called him her ‘compère’.64 Here, compa-ternitas was clearly used to reinforce a business relationship between two entre-preneurs who were originally obliged to ally with each other to make common
64 Chassagne, Oberkampf, pp. 76–81. Another one of Oberkampf ’s children was baptized by the notary of hisfather. This seems a sound economic choice, as at that time Parisian notaries played a crucial role as financialintermediaries in the French credit market; Hoffman et al., Priceless markets.
front against other partners in order to impose their views.This alliance led to theexclusion of the other partners from the enterprise, given that neither Oberkampfnor Maraise judged them trustworthy.
This striking example of the entrepreneurial use of godparenthood is corrobo-rated by the analysis of a larger corpus of data.We analysed the 1,538 baptisms ofchildren of Protestant parents, usually Calvinist, celebrated in Paris betweenJanuary 1803 and June 1817 and recorded in the most ancient surviving baptismalregister.65 Protestant public worship in Paris, and the opening of a church, hadbeen officially authorized at the end of 1802. At that time, about 20,000 Protes-tants lived in Paris. From this database we extracted a group of 100 baptisms inwhich fathers were, at the time of the ceremony, bankers (even regents of the newBank of France), traders, or owners and administrators of factories. Most of themwere members of dynasties rapidly growing in economic or political power: Hot-tinguer, Schlumberger, Mallet, Pourtales, Vernes, Davillier, Oberkampf, Widmer,and so on. Their children usually were given two godparents (a godfather and agodmother), but in nine cases other godfathers and godmothers are mentioned, upto a maximum of five godparents.66
Our sample confirms the predominance of choices from among family and kin.On average, 1.52 godparents per child were chosen from kin.67 All but 16 childrenwere tied by blood to at least one godfather or godmother. These cases areinteresting because they show a strategic use of godparenthood. In 1812 Jean-Conrad Hottinguer, a banker from Zurich, baron of the Empire and regent of theBank of France, together with his American wife (Marthe-Elisa Redwood, marriedin London in 1793 when he was an expatriate) had five of their children baptizedon the same day. Only one relation was selected to act as godparent: a Hottinguergodmother. The other godfathers and godmothers were members of the banker’sprofessional and/or political network or belonged to the Imperial administration,where he was also well connected. So we find among the selected godfathersPhilippe Panon-Desbasseyns, rich landowner and administrator of RéunionIsland, who in 1811 had negotiated in England, on Napoleon’s behalf, the libera-tion of the French prisoners; his wife was also godmother. Other godfathers wereTimothée Lubbert, ‘négociant’ (wholesaler), who was probably the same personwho, at the time of the Directoire, had negotiated a commercial treaty betweenFrance and the Netherlands, Jacob van Staphors from Amsterdam, and Henri
65 Library of the Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (Society for the History of French Protes-tantism), Paris, registers of baptisms of the Eglise réformée de Paris, 1803–17, MSS CP2.
66 In the nineteenth century, among Protestants the abundance of godparents tended to characterize the elites,suggesting that godparenthood was influenced by the extent of the social network of the parents. See Driancourt-Girod, L’insolite histoire, for Lutherans in Paris under the Old Regime. For Sweden in the seventeenth century, seeFagerlund, ‘Women’; T. Ericsson, ‘Who wants to be a godparent? Baptisms in a Lutheran church in Paris,1755–1804’, paper presented at the European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon (26 Feb.–1 March2008). For Sweden in the nineteenth century, see idem, ‘Godparents’, p. 278. For Finland during the nineteenthto early twentieth century, see K-M. Piilahti, ‘Kin, neighbours or prominent persons? Godparentage in a Finnishrural community in the first half of the 18th century’, working paper (2008); Marttila, ‘Beyond the family’.Sometimes a difference in the number of godparents had been formally established by sumptuary laws; Alfani,‘Geistige Allianzen’, p. 50.
67 This is a minimum. Even if registers of baptisms make explicit the existence of kinship between the parties,more complex relationships (particularly with affines) could have been missed. Cross-checks against publishedgenealogies enabled us to find some of these other ties.
Escher, friend and partner of the bank Hottinguer et Cie, who later founded its USbranch.68
Similarly, the négociant Bernard Gros, when he did not choose kin to be god-parent, regularly selected members of the Roman family and, in particular, for thebaptism of Jacqueline-Louise-Marie in 1810, Jacques Roman and his wife. Thelatter came from the Odier dynasty. Jacques Roman, Jacques-Antoine Odier, andFrançois Gros, father of Bernard, were among the founders of the company which,from 1783 onwards, controlled the important manufacture of indiennes of Wesser-ling in Alsace, employing 2,000 workers at the end of the Napoleonic Empire.69
As was the case for the Tarentasian merchants in sixteenth-century Ivrea, whenentrepreneurs deviated from the prevailing selection pattern of godparents theydid so to pursue specific economic-relational interests. As a result, godparenthoodnetworks that closely match business alliances can be reconstructed. In the nine-teenth century, the prevailing custom was to select godparents from within familyand kin. Sometimes, this kind of choice could also be related to economic interests.To quote Sabean’s definition, the nineteenth century was ‘kinship-hot’, especiallyfor the bourgeoisie.70 This shows in the structure of capital invested in the earlyphase of European economic development.71 Endogamous alliances betweenbranches of the same family, which become more frequent during the century,allowed them to maintain the capitalistic cohesion and the credit capacity neces-sary for their firms and enterprises to function efficiently. The bourgeoisie alsomultiplied the rituals of reaffirmation of familial cohesion, such as mournings,regrouping of the familial tribus at the time of important events (marriages,birthdays of grandparents, wedding anniversaries, and baptisms), and holidaysduring which cousins formed lasting friendships. Godparenthood also found aplace in this cohesion-enforcing apparatus, as illustrated by many examples fromour database. In 1810, Henri, son of the banker Adolphe Cottier, was given asgodfather his paternal grandmother’s second husband, Daniel Henry Scherer, alsoa banker, and as godmother his maternal grandmother, Elisabeth JacquelineBontoux, born André. Henri’s sister, Louise-Mathilde, would be baptized in 1814,her godparents being a paternal aunt and her maternal grand-uncle, Dominique-Isambeau André, partner in the bank bearing his surname. Another example is thatof Blanche, daughter of Marc-Jacob Filliettaz, négociant originally from Geneva,and of Jacqueline-Eléonore Bréganty, whose godparents at her baptism in 1804were her maternal aunt, Aimée-Françoise Breganty, and her husband Jean-CharlesJoachim Davillier, regent of the Bank of France. In 1820 Davillier’s son andbusiness associate, Théodore, would marry the goddaughter of his parents, con-solidating with a marriage alliance the tie established earlier by means of godpar-enthood.
The Parisian Protestant community’s behaviour is similar to that found in othercommunities of foreign entrepreneurs across Europe; for example, the SwissReformed entrepreneurs of nineteenth-century Turin, who were involved in thecotton industry. They used godparenthood to integrate marriage strategies, man-
68 His son Alfred founded the Crédit Suisse.69 Lambert-Dansette, Histoire, pp. 21–2.70 On the meaning of this expression, see Mathieu, ‘Kin marriage’, p. 212.71 Sabean, Kinship; Sabean, Teuscher, and Mathieu, eds., Kinship in Europe.
aging not only to reinforce the cohesion of different branches of the same family,but also to establish formal ties with fellow entrepreneurs outside the family.Thisbehaviour led to the establishment of an ethnic-economic group within which trustwas guaranteed.72 In the same period, in Lombardy, godparenthood was used bySwiss cotton entrepreneurs to formalize ties with suppliers, business associates,administrators, and top technicians working in their factories.73 The analysisproposed for godparenthood in Protestant religious minorities can be applied toother milieux, and to other kinds of formalized ties. In the Jewish elites of Paris in1875–1914, where, of course, godparenthood could not be used, witnessing to civilmarriage played a comparable role. A database comprising 1,539 marriages showswith statistical significance that witnesses chosen within family and kin were moreabundant the higher the social rank of the bride and groom.74 Those who mostfrequently chose witnesses from the same sector of activity, independent of theeconomic level of the families involved, were people from the world of business.Half of their witnesses were other businessmen; this was true for just a quarter ofartisans and shopkeepers. For businessmen, selecting witnesses became the occa-sion for symbolically mobilizing a familial network and a professional network thatlargely overlapped, and to reinforce their cohesion.75
VII
The case of the Protestant entrepreneurs in Paris, as well as that of the otherreligious minorities whom we analysed, should not be considered exemplary of thedefensive behaviour of endangered groups. On the contrary, even though theProtestant bankers in Paris or the Swiss Reformed cotton entrepreneurs in Turinand Milan had to operate in a mostly Catholic environment, they had no difficultyin becoming key figures in booming sectors of the economy, their religious beliefsnotwithstanding. When they tried to reinforce solidarity (economic and social)within their group, they pursued strategies entirely analogous to those found forother micro-communities of migrants, such as the Tarentasian merchants in Ivrea.These strategies are then to be considered independent of religion.
Generally, from the specific angle of formalization of social ties to pursueeconomic objectives, the classic opposition between the Protestant and the Catho-lic world (with the first being characterized by ‘new’ social and psychologicalmechanisms favouring economic expansion) seems to disappear. Certainly, theReformation during the sixteenth century cancelled the holy character of spiritualkinship. However, it did not alter the social and economic use of ritualized ties,preserving instead the medieval social customs that the Catholic Church chose tooppose. Furthermore, both in Protestant and in Catholic Europe entrepreneurs
72 Balbo, Torino.73 Poettinger, ‘Innovazione’.74 Grange, ‘Les choix’, pp. 220–2.75 The situation was different among small entrepreneurs, artisans, and dealers. They pursued their own
entrepreneurial use of godparenthood and marriage witnessing, mobilizing family and kin less often. Theyresorted to the formalization of social ties to secure orders (like the Icelandic fishermen of Keflavik whosystematically choose the merchants buying their catch to be godfathers to their children; Gunnlaugsson andGuttormsson, ‘Cementing alliances?’, pp. 265, 269), or to obtain access to credit especially in difficult periods assuggested by Ericsson (‘Kinship’, pp. 236–7) for mid-nineteenth-century Umeå, or to stabilize a privilegedposition in the production chain.
continued to use godparenthood or marriage witnessing to protect business tiessocially and ritually up until the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century,throughout it, and after it, until today.The usefulness of such ties in building trustbetween unrelated parties, thus allowing agreements to be reached even in situa-tions of imperfect information and reducing transaction costs, is proved by thebehaviour of Protestant and Catholic entrepreneurial dynasties who used them toreinforce and to expand professional and economic networks, and also, especiallyat the beginning of industrialization, to regulate the flow of capital from differentfamilies, or different family branches, into common endeavours.
If a difference is to be highlighted between Catholics and Protestants, it is themore common occurrence of morally hazardous situations among the first. Whilethe un-reformed godparenthood systems to be found among people accepting theteachings of Luther and Calvin allowed horizontality to continue to be prevalentin formalized ties, the Catholic reform of godparenthood, by causing its vertical-ization, also brought about a shift in balance, favouring the choice of godfathersable to protect and help, and to whom fidelity and devotion were due in exchange.To understand fully the consequences of this, the analysis should be extended tocover the twentieth century. However, for that period there are very few studiesdedicated to the more advanced nations and focus has been on more backwardareas. This is probably due to the influence of a kind of ‘ideology of the market’suggesting that in well-developed social and economic systems such practices nolonger have any usefulness or any real implications for the parties.76 This way oflooking at the market, as the place where forces of supply and demand should meetunhindered, suggests that obstacles such as family ties as well as formalized tiesshould be removed. This ideal also promotes transparency and the separation ofspheres (economic, political, familial, and so on), in striking contrast with OldRegime societies in which, as suggested by Polanyi,77 the economic is embeddedwithin the social and in which a kind of ‘transparency’ is nevertheless obtained bymaking the establishment of social and economic ties as public as possible bymeans of community rites.78 While this ideal of the separation of spheres inducessome people to regard formalized social ties with suspicion, it is still very differentfrom current practice. The information available suggests that, for countries suchas Italy and France with their very different societies, ritualized ties continue to beimportant in the world of business. Also, in these countries where tycoons show atendency to establish key ties with politicians, where state protection guaranteesthe future of the most important firms, where the mixing of high state officials,elected representatives, and top management of enterprises is the norm, and wheresuch networks are more than capable of helping the careers of both politicians andentrepreneurs or managers, it is very easy to find examples of choices that couldhave been the result of morally questionable intent.79
76 This conclusion would be curiously coherent with that obtainable from a marxist-materialistic perspective.77 Polanyi, Great transformation.78 Alfani and Gourdon, ‘Fêtes’.79 The marriage witnesses of France’s current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, are an example. In 1982, at the time
of his first marriage, his witness was Charles Pasqua, head of the RPR party in the Hauts-de-Seine departmentwhere Neuilly (where Sarkozy would become mayor) is located. In 1996, at the time of his second marriage, hisfirst witness was Martin Bouygues, president of the huge building society Bouygues and owner of theTV channelTF1. Martin Bouygues would later be godfather to Sarkozy’s son, Louis. The second witness was BernardArnaud, currently the richest man in France, president of the important LVMH, a luxury goods group. In 2007,
The conditional here is mandatory: not only because the complexity of humanfeelings and behaviours does not allow us to rule out the possibility that some, oreven most, of these choices were made out of simple friendship and reciprocalaffection, but also because, since the middle ages, this kind of behaviour has beenin keeping with the ‘normal’ use of ritualized social ties, independent of religiousideas. It seems, then, that this behaviour is inborn in human beings, who would notwant to act in a world sterilized of all social relationships, but would aspire tocontrol that world, market included, by entangling it in a net of ties of solidarity,friendship, trust, and reciprocal help to offer both reassurance and access toresources. However, a different propensity to look for patrons, one which is alsolinked to the particular way the Catholic Church reformed godparenthood at theturn of the sixteenth century, increases in southern Europe the instances in whichmoral hazards could emerge. Sometimes, godparenthood and marriage witnessingare used to pursue entirely criminal objectives: such as in the case of Mafiagodparenthood, shown by both historical and anthropological research to be ameans of increasing cohesion within the criminal family.80 In other cases, moralhazards are obvious and the suspicion of misbehaviour well-founded, such as inthe case of the ‘compare politico’ (political compater) shown to be a source of favoursgiven to a clientele who in turn guarantees votes at elections to national and localassemblies.81 On the other hand, similar unethical behaviours were not unheard ofin Old Regime societies. As early as 1456, a Tuscan law prohibited governors ofcities and towns subject to Florence from being compatres to people whom theygoverned in order to prevent corruption.82Yet again, the problem is one of balanceand of tendencies across space and time.
VIII
The establishment of trust is a key component of economic activity, and it is wellknown that social ties can help to build trust and make business dealings workbetter. We know much less about how economic actors deliberately created newsocial ties in order to pursue their economic objectives. Only the primordial roleplayed by marriage alliance in this game has been studied adequately. Other formalties have been neglected. This article, focusing on marriage witnessing and god-parenthood, has investigated how entrepreneurs used them to facilitate theiractivity from the middle ages up until the industrial revolution and beyond.Marriage witnessing and godparenthood were capable of completing a system ofalliances, both by multiplying the occasions for ritualizing relationships, and by
at the time of his third marriage, his witnesses were Nicolas Bazire, who had been director of the cabinet of PrimeMinister Balladur in 1993–5 and was then ‘numéro-2’ of LVMH, and Mme Agostinelli, director of communi-cations for the Prada group. In his turn, in 1992 Sarkozy was witness to the marriage of Claude Chirac, daughterof the former French President Jacques Chirac.This example is representative of common practice in France, aswell as in Italy, Spain, and the rest of southern Europe, independent of parties, ideology, or political faith.Formalization of ties among politicians, and between them and important entrepreneurs, is seemingly to beconsidered an instrumentum regni. As such, and even if the freedom of people to establish ties of familiarity andfriendship with whom they prefer cannot be questioned, it must be noted that similar practices can easily lead tomoral hazards and to a general lack of transparency in government, both in the private and the public sector.
allowing for the exploitation of a useful weakness and an adaptability that marriagealliance could not offer. Such adaptability also explains the lasting fortune of theeconomic use of these ritualized ties from the middle ages up until today, not-withstanding the transformations that they have undergone.
By using information available from all over Europe, and by analysing newdatabases relating to Italy (Ivrea) in the early modern period and to France (Paris)in the nineteenth century, we have demonstrated that entrepreneurs resorted tothe formalization of social ties to protect their business relationships. In Ivrea,godparenthood networks were found to match trade networks closely. In Paris, theexchange of godparents and marriage witnesses replicated systems of alliance inthe world of banking, finance, and big business. We have suggested that theestablishment of formal social ties was key in engendering trust where it waslacking. While there was a change over time in the way in which ritualization andformalization of social ties worked, notably with a decreasing importance of theirreligious aspects as well as of their public character, they continued to play a rolein modern and ‘advanced’ societies.
The period considered has also led us to investigate the consequences of theReformation and of the Catholic Reformation. The Council of Trent determineda more radical reform of godparenthood than the Reformation. In ProtestantEurope, godparenthood proved more favourable to economic activity because itwas more, rather than less, similar to medieval godparenthood than in post-TrentCatholic Europe. This led us to nuance traditional Weberian theses. While thesimilarities in the economic use of godparenthood across Europe should bestressed more than the differences, we have also suggested that the ‘verticalization’of this social institution caused by theTridentine reform might have contributed tothe establishment, in much of Catholic Europe, of entrepreneurial social customsthat make the occurrence of morally hazardous situations more common.
Date submitted 6 August 2010Revised version submitted 27 February 2011Accepted 11 March 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2011.00614.x
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