The Lithuanian Family in its European Context, 1800–1914 Dalia Leinarte The Lithuanian Family in its European Context, 1800–1914

Marriage, Divorce and Flexible Communities Dalia Leinarte Magnus University ,

ISBN 978-3-319-51081-1 ISBN 978-3-319-51082-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51082-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938018

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations.

Cover image © De Luan / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Dalia, Emilija, Nicolas and Gilles PREFACE

This book reaches readers at a time when the paradigmatic framework of the 1960s–1970s on the essential differences in marriage and household structures in North-Western and Eastern Europe is undergoing transfor- mation.1 Industrialisation and urbanisation alone were not capable of changing traditional household and marriage patterns. The East and West typologisation is being replaced by the methodological approach that the variety of family systems existed throughout Europe and these were determined by external factors.2 Military conflicts and the change in political regimes not only brought about sexual violence, and an increase in divorce and infanticide, but also often introduced new family ideologies and led to transformations in family behaviour.3 The fundamental ques- tion is, how did families in the past respond to social upheavals and economic reforms as well as policies of state and religious institutions? This question is especially important for the understanding of family behaviour in Eastern Europe, where due to drastic changes new marital behaviour often masked the dominant family systems. As Andrejs Plakans put it, “From the last decades of the eighteenth to the end of the nine- teenth centuries, virtually every generation of Eastern European rural people had to incorporate in its life some kind of unprecedented change ( ...) which affected everyday affairs.”4 This book investigates family life in nineteenth-century European terri- tories of the within the methodological inquiry noted above. Given the often restrictive laws and policies—manorial rights and serfdom up to 1861, the pervasive role of the Church and absence of civil marriage and divorce, in addition to deep-rooted customary practices—how did women

vii viii PREFACE and men in Lithuania manage to normalise and solve the problems of their family life? The book reveals that it was possible through the adoption of unofficial, and often illegal, solutions. It explores the way in which the peasant community in the nineteenth-century Lithuanian society resorted to unsanctioned marital behaviour. Cohabitation, bigamy and levirate mar- riages, among others, practiced in order to respond to the external obstacles that had an impact on the family life. Up until now there have been no comprehensive investigations in English that examine the historical development of marriage and divorce in Lithuania during tsarist times. This historiographical gap has been partially filled by studies examining the family in central Russia and the three Baltic provinces of the tsarist empire. However, we must take into account the many particularities of marital behaviour in different regions of the European part of the Empire (Figs. 1 and 2). This book covers the case study of the two largest Lithuanian provinces, the Kaunas and Vilnius provinces. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was dissolved in 1795, was the largest empire in the sixteenth century Europe. Subsequently, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was incorporated into Russia in 1795 and was part of the tsarist Empire until 1914. In 1801, Lithuania underwent a division into two provinces (guberniyas): Lithuanian Vilnius (Vilna, Wilno) and Lithuanian Gardin (Grodno). The period of 1842–1915 saw Lithuania being divided into two administrative units, that of Kaunas (Kovno) and the Vilnius provinces (Fig. 3). In 1867, Suvalkai (Suwalki) province, which was part of Poland until 1915, was established in the southwestern part of the current Lithuanian territory. In the nineteenth century, approximately 410,789 people inhabited the Lithuanian districts (volosts) of the Suvalkai province. The Kaunas province covered 38,400 km2 with a total of approximately 969,369 inhabitants in 1857 (Fig. 4). There were 144 districts with around 25,465 villages. Its inhabitants were predominantly Catholics. In the nineteenth century, the Kaunas province was the largest Catholic province in the entire imperial Russia. The Vilnius province covered 41,907 km2 with a total of approxi- mately 1,314,000 inhabitants (including both areas in Lithuania and Belarus) in 1889. According to the first Russian Imperial Census of 1897, there were around 738,943 inhabitants in the Lithuanian districts of the Vilnius province. The main conclusion of this book points to the existence of flexible family strategies in the traditional nineteenth-century Lithuanian PREFACE ix

Fig. 1 European part of the Tsarist Empire, second half of the nineteenth century. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-796 community. Peasants made decisions that often went against the valid legal regulations, canons and dominant cultural norms. Flexibility and adaptability allowed them to “wait out” unfavourable economic reforms or political periods.5 Some family decisions required funds and sanctioned permission from the Church: in the case of an early death of a spouse, in order to preserve a certain household6 structure and the family’s property, farmers often requested dispensation for levirate or sororate marriage. In other cases, peasants would adopt or tolerate illegal family behaviour such as cohabitation and bigamy. Whereas reasons for cohabitation in Western Europe were usually related to the postponement of marriage, cohabita- tion in Lithuania was the result of restrictive canon laws. Flexible strategies x PREFACE

Fig. 2 European part of the Tsarist Empire, 1911. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-1175 were also extended to the treatment of children born to single mothers. In this regard, peasant families could even go to the extent of justifying criminal behaviour: illegitimate children born to single mothers had no place in a farmer’s family and the community would tolerate their early death. The nineteenth-century Lithuanian community acknowledged only family life, so unwed single siblings would miss their part in the inheritance and would thus lose their social status. The introductory Chapter 1 of this book presents a comparative over- view of family systems, including household structures, marriage and inheritance models, divorce and separation, child-rearing, and nationalistic family ideologies in Europe. The chapter also details the description of archival sources used in this book. They include documents from the Curia of the Samogitian Diocese which cover annullments and dispensa- tions, as well as parishioners’ complaints about the interference of priests in their proposed marriages for the period 1813–1914. Another body of sources consists of files holding marriage annulments and separations in PREFACE xi

Fig. 3 Kaunas and Vilnius provinces. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-938 the Kaunas province that were brought before the ecclesiastical court of the Consistory of the Samogitian Diocese in 1853–1914. Significant archival sources come from the so-called “Trials on Depraved Lifestyles” (Дело о блудной жизни) that were also brought before the ecclesiastical court of the Consistory of the Samogitian Diocese. A separate body of sources contains papal encyclicals and sermons given by parish priests in the Kaunas province relating to various matrimonial issues. The book is also based on a broad scope of inventory data from the first half of the nineteenth century, which includes 3,000 peasant households. The census was carried out in 1847 and recorded 19,917 people. The second chapter of the book is devoted to the various social phe- nomena associated with marriage in the nineteenth-century Lithuania. It discloses the ostracism experience by single men and women in the nine- teenth-century rural community. Single mothers and their illegitimate xii PREFACE

Fig. 4 Kaunas province, 1886. The Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, K-516 children were stigmatised, as were the unmarried brothers and sisters of farmers, as well as young widows and widowers who had not entered into a new marital relationship. The chapter reveals underlying reasons that only family life was tolerated in the Lithuanian community. The chapter explains how the premature death of a spouse would destroy the peasant household destabilising the widow(er)’s status in the village community. In many cases, a widow(er) would recover his or her position and status through levirate or sororate marriage. Following the Third Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the regulation of matrimony in Lithuania was subject to tsarist civil law, the canon law of the Catholic Church and Lithuanian customary practices. This complex legal framework governed marriage and divorce, as well as inheritance. Using archival records, including dispensations, marriage registers, wills and peasant complaints, the chapter explores the extent to which individual men and women were legally capable of exert- ing influence over marital issues. Catholic norms regulating engagement PREFACE xiii and marriage were adopted during the Council of Trent. The Chapter reveals that a priest could not marry enserfed peasants without the permission of the manor lord. The chapter also displays the conflict between canon law and Lithuanian customary practices regarding matri- mony after the abolition of serfdom in 1861. It uncovers how the decisions of priests on whether to bless a marriage that contravened canonlawwereoftendeterminedbyargumentsbasedonthepractical needs of the traditional family. So long as the marriage met with tradi- tional Lithuanian family requirements, it received the clergy’s support. As elswhere in historic peasant Europe, romantic love and happiness were not accepted as integral elements of the traditional Lithuanian mar- riage. Similarly, mésalliances were either very rare or completely impossi- ble, since money and other property were equivalent to the value of the land being exchanged between the bride and groom. The data presented in the second chapter confirms that until the abolition of serfdom in 1861, inter-class marriages and mésalliances did not feature in any marked trends in Lithuania. The second chapter also addresses the peasant inheritance system in nineteenth-century Lithuania. In a majority of cases, marriage and land division were a concurrent action. The chapter uncovers how the custom- ary inheritance system was exercised after the land reform of 1863 that forbade the partition of land plots. The second chapter continues by exploring the motives for marriage that were fostered by Lithuanian nationalists and patriots at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that new marriage ideology did not hold the same pronatalistic notions characteristic of German, French, Spanish or Italian concepts of that time. Western European countries used procreation as the way to inseminate the “best qualities” of a given nation and make it physically strong. The Lithuanian intelligentsia instead desired to promote nationally “pure” marriages and believed that the idea of a strong national family would succeed only if a wife and a husband treated each other as equal partners and comrades in arms. The chapter also explains why the Lithuanian intelligentsia rejected the heritage of the Lithuanian peasantry, considering it as back- ward. They doubted peasant family traditions, and were aware of the need to erase them from the “modern” society. The chapter examines the critique offered by aspiring nationalists regarding motives for tradi- tional marriage, interpersonal relations within the peasant family, and a lack of a patriotic upbringing. xiv PREFACE

The third chapter is devoted to divorce, separation “from bed and board” and alternatives to the legal resolution of marriage. According to Catholic cannon law, the dissolution of a legally binding marriage was not possible. Only the death of one of the spouses could terminate the sacra- ment of matrimony. According to Catholic canon law, married life could also be suspended if the ecclesiastical court handed down a separation “from bed and board.” This chapter presents a statistical analysis of all of the Catholic annulments and separations “from bed and board” recorded in Lithuania in the period from 1830 to 1914. Through the case studies, the chapter explores the limited possibilities of granting annulment and separation. The chapter addresses how an unsuccessful marriage could be terminated without the knowledge of the ecclesiastical court in nine- teenth-century Lithuania: fleeing and abandoning, creating an illegitimate family and cohabiting, converting from Catholicism to another religion or murdering one’s spouse. Chapter 3 discusses in detail the reasons behind cohabitation in nineteenth-century Lithuania and the way cohabiting couples were treated in the community. In cases of failed family life, cohabitation in imperial Russia was practically unavoidable. It was accepted and justifiable even though in most cases cohabitation actually meant bigamy. Accordingly, the surnames of the cohabiting men and women very often were different, and their common children would be registered as illegitimate. In tsarist Russia meanwhile, cohabitation was punishable. If a couple living in cohabitation were denounced they were forced to separate. The book uncovers flexible family strategies in the traditional nineteenth- century Lithuanian rural community. It explores in detail the innovative solutions and learned behaviours adopted by the Lithuanian rural commu- nity in order to preserve certain marriage forms and household structures.

NOTES 1. John Hajnal, “European marriage patterns in historical perspective,” pp. 101–143, in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, ed. D.V. Glass, D.E.C. Eversley (London: Arnold, 1965); John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation Systems,” Population and Development Review, 8/3 (Sep, 1982): 449—494; William J. Goody, “Industrialization and Family Change”,inIndustrialization and Society, ed. Bert F. Hoselitz, Wilbert E. Moore (Paris: UNESCO-Mouton, 1968), 242. PREFACE xv

2. Andrejs Plakans, Kinship in the Past. An Anthropology of European Family Life, 1500–1900 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 260; Tamara K. Hareven. “Family History at the Crossroads. Preface,” Journal of Family History, 12/1–3 (1987): 242; Charles Tilly, “Family History, Social History, and Social Change,” Journal of Family History, 12/1–3 (1987): 328; David. I. Kertzer and Dennis P. Hogan. Family, Political Economy, and Demographic Change. The Transformation of Life in Casalecchio, Italy, 1861–1921 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 7—8. 3. Anne-Marie Sohan, “The Golden Age of Male Adultery: The Third Republic,” Journal of Social History, 28/3 (1995): 484; Lawrence Stone. Broken Lives. Separation and Divorce in England, 1660–1857 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15. 4. Andrejs Plakans, “Agrarian Reform and the Family in Eastern Europe,” in Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789–1913, ed. David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 73–105. 5. Peter Laslett, “The Character of Family History, its Limitations and the Conditions for its Proper Pursuit,” Journal of Family History, 12/1–2 (1987): 274. 6. In the book the terms “household”, “yard” and “family” are to be under- stood as meaning one and the same thing. This type of use has been entrenched in historiography, see: xiv. Households. Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Groups, Robert McC. Nettng, Richard R. Wilk, Eric J. Arnould (eds). Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1984. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing on the history of the family is an interdisciplinary undertaking requiring qualitative and quantitative sources, longitudinal data and com- parative analysis. I am grateful to my colleagues, the series of events and institutions that helped me realise these academic requirements, resulting in the release of this book. I would like to thank Mikołaj Szołtysek and Siegfried Gruber and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, who invited me to become a partner in the Mosaic Project. It led to the first-ever collection of Lithuanian household inventory data from the first half of the nineteenth century, presented in the book as an analysis of 3,000 Lithuanian peasant households from 1847. Sincere thanks also goes to Ioan Bolovan and Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and the international conference they organised, “Families in Europe between the 19th and the 21st centuries: from the traditional model to contem- porary PACS” (2009, Romania), as well as the seminar at EHSS (2013, Paris). At these events I could check and cross-check the book’s findings about marriage and inheritance systems. I am also very pleased to have had the opportunity to organise an international seminar in Vilnius in 2012 together with Jan Kok, dedicated to the history of cohabitation in Europe. We prepared a special issue of The History of the Family journal, titled “Cohabitation in Europe: A Revenge of History?” which encouraged me to conduct a comparative review of the history of cohabitation in Eastern Europe. Particular thanks goes to Andrejs Plakans, who read almost the entire manuscript and offered his valuable comments and advice. I am also grateful for having had the unique opportunity to cooperate and engage

xvii xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS in discussion with him, as he is one of the founders of the history of the family as a separate academic field. Many of my colleagues, including Vytautas Merkys, Vytautas Kavolis and David Frick, read and gave their feedback on one or several chapters of the book. The long months spent at the Lithuanian State Historical Archive were made easier thanks to the assistance of the professional team of staff who work there. I thank them all. Also, I deeply appreciate the hard-working and patient approach of Albina Strunga, who translated the book into English. I also thank her for compiling the bibliography, as well as Laima Statulevičienė for her assistance in putting together the book’s index. In addition, I would like to express my exceptional gratitude to Emily Russell, the senior commissioning editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who provided her assessment and believed in the project, suggesting ways of how it could be improved. Many kind words also go to Carmel Kennedy— I appreciate her help, which was felt throughout the course of the book’s production. Finally, the project would not have been completed if it weren’t for the support and assistance of my daughters. I dedicate this book to them and their families. CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1 1.1 Living in the European Household in the Long Nineteenth Century 1 1.1.1 The Variety of Household Structures in Europe 1 1.1.2 Households and Co-Residents 8 1.1.3 Marriage and Inheritance 13 1.1.4 Divorce 18 1.1.5 Cohabitation and Illegitimacy 21 1.1.6 Nationalism and the Family 27 1.2 Archival and Published Sources 30 Notes 32 Bibliography 32

2 Marriage, Family, Love 41 2.1 Nineteenth-Century Outcasts 41 2.2 Administration of the Sacrament of Matrimony 44 2.2.1 Catholic Canon Laws on Marriage Procedure 47 2.2.2 The 1853 Tsarist Decree 49 2.2.3 Canon Law and the Traditional Family 52 2.3 Marriage and Inheritance 54 2.3.1 Marriage Age 62 2.3.2 Love and Marital Happiness in the Peasant Community 63 2.3.3 Establishing the Household 66

xix xx CONTENTS

2.3.4 Memory and the Traditional Family 72 2.4 The Critique of the Traditional Family 74 2.4.1 Worthless Women 74 2.4.2 Marriage Motives 79 2.4.3 Interpersonal Relationships 81 2.4.4 Child-Raising 85 2.5 Nationalism and Making a Modern Lithuanian Family 90 2.5.1 “Prospecting” for a Perfect Wife 92 2.5.2 In Search of the Role Model 96 2.5.3 Following One’s Own Scenario 102 2.6 The Democratisation of Marriage 106 Notes 114 Bibliography 127

3 Divorce and Separation 131 3.1 Legal Regulation of Catholic Divorce 131 3.1.1 Marriage Annulment 133 3.1.2 Separation “From Bed and Board” 138 3.2 Alternatives to Legal Divorce 143 3.2.1 Running Away 143 3.2.2 Conversion 147 3.2.3 Murder 148 3.2.4 Cohabitation 149 3.2.5 Illegitimate Children 153 Notes 159 Bibliography 163

Published Primary Sources 165

List of Literature 169

Archives 181

Index 183 LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Household size in the Kaunas and Vilnius provinces, 1847 69 Table 2.2 Composition of households in the Kaunas and Vilnius provinces, 1847 71 Table 2.3 Mésalliances in Viekšniai, Varniai and Ariogala parishes, 1835–1845 108 Table 2.4 Marriages between spouses from different social estates according to gender in the Viekšniai, Varniai and Ariogala parishes, 1835–1915 112 Table 3.1 Illegitimate births per 1,000 of total population 154 Table 3.2 Illegitimate births per 1,000 of total births 154

xxi