Merovingian period

The Merovingian period is presented as a time when women’s lives were governed by male authority and their legal value was tied to their status as wives and mothers. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, changes in public administration did not amount to freedom: as royal power took over guardianship, the underlying dependence remained.

Marriage and dependence

Under the Merovingians, polygamy was practiced, and women could be married without their consent or repudiated by their husbands. A husband was described as holding power over his wife’s life, while laws protected women chiefly as a man’s property and as mothers of his children. The account characterizes women as treated like servants and denied rights as individuals.

Legal penalties reveal how protection and subordination operated together. Calling a woman a prostitute without proof incurred a fine fifteen times greater than an insult against a man; kidnapping a married woman was treated as equivalent to murdering a free man, and taking her hand or arm incurred a fine. The penalties also assigned value to women through marriage and fertility: abortion brought a hundred-sou fine, killing a pregnant woman cost four times as much as killing a free man, and a woman considered fertile was valued at three times a free man. When she could no longer bear children, that assigned value disappeared. A woman who married a slave could be outlawed, and her parents were permitted to kill her.

Guardianship and the limits of change

The period inherited a system of lifelong female dependence known as mundium. At first, guardianship over women, children, and people regarded as disabled belonged to family law. As the state strengthened, that authority shifted toward public office: beginning under Charlemagne, the mundium came under the king, initially in cases where a woman lacked a natural guardian and later as royal authority gradually took over family powers.

The transfer changed the guardian, not the woman’s standing. The mundium became the guardian’s duty of protection, but Beauvoir emphasizes that this protective arrangement reproduced the same subordination. Women remained wards rather than independent legal subjects; royal oversight did not undo their dependence on male authority.

Historical significance

The Merovingian period illustrates a recurring distinction in Beauvoir’s history of women: a change in institutions can leave women’s concrete condition intact. Royal intervention displaced some family control, yet the language of protection preserved women’s lack of individual rights. The period therefore belongs not to a story of emancipation, but to the account of how dependence could persist even as the authority administering it changed.