DOI: 10.47743/jss-2025-71-4-3

Faculty of Law, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iași.

Abstract: Félix Grandet’s remark — “Why do we have children!” — offers not only the central connotation of inheritance as depicted in the novel, but also the reflection of a patriarchal mentality that reduces filiation to a mere mechanism for the transmission of patrimony. In this vision, the child does not exist as an autonomous subject, with emotions and personal aspirations, but as an extension of the father and a guarantor of the transfer of wealth. Inheritance is not regarded as a bond of blood, but as a strategy for preserving masculine power through economic and familial control. Eugénie inherits her father’s fortune, becoming one of the wealthiest women in the region, yet wealth does not bring her happiness, but rather a life marked by suffering and solitude. Her love for her cousin Charles Grandet lies under the shadow of this inheritance and is shattered by material interests. His betrayal, together with Eugénie’s decision to marry without love, reveals the paradox of inheritance, which, instead of granting her autonomy, binds her even more tightly to external rules, demonstrating how wealth becomes an instrument of constraint rather than of emancipation.

In this paper, we aim to analyse inheritance from a threefold perspective: legal, by highlighting the succession regulations in the French Napoleonic Code of 1804, psychological, through the decoding of the Generation-Code and the loyalty pacts made with the ancestors, and emotional, through the exploration of Eugénie’s love for her cousin Charles.

Keywords: Eugénie Grandet, inheritance, acceptance of inheritance, heir, transgenerational trauma, loyalty pact.

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