"Simple" adoption in France: Revival of an old institution (1804-2007) Jean-François MIGNOT Along with so-called "full" adoption, there is in France another form known as "simple" adoption, which adds an additional descendency tie to the adoptee's tie with his family of origin. Nowadays, this form of adoption is mostly used by a step-parent without children to adopt an adult stepchild to whom there is already an attachment in order to transmit his/her estate to it. Simple adoption, about which little is known by sociologists of the family, has now become more common than full adoption. Using historical statistics from the Ministry of Justice on simple adoption since the nineteenth century, we trace the history of this institution since 1804 when it became part of French law. The objective is not just to better understand simple adoption, but also the reasons for its rise since the 1970s and what this reveals about long term socio-demographic and cultural changes within the family. Keywords: FAMILY - DESCENT - ADOPTION - STEPFAMILY - DIVORCE - INHERITANCE Two types of adoption are current today in France, which differ from both a legal point of view and a social point of view. On the one hand, there has been, from the Family Code (Code de la famille) of 1939 and the Law of 11 July 1966 a so-called "full" or "plenary" (plénière) adoption, that is to say, an adoption whose main legal effect is to completely break the legal ties between the adoptee and his/her family of origin (substitutive filiation). In practice, this institution is an adoption of minors for primarily educational aims: typically, a childless couple adopts an orphaned or abandoned foreign or French child in order to raise him/her. On the other hand, from the Civil Code of 1804 (then the law of 11 July 1966) there has been a so-called "simple" adoption, whose main legal effect is to add a descendency tie to a prior legal relationship between the adoptee and his/her family of origin (additive filiation). In practice, this institution is an adoption of adults for primarily inheritance aims: typically, these days, a childless step-parent adopts an adult stepchild, to which he or she is attached, in order to transmit their inheritance to him or her. Both types of adoption, however, have something in common: they create a legal relationship between an adopter and an adoptee without this filiation being based on the procreation of the adoptee by the adopting individual or couple. In this regard, social science research is faced with a paradox: simple adoption, less well known to the public and also to sociologists of the family, is now the most common form. More precisely, as in France the number of simple adoptions has exceeded that of full adoptions since the 1990s, historical (Gutton 1993; Neirinck, 2000; Fine, 2008; Louyot, 2012), anthropological (Fine, 1998; Fine and Neyrinck, 2000), demographic (Halifax and Villeneuve-Gokalp, 2004, 2005; Villeneuve-Gokalp, 2007; Halifax and Labasque, 2013) and sociological research (Fisher, 2003) on adoption has been focused — with some exceptions (Martial, 2003) — on full adoption. However, the recent development of simple adoption is the result of several current changes in the family, including the rise of step-families after divorce or separation and therefore deserves the full attention of sociologists and, more generally, of researchers engaged in kinship studies (Cicchelli-Pugeault and Cicchelli, 1998; Segalen, 2004; Déchaux, 2006. Singly, 2007). This article proposes a historical sociology of simple adoption since its introduction into French law in 1804. Its main objective is descriptive: given the limited information available 1