![]() In recognition of all this, marriages between first cousins were legalised in France and Italy in 1804, under the Napoleonic Code. In many ways, those marriages were the product of a defensive circle-of-wagons mentality the rich would keep their estates and cultural values intact while consolidating power and wealth, and they would ensure that wives would retain the support of familiar friends and relatives (among the du Ponts, women had an equal vote with men in family meetings). As a result, according to Robin Fox, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, it's likely that 80 percent of all marriages in history have been between people who were second cousins or closer. The traditional view of human inbreeding has been that, in the days when social mobility meant the wherewithal to make it to the inn of the hamlet on your own for the purposes of getting wasted, it was making a virtue of necessity pre-internal combustion engine, families tended to remain in the same area for generations. But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the du Pont/Rothschild approach to genetic propagation seems to have been the historical rule rather than the exception. Such obsessive-compulsive concern with 'pure' bloodlines would seem to reduce humans to the level of racehorses or Crufts contenders. Perhaps it was that which made the Rothschilds truly exceptional.' Though he later opted to hedge his bets, dismissing any putative dosh-gene as 'unlikely'.īanking clan the Rothschilds liked to keep it in the family (four of dynasty founder Mayer Rothschild's granddaughters married his grandsons, and one married her uncle). Oxford historian Niall Ferguson, in his book, The House of Rothschild (Penguin), speculated that there might have been 'a Rothschild 'gene for financial acumen', which intermarriage somehow helped to perpetuate. Such homogeneity is as tight-knit as an XXXS sweater, and it's given rise to some disturbingly eugenic notions. In fact, between 18, of 36 male Rothschild descendants, 30 married their cousins, with first preferences going to those whose fathers were partners in different branches of the bank, giving a whole new dimension to the term 'family business'. Thus, four of Mayer's granddaughters married his grandsons, and one married her uncle. ![]() His will barred female descendants from any direct inheritance, so that female Rothschilds had a paucity of possible marriage partners of the same religion and suitable economic and social stature - except other Rothschilds. Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the banking family, also liked to keep things cosy, arranging his affairs so that cousin marriages among his descendants were inevitable. Du Pont-the-company, incidentally, went on to invent Teflon, perhaps in an effort to prove that even the most unsavoury of impressions needn't stick around forever. In that way, we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.' He got his wish and then some, with seven inter-cousin marriages following over the next few decades. As Pierre Samuel du Pont, patriarch of the American clan, pronounced, back in the 19th century, 'The marriages that I should prefer for our colony would be between the cousins. pretty much everything ('agriculture, nutrition, electronics, communications, safety and protection, home and construction, transportation and apparel,' according to its website). Take the du Ponts, the family who founded the multinational company specialising in science-based solutions to. They've not only cocked a snook at the increased risk of homozygosity - the chances of offspring being affected by recessive or deleterious genetic traits, magnified when both parents come from the same gene pool - but it's actually the preservation of those 'pure' genes that's been the point behind the whole family-that-lays-together-stays- together philosophy. Many of the world's most prestigious families and a sizeable proportion of its royal dynasties have, over the centuries, flaunted more than their share of more- than-kissing cousins. It's certainly not something condoned in polite society. They're the raving, drooling embodiment of the taboo of incest: an outré practice confined to swinging Egyptian pharaohs, obscure Inca tribes and the kind of patriarch whose parenting skills haven't evolved beyond imprisoning daughters in cellars and insisting on regular exercise of his 'visiting rights'. This is the classic folk-tale admonition against indulging in intra-familial relations that are a little too, well, intra the resultant filmy-eyed, web-fingered, knuckle-dragging, tree- dwelling, leg-humping progeny are disturbingly familiar from gothic backwoods horror tales like Deliverance. ''You can't marry your first cousin,'' cautions one of the characters in Neil Simon's 1982 play Brighton Beach Memoirs.
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