Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France

Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France uncovers the unexplored history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements to track the commercialization of marriage in nineteenth-century France. Brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange, linking them to the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility.

By studying agents' and readers' media fictions on love alongside court cases, legislation, and literature surrounding the industry, Andrea Mansker reveals the intimate and socioeconomic pressures of finding a spouse, while demonstrating how contemporaries used the business of matrimony to reimagine their public identities, relationships, and courtship rituals following unprecedented historical change from the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The matchmaking business both responded to and helped shape national anxieties regarding fluctuating nuptial rates and changing laws on marriage and divorce. As a result, marriage itself was reconceived as a commercial contract inseparable from the atomistic and corrupt marketplace.

The debates and pressures described in Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France are still relevant today. As online daters have discovered, the possibility of finding a mate in an expanded pool of candidates beyond one's family, locality, and nation offered individuals the liberating opportunity to explore new personas just as it produced a novel sense of danger about these impersonal transactions in the anonymous marketplace.

Auteur

Andrea Mansker is the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at Sewanee: The University of the South. She is the author of Sex, Honor and Citizenship in Early Third Republic France. Her research on matchmakers has appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, French Historical Studies, and the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.