Matchmaking (in Postrevolutionary France)
Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France
by Andrea Mansker / Cornell University Press, 2024
This book examines the multiple “media fictions” surrounding the origins and development of French marriage brokerage following a period of intense revolutionary change and amid the ongoing pressures of Napoleonic warfare and economic dislocation. During the First Empire (1804-1814) and Restoration (1814-1830), self-styled matchmakers Claude Villiaume and Charles de Foy established Parisian offices that catered to displaced individuals looking to connect with their soulmates in the congested city and in the classifieds. These agents, together with their fans and critics in the press, wove fictional narratives around the practice of matchmaking that generated innovative consumer identities and connected marriage to the fleeting principles of unlimited choice, instant gratification, and aspirational lifestyles. The collective consumer imaginary they initiated in print media defined and gave shape to the industry itself, which was built almost entirely on commodified stories of hope and fantasy.
Contemporaries used the business of matrimony to grapple with unprecedented historical change and to re-imagine their public identities, relationships, and rituals of marriage in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Numerous men and women, for example, embraced broker Claude Villiaume’s consumerist view of marriage as a random product of chance based on the dramatic reversals of fortune they had endured in their intimate lives and on a national scale. An obscure veteran of the Revolutionary Wars, Villiaume had suffered imprisonment during the Consulate for a suspected attempt to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte. Astonishingly, by 1812, he had remade himself into a celebrity matrimonial agent for “Paris and the Empire.” He and his purported clients exchanged anecdotes in the press on the arbitrary nature of events that had befallen them and reflected on how such circumstances had altered their marital prospects and strategies.
Whereas Villiaume emphasized his spontaneous role as an agent of fate in connecting lost souls in the post-revolutionary context, Charles de Foy sought to rationalize the industry and rehabilitate the professional and legal reputation of the marriage broker. Abandoning Villiaume’s haphazard approach to matchmaking and fashioning himself as an aristocratic intermediary who catered to the social elite, Foy succeeded by midcentury in generating a new juridical and popular narrative about not only the legitimacy of matrimonial agencies, but also about matrimony as an acceptably commercial contract.