Wife-Abuse in Eighteenth-Century France, SVEC 2009:01 (review)

Mary Trouille's account of marital violence focuses on an important period in France when attitudes to marriage and divorce were undergoing enormous changes. In 1792 the divorce law was overhauled, permitting remarkably liberal grounds for divorce, including divorce by mutual consent and divorce because of incompatibility of temperament. This radical change was short-lived, however, for in 1803 the law was repealed and far stricter rules for divorce were reintroduced under Napoleon. Examining how and why these changes occurred is a crucial task for the historian. In particular, we need to know how far legislation was reflective of popular views and opinions about marital rights and roles. By examining a series of marriage separation cases that went through the courts between 1751 and 1805 and three contemporary novels that take marital violence as their theme, Trouille's book has the potential to reveal a great deal.

Unfortunately, this potential is not fully realized. There is certainly a mass of useful information in this book that relates to themes in the history of marital abuse, such as the extent of husbandly authority, the role of disputes over finance in marriages during a period when spouses had unequal property rights, and the mounting social criticism of parents who forced their children into loveless marriages. Lawyers representing husbands and wives in marital suits, Trouille shows, often used the same rhetorical and dramatic techniques deployed by eighteenth-century novelists, in an endeavour to make their narratives more convincing. By examining the first case in the French courts that permitted separation upon the request of a wife because her husband had knowingly transmitting venereal disease, and Rétif de La Bretonne's shocking novel based upon his daughter's marriage to a sexually abusive husband, Trouille exposes details about the sexual nature of violent relationships that historians rarely discuss. But, in Trouille's study, a total of six marital separation cases are surveyed, all brought by couples of middle to upper social rank. Trouille's claim that these social groups found separation easier to achieve for non-life-threatening violence than those of lower social status needs to be supported by evidence. What is more, each of the six cases was published in either Nicolas-Toussaint Le Moyne Des Essarts' anthology of causes célèbres, or in Nicolas-François Bellart's account of his defence of two cases in the early nineteenth century. Questions about how and why these cases were selected for inclusion in these publications, and more importantly, what motivated the wider public to take such an interest in them are insufficiently answered. Related to this is the issue of why readers would want to read a Gothic tale of a nightmare marriage that had descended into violence and depravity, rather than a sentimental novel about love triumphing against the odds. We need to know more about the audience of these sources before we can make claims about what they reveal about changing public opinion. Trouille's book mentions a number of themes that would be worth pursuing in greater depth. For example, during the separation suit brought by the marquise de Mézières in 1775, there was discussion of the extent to which the marquise had been suffering from depression brought on by menopause. The relation between age, mental health, and marriage is an intriguing issue, as is the role of fertility and children more generally. Trouille notes that violence was often triggered or was intensified during pregnancy, and that fears about child welfare could delay a woman from leaving a violent marriage. A clearer account of French laws on child custody would have been helpful here, as this was evidently of such concern to contemporaries when contemplating marriage separation. Trouille's book shows how marriage separation cases, both real and fictional, shed light upon a large number of issues that relate to the lives of married people in the eighteenth...