Arranged Marriages and Marriage Arrangements in Eighteenth-Century French Novels by Women

Although traditional marriage, arranged among families for the transmission of property, economic advantages and social considerations, was the norm for the France of the Old Regime, it was increasingly called into question in the eighteenth century. Authors like Diderot, Rousseau and Voltaire criticized arranged marriages as contrary to individual freedom and the right to happiness and insisted upon the importance ofchoice. Their works, however, are ambiguous and offer mitigated messages. Women writers also took up the cause of marital reform in a more direct fashion than their male counterparts. In this essay I consider the theme of arranged marriages and their inevitably negative consequences in four women's novels: Riccoboni's Lettres de Mme de Sancerre, Charrière's Caliste, Cottin's Clair d'Albe and Souza's Adèle de Sénange. These writers focus on the incompabilities of arranged marriages which from the outset preclude intimacy and destroy companionship and communication, and show the accommodations that men and women are obliged to make when marriage is imposed upon them. Arranged marriages become little more than marriage arrangements and have wideranging effects on society as a whole.