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163 C h a p t e r 6 Courtly Love, Courtly Marriage, and Republican Divorce In the previous chapter, I traced the philological exclusion of sexuality in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I argued that the civilizing mission of chivalry and chivalric love was preferable to the unbridled and contaminating influence of sexuality of the fabliaux that could not adequately represent the French nation. The preceding chapter, however, brings up the question of why chivalric or courtly love, widely perceived to advocate heterosexual adultery, was not ostracized by academic medievalists and doctors as a form of deviant behavior. In the tradition of the histoire des mœurs elaborated between ca. 1760 and 1855, chivalric love was considered a civilizational phenomenon riddled with paradox: what made the Middle Ages civilized, because it refined a brutal and violent feudal society, also provoked sexual excesses outside marriage. There was something inherently decadent about this “religion of love, having reached its supreme exaltation”:1 the “laws of love” (lois d’amour) were “a theory very widespread and very harmful to conjugal fidelity”2 that worked against its protagonists by provoking extreme acts of violence, “hence the cases of adultery and bloody vengeance.”3 In 1883, thirty years after the histoire des mœurs reached the peak of its production, Gaston Paris coined the term “courtly love” (amour courtois).4 Many doctors were writing at the same time about chivalric love (amour chevaleresque) and the courts of love (cours d’amour): while “pretty pages, elegant squires, proud knights, languorous troubadours, jongleurs, singers and minstrels” were “animated by the most chivalric of sentiments,” the women were presiding over “the courts of love where principles that would make the hair of honest modern women stand on end were professed under the pretext of a ‘purified love.’”5 The answer as to why doctors and medievalists alike embraced courtly love could be as simple 164 Chapter 6 as follows: adultery is the lesser of all evils among “deviant” behaviors and it is less immoral to speak of love than of sexuality. But another historical-cultural reason exists. The early 1880s, when academic medievalists defined the concept of “courtly love,” was also the height of the legislative and public battle for the legalization of divorce, made into law in July 1884, which had begun eight years earlier, on June 6, 1876. An ever-increasing pressure on the institution of marriage to sustain itself, not by denying the right to divorce, but by the very nature of the husband-wife relationship, resulted in the assimilation of chivalric love into marriage. That is, doctors aimed to transform love outside of wedlock into marriage based on love; the force of law prohibiting divorce that had kept marriage indissoluble would become irrelevant if marriage were held together by the bonds of love. In this context, chivalric love continued to have a wide cultural resonance when it underwent a series of transformations that made it productive to the social engineering of the French nation. Both professional groups, doctors and medievalists, inherited the term from the histoire des mœurs and in both cases seized on the paradox of decadent love to improve radically the morals of the nation. While medievalists applied it to a carefully contained and crafted literary phenomenon that further elevated French medieval literature as the paragon of civilizational refinement, doctors, in trying to discipline the population, used it to redefine marriage, transform conjugal love and marital sexuality, and improve national health and birth rates. Consequently, this concept continued to be socially productive when, in the attempt to transform chivalric love into courtly marriage, doctors wrote popular marriage manuals in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, in the middle of the French demographic crisis and natalist debate. Chivalric Love: Another histoire des mœurs By the early 1880s, medieval chivalry and its “code of love” (code d’amour) had been around for over 100 years, following the initial publication of Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie in 1759.6 In this earliest study of chivalry, La Curne de Sainte-Palaye repeatedly used “courtoisie, meaning civility or honesty,” “a gentleness, a modesty, a politeness that the name courtoisie expressed perfectly, concerning which no other rules are as formal as those of Chivalry.”7 Chivalry prescribed a set of rules of courtoisie that made possible, in the eleventh century, that “the French government...

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