Wife Abuse in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

In this interdisciplinary study Mary Trouille analyses legal cases involving spousal abuse and literary representations of such violence. The book is divided into three parts. It begins with an informative chapter on the social and legal contexts of wife abuse in ancien régime France. As husbands had the right to correction modérée, magistrates granted separations only if women could demonstrate that their husband's mistreatment put their life in danger. By the later eighteenth cenrury, however, differing standards for the various classes became visible as upper-class women successfully argued that the limits of acceptable behaviour among the educated elite differed from those of the poor. The second part of the book treats four separation cases contained in an anthology of causes célèbres published by a former lawyer, Nicolas-Toussaint Le Moyne Des Essarts, and then concludes with two divorce cases dating from the brief period (1792-1816) when divorce was legal. The last section of the book analyses three fictional works — Sade's La Marquise de Gange, Genlis's Adèle et Théodore, and Rétif de la Bretonne's Ingénue Saxancour — whose plots include stories similar to those found in the legal cases. Trouille uses these two types of source to reflect on the relationship between history and literature, fact and fiction. The legal briefs use narrative devices similar to those found in popular literature of the period, particularly sentimental literature and melodrama, to succeed in their goal of convincing judges of their clients' innocence. Similarly, the literary accounts blur the border between fact and fiction, as the novelists based their stories on real-life incidents, at times combining the experiences of more than one real woman into one fictional character's life. In both cases, the lawyers and writers sought to tell compelling stories, and to do so they drew on contemporary attitudes towards spousal abuse and the limits of what was considered normal and acceptable. Trouille makes a convincing case for the efficacy of her examples both to understand prevailing attitudes towards spousal abuse and to seek evidence for how those attitudes changed over time. She found that by the end of the century a Rousseauian rhetoric of domestic happiness had infiltrated these views and shaped the arguments presented by lawyers arguing for legal separation. In the conclusion Trouille takes this argument further and links her findings to Revolutionary legislation: 'By challenging traditional inequalities between spouses, these jurists helped shape public opinion and prepare the way for the radical changes in marriage and family law adopted in the early years of the French Revolution' (p. 319). The literary sources permit Trouille to reveal forms of female power and agency, even within a system that gave abusive husbands great latitude. Her analysis of French female gothic heroines similarly draws attention to women's use of literature to voice their criticism 'of patriarchal structures through strategies of estrangement and defamiliarisation' (p. 252). While Trouille's argument will not surprise specialists, her insightful analysis of literary material in dialogue with the legal cases makes a convincing and valuable contribution to the field of eighteenth-century French studies.