Marriages of love and convenience: The French dating market and the revolution of romantic love (19th-20th century)

Did love conquer marriage between the 19th and 20th centuries in France? Does a personal choice imply a free choice? To date, no study has had access to sources that are both numerous and sufficiently stable over the vast period of the 19th and 20th centuries to allow a comprehensive examination of the simultaneous emergence of the love marriage norm and its impact on spouse selection. This paper sets out specifically to explore the issues of spouse selection and the eco-intimate changes in marriages, highlighting the evolution of the love marriage norm, using the archives of matrimonial agencies and advertisements from the 19th and 20th centuries. While the writings of the time debated the merits of marrying for money versus marrying for love, the dating market was serving a bourgeois clientele in search of homogamy. The study of agency operations shows how these marriages first unite two families and two heritages from the same milieu. This good match is seen as a necessary condition for mutual affection. When, in the 20th century, matrimonial ads more systematically enabled individuals to search for their spouse themselves, without the help of their family, these economic stakes did not disappear, but underwent a significant evolution. They are now put on the same level as moral and physical criteria. While homogamy was still preferred, it was no longer considered the only condition for a happy union.