“Happy” Marriages in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This article uses familial correspondence to examine how bourgeois families conceived of marriage in the early nineteenth-century France. It argues that the companionate model of marriage, which was gaining influence during these years, did not replace the earlier model of the arranged marriage but rather was integrated into it. Marriages continued to be arranged by families but bourgeois couples also sought love and companionship in marriage. Their sense of “happiness” was a very bourgeois kind of happiness, however, based on economic security and domestic peace within the constraints of familial obligations.