Merchants of Love with Dr. Andrea Mansker

Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Andrea Mansker. Mansker is the David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Specializing in French cultural and gender history, her research interests range from the history of marriage, reproduction, war, and consumerism in postrevolutionary France to gendered codes of honor and citizenship during the Third Republic. Today we are discussing her book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2024), which was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Appalachian College Association. This work is all about the rise of professional matchmaking services in 19th century Paris. Were these matchmakers charlatans or genuine merchants of love? Listen and find out!

Gary: Thank you very much for being on the show. Doctor Andrea Mansker. Your book begins by talking about how a media and advertising revolution allowed for a whole new culture. Can you tell us how mass printing developed and changed society in France around the time of the revolution and after, specifically as it relates to advertisements?


Andrea: Yes, absolutely. And I first just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate the chance to speak with you and your listeners today. So the rise of commercial matchmaking in post-revolutionary Paris was linked to an early media revolution, as well as the growth of print advertising, and this early media revolution tends to span from about the second half of the 18th century up through the first part of the 19th century. Now, this was not the mass press that we're talking about. Historians tend to talk about the rise of the penny press in the 1860s, when you get house modernization, and then this kind of, you know, increasing volume of papers that can be printed cheaply and sold for very cheap prices. And so this isn't, we're not there yet in this period. But nonetheless, there were some more kind of modest changes that did allow certain merchants and retailers to begin experimenting with these new kinds of marketing. These changes were mechanical. The invention of the mechanical press. They were also cultural and legal to a certain extent when we're talking about changes brought by the French Revolution. Some retailers in the second half of the 18th century, in the press, did start to move beyond this kind of dry, straightforward style of advertising that some had engaged in before this, where you're just kind of describing the inherent properties of a product or your services to the public, and started to experiment with communicating more kind of abstract illusions and values and lifestyles. So this story of the media revolution was linked to the rise of the public sphere in the same period where in kind of Habermasian and terms, private people in the 18th century came together to make critical use of their reason. They did this in the press and also in these kind of concrete social settings, where they started to criticize various elements of these kind of old regime institutions and structures. So you do get the increasing circulation of print culture in this period. There's a variety of newspapers, pamphlets, judicial memoirs, scandal sheets, even that begin to kind of circulate much more widely and then help bring about this new entity that is going to be known as public opinion. And so there is this public sphere that many historians have written about in the 18th century that was rational, seen as rational, and was linked to the enlightenment. But historians have also written about a different kind or a different side to this kind of public sphere, one that was in some ways connected to celebrity culture. This was a more irrational, superficial version of the public sphere where private lives are turned into public spectacles. And so I would argue that the world of print advertising really tends to belong to this second form of public sphere as you get in the press. Certain merchants begin kind of playing on various kinds of utopic fantasies of the reading public, and sometimes are making when we talk about the commercial matchmakers, sometimes they're making these kind of unfeasible promises about love and marriage that are appealing to the readership of the press in this period. You also get this idea of kind of public intimacy that with the personals people are revealing, though these are anonymous, people are revealing aspects of their private lives in this kind of public forum, and there is going to be this kind of period of interest that is involved in reading these kind of classifieds and personals. So the early story of print advertising really centers on, at least in this period, centers on this popular classified publication, Paris, which was popularly known as the petite affiche. This had been around, the paper had been around in different forms from about the mid 18th century, and it was a publication that is mainly dedicated to classified ads, and so individuals could place their classified ads on everything from property that they were selling or that they wanted to purchase to offices. Offices could be for sale in the old regime, novelties for sale to an array of kind of professional services, along with requests for and offers of jobs in Paris. And so it included all of these kind of wanted sections, but it also included a miscellaneous section, a section that I would refer to as kind of miscellaneous. And this is where these more kind of overt commercial ads would appear. The paper also contains sometimes kind of reviews of plays and announcements of various sorts. The petite affiche really grew and became a kind of daily publication in the late 18th century. Part of this was due to kind of public demand. The volume of pages that the journal produced more than tripled in the late 18th century, and you get paid advertisements that start to make their debut in 1788. Prior to this, it was free to place ads and classifieds in this paper. So the classifieds newspaper in general, in this period started to function as these kind of malleable tools of communication that facilitated both kind of sociability, but also commerce between strangers, between individuals who previously had no connection with one another. In the old regime, the advertisements print advertisements were the main vehicle of promotion that was not actually regulated or censored by the government, and so print advertisements really began to expand fairly rapidly in the second half of the century. The French Revolution then opens the press more broadly with its, of course, it's kind of declaration of freedom of the press, but also its suppression of privilege. Privilege had previously kind of limited the number of papers that could specialize in the classifieds. And so henceforth many periodicals began again, printing kind of these paid ads based on the number of lines, and they use these ads to kind of bolster their earnings to a pretty modest extent. I wanted to also emphasize that when we talk about print advertising throughout most of the 19th century, and especially in this period, there was a very strong stigma attached to it. And this is partly due to this kind of hangover of guild mentality, especially for these artisans and these small shopkeepers who really associate advertising with the practice of kind of charlatans. The advertising was for merchants who sold kind of quack medicines and other forms of questionable merchandise. It was seen as immoral, as flashy. It created kind of unfair competition. This is the kind of general View of advertising that many people had. And so it does go some way toward explaining why the commercial matchmakers tended to be very stigmatized. There were different kinds of advertisements that were printed in the press in this period. You do see this in the petite affiche, but also in other papers that you start to see the rise of what they called in English, The Puff. And they used the same term in French to refer to this in the French press in this period. But The Puff is something that would appear in that miscellaneous section in the petite affiche. It was really, the term refers to kind of hype. It was this kind of really self-aggrandizing, exaggerated promotion where a kind of a retailer is making these really bold claims for their product, for their service, and also for their own role in kind of creating that product. They tend to position themselves as being these kind of artists or creators, rather than just being these kind of ordinary artisans. So you have The Puff and those appear in the press throughout this period, but that is actually not the most popular form of advertisement in the French press in this era. Most popular was the so-called réclame the French term, and that réclame was the term that the French used for advertising in this period. Unlike the puff, the réclame was a covert advertisement, and so the réclame would appear. It was an ad, but it would appear as a kind of neutral article, or an announcement, or a kind of review of some sort whose actual intention was to kind of pitch a product or a service. And so the réclame, as I say, was the most common form of advertising throughout the first part of the 19th century and did appear in multiple forms throughout the French press. Claudia Hume and Charles de Foy. These early matchmakers that I focus on, did use both forms of advertising. They really made use of any form of publicity that was available to them. Both of them ran these kind of saturation campaigns. I think that you could characterize as such. And both of them early on did advertise principally in the petite affiche. So I do make an argument about the petite affiche in my book, that these marriage negotiators were really operating in this very flexible, consumer based medium that allowed them to experiment with their promotional language on matchmaking, as well as with the format of matrimonial ads and the kind of, I would characterize this publication, as with many of the other newspapers in this period. There is not a clear distinction between news and announcements, the personals or the classifieds and commercial ads. Because of the réclame, the lines between these different kinds of ads was not clear at all. And that kind of flexibility, that ambiguity, tended to work in favor of these retailers who wanted to make these kind of bold claims for their services. I would also emphasize that commercial matchmaking was seen as a new kind of profession, or a new kind of, commercial activity in this period. So they had to really make a case for themselves in this way. But both of these matchmakers were some of the earliest advertisers to really create these kind of conceptual, aspirational narratives for their audience that focused on kind of concepts like romance or destiny or social emulation. And so their innovative ads help kind of forge this collective imaginary for readers about kind of pleasurable shopping and new consumer identities in the modern city.


Gary: So let's get into some of the figures present in your book. You have a number of colorful characters. None more so than Claude Vuillaume. Tell us about this fascinating figure and his matchmaking business.


Andrea: Yes. So I was very lucky to find the case of Vuillaume. He is very forthcoming.  He's very forthcoming about his business and about the ways in which he kind of operates, he runs these, uh, long lasting kind of marketing campaigns. And he really does so much to kind of shape the business of professional matchmaking in this period. And everyone after him essentially does draw from these very creative consumer scripts that he creates. So Vuillaume has a kind of storied history. He was a former revolutionary soldier who is from the department of the Vosges and he volunteers for the Revolutionary Army at a very early age, at age 13, when he most likely kind of lied to the registration officials to gain this post. And he serves as a revolutionary soldier until 1798, when he is a young adult. He at that time kind of returns to the Vosges, spend some time in Paris as well. He kind of floats around after his time in the Army, trying out different kind of lines of work, different kinds of jobs, none of which really work out for him. By 1803, he has become impoverished. He doesn't seem to have many options that are left that are available to him. And he also seems to be in a kind of suicidal frame of mind. And I am drawing this information, yes, partly from his memoirs that he will later publish, but also from a police file that I was able to obtain on him and his activities in this period. But in 1803, when he is feeling like, you know, this is the end of the road for him, he comes up with the idea that he is going to throw himself back into soldiering, and he's going to make his way to Paris, and he is going to offer up his services in the Army for any kind of, risky or bold venture that First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte wants to take at the time. And so he makes the mistake of wanting to kind of offer up his services to Bonaparte personally. When Bonaparte is inspecting a boat for his planned invasion of England. And this is he's inspecting this in Paris. Vuillaume suddenly shows up on the ship in front of Bonaparte. He has two pistols on his person, and he has this kind of wild look in his eye, and he tries to offer his services for some kind of risky venture. Vuillaume then, is, of course arrested, and he is incarcerated as a kind of prisoner of state. He's accused of attempting to assassinate Bonaparte, and he does spend three years in prison, three years total in prison, in a variety of prisons in and around Paris, and this time is interrupted a bit by several escapes that he makes from prison, but he is able to obtain his release by 1806, when he's then put into exile. And so, amazingly, considering that Napoleon did run a police state that tended to use extrajudicial detention with often unlimited terms for especially these kinds of prisoners. Vuillaume did manage to free himself from incarceration and then from exile. And he did this, it seems, through this kind of intensive writing campaign that he engaged in, in which he wrote to these kind of well-placed bureaucrats in Napoleon's government, kind of winning them over to his side and getting them to kind of serve as these advocates for him. And he obtained his release in that way. Also, amazingly, by 1812 he had been released from exile as well. He was able to make his way back to Paris, where he had refashioned himself as the most prominent commercial matchmaker in the Napoleonic Empire. And so it was in 1811 that Vuillaume opened his agency, as he called it, and he it has a kind of long, cumbersome title. He called it the General and Central Agency for Paris and the Empire. This agency at first, he didn't offer commercial matchmaking as one of his services. He did offer a wide array of different kinds of commercial services to the public, ranging from everything from debt collection, real estate sales and purchases, to job placement for, mainly for domestic servants. So Vuillaume, I will characterize him as a kind of early entrepreneur and hustler who established himself as a so-called, initially, as a so-called business agent in the capital. And so the business agents, that was also a new kind of job that some, mostly men, but some women as well, started to set themselves up as. The French term for the business agent was agent d'affaires. The agent was a, as I say, a new kind of business person and a new social type who emerged in these urban centers only in the early 19th century. These were essentially intermediaries or brokers who handled commercial and sometimes kind of quasi legal functions for clients and in return for a fee. This is a weird kind of job, a strange kind of job to have. The broker didn't seem to need any kind of professional training to set themselves up in this way, or any kind of credentials. So it was something that was appealing to these kind of provincial men like Vuillaume, who had experienced maybe a certain amount of kind of physical and social mobility in the revolutionary army and did not want to go back to their hometown, but wanted to settle in kind of Paris or one of the other big cities. It is also the case for Vuillaume that he again entered the Army at a very early age, and so, by his own admission, kind of had a really incomplete education. Vuillaume often referred to himself as being kind of semi-literate or kind of poorly educated, and he just kind of marveled about how, isn't it amazing that I could write? I could write all of these pamphlets, even though I was very poorly educated. But essentially, the business agents in general offered to serve as guides to help people navigate the city and its social networks. And so they especially pitched their services to people who were displaced or kind of newcomers to the city. And so Vuillaume really saw his office, which was centrally located as this kind of hub of communication and exchange. He saw his role as kind of helping buyers and sellers connect in a period when in capitalism, revolution and war were contributing to this kind of greater sense of urban alienation. And so the business agents are going to increasingly specialize as you go forward into the 19th century. This will be the origins of, yes, the matchmakers, but also of real estate agents, also of private detectives, also of these kind of employment agents. The public tended to view them with a great deal of suspicion because they were connected to this newer, more speculative economy and because the agents were frequent advertisers. So in practice, what Vuillaume did was, clients would come to him for a particular service. He would place a want ad for them in the petite affiches. He claims that at one point in 1812, a client came to him and asked, would you be willing to place a marriage ad for me? And then I could use your office as the kind of go between rather than printing my name or my address in the press, and from there, things just kind of took off. This is really it was his marriage ads that made them so popular, and he really initiated this kind of consumer craze surrounding this newer idea of kind of professional matchmaking. And so in the book, I look at Vuillaume’s use of the Parisian classifieds to market his very lively scripts on love as a product of blind destiny. Vuillaume argued that it was these kind of random, unknowable forces that that really kind of propelled these dramatic reversals of fortune that people had experienced both on a national scale, but also in their kind of private conjugal lives. He also pitched his unions as part of this new kind of commercial and social world of movement in Paris, and he associated marriage with these kind of marriage and courtship with these new urban values of abundance and pleasure and social mobility.


Gary: So let's move to the actual people then, who are requesting these services. What kind of people were looking for partners? Who were they looking for? How did they make themselves appealing to potential suitors? And ultimately, what does this whole phenomenon tell us about Paris at the time?


Andrea: Yes,  So the type of, is kind of judging from the advertising and the kind of target audiences of Vuillaume, as well as the kind of ads that he claimed to place for clients. The type of people who are looking for a mate, and then also kind of what they were looking for, is going to change from the time of the First Empire, when we're talking about Vuillaume and his office to the kind of late restoration July Monarchy and beyond. And that is when you're getting up to this second matchmaker, Charles de Foy, when he kind of establishes his office. But generally speaking, throughout the 19th century, we are talking about a clientele that is mostly middle class and the kind of a segment of the middle class under Charles de Foy. A little bit later, we'll narrow a bit, and I'll talk about that in a minute. But for Vuillaume, he is really appealing to a very broad base of the middle classes. The middle classes I say that in part because no one in the personals, none of these ads, seems to be seeking a match that is solely based on love. Almost everybody is mentioning their kind of economic resources, or the kinds of financial resources that they are looking for in a partner. Almost everyone is mentioning their economic worth, their amount of salary if they're a man, the property that they possess, if they possess any, and also inheritance prospects. But Vuillaume tends to appeal to a very broad base, seems to have kind of artisans and small shopkeepers, but also notaries who are placing ads with him. He also appeals to these kind of this more middling milieu, this kind of commercial milieu of merchants and sometimes larger business owners. And that, by the way, will be the kind of the main group that Foy is targeting as well, this kind of commercial media. But additionally for Vuillaume, he is also appealing to Napoleonic civil servants and veterans during the Empire. This does not mean that money, though, was the main requirement or the only requirement for all of the clients. Some clients did see commercial matchmaking is really kind of opening up a new kind of marriage market, a marriage market that is different than the one that existed in real life, a marriage market, whereas some seemed to approach it. The normal rules of partner selection and courtship simply did not apply. And so it was a kind of space, an imaginative space where people could think about new kinds of relationships and criticize older kind of traditional forms of courtship and marriage. Some clients, for example, some of Vuillaume’s female clients were widows, and they wrote in kind of alluding to their previous marriage, which may have been a kind of an arranged union may have been a kind of an unhappy union. They saw matchmaking as perhaps providing the opportunity for them to imagine a more kind of companion type of partnership that they could have with a new spouse. Some women also used, or at least in their letters that they wrote to the matchmaker. Some women also kind of liked the idea of using matchmaking as a way to gain a bit more control over the courtship process. When we're talking about the middle classes. Women in the middle classes and these kind of arranged unions, which were the kind of typical kinds of unions and would remain the typical kinds of unions throughout the 19th century. It was mainly families and parents who would choose the partner and women. Young women would not have very much say over this. These marriage ads provided some women with a way to think about new kinds of behavior and new kinds of partner selection. Some of the female clients don't even seem to have been serious about marriage at all, but were rather seemed to be using Vuillaume’s marriage column as a way to kind of experiment with different public personas, even though these would be anonymous. Some of the brokers clients, men and women, referred to Vuillaume’s big theme of kind of chants, and the kind of power of coincidence in bringing people together as a way to suggest that they could use this concept to kind of violate these gendered norms of courtship and arranged marriage, but still present themselves in a somewhat passive manner, since when you're falling in love with someone, you don't have any control over that. And so you're not being a kind of agent. You're not taking a kind of an assertive role in partner selection or courtship. And so they kind of played on Vuillaume’s themes in a number of ways that were beneficial to them. If women had few resources, they tried to make themselves attractive in other ways. They might emphasize, for example, their skills as household managers. They might emphasize their careful upbringing, their kind of moral and modest upbringing. They might emphasize their families honorable reputation. They might suggest they they have a pleasing appearance or a personality that will suit a male partner very well. In the case of Vuillaume’s famous client, who he dubbed Emily. She suggests very forthrightly that her wealth made up for her transgression of sexual and social norms. Men who lacked property and inheritance prospects might note they practiced like an honorable profession. They might say that they were working in service to the state, and they were on a kind of upward social path. They also were very attracted to Vuillaume’s notion of this kind of irrational marriage market, and this idea that marriage was a lottery over which control and planning made very little impact. And so some male respondents were kind of centering, used Vuillaume’s matchmaking to kind of center their marital strategies around the idea of gambling on love. And so they suggested the marriage market is irrational anyway, so control and planning don't make any difference. And so I'm going to kind of use matchmaking. I might as well throw my dice here and see what Vuillaume can kind of turn up for me, because I have just as much of a chance of making a kind of happy union with this new method of matchmaking, as I do with the kind of traditional arranged unions. So the commercial space of the classifieds really appeared to offer these kind of concrete opportunities to those who many of them, struggled on the actual French marriage market, but it also felt disconnected from real context, and also sometimes from the kind of real life complexity of courtship. In terms of the story about Paris. Commercial matchmaking, I think, does tell us a lot, quite a bit about Paris during this Napoleonic period. Um, one of the groups that I was most interested in that Vuillaume’s really appeals to, and also this group seems to write to him quite a bit. Were these veterans, these veterans of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies who were often from these kind of humble lower or lower middle or middle class backgrounds in the provinces, many of whom had served in the Army for long years, who then in many cases, at least as Vuillaume tells it, didn't want to return to their hometowns even though the government directed them to after their service was over. But many of them didn't want to. They preferred to kind of settle in the city. They had developed a kind of taste for the faster paced of kind of urban life. There were a lot of these kind of Napoleonic new men, some of whom were in the army, some of whom were in the bureaucracy, who were really kind of able to move up the social ladder in this period. One of the main things I argue is that matchmaking tells us a lot about this kind of ambiguous social landscape of the city during this period of upheaval, when you're having revolution, war, urban migration, and changes to the social geography of the city. There had been an unprecedented movement of troops Of men working in the civil service. Civilians. Napoleon had engaged in big projects of kind of social re-engineering to promote a lot of these men from humble backgrounds, who rose in the military or in civil service. He had created a new imperial aristocracy, in 1804. That was kind of an amalgamation of old regime nobles. And then these nouveau riche military officers that he had promoted also have the kind of older social networks in the city breaking down. And social markers in Paris were very fluid and not clear in this period. And scholars have argued that they don't really become solidified until the late restoration. And so Vuillaume created this kind of abstract narrative about Paris that emphasized this fluidity. He really emphasized these kind of problems that urbanization had created for making connections, including romantic connections with other people in the city. He pitched to, again, these kind of middle class men mostly, and said that, you know, people had become strangers in the city. These middle class men who worked long hours in these kind of white colored jobs didn't have time to go to these kind of mixed sex functions where they might meet a prospective bride. Also, after work, they visited these kind of homo social clubs where they're not going to meet any women. And also, he said that they were oftentimes excluded from these more elite or smaller kind of family or social circles in the city. He also really played on this idea of kind of alienation. It's difficult to locate people. You could be living next to the woman of your dreams for years and simply not know it. And so he really kind of developed this very interesting and intriguing narrative about helping people kind of make these love connections in this kind of setting of urban alienation.


Gary: Vuillaume’s critics accused him of abusing romantic notions, which is kind of an interesting thing going on here is that on the one hand, you have sort of a romantic movement, a change in sentiments. There's a great amount of feeling. Well, at the same time, you know that there is this great triumph of capitalism and perhaps even the commodification of a romance connection. So how did the romantic era change people's perceptions of love, and how did this impact the matchmaking industry?


Andrea: Yes. So there were these ongoing debates that were happening in the early 19th century over different kinds of marriage. And this was a debate that had continued from this pre-revolutionary period. Over the, for example, the marriage of convenience versus which is an arranged marriage versus the marriage of inclination. So the marriage of convenience was a union that was arranged by two people's families, and it was seen as a family alliance that some wrote about in the 19th century as being based mostly on material interest or material concerns, but not on individual preference versus the marriage of inclination, which some were really emphasizing during the romantic era, which were unions that were based on love and individual choice. In reality, throughout the 19th century, for the middle and upper classes. The marriage of convenience remained the dominant form of union, but it is the case that things were not that black and white between these two different kind of variants. In reality, many families did consider material interests, but they also considered the kind of sentiments of the future spouses and took various other factors into account. There was also this idea, also stemming from the 18th century, as you see in various novels and plays of the coup de feu, referring to this idea of love at first sight. This was seen as this unique, unrepeatable sensation that was seen by some as a kind of, the best proof of a powerful, enduring love. The coup de feu concept was used to criticize the idea of familial authority and familial obedience. It was used to criticize the older arranged union and various kind of social convention in the choice of a marriage partner. This was a period moving into the 19th century, when you've had a lot of changes in the legislation regarding the family. And so in fiction, in plays of the period, in this period of kind of French comedic plays from 1800 to the 1820s, you tend to have these kind of compromise positions that come about. You do have a lot of plays that focus on this idea of love at first sight with a stranger. The coup de feu tends to kind of hit these characters when they are in these kind of crowded urban spaces, when they're at a someplace like a masked ball or when they're at the theater. Another theme that these plays emphasizes, this idea of love put to the test to verify its kind of authenticity. And so the kind of vaudeville plays in this period, do offer their characters the opportunity to kind of, even young women to meet a stranger and fall in love with a stranger in an urban space. But then by the conclusion of the play, we find out that that match that the person met was kind of magically of the same social status or of a proper social status, that aligned with the parents wishes, and so with the Civil Code of 1804, they had rolled back many of the kind of more egalitarian legislation regarding the family that the revolutionaries had passed and reimplemented this idea of kind of parental consent for marriage and a certain amount of patriarchal authority. So when we talk about Vuillaume and which kind of ideals was he referring to? He did use this kind of theme of chance encounters and these unknowable forces of attraction. And this was seen as this kind of romantic copy that he was using, and that was attractive to many people at the time. But Vuillaume’s approach was really to appeal to the kind of broadest audience possible and to find a middle ground between those two ideals of kind of parental authority and family alliances, or the arranged union, and then also the newer, more romantic idea of individual choice. So he considered himself to be a kind of child of the revolution. He did insist, oftentimes on the kind of liberation of love and marital choice from family controls. He also offered both men and women the possibility of following their personal desires to find a match. He wrote quite a bit about how he and his wife had met on the so-called Street of Chance in Paris by, in this kind of random way, and he offered that as a possibility for his clients. And so he did describe this in a rather kind of romantic way. However, he also pitched two families and suggested that families could come to him and he could arrange these kind of family alliances. So he also offered to do the kind of arranged unions. He indicated that he in some cases, he was speaking to the family members of a young woman, but he never actually met the young woman in question. And so families could also use his services in this more traditional style. And yes, and as you said at the top Vuillaume, critics very much took a kind of cynical approach to the romantic marketing copy. But there were many people among the public who were very much drawn to it.


Gary: This was a time of profound political upheaval. We've got the first Empire, the restoration, the July Monarchy, second Republic, second Empire. How did all of these political changes affect matchmaking, or did they not?


Andrea: They do in a variety of ways. They the political climate is affecting matchmaking and vice versa. The matchmakers are responding to various anxieties that are created by all of these kind of fast paced political and social changes. So the matchmakers, I argue, they embodied in many ways many of the prevalent political and social anxieties, but they also provided ways of coping with those changes. And so Vuillaume, for example, with his theme of chance and this kind of random nature of the universe and people are just kind of at the whim of these impersonal forces, gave his public a theme that allowed them, in some ways, to kind of grapple with the impact of the revolution of military conscription, of decades of continuous warfare on their private lives. And so and this wasn't a theme that allowed people to really kind of process what had happened to them in any kind of deep sense. But it was more a theme that, you know, well, this is just what's happened to all of us, that there have been these tremendous reversals of fortune and you can't control it. And so you should just kind of accept that this is the way the world works, and then you should just kind of move on. You do see that in some of the client ads that were written in response to him. These personals served as one kind of site where the public could consume and kind of generate these personal stories about revolutionary loss. His famous client, Emily, for example, asked for a kind of ruined nobleman who had suffered during the revolutionary period and somebody who had maybe lost everything. And there were some purportedly kind of old regime nobles who wrote in, who wrote in response to her ad explaining that they had lost their military posts and they had been impoverished. And this was her ad was giving them kind of new hope for the future, perhaps a sense of kind of financial security. There were also these kind of stories of all of these, again, these Napoleonic new men who had been able to experience some kind of social mobility, who wrote in as well and clearly saw marriage as one way to raise their social status. It's also interesting, I think, that for Vuillaume and again, he's starting to do his matchmaking in 1812. And so this is later during the First Empire. And this is a pretty depressing political situation for many people in Paris. You have these very heavy conscription demands. You have a very strict political censorship that Napoleon is exercising over the press. The classifieds where his ads are appearing, they are supposed to be a really apolitical space, and one of the functions of these ads for the public at the time is clearly entertainment. And so Vuillaume, rather than kind of get angry when people are mocking him for this new kind of activity or mocking his clients, rather than get angry, he decides to just kind of roll with it. And so he kind of presents himself as this really easygoing persona who is allowing or giving the public a good laugh. And this tends to be a really winning formula for him. And I think that this kind of depressing or bleak situation that many people are experiencing at the time. There's a lot of political apathy turned their attention in some ways to this really lively and interesting marriage forum that he was developing in his marketing copy in the petite affiche. When we move up there starts to be this criticism of the commercial matchmakers that they are degrading marriage, that they are corrupting marriage and that, yes, they're introducing this kind of profit motive into it. That critique is not as loud during Vuillaume’s time as it will become for Charles de Foy, who sets up his office in 1825. And so, moving up into the July Monarchy, we start to see more intense anxieties emerge that are surrounding the kind of capitalist economy and these kind of extreme changes within it. Different modes of speculation. There begins to be this big concern about con artists, and the matchmakers get kind of lumped in with the business agents. And they are depicted throughout the press and in various other forms of literature and the theater in the 1830s as really kind of embodying that economy of risk and speculation and these fraudulent activities that are associated with it. And so this is following the July Revolution. King Louis Philippe's government was pursuing these kind of free market policies that were favoring the upper crust of the financial, banking and industrial elite and disadvantaging the popular classes who are suffering from boom and bust economic cycles. And so the July Monarchy. The political regime was associated with these unstable market forces and really unregulated financial speculation. And so there was this concern about the increasing importance of wealth in more areas of daily life. And marriage was seen as the kind of stable foundation of the state. And so it did create more anxieties to think that, oh, well, um, you know, the marriage broker is just making marriage into another kind of product or another kind of commodity. So raising these kinds of concerns and many of these concerns were expressed in response to Charles de Foy and his office. He is really targeting this demographic of middle class provincial men who viewed matrimony as a route to upward mobility. He was positioning himself as this, as he referred to himself this kind of aristocratic matchmaker, and so he claimed to this audience that he had access to these elite social networks thanks to the currency of his name, and that he is providing his bourgeois clients with an older form of informal matchmaking. It's very ironic because he is positioning himself as being aristocratic and kind of removed from the marketplace, but at the same time, he's using mass advertising in order to establish himself in this way. And so you really start to see more of the kind of, political and social anxieties that start to emerge surrounding, matchmaking or disgust through matchmaking by the July Monarchy.


Gary: Your final chapter deals with the character of Charles de Foy and his courtroom dramas. Why were these so important in changing the business of matchmaking?


Andrea: Charles de Foy wants to rationalize the business of matchmaking, and he very much ditches Vuillaume’s old emphasis on love and individual choice. He also makes it into his life's work to establish the professional and also juridical legitimacy of the commercial matchmaker, and he does that in a variety of ways. But one of them is to launch a series of civil suits against clients who have refused to pay for his fee or who have, you know, gone into kind of default and not been able to pay it for launches a series of civil suits against his clients from 1830 to 1850. And in these cases, he does win a series of victories, in these cases against clients. He also manages to marshal these positive opinions about professional matchmaking from some of the main, some of the most prominent jurists of the time, some of the most prominent judges and lawyers in Paris and also across France. And he then wins these court cases, and then he will publish these legal briefs that, in which he claims that he has, you know, gotten the courts approval of kind of professional matchmaking. And he does when a great deal of vocal support from the legal community for this, I argue in these debates that are being played out in the courtroom, they're not just debating matchmaking, they're also considering marriage. And the question of whether marriage could be considered as a commercial contract or a contract, excuse me, that is like other kinds of contracts, or whether it is this kind of separate bond that has something kind of sacred or religious about it and can't be just considered as another business agreement. And just keeping in mind that during this period, marriage is indissoluble. Divorce is outlawed. A legal separation is possible, but in legal separation, you are still married to the person. And so jurists are actually contesting the status of marriage through these debates. One of the things I emphasize is that Foy wins a lot of victories, and that his victories in court also strengthen that of other marriage brokers in this period. And so it is surprising that in 1855, there is this major reversal of those earlier judgments by the Court of Cassation, which is the highest court in France, and the Court of Cassation will deem the matchmakers contract if framed in a certain way, as being illegitimate and illegal. But this is, I argue in some ways, just a blip on the radar, and it has a lot to do with a Court of Cassation decision, has a lot to do with that particular kind of political and social context, because it is after this period of the revolution of 1848, it is during the Second Empire when there is this kind of conservative reaction. But the critiques of the matchmaker do start to be made in this big case that Foy wins in against a negligent client called the designé. And it's a father and the son. He wins this case in 1850, and he also wins on appeal. The defense of the designé had started to make some of the main juridical arguments against the matchmaker, and among other things, they had said that the matchmaker has a desire for profit. They are motivated solely by profit, and that is what is corrupting the matrimonial bond. It might lead matchmakers to engage in fraudulent activities, and trying to even blackmail, and trying to get their client accepted in order that they can kind of make their fee. And the designé argue against Foy, that essentially they were not obliged to pay the matchmakers fee because matchmaking and the contract was harmful to public order and morality. Now they lose that case. But this is the argument that the Court of Cassation is going to pick up. And so the Court of Cassation will argue that the objective of the broker's contract was marriage, rather than a commercial end. So the broker had become a so-called salesperson of marriage, rather than simply charging a fee for their services or their assistance. This idea was based on the way that Foy and other brokers wrote up their contracts. There contract stipulated that, you know, clients do not have to pay anything upfront. They will only pay once the marriage is contracted to a certain person that Foy has suggested, and at that point, after the marriage is made, Foy will take 5% of the dowry. And so that is what allowed the High Court to say that. Well, the matchmaker is in that case, kind of corrupting marriage because they're treating marriage like a commodity. And marriage is something that is both a civil contract, but it's also sacred. It's also a sacrament. And we should act, marriage is a contract apart, is what the ruling said. And we should act to kind of protect marriage, which is, again, indissoluble. And so that makes it permanent, but protect marriage from the marketplace. And so this is a big decision. But I do want to emphasize that this does not put a stop in any way to commercial matchmaking in France. So it only kind of hinders people from framing their contract in that way. And so it doesn't lead any of these matchmakers to shut down their offices. Certainly Foy’s business is going to continue well into the 19th century and will be thriving, just judging from all of the kind of advertisements that he is paying for. But and then there are some later legal decisions that even make that form of, of contract legitimate as well.


Gary:  Finally, when and why did matchmaking agencies die out in France?


Andrea: Yeah. So this is an interesting question. As I just indicated, these kind of legal decisions or these judicial decisions don't really put a dent in marriage brokerage. By the late 19th century, marriage brokerage is really thriving in France. There are many, many different kind of agencies in Paris alone, and some of them really seem to be doing quite lucrative business. And so the short answer is matchmakers do not die out in France. They kind of have their ups and downs. But I think one of the things that stands out to me about them is that they have continually been able to remake themselves and make these kind of persuasive pitches to their audience, that they have continued to kind of offer solutions to whatever crises the nation and individuals seem to be suffering through at the time. A lot of this is due to clever marketing, and that is precisely why I think that this history of advertising is so important to the story. But when you get to the late 19th century and then the interwar period, you do have professional matchmakers who are talking about this kind of major demographic crisis, where there has been a slowed down birth rate in France from the late 19th century, and then also with the First World War. There's been a tremendous number of deaths. So professional matchmakers start to suggest that they can help all of these surplus single women to find partners. There are a very prominent agencies later in the 20th century as well. One big agency in the 1990s that I read about a little bit in the archives was referred, was called Ion International. They, in their ads, cited a declining number of marriages and then a high divorce rate that France had been experiencing from the 1970s. They called this a kind of worrying decline and offered to help people kind of solve this crisis. They also targeted younger people, saying that, young people, had different expectations for a mate than their parents generation and that their social network is not as large as that of their parents. And this is why they need matchmakers there. Also, their director was a psychologist. And so they really kind of touted that. So they can match you based on your your personality. Today matchmaking, professional matchmaking is experiencing a real resurgence, and in their ads, they are very much talking about this epidemic of loneliness that our generation is facing due to partly the pandemic, yes, but also due to this dating app fatigue and disenchantment that many French users feel with the dating apps, which they see as, impersonal, calculated. And also there are a lot of fraudulent activities that are associated with the dating apps as well. So in response to that, these professional matchmakers offer a more, as they say, human touch or more personalized approach.


Gary: They are telling me that the hot singles in my area aren't real.

Andrea: All of the kind of romance scams and frauds that these dating app that are being run on these kind of dating apps today. Of course, the matchmakers also are rocked by these kind of big scandals from time to time as well. But, yeah. So they're just these matchmakers are just constantly reinventing themselves and, speaking to this kind of demand in the marketplace. I’m going to say one more thing that I think that the professional matchmakers today still use many of the scripts that were innovated by both Vuillaume and Foy. If you look at many of them are specialized. And so some of them are promising, for example, exclusive access to these kind of elite social networks. Some of them are pitching to people who see love as a, you know, a business plan. And that is straight out of Foy's playbook. That's precisely the kind of advertising that he ran. Others are saying, well, no, we're just  kind of taking a more personal approach. I'm just started matchmaking in this kind of informal way with some of my friends, found out I had a knack for it. And so I am just this kind of friendly matchmaker who, you know, had a knack for bringing people together. And again, Vuillaume had taken that much more kind of personal approach to matchmaking and had seen himself really as this kind of simple soldier who could really connect to his audience at the time. So it's just whatever period that they're are operating in. They are always kind of promising to help individuals overcome this kind of sense of dislocation and loneliness that seems to be associated with a lot of social change.


Gary: The book is Matchmaking and the Marriage market in post-revolutionary France. Thank you so much for being on the show. Doctor Andrea Mansker.


Andrea: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.


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