Love and marriage were briefly reconciled in the revolutionary period. Divorce by mutual consent or for incompatibility was introduced by a law of 20 September 1792, and the divorce rate shot up, with 65–75 per cent of divorces in both town and country being requested by women. Control of family property by wives as well as husbands was allowed for by the Convention, and a law of 2 November 1793 declared ‘there are no more bastards’ in respect of inheriting family property, opening the way to paternity suits being filed by abandoned mothers or natural offspring.4 A conservative reaction set in, however, soon after Thermidor, as much in public opinion as from the authorities, as the family unit and family property under patriarchal control was felt to be the basis of a much needed stable social order.5 Several versions of a Civil Code were drafted before that finally endorsed by Napoleon Bonaparte on 21 March 1804. Its article 213 announced, ‘The husband owes his wife protection, the wife owes her husband obedience.’ The Code retained divorce, but mutual consent no longer sufficed; it was now a sanction for defined transgressions, namely criminal conviction, cruelty, and adultery – by the wife, counting against the husband only if he kept his mistress in the family home. The control of family property by husbands alone was restored and Bonaparte announced, ‘society has no interest in recognizing bastards,’ who once again were prevented from laying claim to the family inheritance. Divorce, however, did not outlast the Empire: the royalist Chambre Introuvable passed a law of 8 May 1816 which provided only for legal separation, allowing spouses to live apart and property to be divided, but prohibiting remarriage.6
This restrictive legislation did little more than reflect prevailing opinion among the families of the social elite. Family alliances and the accumulation of patrimonies from which an independent income could be drawn came before any notion of romantic love. A man could not marry until he had established himself in a situation or inherited property. For a young woman to make a ‘good’ marriage with someone of sufficient standing she required firstly virginity, which was ensured by a closely supervised and pious convent education, and secondly a dowry from her own family large enough to suggest equivalent wealth. It was thus not uncommon for women under twenty to marry men over forty. Once married, a woman was regarded as subordinate to the family, her sole duty being to see to its welfare. Finding happiness in love or fulfilment or recognition in a career were simply not considerations. While a married man might pursue relationships outside marriage with impunity, such behaviour on the part of a married woman brought dishonour and even catastrophe. And yet the system which married off teenage virgins to much older men for dynastic reasons was, as Balzac observed in his 1829 treatise, The Physiology of Marriage, a time-bomb waiting to explode. Young wives married to ugly old men characterized essentially by ‘nullity’ would be laid siege to by at least three highly sexed bachelors who had not yet established a situation for themselves that would permit them to marry and thus had to choose between frequenting prostitutes and adultery. Balzac postulated that a woman subjected to an arranged marriage would suffer a build-up of unhappiness such that thirty was the optimum age at which she would take a young lover, cuckolding her old husband.7 Unsurprisingly, his novel La Femme de trente ans, serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1832, explored precisely this predicament.
How French women in fact charted a course for themselves can be examined through the lives of three women born in the years 1804 and 1805, Delphine Gay, Marie d’Agoult and George Sand. These were drawn from the noble or upper bourgeois elite and were untypical in that they all had a public profile, but their experiences and reflections upon them shed a great deal of light on the predicament of women from their class in the early nineteenth century.8 Delphine Gay was a young and talented poet to whom Madame de Staël was said to have passed her quill pen as she lay on her death-bed in 1817. Her mother, Sophie Gay, was married in 1791 at the age of fifteen to a banker twenty years older than she, ran a salon in the Chaussée d’Antin under the Directory, and fell in love with a soldier who had returned from the Egyptian expedition, Sigismond Gay, by whom she had a daughter before she divorced and married him in 1803. Moved by Madame de Staël’s Delphine, which she defended in print, she named the new daughter she bore Sigismond in 1804 after the heroine. Sigismond became an imperial functionary, appointed receiver-general at Aix-la-Chapelle, but his wife’s mordant wit upset the authorities and he lost his office in 1811, reverting to banking. Sophie published novels herself and launched Delphine in the Faubourg Saint-Germain as a young writer. Her reputation, however, was initially made by her beauty rather than her pen. Lamartine recalled seeing her, aged eighteen, the year of her father’s death, at Terni in Umbria, leaning on a parapet and watching the waterfalls. ‘A painter’, he wrote, ‘could not have chosen an attitude, expression or day that better matched her grandiose beauty.’9 That painting was in fact executed by Louis Hersent, and became the pose that was her trademark. Thus Théophile Gautier said of the first night of Hernani in February 1830, ‘When she entered her box and leaned over to see the crowd, her beauty – bellezza folgorante – momentarily calmed the tumult and provoked a triple round of applause. The beautiful girl was wearing the blue scarf of the Hersent portrait and, with her elbow resting on the edge of the balcony, she involuntarily reproduced the famous pose.’10
Sophie’s ambitions for her daughter also included marriage and Delphine was courted by an habitué of her mother’s salon, Émile de Girardin, the illegitimate son of an imperial general made doubly ambitious by his sense of inferiority. He fought in the courts to secure the right to use his father’s name, de Girardin, and with loaded pistols to defend his honour against slurs in the press. In 1836 he launched La Presse, a popular newspaper which attracted a new clientele by means of the serialized novel or feuilleton. Delphine’s great coup was to win over Balzac, whose La Vieille Fille was soon serialized in La Presse. Her marriage to Émile was not happy personally, although she did make it work for her professionally. Émile soon went back to a childhood sweetheart, an illegitimate daughter of the banker Ouvrard, with whom he had been brought up in the same foster-home, while Delphine had an affair with a young dandy addicted to gambling, who subsequently committed suicide.
In the winter of 1826 Delphine was introduced to Marie d’Agoult in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; Delphine excelled at poetry, Marie at the piano. Marie’s origins were fully aristocratic, as the daughter of a royalist émigré, Alexandre de Flavigny, who returned to France with his German wife in 1809, settled in Touraine, and died in a hunting accident when she was not yet fourteen, in 1819. Marie was sent to a convent school, married off in 1827, at the age of twenty-one, to Charles-Louis-Constance d’Agoult, first equerry to the Duchesse d’Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI, and presented to Charles X. She later said of the arranged marriage:
for a young lady of the nobility there could be no question, in the period I am speaking about, that she might listen to her heart for a single minute when it came to choosing the husband to whom she was to entrust her entire destiny. Only what was called the marriage ‘of convenience’ was admitted in principle. Birth, fortune, situation, alliances, ‘expectations’ – that is to say the presumed inheritance, more or less imminent, depending on the age of the parents and grandparents – those were the ‘conveniences’ between which it was permitted to hesitate and choose.
After the marriage, she continued, the husband disappeared as quickly as possible from the home and savoured society on his own. Society hostesses did not like to receive husbands with their wives – ‘it was said to freeze conversation. Wit, the desire to please, flirtatiousness, verve and spicy provocation’, she observed, ‘were killed off by the insipid commerce of conjugal habit.’11
Marie d’Agoult founded her own literary salon, and frequented the world of Romantic musicians where she found greater inspiration. In 1832 she met Franz Liszt, six years younger than she, and left her husband. For the sake of discretion she travelled abroad with Liszt to Switzerland in the su
mmer of 1835, and bore him a daughter, Blandine. Two years later, after a visit to Italy, she had a second child by him, Cosima, then a son, Daniel. In 1835 Liszt introduced Marie d’Agoult to George Sand, with whom he had had a brief affair. George Sand’s background was more mixed than Marie’s: her father, Maurice Dupin, was Murat’s aide-de-camp in Spain in 1808 and died in a riding accident that year, when she was only four; her mother was the daughter of a billiard-hall proprietor and canary-seller in Paris and had herself been a prostitute. Aurore Dupin, as she was then, was brought up by her father’s authoritarian mother, Marie-Aurore Dupin de Francueil, herself the illegitimate daughter of Louis XV’s military commander, Marshal de Saxe. Aurore was sent off to a convent school, but out of school on her grandmother’s estate at Nohant in Berry she enjoyed horse-riding, for practicality in men’s clothes. After her grandmother died in 1821 Aurore returned to her mother in Paris, but soon found an escape by marrying a rather boorish sublieutenant, Casimir Dudevant, who promptly resigned his commission to live off her inheritance of 500,000 francs, which he controlled under French law, permitting her an allowance of 3,000 francs per year.12
Aurore had an affair in 1830 with a young novelist, Georges Sandeau, left her husband, and began a series of relationships which ran the gamut of Romantics of both sexes in Paris: Marie Dorval, the mistress of Alfred de Vigny, Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, six years younger than she, with whom she went to Italy, and the republican lawyer Michel de Bourges who secured her legal separation from her husband in 1836. She idealized her father and wrote that ‘had I been a boy and lived twenty-five years earlier, I know and sense that I would have acted and felt in all things like my father’.13 From 1831, to secure her financial independence, she worked on Le Figaro – the only woman on the staff – and dressed as a man in a greatcoat, in order to move freely around Paris and not least in order to sit in the stalls at the theatre (women were confined to the boxes). Publishing her first novel, Indiana, which related the loves and dreams of a Creole woman unhappily married to a Napoleonic officer, in 1832, she abbreviated the name of her first lover as her pen-name, George Sand.
George Sand and Marie d’Agoult were both fascinated by and rivalrous with each other. Marie d’Agoult envied George Sand her literary success, while George Sand was jealous of Marie’s pure aristocratic pedigree. ‘I am burning to challenge you for literary glory,’ wrote Marie. George replied, ‘For me, at present, you are the ideal of the fairy-tale princess, artistic, loving, gentle in manners, speech and movement, like kings’ daughters in epic times’; her only criticism was that she was ‘devilishly too intelligent’.14 After her separation had been finalized, George Sand invited Marie and Liszt to spend the summer of 1837 with her at Nohant. The two women went out for early-morning rides, savouring nature, and conversed in the evening. Yet the rivalries were too powerful. George Sand found Marie cold, Marie found George like a spoiled child, and indiscriminate in her affections. They confided their regrets to friends in ways that got back to the other – George’s portrait of the superior, frigid Marie found its way into Balzac’s characterization of Béatrix in his 1839 novel of that name. Meanwhile Marie was convinced that George was trying to rekindle her relationship with Liszt, and may well have done so before she found her own enduring Romantic hero in Frédéric Chopin, likewise six years younger than she, with whom she began a relationship in 1838. What might have been a powerful friendship between two exceptional women became a silent hatred that lasted from 1838 for well over a decade. In 1847 George Sand broke up with Chopin and in many ways her most fulfilling relationship was the quizzical, ironic, platonic one she sustained with Gustave Flaubert. Having met at Magny’s, the Paris restaurant where the literary and artistic elite gathered in the 1860s, they embarked on a long playful correspondence in which he would address her in the masculine as ‘cher maître’ or even ‘cher bon maître adoré’, while she would sign off ‘Ton vieux troubadour’.15
If marriage was so closely defined socially and unlikely to lead to personal happiness, one option was to remain unmarried. The proportion of women at fifty who had not married rose from 12 per cent of those born in 1821–5 to 14 per cent of those born in 1836–40.16 Of course this might condemn women to a life of poverty, while doing nothing for their happiness. Spinsterhood was said to predispose to madness in the nineteenth century and half the patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital as mad in 1838–48 were unmarried.17 One solution which combined spinsterhood with in tegration into a community and a degree of social support was, as Madame de Staël’s Delphine discovered, to become a nun. Instead of regarding spinsterhood as a social stigma, taking the veil consecrated virginity as the highest state woman could achieve. Of every hundred women who did not marry in the 1850s, twelve became nuns. Being a nun, however, was different after the Revolution, which had dissolved religious orders and prohibited perpetual vows as a violation of natural liberty. Cloistered communities as experienced by Delphine and before her by Simone Simonin, Diderot’s fictitious Religieuse, who was deprived of her dowry and confined to a convent because she was illegitimate, were a thing of the past. The new congregations that sprang up like mushrooms – six per year between 1820 and 1860 – were unenclosed and dedicated to the service of the community, either by nursing or by teaching. They were overwhelmingly women’s congregations – only one male congregation a year was founded in 1810–60, for male orders like the Jesuits were seen as a political threat and the Church as reconstituted by Napoleon was that of the secular clergy. Lastly, rather than a way of removing unwanted upper-class girls from sight the female congregations were highly democratic, with 22 per cent of their founders of noble origin in the early nineteenth century, 43 per cent bourgeois, 18 per cent from artisanal or shopkeeping families, 14 per cent of peasant origin and 4 per cent from the working classes.18
One example of this new kind of nun was Jeanne Jugan, born into a large Breton family outside Cancale in 1792. Her father, a fisherman, joined the navy to fight the English in 1798 and never returned. While her two elder sisters and younger brother married, Jeanne at twenty-five became a nurse in the hospital of the recently founded Soeurs de la Sagesse, in nearby Saint-Servan. She spent six years there, caring in particular for an invalid priest, then became the maid of a local lady whose brother had been a priest and who left Jeanne a small legacy when she died in 1835, at which point Jeanne shared lodgings with a former priest’s housekeeper who had a similar small legacy, continuing to work as a domestic but now also looking after the poor of Saint-Servan. The key relationship in the foundation of any new congregation was that between a pious woman like Jeanne Jugan, the local priest, who in this case was the curé who arrived in 1840, and a benefactor, here a prosperous Saint-Servan shopkeeper, Mlle Doynel, who bought the nuns a house that had belonged to an old convent. The Little Sisters of the Poor, as they called themselves, bound by simple (not perpetual) vows, were constituted in 1842, and by 1850 had founded houses at Rennes, Dinan, Nantes, Angers, Tours and Paris. In fact Jeanne Jugan, now Sister Mary of the Cross, ill educated as she was, served as superior for only one year, but in 1845 was awarded the Prix Montoyon of the Académie Française, presented to ‘a poor French person who has done the most virtuous act’, cited as one of ‘those helpful souls who, themselves without any possessions other than a loving heart and a strong arm, have nonetheless managed to become the good angels of their fellows’.19
WOMEN AND EMPLOYMENT
For women, whether married or unmarried, there were few career options for most of the nineteenth century. The professions and state service were restricted to those with a classical education leading to the baccalauréat, and this kind of education was not available to women. Women’s education was increasingly controlled by congregations of nuns – who in 1850, for example, taught 73 per cent of girls in the Rhône department (around Lyon) and 94 per cent of those in the Loire department (around Saint-Étienne)20 – was not very academic and concentrated on the shaping o
f future wives and mothers, if not future nuns. State service was a function of government patronage, but the only official posts that were available to women were those of local postmistresses (receveuses des postes), in which role they were often preferred to former NCOs from the 1840s, if they could claim, for instance, that they were the orphaned daughter of an army officer or widow of a civil servant. Accommodation was attached but the pay was meagre – from 800 francs per year to 1,300 at retirement age in the 1860s – and although they were not barred from marriage, 58 per cent of them were spinsters in 1880.21
The domination of girls’ teaching by nuns and the absence of state secondary schools for girls before 1880 meant that there were very few teaching options for lay women. One exception was the career of Marie Pape-Carpentier, whose father, an NCO in the gendarmerie, was killed by chouans in the Sarthe before she was born. She was entrusted to her grandmother at Alençon to learn lacemaking, but by dint of independent study she became head of the salle d’asile – a cross between a nursery school and crèche to keep poor children off the streets – first at La Flèche in 1834–9, then at Le Mans. She achieved a wider reputation with a handbook on running salles d’asile, published in 1846 and awarded the Prix Montoyon of the Académie Française, and in 1848 was appointed head of a new training school for nursery school teachers in Paris. She married a captain of the Paris National Guard in 1849, but he died in 1858, leaving her to raise two daughters, so that her salary of 3,000 francs was essential. In 1862 she wrote a series of articles in the Économiste Français on the need to open careers such as teaching, the civil service and pharmacy to women, and was invited by education minister Victor Duruy to give five lectures on salles d’asile in the Sorbonne during the Universal Exhibition of 1867, after which she was appointed general inspectress of salles d’asile. That said, she forged her career in the face of opposition from the Catholic Church for promoting a sector over which they did not have control, and was even suspended in 1874–5 by the Moral Order regime of the Third Republic before the republicans took office.22
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