Of this the best example is a wildly popular book that appeared under the Second Empire, Gustave Droz’s Monsieur, Madame et Bébé. The book went through 20 editions within a year of its appearance in 1866, a number that grew to 85 by 1876, 121 by 1884, and 215 by 1908; although translated into other languages it never found the same success elsewhere as at home. A chief feature of the book was an imagined account of the first night of a marriage; frank and cheerful but serious too, it considered the occasion from both the husband’s and the wife’s point of view, basing each on what was assumed to be men’s and women’s prior experience. After a long day of ceremony and leave-taking, the husband (a whiskered soldier, clearly older than his wife, as was often the case in nineteenth-century marriages) finds himself in the room where the couple are to spend the night; full of uncertainties he sees himself as up against “that instant of anguish and happiness when one has to play the most difficult of roles without any prior rehearsal,” needing to apply whatever resources he has “to the task of making the rudest of realities acceptable without driving the dream away, to bite into the peach without wilting its skin, to defeat an adored enemy and make her cry out without making oneself hated.” When, after many preliminaries, beginning with kissing the tips of her fingers, he undresses and slips into bed next to her, she recoils at his first, accidental touch, bumping against him and irritating an old leg injury. She pleads to be left alone to sleep, and he moves to a chair where he expects to spend the night. Only when, later, she sees him shivering there and invites him back do things get under way.
Inside each partner, meanwhile, a separate monologue unfolds. Does he know that her hesitations do not arise from reluctance to learn the lesson planned for her, but from fear that her teacher does not understand the need to go slowly, that he will “turn the pages of the book too quickly, neglecting the abc’s”? Does she understand that he too is trembling, from fear that he will be a bad teacher, that his emotion will make him forget whatever he knows? Does she realize how dry is his throat and how shaky are his legs? How can she explain the feeling that her formerly cherished gossamer purity and virtue suddenly feels a bit heavy and thick, a winter garment out of season? Her heart says yes and no at once; fearing both that she will be understood and that she won’t she clams up, keeping the storm of feelings inside herself. Afterwards she writes in her diary that marriage is like a swimming lesson that consists of throwing someone in deep water and praying. From one moment to the next everything changes, “what was forbidden is permitted, the code changes its face, even words take on meanings they never had before.”34
Droz prefaces this story with a defense of treating marriage as a real event between actual people and not idealizing it: if people are to be happy in it they must acknowledge its physical side and value the pleasures it can bring. His advice to women is to accept the bodily play and contact, even the foolishness that desire provokes in their husbands. “He adores your virtues, is it so astonishing that he also cherishes their envelope? Your soul is beautiful to be sure, but your little body is not so bad either, and when one loves one loves everything at once.” That women need to be told such things is the fault of the education imposed on them: “Your nature is not guided and cultivated but stifled and cut up, you are treated like those yew-trees in Versailles made to represent goblets and birds.” If you want to be happy in your marriage, make yourself loved: “Don’t be satisfied with being virtuous, be seductive, perfume your hair, cultivate illusion like a rare plant in a golden vase.” To do so is “moral and healthy; the world is not a damp convent and marriage is not a tomb. And do you not see that it is the family whose cause we are defending, that we preach happiness in living, the joy of being together, that good joy that makes us better.”35
Droz’s book gives a very different sense of the place of sexuality inside marriage than some other contemporary accounts, for instance the joyless, stiff and disillusioned portrait of bourgeois family life we find in Zola’s novel Pot Bouille. It is hard to know how to reconcile such diverse images, nor do we know what Droz’s legions of readers actually took from his book. He seems to have expected that it would surprise and even shock some of them, but in many ways he was a figure of his time, and far from radical. He found it natural to describe sex as “the rudest of realities,” and he assumed that a newly married man and woman will approach each other across a great divide that only careful guidance can prevent turning into an abyss. His criticism of female education seems to imply a need to change it, but he made no proposals in this regard (nor it seems would anyone in France or elsewhere in Europe advocate sex education for girls before the very last years of the nineteenth century).36 His aim was to aid people in dealing with the sudden changes marriage brought, not to end the situation that made them loom up. Above all, Droz locates his positive evaluation of sexuality inside the family and presents his purpose as strengthening it. His insistence on this score may have been partly defensive, but much of his book was about relations between parents and children; a cartoon promoting it in La Vie parisienne, the somewhat saucy journal where his sketches first appeared, showed a man telling his wife that it was “A dangerous book: saying such pretty things about children gives one too much desire to have them.” Some people may have found titillation in the text, but it was clearly aimed at respectable bourgeois; its success reminds us that there were many among them who shared or countenanced his anti-clericalism, and who found a free-wheeling sheet like La Vie parisienne at once to their taste and compatible with their sense of themselves as upstanding citizens. Beyond all the reasons why such people remained devoted to the family as an institution we have several times stressed, new ones emerged after the French defeat of 1870 led to fears of national decline. These worries were fed by the contrast between the rapid rate of population expansion in Germany and the sluggish French one, and during the Third Republic people were encouraged to see the procreative function of the family as a kind of patriotic duty. Both men and women (including those in feminist organizations) regarded producing children as a demonstration that the country was not falling into the debilitating “decadence” induced by modern life with its luxuries.37
All the same, the success of Droz’s book should help us to rethink the nearly universal view among historians that the widespread discussion of the “first-night” and of the dangers he sought to help people avoid constitutes evidence for the period’s especially repressive character. Despite what almost every writer on the subject assumes, there is little reason to think that the “problem of the first night” was an exclusively nineteenth-century or bourgeois one. The daughters of the seventeenth-century noblesse de robe families Sarah Hanley studied, kept on a short leash by parents intent on using them as counters in marriage alliances, or of early modern German guildsmen determined to preserve the family honor on which status in their communities depended, the young girls described by Bernard Mandeville early in the 1700s, encouraged by those around them to develop reticence and reserve in every way possible, were all unlikely to enter marriage with much more knowledge and understanding of sex than were comparable women in the nineteenth century, and it is hard to imagine that some did not undergo similar experiences on their wedding nights. Anne-Marie Sohn finds that many French peasants were no less anxious and ignorant about sexuality than were bourgeois (rural women seem especially to have been under the influence of priestly inspired prudishness), so that first-night experiences were often no better among them.38 If fewer testimonies to this effect exist, a chief reason may be the lesser regard given to individual feeling and sentiment in rural and village settings and in general before the eighteenth century: the increasing public attention to the problem after 1800 was a largely bourgeois phenomenon and reflected the growing concern about personal feeling and happiness that Enlightenment and romanticism voiced and fostered. The first person to stir up public attention about the dangers to be avoided on the wedding night was Balzac, whose Physiology of Marriage (1830) warned men “nev
er begin your marriage with a rape.” Balzac, as we saw in his remarkable story “Honorine,” was no advocate of feminine liberation, but he was deeply aware that the high valuation placed on inner feeling and personal freedom by the culture of his time made the success of marriages more beholden to individual sentiment and emotion, particularly that of women, than before. His warning found many echoes in literary accounts of first nights for the rest of the century, giving evidence that the abyss Droz sought to bridge over remained in place for many couples. But the very frequency of these stories testifies no less to the age’s greater sensitivity to the dangers of emotional injury, and its heightened awareness of the need to base marriage on sympathy.39 The idealization of women that contributed to picturing them as ethereal creatures strengthened the sense that wives ought to be defended against the danger of violence inherent in untutored male passion. Moreover, putting sexual relations in the more psychically oriented light Droz applied was part of a general shift away from the attitudes Alain Corbin noted in earlier times and more popular milieu, where bodies and feelings were thought to be driven by external forces like the magical and astrological powers that governed animals and plants, and which made it appear questionable or dangerous to interfere with bodily impulses rooted in an unchangeable order of nature. In the perspective Droz helped to diffuse, individuals themselves were recognized as the sources of their affects and emotions, and thus as responsible for regulating them. This was a momentous change in moral attitudes, deserving of more recognition than it has received.
The 1860s and challenges to anti-sensualism
The decade in which Droz’s book appeared was one marked by palpable changes in sexual understanding and behavior. Alain Corbin points to the 1860s as the moment when sexuality of a modern sort first made its appearance in France, along with outcries by conservatives against the forms it was taking. To be sure he does not mean by “modern” the kinds of attitudes and behavior that radically transformed personal and social life from the sixties of the next century, although as we shall see certain anticipations of those changes would become visible soon after World War I, along with backlashes against them that prefigure similar later ones. The enormous success of Droz’s book may be taken as one testimony to the shift (although Corbin does not refer to it), whose elements included closer relations between husbands and wives and heightened concern for women’s sexual needs and desires, so that “shared pleasure replaced selfish assault.” The power of sex began to be more frankly acknowledged outside marriage too. Both novelists and medical writers described a new and more direct style of flirtation, in which a possible sexual outcome was acknowledged, even in interactions that presumed a sense of distance at the start; an early medical observer of such meetings, Auguste Forel, said that they began with “mute conversations regarding the sexual appetite,” pointed glances or seemingly innocent touching, possible harbingers of caresses, foreplay, and even orgasm in some situations. Railway cars were cited as places where such encounters took place, followed by the away-from-home locations they made available – spas, casinos, hotels, and sanitariums (the potential Thomas Mann would famously draw on later in The Magic Mountain).
One remarkable unpublished diary reveals the excitement and confusions experienced by a properly brought-up French girl not yet twenty, Mireille de Bondeli, allowed to visit a spa with some relatives. Pleased by her ability to draw the attention of men, she recorded impressions of the ones she met, and even made up a kind of typology of flirting, with categories applicable to several of them. With one she allowed herself to imagine marriage, but never seriously contemplated it, since she knew that his position was not sufficient to meet her family’s expectations, and she lacked either the desire or the courage to consider thwarting them. The experience made her feel some envy toward girls who seemed less closely watched than she, but she took satisfaction in thinking that the whole experience helped her to grow up. Her record indicates that participants in such behavior were by no means ready to engage in premarital intercourse, and many were willing to accept their family’s ideas about a suitable marriage when the time came. But the new style expressed an openness toward sexual attraction and physical enjoyment that seems related to the more eroticized style in marriage relations.40
Forel believed that the tension between this attitude and the restrictions within which it emerged led some to a perverse preference for flirting over more lasting connections, and even for “orgasm without intercourse.” His interest in such forms of sexual behavior was, as Corbin observes, part of the wider attention to “abnormal” types of sexual activity and desire characteristic of the new scientia sexualis represented also by Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and Edward Carpenter, and which sought to raise awareness of sexual needs as part of social and marital relations. A few years before divorce was legalized in France in 1884 (to the horror of Catholics and conservatives), one sexologist recommended promoting female orgasm within marriage as a way to forestall adultery.41
Michael Mason points to the 1860s as marking a shift to greater sexual liberalism in England too. He finds evidence in a wide variety of texts, some describing events as they happened, others looking back with some nostalgia on the tone of those years after the backlash they provoked had changed the atmosphere (which is not to say that all its effects were reversed). Flirting much like the kind described by Forel and Corbin was one thing people noticed, sometimes “carried to a remarkable extreme, to a kind of simulacrum of courtship (‘half-engagement,’ ‘playing at lovers’).” The term given to young women who engaged in such behavior was “fast,” signifying an uninhibited way of talking to and acting toward young men that suggested intimacy with ones they might not know very well. Some observers at the time saw such demeanor as a way for girls to advertise their availability for marriage, but others viewed it as aping the behavior of courtesans or prostitutes, with whom some girls may have thought themselves to be in competition for male attention. One account describes a young woman from a well-placed family who ended up in what Mason describes as “a kind of limbo between sexually transgressive behavior … and respectability.” Given what we noted about the greater freedom exhibited by unmarried girls in England there may have been more continuity there between these ways of acting and earlier ones, but certain people at the time were shocked all the same. One critical observer saw the new behavior as a return to pre-Evangelical days after the “moral oasis” of the earlier nineteenth century.42
British comments (that is, in respectable publications; shadier ones and music-hall songs are another story) seem never to exhibit the light-hearted tone of Monsieur, Madame et Bébé, and the contemporary English book that represented the changed atmosphere, affirming a frank acceptance of sexuality and sparking considerable public debate, was the far grayer but intensely passionate and serious Elements of Social Science. Written by George Drysdale, radical scion of a prominent family, it was published anonymously (originally with a different title) in 1854 or 1855, and sometimes attributed to his better-known brother Charles. Although never as popular with the reading public as Droz, it seems to have sold steadily at around 3,500 copies a year between the 1860s and the end of the century. Whereas Droz’s argument for sexual pleasure in marriage fits with the pro-natalist propaganda of the Third Republic, Drysdale’s was an argument in favor of contraception, to which he looked at once to provide a much freer sexual life and as a means of population control. Drysdale was a neo-Malthusian, convinced that the “principle of population” posed great dangers to social well-being and happiness, and concerned especially (though not only) to improve working-class lives by at once allowing greater sexual satisfaction and reducing the burden children constituted for laborers’ families. This stance made the book suspect to many on the left, who had long seen Malthusian doctrines as an attack on workers’ morality and a strategy for reducing their numbers and influence, but it provided grounds for many progressives to develop a positive attitude toward
sexual fulfillment.
The reasons Drysdale offered for his position were both physiological and social. The first involved what he called the “law of exercise”: like other bodily organs, those connected to sex needed to be put to use, by intercourse, at least twice a week, no less for women than men, in order to keep them in good health. Nature has made the sex drive so powerful in order to impress upon us that well-being depends on obeying her commands; what we feel as passion and desire are the calls of a moral conscience that “will give youth no peace till they be obeyed and all obstacles to an honourable and disinterested outlet for the sexual desires surmounted.” This pressure created not just a personal right to sexual satisfaction but a moral obligation to help others achieve it: we must all do our parts in providing society with a “sufficiency of love” adequate to general happiness. Such a message required that the contemporary elevation of the mind and its satisfactions above the body be replaced by a recognition that, as one of Drysdale’s followers put it, “the sexual part of our nature … is intimately connected with what they are pleased to call the higher parts … the strength of it is a measure of the strength of the whole nature.” Like such anti-sensualists as Godwin and Helen Taylor, Drysdale believed that the sex drive could wax and wane with historical circumstances; unlike them, however, he expected its power to rise over time as contemporary “spiritualist” culture lost its hold. Contraception made the practical affirmation of these views possible, providing a shield against the two great sources of contemporary misery: sexual abstinence and working-class poverty. 43
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