WMST faculty member Dr. Andrea Mansker, David E. Underdown Professor of Modern European History, has published her latest book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France (Cornell University Press, 2024). A full description of the book is below:
Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France uncovers the unexplored history of matrimonial agents, their novel marketing tactics, and the rise of personal advertisements to track the commercialization of marriage in nineteenth-century France. Brokers transformed courtship and marriage into forms of commercial exchange, linking them to the burgeoning urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility.
By studying agents’ and readers’ media fictions on love alongside court cases, legislation, and literature surrounding the industry, Andrea Mansker reveals the intimate and socioeconomic pressures of finding a spouse. At the same time, she demonstrates how contemporaries used the business of matrimony to reimagine their public identities, relationships, and courtship rituals following unprecedented historical change due to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The matchmaking business both responded to and helped shape national anxieties over fluctuating nuptial rates and changing laws on marriage and divorce. As a result, marriage itself was reconceived as a commercial contract inseparable from the atomistic and corrupt marketplace.
The debates and pressures Mansker describes in Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France are still relevant today. As contemporary online daters likely understand, the possibility of finding a mate in an expanded pool of candidates beyond one’s family, locality, and nation offered individuals the liberating opportunity to explore new personas just as it produced a novel sense of danger about these impersonal transactions in the anonymous marketplace.
Dr. Mansker’s book has already received advance praise! Denise Z. Davidson, author of France after Revolution, writes: “By focusing on two of France’s best-known matchmakers and their business practices as well as the engaging stories of their clients, Andrea Mansker’s Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France sheds new light on the history of consumer culture and marketing in nineteenth-century France.” Carol E. Harrison, author of Romantic Catholics, concurs: “Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France is a successful and original approach to the history of marriage. The connections that Mansker draws to our own moment—in which the anomie of the early-nineteenth-century city now characterizes our digital lives—invite all readers into this engaging history.”
To learn more about the book and her research, read Dr. Mansker’s recent interview.
Congratulations, Dr. Mansker!
