Invisible Services

‘Iwant a husband who is between sixty and seventy years old,’ announced a Parisian classified ad in 1813. ‘If possible, I’d prefer a former nobleman whose misfortunes, which are regrettably common, ruined him. I want him penniless, desiring to give him at least 3000 francs of life annuity. In addition, he will have accommodation in my townhouse and at my table.’ The request was published on behalf of a certain ‘Emilie’ and reprinted in newspapers across France, causing a stir. Proposals arrived from more than six hundred suitors, mostly middle-class men with aristocratic pretensions. Emperor Napoleon sent for the original letter to inspect in private. Everything ended happily when Emilie, described as 25 and ‘pretty’, married a 93-year-old count. His fortunes had tumbled with the Revolution, but he wished to pass on his good name.

Believing this story requires trusting a marriage broker called Claude Villiaume. He had placed the advert, but may have embellished the details or invented them outright, given his business interests, or may himself have been duped. Villiaume had been accused of blackmail and fabulism, among other things, and had been in and out of mental asylums and jail. Some historians might search for solid truths behind these potentially suspect narrations, but Andrea Mansker takes them as objects of study in their own right. Her book focuses on two commercial marriage brokers, Villiaume and his starchier successor Charles de Foy. The two differed in demeanour, strategy and approach, each seeming to personify his respective era. Their activities made them famous but also turned them into subjects of satire; they were attacked by competitors and disgruntled customers. Mansker considers the swirl of stories around these contrasting figures and finds evidence of the anxieties, hopes and values of a society in upheaval. Above all, she explores the links between marriage and the emergence of a consumer economy, though whether this was a positive development (choice, excitement, reinvention) or otherwise (fraud, fads, corruption) was contested throughout the period.

Villiaume started as a general-purpose broker, one of many offering to find jobs, track legal cases, supply domestic servants or arrange business ventures. He posted adverts in the ‘wanted’ section of newspapers, and before long started touting prospective matches:

MARRIAGE. A business owner, aged 50 but looking no older than 40, very well respected, wants to join in matrimony a young woman or widow who is no older than 34, has a good upbringing, proper manners, a charming personality, and at least 30,000 francs in cash. This man’s business is very lucrative and his assets may amount to 90,000 francs.

Such adverts attracted wide attention, in part because Villiaume was lucky with his timing. He went into business just before a clampdown in 1811 channelled all Parisian classifieds into a single paper, known as the Petites affiches de Paris, concentrating the market in his favour. Additional laws created regional analogues. Responding to demand, Villiaume increasingly (though never exclusively) focused on the marriage market. And he was an audacious publicist. In the 1810s, as a critic grumbled, one could find his ‘brochures displayed on the railings of all the bridges, his posters plastered on every street corner, and his sign in red letters 27 inches high’.

By his own account, Villiaume was restless and easily distracted. He never shut up. As well as many adverts, letters to editors, pamphlets, missives and pleas, he wrote two autobiographies recounting the misfortunes that had befallen him. His backstory was picaresque (though the precise details varied): a family history of insanity, a career as a child soldier, a bit of fraud, an attempt to assassinate Napoleon, a jailbreak. The common thread Mansker identifies in all this is chance or luck (hasard) – an idea that helped Villiaume make sense of his life and the social encounters of the time.

In a garrulous business prospectus from 1812, he claimed to have met his own wife when she tripped on a cobblestone crossing the rue du Hasard. It sounds improbable but, as Mansker points out, there really was a rue du Hasard not far from his office in central Paris. Whether or not the story is true, an appeal to hasard seemed to resonate with those who lived through the dislocation of the post-revolutionary years. Demobilised soldiers and rural immigrants swelled the population of Paris from 524,000 in 1789 to 714,000 in 1817. Community ties grew weaker and crowds of strangers became common. Old markers of status were undermined as fashions changed. Even mathematicians and men of science began to lose faith in a universe governed by laws, finding more room for uncertainty and randomness.

Villiaume presented love as a product of such a world, arbitrary and incomprehensible, in contrast to older forms of courtship and arranged marriage. His target clientele were veterans, bureaucrats of the Napoleonic state and other uprooted arrivals without social links in Paris, although he also attracted business from artisans, clerks, notaries, merchants, landowners, rentiers, even ‘unemployed capitalists’. His customers were mostly men, though the number of women increased over time. He offered to find a potential spouse and to check their assets and family details. If a match was financially compatible, Villiaume might co-ordinate an exchange of letters then arrange a ‘chance’ encounter. As he explained in an advert, a prospective couple – explicitly fictionalised in this case – would be invited to his office at similar times, finding themselves in the waiting room along with others: ‘You will have inevitably recognised Angélique, who will have also noticed you. But is it her or one of the women sitting near her who bears the name that is already so dear to your heart?’ If both parties expressed an interest, Villiaume would let them introduce themselves. As one correspondent put it, this was an idea of chance ‘without any risks’.

Clients appear to have been happy to embrace the notion of arbitrary fortune. For men it turned matchmaking into a game, and helped to explain failure. Women, often steeped in romantic literature and epistolary novels, embraced it too: love should strike like lightning, suddenly and powerfully. Mansker suggests that although a commercially brokered marriage might give women more control than a family match, the appeal to chance provided a convenient fiction that it had simply happened; traditional gender roles were maintained and social contradictions smoothed away. Villiaume himself claimed that fate, his star, had turned him into a marriage broker: ‘Is that my fault?’

For most of history, love and marriage have been regarded as separate if not opposed – the Romans made Venus, goddess of love, the enemy of Juno, goddess of marriage – but during the late 18th century selecting a marriage partner became idealised as an individual choice based on sentiment, even if in reality practical considerations remained paramount for at least another century. Marriage was defined as a freely chosen civil contract in the constitution of 1791; divorce was legalised the following year. During the era of revolutionary enthusiasm, a Marriage Post for women was published and a citizens’ marriage bureau set up, though neither endured. Villiaume, a ‘child of the Revolution’ in his own account, might have been influenced by these forerunners. He promoted marriage more or less according to its emergent egalitarian form, contracted by individuals liberated from parental controls. He consulted his wife on matches and, Mansker suggests, they may have run the business together.

After initial success with telegraphic announcements, Villiaume launched a new column, ‘Marriages, or an Excerpt from M. Villiaume’s Portfolio’, which claimed to feature letters written by his clients, though they often appear cribbed from novels. This was where Emilie’s advert appeared. Some women wrote witty letters; others described unhappy marriages or husbands killed in war. Adverts by men tended to be more pragmatic, even terse, with veterans apologising for their lack of education and sophistication; some spelled out the misfortunes they had suffered during the Revolution. Many now seem sketchy, or desperate: a substantial sum trapped in a foreign bank account; a poor veteran who stands to gain a large inheritance if married. None of this material was subject to censorship, unlike political pamphlets or newspapers. Classifieds were regarded as frivolous, giving them appeal for the public at the time and researchers today.

Critics likened Villiaume to a con artist. They claimed that many of his clients were imaginary, their letters written by Villiaume himself, although nobody seems to have checked. If clients saw Villiaume’s services as a means of forming new social bonds, conservative opponents charged that he used revolutionary language to appeal to an unserious young generation with unrealistic expectations. He turned marriage into a fad, like the craze for cashmere. Even the letters that Villiaume published, and perhaps embellished, mocked him: ‘people laugh at your agency quite a bit, Monsieur, and they even laugh at you.’ He learned to lean into the jokes, inviting rather than avoiding negative publicity.

The same could not be said of Charles Foy. If Villiaume’s hectic approach embodied the turbulence of the post-revolutionary period, Foy belonged to the era of restorationist reaction, with its blend of nostalgic legitimation and commercial volatility. After founding his agency in Paris in 1825, he benefited from changes in the economics of print. The advent of the steam-powered printing press enabled the production of newspapers in greater volumes, boosting advertising, reducing subscription costs and expanding readerships. Foy used this new media ecosystem to sell the idea of aristocracy to bourgeois men. His large adverts announced his connections to ‘the premier families’ of the nobility, judiciary and finance – the largest fortunes in France and abroad. Foy himself claimed to be a member of the nobility. He wore a curled flaxen wig, tailcoat, tight pantaloons and diamond buckled shoes with ‘three or four gold watch chains hanging from his neck’, and had ‘elaborately enamelled’ cheeks. He soon changed his name to the more aristocratic de Foy, and in 1832 renamed his agency the Ancienne maison de Foy et Cie.

Foy spent decades trying to turn marriage brokerage into a reputable profession. He marketed his lack of commercial motivation as a defining feature of his services. He promised that clients would receive reliable information on marriage prospects, including notary-checked accounts of potential spouses’ net worth and inheritance claims, information on their families and social networks, as well as essential details such as age, character and appearance. As a scrupulously disinterested professional, he could squirrel out delicate facts and relay them to clients, something not true of relatives in the older method of aristocratic matchmaking. All the while, he picked fights, attacked competitors and overused capital letters in a forty-year press campaign, spending a fortune on adverts to remind readers that he didn’t need to promote his business. He challenged one satirist to a duel.

Foy noted that Londoners already embraced classifieds when seeking partners, but Parisians were more guarded. He knew his audience and promised that ‘DISCRETION IS A SACRED DUTY.’ His service would remain ‘invisible’. Unlike Villiaume, he arranged for his customers to be presented to their match in a family setting by those who already knew them, ‘methods that cannot raise the slightest suspicion about the real source of the marriage proposal’. To this end, he recruited people who had extensive social connections, and paid them to make introductions. The layout of his office allowed clients to enter and exit in privacy: it had two entrances, and was rumoured to have multiple staircases. It was a ‘tomb of secrets’, Foy said; even the most mundane records were written in a code known only to him. (Fifteen years ago, his registry book, uncoded and intimate, was found by a PhD student in a Paris archive.)

What Foy really wanted was official legitimacy. He obtained a droit de patente, a business licence functioning as a tax, and used it to imply express government authorisation for his activities (critics pointed out that anybody could get one if they were stupid enough to pay). Starting around 1830, he fought for more than twenty years for juridical recognition of marriage brokerage in the courts, suing clients over unpaid fees, publishing legal briefs in his favour and enlisting help from notable experts. Mansker uses these trials to peer behind Foy’s marketing claims, and ends up uncovering more conflicting narratives and allegations. Law was a spectacle in its own right during the July Monarchy, with the public following cases in court and in a number of dedicated newspapers. Family legal dramas, broken marriages and adultery were all popular subjects, especially when they exposed the lives of the privileged. Foy’s cases involved the added spice of a contracted marriage. They drew such large crowds they often had to be moved to bigger courtrooms, and were widely discussed in the press.

Most of these cases turned on a simple point of law. The 1804 Civil Code provided legal force for free contracts, unless ‘detrimental to common decency or public order’. Foy claimed that his business was entirely legitimate, and his contracts valid like any others. Delinquent clients sought refuge in the exception clause of the Code: trafficking in matrimony was a moral outrage, they had belatedly come to realise, and therefore unlawful. The legal spats discussed by Mansker suggest that Foy’s male clients tended to treat marriage as a more or less explicitly commercial undertaking. Thanks to his discreet, third-party introductions, women appear to have been unaware a broker was involved until it was revealed in court. One case involved a knifemaker who sought a dowry to pay off debts; another litigant was a father seeking ‘a young woman from an honourable family’ (with a thin waist), ostensibly for his son.

In​ 1840, Foy became entangled in a widely discussed murder trial. He had matched Charles and Marie Lafarge the previous year. They rushed to marry, but things quickly turned sour when they arrived at Charles’s ‘château’, which she described as an isolated hovel. Five months later, while away on business, Charles received a cake, a portrait of his wife and a letter urging him to eat the cake at midnight while thinking of her. He did so, and died from arsenic poisoning. At the trial it emerged that Marie was an orphan from a noble family who had been sent to Paris aged eighteen to live with her aunt, wife of the secretary-general of the Bank of France. She had ‘personal charms’, but after five years her relatives hired Foy to offload her without her knowing of his involvement. Divorce, legalised in 1792, had been banned again in 1816, and the 1804 Civil Code legally incapacitated women: Marie was trapped in marriage a few weeks after first meeting her prospective husband, whom she found common and repulsive. Charles was presented in court as a naive and unlucky romantic, but he also happened to be the owner of a struggling iron forge in Limousin. He had lost credit, and saw a dowry as his only chance of injecting new capital. When dealing with various matchmakers he overstated his wealth and income, and forged loan letters and bank notes to inflate his prospects.

Foy’s career coincided with a period of high interest rates in which bankruptcies were common. When Louis-Philippe became king in 1830, his regime embraced laissez-faire policies, increased the money supply, and expanded credit and investment. He also extended the franchise to wealthy bankers, financiers, industrialists and some other property owners. Financialisation was rampant, money appeared to determine social status, and French society itself began to be understood as a market. Go-betweens of all kinds promised to arrange jobs or find information only to disappear, strengthening the impression that matrimonial matchmakers were conmen taking advantage of a speculative economy – which of course many were. Alongside these economic changes, the rural bourgeoisie increasingly aspired to upward social mobility. Marrying a daughter of the Parisian elite was a simple way up the ladder. The right marriage would come with a good title, thereby opening doors to elite networks and the possibility of deals and private credit. Dynastic alliance had long been the basis for aristocratic marriage; the new, more explicitly commercial pressures caused anxiety that marriage was being corrupted, a solemn vow cheapened. As one commentator lamented, ‘These days, when marriage is nearly always a speculation between Paris and the provinces, it is a battle full of ruses in which each party tries to dupe the other.’ Critics suggested that Foy contributed to this by commercialising family values and rushing clients into doomed unions so he could pocket a fee.

In the lawsuits Foy brought to recoup unpaid fees, lower courts tended to find in his favour, on the basis that marriage was recognisably a form of commercial contract. Foy celebrated by buying adverts to announce his ‘TRIUMPH’. Denouncing the ‘absurd prejudice’ against his business, he extolled even more loudly the benefits of using a broker. It was ‘priceless to be able to choose a match according to one’s taste from an extensive selection and to use to one’s advantage an experienced man’s wisdom to marry well’. Foy promised to open branches of his company in England, Germany, Belgium and the United States, and to start matching clients within 24 hours of their application. Perhaps aware that any triumph was not yet definitive, he also convinced the Paris Bar Association to take up the question of marriage brokers as the subject of its prestigious annual debating competition in 1854. His position won the day. ‘Property, like the permanency of the conjugal link, is a basis of the family,’ a jurist argued in 1850. ‘Never look at this contract, those who want to maintain some illusions about the saintly poetry of marriage,’ another advised. In the view of one judge, brokerage merely shifted unions from love and affection to the ‘still honest domain of self-interested transactions’.

But this emerging legal consensus didn’t hold. The following year, a case involving one of Foy’s competitors, André-Constant Foubert, went before France’s highest court, the Cour de cassation, which ruled that matchmakers trafficked in unions just as others trafficked in sex. Such business threatened public order and was contrary to public decency, thus triggering the exception clause in the Civil Code. Brokers’ contracts were not enforceable. The justices claimed to be protecting marriage from the pollution of the marketplace. The rationale behind the decision was broad, but legally it rested on the structure of the contract, according to which a client was charged a percentage of his wife’s dowry. The court ruled that this variable figure implied what had been bought was marriage itself, rather than the service to find it. Simply charging a fixed fee enabled brokers to continue more or less as before, until they were undermined by the rise of personal ads in the 1870s.

Mansker links this legal reversal to the political turbulence of the mid-19th century and the reaction against it. A renewed emphasis on family as the foundation of the state and moral order emerged after the revolution of 1848 and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup in 1851. An attempt to reintroduce divorce in 1848 prompted a backlash from both conservatives and leftists worried about the threat to patriarchal society.

Matchmaking was sold as an invisible service, and clients sought to keep it that way: few direct traces survive, and they are mostly scattered. Mansker’s focus on media strategies, fictionalised narratives and representation is a pragmatic move, although also one suited to her subject. Because even ostensibly unmediated romantic matches are structured by idealisations and fantasies, taking mediation seriously reveals much about what was assumed to be attractive. In her emphasis on the narrative dimension of matchmaking, Mansker distinguishes her research from social-scientific studies of the same topic. Since the 1960s, when economists, political scientists and sociologists began moving onto their turf, some historians have given up trying to explain grand historical phenomena and regrouped around the interpretation of particularities, often those relating to marginal characters. Detail is cherished, context prized. Mansker follows this trend without remaining unduly faithful to it. Collective imagination and social reality cannot be cleanly separated: Villiaume and Foy are miniatures of their age.