Extrait du porte-feuille de M. Villiaume, précédé d'un opuscule sur son agence et ses mariages.

LOOKING FOR LOVE IN NAPOLEONIC FRANCE

Sole edition. Livre 1er [all published]. 8vo. Original printed wrappers, small chip to spine, a little edgewear, paper flaws on two leaves. iv, 5-62pp. Paris, chez M. Villiaume,

An excellent copy of this rare pamphlet, one of the more intriguing stories to emerge from the Napoleonic wars.

 

Born in 1780, Claude Villiaume's career began in the army, though his involvement in a plot to assassinate Napoleon led to a lengthy spell in the asylum at Charenton. (In 1814, he published an account of this time: Mes Détentions comme prisonnier d'Etat sous le gouvernement du Buonaparte ...) It was during his incarceration that the idea of match-making occurred to him and, making use with what he had, immediately set about trying to marry the other inmates off to each other. Undeterred by his early failures, upon release he began advertising in Petites Affiches which was the only Paris newspaper to carry personal ads.

 

Before long, what was apparently France's first marriage agency had offices on the rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache, trading as the Agence Générale et Centrale pour Paiset l’Empire. In need of something more substantial than ads in the press and posters on the street, this pamphlet - the wrapper title is Mariages par Correspondance - provides an excellent overview of the business. It includes a prospectus and a selection of (extraordinary) letters from people hoping to find a suitable partner. The majority of his clients were military personnel and Villiaume's success was such that within a decade the enterprise had become international and, tellingly, he was satirised in the contemporary press.

 

Andrea Mansker deftly summarises Villiaume's enterprise: "Offering to serve as a conduit for men and women who pursued love anonymously in the Petites affiches, he skilfully marketed his “marriages by the classifieds” to lonely, uprooted individuals throughout imperial France. Villiaume pitched his unions as part of a new commercial and social world of movement in Paris. He sought to facilitate the circulation of capital and people by forging family alliances and love matches across multiple social and geographic borders. By linking marital choice and courtship to the vagaries of consumer capitalism, the agent transformed marriage into a form of commercial exchange associated with the new urban values of abundance, pleasure, and social mobility."

 

Mansker, A., ‘“Marriages by the Petites Affiches”: Advertising Love, Marital Choice, and Commercial Matchmaking in Napoléon's Paris’ in French Historical Studies Vol. 41, No. 1 (2018), p.1.

 

OCLC locates four copies at Cornell, NYPL, Geneva, and the BnF.

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Stock Code: 243379