When Tinder arrived on our cell phones in 2012, the word spread quickly: the application was considered a “revolution”. geolocation, swipe, the profile picture and the short description, everything sounds new and exciting. The debates are heated: can we find love from a distance? Choose someone on a simple “profile”, without having ever met them? But when we look at the history of encounters, we realize that in the 19th and 20th centuries, our ancestors also had a few means of meeting at a distance… Among which, classified advertisements in the press.
This is what Claire-Lise Gaillard, postdoctoral researcher at the INED (National Institute for Demographic Studies) and historian, doctor of history and attached to the 19th century history center, studied. In her thesis “” Single would marry young girl with dowry “, History of the dating market in France (19th-20th centuries)”, she explores the history and the mechanisms behind these classified ads which gave rise to some marriages… maybe those of your (great) grandparents.
These matrimonial classified ads that are born in the press, how do they work?
There are two simultaneous phenomena: on the one hand, there is the birth of marriage agencies, from the beginning of the 19th century, and which will multiply. And at the same time, at the end of the 19th century, there was a change in press legislation, under the Third Republic, which allowed more and more press titles to appear without censorship and to develop the press in large draw. So some marriage agencies will use the press to act as a catalog of their clientele. There will be specifically matrimonial press, and at the same time these announcements will develop in the general press such as Le Figaro, Le Matin…
It is not exclusively marriage agencies that will write these ads, there are also individuals. But agencies, when they post ads, don’t say they’re a marriage agency, because newspaper readers are quite suspicious. In particular, they take a commission on the dowry of the future wife, and have a very bad reputation at the end of the 19th century.
It must have been very strange to entrust your love life and your marriage to people you don’t know…
It wasn’t that strange, not much more so than today… The existence of marriage announcements for 19th century society is something known, they are visible in the press. Everyone knows you can find a spouse through the classifieds. It’s a theme taken up in literature, in vaudeville, it’s well known, but it remains very frowned upon.
Who will be the type of people who will use these classified ads?
This evolved over the period that I studied, but at the beginning of the 19th century, it was a very bourgeois clientele and initially rather masculine. These are men who come to the marriage agency to seek information to access young girls richer than them. These young women, who are very good matches, do not need to be registered with the marriage agency and for the majority of them, do not know that they are registered there. It is people from their close or more distant entourage, such as chambermaids, seamstresses, who will provide information to the marriage agency. Who she is, where she lives, who to contact to get in touch with the family… This set of information is a commodity that the informant will sell to the marriage agency and will receive a small payment on it.
At the end of the 19th century, the clientele remained bourgeois, the women were a little more active, they wrote more for themselves, even if there were still a lot of advertisements written by the families. After the First World War, the bourgeoisie is less present in the advertisements, and there is a democratization of the practice. Those who use marriage announcements are part of the new middle class which develops after the First World War, there are fewer large fortunes, some of which have disappeared with inflation. .
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, did the way of writing these announcements change?
Even between the 19th and 20th centuries, it remains very standardized. There are writing and reading codes, key words to know. For example, a marriage with “tasks” means that the girl is no longer a virgin and most likely refers to the task of defloration. And what’s more, it’s a marriage that bears the stigmata of the unborn child. We can also talk about a “rushed” marriage where we try to “regularize” a situation where a young girl “seduced” would seek a husband quickly.
What changes between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century is that at the beginning, the affective dimension does not appear at all in the advertisements. Professions, social status, age and marital status are given. Knowing that marital status matters a lot to women, it is stigmatizing for them to be single after a certain age. Women are asked to have a dowry, a fortune precisely; whereas men, they are above all asked for a profession with a future, income, and therefore money in flow.
By writing the ads, we dictate the rules collectively. The balance of power, which dictates who is able to dictate the rules, is the men who have it: relationships, for women, are very marked by the strength of male domination and the marriages that emanate from this mode dating, are mostly dictated by the rules of male dominance.
We have the impression of being far from love marriages…
We must think again about this, because the marriage of love is not at all incompatible with an arranged marriage in the 19th century. We believe that an arranged love marriage is likely to be a happy marriage. What changes is that in representations, in literature, more and more over the century, the love marriage is set up as a model. And this model should be stripped of material conditions. Except that in fact, in the announcements, economic concerns remain really paramount. We prefer to marry someone above his condition and his social class.
At the beginning of the 20th century, after the First World War, the economic dimensions did not disappear, but on the other hand, the affective vocabulary took on more space. Vocabulary that refers to moral and physical qualities takes up more space. We will always marry in our social class, but we try to reconcile that with a physical attraction. We try to make sure that the young girl is a little seduced, so that she gives her consent. This question of love also arises from the first stage of the negotiations, in the same way as the social situation.
And were there any strategies or ways to introduce yourself to increase your chances of success?
When we speak of “strategies”, it is a sociological concept which does not necessarily mean in the sense of a strategist, but maneuvers implemented by the actors in action. There are plenty of examples, but for example after the First World War, the marriage market is unbalanced because there are fewer men because of the war. Men and women are aware of the situation, and this mass celibacy leads them to have different strategies.
Women, to increase their chances of getting married, will lower their expectations a little and accept less attractive candidates. The men themselves will increase their claims. Before writing an ad, we will look at what others write, what rules are laid down, and as a result, some women are ready to accept men ten years older than them. In marriages by announcement, the average age between spouses will be five to seven years apart. One could say that it was normal for the time, but in fact no, at the same time, the age difference between spouses in a marriage outside the announcements was two to three years!
Listening to you, it seems like Tinder didn’t invent anything…
The only difference is that in my research, there are no algorithms! We stick to stereotypes that are still present today, such as “the man proposes, the woman disposes”. We have dealt a lot with the revolution of the digital age with a critical aspect of the commodification of love, as what it would be one of the evils of our society. And yet, throughout the 19th century, we will find newspapers that describe marriage announcements as a novelty of the time. Except that other articles explain that this remote dating system existed even before! We are in a perpetual rediscovery, which I have analyzed as a denial of historicity: we regularly forget the history of agencies and advertisements, of the dating market. And I interpret this oversight as a sign of a malaise in our society with these types of practices, which can mean a lot of things depending on the time.
Overall, for the 20th century, this malaise says that the ads and then the dating sites expose principles that are usually hidden but which are very real in the process of selecting couples. This criticism contributes to forgetting the history of the dating market over time. And it is a forgotten memory, rarely passed on in family stories. And we know even less when his parents or grandparents used the ads before they even met their spouses. The success rate of this matrimonial press is around 20% of people who are registered and who get married via these ads. Which means that we have 80% of people who have tried, and for whom it did not work.