Her research on matchmakers has appeared in Histoire, Économie & Société, French Historical Studies, and the Annales historiques de la Révolution française.
Mansker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Matchmaking and the Marriage Market in Postrevolutionary France, and reported the following:
Page 99 analyzes an epistolary exchange in a personal advertisement section of the Parisian classifieds that captured the public’s attention during the Napoleonic Empire. The early commercial matchmaker, Claude Villiaume, had invited his male and female clients to communicate their personalities and preferences for a spouse directly to the newspaper’s readership in a column he mediated. Villiaume’s first batch of published letters included an intriguing missive penned by a young, wealthy, unwed mother he dubbed “Emilie.” Emilie requested a platonic marriage with an aging nobleman who had been “ruined” by the French Revolution. Page 99 features some of the published correspondence surrounding Emilie’s unusual entreaty and makes a few points that are central to the book’s argument.Visit Andrea Mansker's website.
First, I suggest that one of the most attractive elements of Emilie’s advertisement for male readers was her “self-representation as a sentimental heroine,” which she likely modeled on the celebrated eponymous protagonist of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bestselling 1761 novel, Julie, or the New Heloise. Her case demonstrates that the matchmaker’s anonymous love seekers adopted a writing style that confused fantasy and reality and drew inspiration from the cult of sentimentality when shaping their marriage ads. Emilie’s male suitors responded to her in the guise of Julie’s marriage prospects in the novel. Using a work of fiction as their blueprint, her respondents and the publication’s readers could imagine themselves as characters who had come to life. Page 99 thereby suggests that advertisers used the early personals to experiment with unconventional matrimonial strategies and embrace various personas that may or may not have been rooted in reality.
Second, page 99 also emphasizes the matchmaker’s “formative role in shaping [Emilie’s] story.” Since Villiaume had editorial control over the ads and his client letters exist only in published form, the book argues that we should maintain skepticism concerning the authenticity of these inserts. Rather than attempting to uncover the reality behind these client communications, I ask about the function of these “media fictions” for contemporaries. Why did the public respond to these stories so enthusiastically and how might readers have used Emilie’s tale of forbidden love and revolutionary loss to “make sense of the unexpected” during the First Empire?
The Page 99 Test thereby works rather well to highlight a few principal themes of the book. Matchmaking and the Marriage Market queries how the first commercial matchmakers and their correspondents imaginatively shaped the meaning, format, and allure of the personal ad in an era when the press invited individuals to express their private desires in a newly commodified medium. Like dating apps today, Villiaume’s marriage column blurred the lines between fact and fiction and reproduced the distinctly urban experience of imaginative spectatorship and voyeurism by featuring letters from seemingly real but unidentified authors.
--Marshal Zeringue
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