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This work examines and compares courtship and marriage patterns that occurred between France and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Departing from state-centered studies of marriage law, it draws on the methodologies of transnational history, cultural history, and the history of emotion to show that these unions were part of a broader pattern of the larger cultural love affair between the two societies.
Placing the history of courtship between American heiresses and French aristocrats in conversation with the history of wartime unions between American soldiers and French women, this welcome addition to the literature on Franco-American relations offers a fresh take on the particular rituals, emotional registers, and contact zones—from high-society costume balls to Red Cross dances—that facilitated transnational marriages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries —Brooke L. Blower, author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transnational Politics and Culture between the World Wars.
An enthralling study of marital unions between American heiresses and French aristocrats during the Belle Epoque, and between American soldiers and working-class French women during the two world wars. It offers an eye-opening analysis of Franco-American cultural relations, transatlantic mobility, nationalism, and the general enshrining of marriage as the embodiment of romantic love while it also remained a social and legal arrangement —José C. Moya, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA.
An insightful transnational analysis of courtship and marriage in the Atlantic world comparing elite Franco-American marriages of the nineteenth century and wartime marriages of the early-to-mid twentieth century. Leopoldie contributes to the history of emotions, highlighting the changing transnational spaces of feeling within which these marriages were constituted and negotiated —Ian Tyrrell, Emeritus Professor of History, UNSW, Sydney.
This wonderful book examines Franco-American romantic relationships from the nineteenth century through World War II. Couples were drawn together, in part, by preconceptions that each society harbored of the other. Yet the cultural never subsumed the personal. The people in Leopoldie's book built transatlantic worlds of their own —Alan Lessoff, University Professor of History, Illinois State University.
An engaging and original contribution from which scholars interested in the history of emotions and cross-border intimacy will benefit. —Journal of Family History
Nicole Leopoldie is a transnational historian who specializes in French and American cultural relations.
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction Marriage: National Borders and Personal Spaces; Part I “Trading Titles for Treasure?”: Elite Marriages during the Nineteenth Century; Part II “Paris is Free—and So Are Its Kisses”: Wartime Marriages during the Twentieth Century; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index