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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.
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