Abstract
In Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making During the 19th and 20th Centuries, Nicole Leopoldie focuses on the Franco-American marriages that were celebrated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this short book at just under 150 pages of text, she proposes to “draw on the intersecting methodologies of transnational history, cultural history, and emotions history” (4) to explore the transnational marriages that formed out of cross-cultural encounters taking place across modern France. The temporal framework of this study is ambitious, as studies on intimate relationships between the French and American people have tended tend to focus on either of these centuries but not both. This is likely because transnational marriages took different forms in these two centuries. First, the gender pattern of these conjugal unions flipped. In the nineteenth century, it was typically rich American heiresses and titled French aristocrats who married, whereas during the two World Wars, American soldiers married French women. Second, the social class to which the partners involved in these unions belonged also changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While in the nineteenth century, people from the French aristocracy married rich American women, in the twentieth century, the American men who married French women mostly came from the working, rural, and middle classes. Lastly, military and state laws regulating transnational mobility and marriage were far more rigid in the twentieth century than they were in the previous century, which was not only a time of fairly unrestricted transatlantic mobility for the elite, but also one with few barriers toward transnational marriage. In contrast, couples who met during or in the wake of the two World Wars often felt pressured to officialize their union after a shorter period of courtship than what was typical for national marriages, as burdensome administrative processes, increasingly rigid immigration laws, and shifting wartime conditions raised concerns of permanent separation. As many French war brides looked back on their decisions, many noted that this shortened period of courtship had led to disappointment, disillusion, and for half of those interviewed, divorce.
Despite these important differences, Leopoldie nonetheless points at some remarkable similarities between nineteenth and twentieth-century transnational marriages. Perhaps the most important one was that these unions were spurred primarily by emotional attachments rather than economic motivations. As such, Leopoldie placed these unions within a broader trend that had consolidated in the eighteenth century, namely that marriages that were purely socio-economic were losing favor to those based on emotions. To be sure, documenting such emotions can be methodologically challenging, especially since public display of emotional attachment was poorly perceived among elite circles in the nineteenth century. In order to circumvent this limitation, she uses a range of primary sources, from French and American newspapers, private correspondence and travel literature, as well as memoirs to document instances of courtship and other cultural rituals that revealed the presence of emotional ties binding the two partners. Interestingly, she also interprets rising divorce rates in the late nineteenth century as further supporting her point that partners expected to feel emotionally connected to each other, and that the lack of such ties led to divorce. In making the case that these unions were motivated by sentiments rather than money or a title, she challenges some of the scholarship (at least on the nineteenth century) as well as some of the rumors circulating in the nineteenth century that American heiresses were primarily interested in obtaining an aristocratic title or that French women in the twentieth century were in it just for the money. Perhaps unsurprisingly, women seemed to be the primary target of the backlash against transnational marriages, revealing how nationalist sentiments materialized into sexist and misogynist language.
Leopoldie's emphasis on the role of emotions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Franco-American marriages differentiates her study from much of the existing scholarship on transnational marriages, which has tended to examine how states have sought to regulate marriages because of their essential role in the reproduction of the citizenry. Leopoldie, in contrast, is invested in uncovering the “wider transnational processes, networks, and spaces created by the actors themselves” (5). She draws from feminist and postcolonial theory and deploys the concept of positive othering to explain the mutual attraction that Americans and the French felt for each other. National and gender stereotypes produced a certain form of cultural infatuation, sparking longing for the other without creating hierarchies as in other processes of othering that postcolonial scholars have observed. In the context of nineteenth-century transnational marriages, American women were attracted not only to French men, but also to their own preconditioned idea of French culture as a whole, with its social luxuries including its refined cuisine, its impressive architecture, and exquisite fashion. At a time when elite Americans could freely cross borders and oceans, they became an important part of what Leopoldie calls a “transnational high society” (29) where wealthy American travelers mingled with, courted, and sometimes married, the aristocratic and diplomatic echelons of Europe. In the twentieth century, the romanticized sexualization of French women contributed to their appeal in the eyes of American doughboys and GIs. This romanticization of and fascination for the other was not one way, as French women similarly idolized American soldiers. In other words, “notions of and attraction to difference largely remained the driving force of marriage and coupling processes in both contexts” (13), even as Americans and French people increasingly saw their own identity through national lens.
Although language barriers constituted a significant obstacle in fostering connections across national boundaries, certain spaces, such as dinners and balls, helped to overcome these challenges. Leopoldie pays particular attention to the spaces leading to transnational encounters that helped to transcend these linguistic barriers. Through dancing at elite balls in the nineteenth century or YWCA and Red Cross events at the end of the Second World War, heterosexual attraction and courtship bloomed. Strikingly, however, these encounters rarely led to marriages across class. Indeed, the cultural spaces where the elite transnational high society met were strictly open to those who shared a similar pedigree—European aristocrats and plutocrats on the one hand, and wealthy Americans on the other—to the exclusion of the American nouveaux riches who lacked the social connections leading to such exclusive invitations. Those participating in these elite balls and dinners thus felt “a self-conscious sense of shared identity and superiority” (38) that transcended national borders and made transnational marriages possible. In the context of the two World Wars, the American men who courted French women also did so along class lines, a more surprising finding given the more diverse economic background of the soldiers enlisted in the war and the potential for them to meet French women across social classes.
While the book's attention to courtship and coupling practices leading to transnational marriages yields some valuable insight, it leaves certain areas unexplored. For example, it pays relatively little attention to the structural factors that facilitated certain patterns of transnational conjugal unions while prohibiting others. A prime example is the absence of discussion of interracial courtship and marriage. The racial identity of the individuals involved in transnational marriages is hardly ever discussed throughout the book, a regrettable omission that is likely explained by a source base that privileges ego documents and newspapers to the detriment of state produced documents. As a result, Leopoldie primarily found discussion of unions that did formalize, rather than those that American (and potentially French) authorities successfully aborted. It would have been interesting to know whether Black American soldiers faced any kind of structural hurdles in trying to marry across the color line during their wartime stay in France. After all, one can imagine that just like their white American counterparts, they too experienced some form of cultural infatuation and longing for white French women. One may also wonder whether French women's longing for Americans stopped short of crossing not only class boundaries, as Leopoldie importantly notes, but also racial ones.
Another area that would have benefitted from further development is the geography of transnational courtship and marriage. If the book pays attention to the spaces, such as the balls and dinners, where Americans and French met and developed courtships that at times turned into marriage, it scarcely considers where these spaces themselves were located within France. Is this a story that is specific to Paris, urban settings, or the totality of France? And, to what extent was the timing of Liberation key in the development of transnational marriages? Historians have noted how the initial feelings of jubilation and relief following the liberation of France from Nazi Occupation shifted after the latter engendered further destruction of the built environment and acted in ways that made some French people feel like they were experiencing a new form of occupation. How did the rise of anti-American sentiments among the French population shape the development and perceptions of transnational marriages?
Understandably, the questions raised below would have been difficult to answer given the short length of the book—even as the Second World War seemed to have received more treatment than the first. This imbalance is perhaps the result of what is available in primary sources, as GIs seemed more eager than their predecessors to describe their emotions and intimate relationships in memoirs published in the wake of the Second World War. Still, this raises the question of whether the book's temporal framework was perhaps too ambitious for such a concise study. While the two sections of the book are both fascinating on their own, there seem to be more differences than similarities between transnational marriages during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making the comparative approach less fruitful. Additionally, the second section of the book, which focuses on the World Wars, faces the additional challenge of combining together two major global conflicts, providing little room to fully explore the specific political, social, and cultural forces that shaped these transnational encounters. As a result, it is unclear how bringing these various moments together enhances our understanding of each.
Despite these oversights, Transnational Coupling remains an engaging and original contribution from which scholars interested in the history of emotions and cross-border intimacy will benefit. It also has the potential to springboard other research projects on questions related to Franco-American marriages that the book did not get a chance to explore—some of which are raised by Leopoldie in her conclusion. For example, one may seek to uncover what happened after two individuals tied the knot. In which country did these couples choose to settle their household? What language and childrearing practices developed within these transnational families? What happened when these transnational relationships fell apart? Building on the strong foundations offered by Transnational Coupling, future scholarship can look forward to finding out more about what happened after the feelings of cultural infatuation and longing for the other that first sparked these Franco-American unions eventually faded away.