Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries

- Blurb -

Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries examines and compares courtship and marriage patterns that occurred between France and the United States during the 19th and 20th 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. In an effort to address not only why Franco-American marriages occurred but also how and why the dynamics that produced them changed over time, this work examines and compares two transnational marriage patterns in different historical contexts: the first, when wealthy American heiresses married French aristocrats during the second half of the 19th century - a period marked by relatively free transatlantic circulation and mobility - and the second, when borders were far more solidified - during the world wars when French women entered into matrimonial contracts with American soldiers. The purpose of this work is twofold. In an effort to provide new categories of analysis that place the human experience into broader, more global perspectives, the first is to show how concepts of transnational marriage and courtship allow the historian to move further beyond the analytical frameworks of national histories by forcing the researcher to reconsider the ways in which one thinks about family formation and the permeability of national borders during these different stages of the national project. The second is to challenge underlying assumptions in existing historiographical explanations that those who crossed national borders to couple or to marry did so for purely socio-economic reasons. Nicole Leopoldie contends that such rationalisations are simply too narrow and that at the intersection of cross-cultural encounter and transnational coupling stood a profoundly emotional experience. Therefore, greater analytical considerations need to include both cultural and emotional motivations that were always in the background. Situated in the methodologies of transnational history, cultural history and the history of emotions, Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries examines and compares courtship and marriage patterns that occurred between France and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Because the social practices of courtship and marriage became mechanisms through which borders were crossed and new cultural spaces were created, these relationships represent important elements of transnational entanglements. This work, therefore, seeks to examine not only the ways in which observable patterns of transnational marriage emerged out of social spaces of cross-cultural encounter between the two societies but also how the dynamics of those encounters changed over time. While existing scholarship on the subject has pointed to obvious socio-economic motivations for these marriages, Nicole Leopoldie contends that such rationalisations are simply too narrow and that greater analytical considerations need to include both cultural and emotional motivations that were always in the background. By locating and identifying transnational spaces that produced marriages and analysing the cultural and emotional dimensions of those spaces, she argues that marriage participants were largely driven by a strong emotional attachment to perceived cultural differences that stretched beyond the national polity. Within the shifting global contexts of the 19th and 20h centuries, these marriages, therefore, provoke important questions regarding family formation, the role of marriage in the making of national cohesion and belonging, and the permeability of national borders during different stages of the national project.