Early marriage in pre-modern France

Abstract

In France, from the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, despite noticeable age fluctuations, most subjects of the French kings entered into matrimony well beyond the age of puberty. In the present article, females marrying when under the age of 20 will be considered “precocious,” following the principle that early marriages not only fell outside the result of normal distribution but were a forceful expression of the marriage behavior peculiar to certain couples. The analysis sought to determine whether these exceptional unions were idiosyncratic or whether they reflected rational conduct that could be generalized. Certain features stood out, without any single one being decisive because of the relative weakness of the differences observed. The daughter who married young was often well-born and literate. Coming from the South, she was more frequently found in data from the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century. Her husband was also young and had grown up not far away from her. She had a mother and a mother-in-law who had been young brides and at least one sister who had married young. As the youngest of a large family, she often had lost her father.