Mothers-in-Law between Epée, Robe and Finance: A Quantitative Approach to Patterns of Marriage Inequality within the French Court Elite

Abstract

The court aristocracy of Versailles has been seen as open to relative mésalliances with daughters of the noblesse de robe or nouveau riche financiers. At the same time, status consciousness and court politics guaranteed that many marriages were still concluded within the narrowest élite of dukes and major courtiers. What resulted was a pattern of connubium where status-equal marriages regularly alternated with mésalliances. This article first discusses well-known cases of the intra-familial antipathies allegedly caused by these differences in status and establishes the impossibility of assessing them based on unreliable anecdotal evidence. Instead, it quantifies the likelihood of these status differences based on a prosopographical sample (174 marriages of high-ranking courtiers) and proposes a matrix of status categories. Based on this, we can not only gain a clearer understanding of how frequent (and how extreme) mésalliances really were, but also establish separate patterns of inequality between husbands, wives and their respective mothers-in-law, as well as gender-specific statistics both for the likelihood of encountering a living mother-in-law at all, and for the average length of co-existence between the two generations.