« Réduit à désirer la mort d'une femme qui peut-être lui a sauvé la vie » ; la conscription et les liens du mariage sous Napoléon

Abstract

Jennifer Heuer, « Compelled to hope for the death of a woman who may have saved one's life » : conscription and marriage bonds under Napoleon. During the Napoleonic era, many couples married simply so that the man could avoid conscription. These couples were often wildly mismatched ; young men wed women who were in their seventies or eighties, or who were sometimes deranged or epileptic. Girls who still lived with their parents were officially united with their neighbors. Almost all imagined that they would divorce when peace arrived. But the laws of the Restoration, especially the abolition of divorce, left couples potentially bound together permanently. This article is based on a series of petitions written between 1814 and 1820 in the hopes of breaking these fictive, but legally binding, marriages. These petitions illuminate resistance to the state by revealing strategies that were deliberately hidden from the Napoleonic authorities. They also show the arguments petitioners used to convince new authorities of the injustice of their fate and to associate the political and military crimes of the « usurper » with domestic disorder. They reveal the legal conundrums created by such marriages, like the case of a man in love with a woman who after his paper marriage to an old woman to escape conscription- was technically his own granddaughter. Considered together with court cases, these petitions show that it is insufficient to write a history of the family based on the prescriptions of the Civil Code, without also considering the effects of two decades of war.