December 12, 2007
HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ , info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
Philippe Corno, « THE THEATER AND THE LAW OF DIVORCE DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION - Moralization and politicization of a desacralized marriage », HALSHS : archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société - notices sans texte intégral, ID : 10670/1.b91bfe...
On September 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly legalized divorce in France. This ground-breaking law, which would be forcibly challenged by the Civil Code of 1804, redefined the status of marriage according to an unprecedented liberalism. Just as marriage traditionally anchored the individual in a nexus of familial and social ties, the potential to dissolve marital vows effected a profound transformation of the individual’s relation to society, particularly as regards moral and judicial authority.Theatre provided an ideal medium to exploit the multiple tensions brought to crisis by this legislation; indeed plays written as early as 1789 already foresaw the potential to stage dramas of divorce for political and educational purposes. In a mirror-like effect, these plays worked through the perplexing questions raised by revolutionary legislation and thereby complemented the dialogue running through other media (essays, petitions, legal briefs, novels and poetry) in spectacular ways. This corpus questions the legitimacy of legislating divorce by confronting the discourse of natural rights against religious rhetoric. It also notes the troubling social implications of divorce and ultimately defends the value of matrimony in moral terms, by reinforcing the traditional hierarchy of compliance in which wives submit to husbands, children obey their parents, and romantic passion is sublimated into conjugal stability and parental union to ensure the well-being of the polis. Written in a medium designed explicitly for public edification and display, these fictions of stability and union reveal the anxieties provoked by the conflict between traditions of family life and new hopes for legal reform during the revolutionary age. By appealing to spectators’ new sense of political identity, these morality tales thus used the metaphor of matrimonial fidelity to reinforce the citizen’s allegiance to the Nation.