ABSTRACT
This book tells the story of an ideal that changed our world. It is not a study of the law, or of children and childhood, or of criminals, or of any particular class or condition, though representatives of most social levels and situations appear in the following pages. Nor is it a long, detailed observation of a particular set of historical documents, for appropriate sources are unfortunately seldom available. It is neither a study of facts nor causes. Rather it is a consideration of the ideas people held about facts and, when possible, the attitudinal complexes that inevitably followed, especially in the life of eighteenth-century France, where something happened on the way to the Revolution. The rise of individualism, the autonomous expression of the sense of self, was, I believe, the most important of the revolutionary changes affecting the century. The shifting ideas about ”self” touched on many other realities, like the desire for equality, the middle class, the spread of education and wealth across the whole of France, and, especially, of the new attitudes toward passionate love. All are important, but I suggest that the new amorous mentalité, which is the subject of this book, was a major component of individualism. A revolutionary conception of love changed ideas about every element of the lives of eighteenth-century French people. Love, viewed as a passionate sentiment joining two individuals, became the driving impetus of social evolution, if not revolution. Affective attitudes were reimagined as individual, emotional pursuit, and agents of marriage-parents, relatives, sons, and daughters-came to be viewed in completely different ways. While I would not dispute the suggestion that John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had much to do with the increasing interest in passion in France, England, and elsewhere,1 I am more interested in the process that brought such love to dominance in marriage and other, less legitimate relationships.
