97

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, French society witnessed the birth and expansion of a dating market. In the late nineteenth century, marriage agencies proliferated in Paris; many used matrimonial advertisements to conduct their business. Some saw this new, vibrant market as posing a serious moral problem, dangerously expanding market forces into the private sphere. This article shows that this critique of the commercialization of matchmaking was profoundly paradoxical for nineteenth-century society, given that the rise of this market did not go hand in hand with a deregulation of matchmaking or a “disembedding” of the choice of a spouse, to quote Eva Illouz. On the contrary, this new marriage market built on an older ecosystem of spousal choice largely dominated by social, economic, and family frameworks. Since financial status was already the most important criterion in the matching of bourgeois couples, marriage agencies were not responsible for the entanglement of money with intimacy but only for making it visible. This visibility, which fed critiques of the market, led marriage agencies and their clients to develop strategies aimed as much at making the imbrication between intimacy and economy morally acceptable as justifying the weight given to economic factors in the choice of a spouse.