In the first part of this work, I examined the ways in which marriages emerged out of cross-cultural encounter within elite transnational communities during the nineteenth century and the extent to which the cultural and emotional dynamics of those communities facilitated those unions. In this second part, I examine twentieth-century Franco-American marriages that occurred when national borders were most solidified—during and between the world wars. Unlike those discussed in the first part, wartime-marriage participants were no longer members of an elite, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries but were instead local women restricted by the conflict around them and soldiers who acted as representatives of a nation-state and moved only insofar as the military regulations allowed. Yet, despite encountering one another during a period of heightened boundary-making and hyper-nationalism, these men and women still managed to construct families that transcended those national limits in far greater numbers than the Franco-American marriages of the nineteenth century. In 1919, the Literary Digest, a weekly American magazine explained that “[s]o many of the American soldiers in France [had] married French girls that an official pamphlet [had to be] issued setting out the legal requirements governing marriage in that country.” Likewise, in a March 7, 1918 memo to the Adjutant General, one commanding general complained that 350 marriages to French women had taken place in his division alone in a period of only seven months. At the war’s end, American military newspaper Stars and Stripes estimated that 6,000 or more Franco-American marriages had been registered in town halls across France and speculated that many more went uncounted by authorities. Just after records of the American and European militaries, on which these studies are largely based, not only overemphasize the nation-state but also rarely detail the personal motivations or emotional expectations of marriage participants.

Therefore, while these matrimonial stories cannot be completely separated from the conflicts that facilitated them, what follows is not an account of war. It is instead an account of encounter. As in the first part, the central question rests on the cultural and emotional dimensions of Franco-American interaction; however, in the absence of elite transnational social networks like those that produced titled marriages during the previous century, this part seeks to locate new transnational spaces that were created by the war and map them accordingly.

Throughout, this study has built upon Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu’s concept of transnational marriage, which successfully situates the concept of cross-border marriage within a context of wider transnational processes by placing the analytical focus on the transnational networks and spaces from which marriages emerged. Based on that working definition, in the case of wartime marriages during the twentieth century, the relative absence of a transnational community or social network among marriage participants, such as that which produced elite marriages in the nineteenth century, creates a methodological imperative to locate and define new transnational spaces that were created during the world wars. Therefore, in what follows, the focus shifts from wartime othering as an emotional process to a spatial analysis of transnational courtship and marriage.

This chapter is divided into four parts. In the first part, I attempt to locate and trace transnational cultural formation across and within multiple sites of wartime encounter by examining where and how soldiers and local women met and courted one another. Here, I argue that because most couples did not share a common language, other forms of mediated cultural cues, such as dancing, provided the translinguistic means of communication that became important cultural devices in courting rituals and transnational coupling. In this fashion, public dances, like those organized by the American Red Cross, came to serve as one of the most important examples of wartime transnational spaces that produced Franco-American marriages. In the second part of this chapter, I further explore subsequent courtship rituals among participants as well as the important role of their families in the cultural negotiation of these spaces. Finally, the third and fourth parts of this chapter examine how those transnational spaces of courtship and marriage existed in opposition to national spaces. Through an analysis of the conditions and frameworks that transnational couples had to navigate in order to form recognized matrimonial unions, I argue that state and military regulations, as well as the national criticisms of wartime Franco-American marriages further solidified participants’ conceptions of the national borders that they attempted to cross.

This chapter is divided into four parts: In the first, I examine the making of elite transnational communities in the context of both nineteenthcentury economic development and transatlantic mobility. By adopting Thorstein Veblen’s concept of the American leisure class and applying it to a transnational context, I argue that a transnational high society developed as wealthy American travelers began to keep company with the aristocratic and diplomatic echelons of Europe, whose lifestyles appeared to resemble their own. The second part goes further to examine the cultural dimensions of this elite social network by examining the cultural rituals of their social events. Here, I argue that elite transnational social events such as costume balls and dinners came to serve as both a stage for Franco-American crosscultural encounters and a cultural mechanism for elite coupling. The third part examines the ways in which American women saw their own place within these elite transnational social networks. Through an examination of assertions of common socioeconomic belonging, I argue that rather than American social or status anxieties driving these marriages, it was instead a sense of social confidence or a confident assertion of elite position among members of elite transnational communities that facilitated them. Finally, the fourth part examines how legal questions around marriage and citizenship affected the extent to which participants saw themselves as marrying across national lines. Here, I conclude that a relative absence of nineteenth-century legal barriers further facilitated not only elite high society’s transnational existence but also cross-border coupling.

Emerging Transnational Communities

The emergence of the pattern of Franco-American titled marriages in the second half of the ninetieth century coincided with two interconnected developments that facilitated both movement and encounter: First, technological developments of the Industrial Revolution made transoceanic steam travel between Europe and America safer, more comfortable, more rapid, and more frequent. The second was the development of what Thorstein Veblen calls the American leisure class. Identifying and associating with only those whose economic and social positions afforded them similar lifestyles, this leisure class was characterized by conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, increased leisure time, and travel for no other reason than to mark their prestige.

In the last chapter of Part One, I proposed for consideration the extent to which cultural othering could be successfully analyzed as an emotional process. In this chapter, I apply this inquiry to the changing contexts of the twentieth century and the subsequent pattern of Franco-American marriages during the world wars. Here, I argue that despite increasingly seeing their own identities through national lenses and despite changing cultural relationships between France and the United States, notions of perceived difference remained the driving force of transnational coupling during the world wars.

This chapter is divided into four parts. The first part begins by contextualizing the broader temporal comparison of nineteenth-century elite marriages and twentieth-century wartime marriages by examining some of the broader global changes brought on by the world wars. These changes shifted the context in which a wartime encounter took place by producing conditions in which marriage participants not only came from the working and middle classes but self-described through more national frameworks. In this setting, notions of difference were therefore further heightened. The remainder of the chapter examines more extensively the extent to which encounter and othering could be considered an emotional process in the context of war. By examining the accounts of marriage participants as well as national news publications, I show not only how notions of difference were marked but also how these perceived differences provoked certain emotional responses. Even though mutual attraction developed among both French and American marriage participants, the processes of othering for each took very different forms and are examined separately. In the second section, I trace the othering of French women by American soldiers and argue that rather than the elite, high cultural forms of the nineteenth century, cultural fascination of the French (or what was perceived as French culture) during the World War I became laced with notions of romance, sex, and pleasure. These conceptions were subsequently transcribed onto French women and the notions of their perceived difference, thereby creating the contradictory construct of war as an opportunity for romance. The third and final section examines the ways in which fear, uncertainty, and the longing for stability under German invasion and occupation during World War II were contrasted with the overwhelming excitement and euphoria of liberation.

In Chapter 1, I argued that rather than attempts of nouveaux riches Americans to gain social status by participating in title-for-dollar exchanges, titled Franco-American marriages in the nineteenth century were instead the result of social interaction within elite transnational spaces that existed between the United States and Europe and among those who identified with others of similar economic and social status rather than national origin. What follows is a continued attempt to move beyond limited explanations of these elite marriages as mere socioeconomic arrangements by more closely examining the cultural and emotional dimensions of those spaces. Here, I argue that at the intersection of encounter, elite class-consciousness and transnational coupling stood a profoundly emotional experience, and because that experience was so intertwined with cross-cultural interaction, the marriages that emerged from these spaces can be, in many respects, characterized as even more (rather than less) emotional than their national counterparts.

This chapter is divided into four parts: In the first, I demonstrate how perceived notions of cultural difference within elite transnational social circles were the driving force of transnational elite marriages. As members of transnational high society encountered one another, perceived cultural stereotypes as well as processes of othering led to what I call cultural infatuation—affection not (only) for another person but for the perceived culture to which they belonged. This long-standing, mutual fascination between French and American members of high society created for many marriage participants a longing for the perceived “other.” In this section, I also examine the role that the perception of one’s own otherness in these spaces played into marriage motivation and the extent to which this too was a profoundly emotional issue. Thereafter, the second and third parts of the chapter go further to contextualize these marriages within broader emotional and cultural shifts in European and American societies as they pertained to marriage practices. Here, I examine elite cultural rituals of transnational courting and divorce patterns in order to demonstrate how their details confirm that the emotionalization of marriage practices—a process that had begun over the previous centuries—was already deeply rooted in elite society by the nineteenth century.

Why do people marry? Or better: Why do they couple? While marriage and coupling practices seem to correspond with obvious biological and social necessities, a more targeted question might include: Why do they choose to couple or marry with the people that they do? And, what happens when they marry someone who is perceived as different from themselves?

Admittedly, such overgeneralized questions are, of course, accompanied by the underpinning assumption that the modern, Western social practice of marriage is largely accepted as a contract between two individuals based on both their free will and their affection for or commitment to one another. However, the cultural normative characterizations of both marital practices and courtship rituals show great variability in different historical contexts, and as Stephanie Coontz shows in her work, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage, marriage as an emotion-based, state-sanctioned union is a relatively recent social invention. This leaves the task of defining marriage a difficult one. Over time, courtship and marital practices have taken many forms. In some contexts, to marry was a privilege, in others a necessity. Even in the present time, the tension between its dual meaning—both as a legal contract and as an emotional relationship— persists, and academic definitions vary. Anthropologist, Edmund Leach, for example, defines marriage as “a set of legal rules” that largely determines inheritance between generations. Coontz, by contrast, notes the limitations of this definition and goes further to define it instead as a social practice that “determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children.” However, no matter the changing legal or social characterizations, the practice of marriage has always, at its core, represented the connectedness of individuals—connectedness between participants, between families, between larger kinship and social networks, and even between societies. The marriages that make up the subject of this work transcended national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and connected individuals across the Atlantic.

History written within the framework of the nation is as distorted as it is incomplete. From these caged perspectives, instances of transnational coupling and marriage were too often treated as curious anomalies that violated norms and could only be explained by the economic motives of the participants. The marriages examined here however were deeply embedded in a profound cultural relationship between these two societies. Of course, these subjects were only a small subset of a larger population that occupied the Atlantic space, but by carving out these small moments in the past, and examining them through cultural and emotional lens, a more fruitful historical perspective of recent discussions about the nature of transnational cultures and the definitions of marriage and family formation emerges.

This book has provided an examination of two different patterns of Franco-American marriage that occurred in two very different historical contexts. In the nineteenth century, transnational marriages between France and the United States largely occurred between wealthy, elite Americans and those that they perceived to be their socio-economic equivalent—European aristocrats. Linked within same social networks, these elite transnationalmarriage participants often spoke the same languages, shared common values, read similar literature, and performed similar cultural rituals. This paired with their unrestricted movement between different urban centers such as New York, London, and Paris meant that their marital unions often emerged out of spaces that were not entirely defined by national boundaries. The coming of World War I then effectively ended elite domination of the transnational space that existed between France and the United States and allowed for a geographic mobility of the working, rural, and middle classes who engaged in the conflict. By bringing an entire new group of people into the sphere of transnationality, World War I and its consequences changed not only the power relations between France and the United States but also the dimensions of broader cultural encounters and social spaces that existed between the two. In this context, wartime-marriage participants were not members of a socially homogenized, transnational social network that effortlessly carved out an existence and moved freely beyond national boundaries as their nineteenth-century counterparts had but were instead American soldiers and local French women who were largely restricted by both the conflict around them and the national boundaries that were tangibly manifested in their everyday lives.