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.

Leadership and Armed Groups in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain

Of all of the post-Roman kingdoms that emerged in Europe after the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire, the Merovingian kingdoms and the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo were the entities that best managed to endure and consolidate their inner administrative and political structures. These kingdoms experienced both inner political struggles, which involved members of the royal family, and rivalries among the members of the aristocracy. As we shall see in this chapter, both leadership and social cohesion mutually influenced each other.

During the fifth century, the dioceses of Galia and Hispania witnessed the arrival of different non-Roman groups who settled there, sometimes by means of the administrative mechanisms of the imperial bureaucracy, through their negotiations with the inhabitants, or by the use of force. This was the case of the Visigothic and Frankish groups during this period. Both contingents participated actively in the defence of the Western Roman Empire at the orders of the magistri militum on different occasions. At the same time, both contingents engaged in military campaigns in those territories for their own profit. In the case of the Visigoths, this consisted of raiding and besieging cities in Gaul in order to blackmail the Roman authorities – in a way, they occupied those cities and their jurisdictions. Later on, they continued developing some of these strategies of control and influence in Hispania, especially during their campaigns against the Suevi and the bacaudae in the middle of the fifth century.

Sint Pancras, 1627

In 1627 Johannes extended his right hand and clasped the right hand of his uncle's twenty-seven-year-old stepdaughter, Machtelt Willems, before the predikant (preacher) and elders of the Dutch Reformed Church of Sint Pancras. After clasping hands, the predikant—their uncle and stepfather, Dominee (Reverend) Johannes Megapolensis—raised his right hand and blessed the couple. Into this new union Machtelt brought a young son from an earlier marriage. His name was Wilhelmus Grasmeer. A year later Machtelt gave birth to a baby girl who was named after Machtelt's mother, Hillegont. A baby boy, Dirck, followed in 1630. Three years later the family of five moved some sixteen miles north to the village of Wieringerwaard where Johannes became schoolmaster. It was here, in Wieringerwaard, that Johannes delivered his proefpreek (test sermon) for the Reformed Classis of Alkmaar while a candidate of theology. Having passed his exam, the Classis of Alkmaar appointed him the first predikant to Wieringerwaard in 1634, a position he held for the next four years. During that time, Machtelt and Johannes also welcomed two more boys—Johannes (b. 1632) and Samuel (b. 1634)—into the world.

This was a time when the worlds and fields of Dutch Reformed predikanten were expanding across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In fact, the directors of the Geoctroyeerde West-Indische Compagnie (Chartered West India Company or WIC) had recently presented themselves to Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, as “mostly professors of the true Reformed religion” whose primary motives for investing in the company had been “first, to honor God, second, to extend the true Reformed religion here and spreading it in other lands, third, to care for the welfare of this country, and this city [Amsterdam] in particular, and fourth, to damage the common enemy [the Spanish Hapsburgs].”

Alkmaar, 1566

In 1603 a baby boy was born into the Mecklenburg family in Koedijk, a small, rural village situated a little less than four miles north of the commercial town of Alkmaar in the Province of Holland. His parents named him Johannes. Johannes would come of age during a period of growing pains for the adolescent Republiek van der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden (the Republic of the Seven United Low Countries commonly known as the Dutch Republic). Only thirty-seven years before the birth of Johannes, some of the inhabitants of Alkmaar participated in the beeldenstorm. This storm of iconoclasm initially broke out in Flanders in 1566 during the Feast of St. Lawrence. Following an open-air sermon in which an exile Calvinist preacher called an audience of around 2,000 to cleanse the church of idolatry, twenty evangelical activists entered the chapel of the monastery of St. Lawrence in Steenvoorde and smashed its sacred images and objects to smithereens. The storm rapidly moved north, reaching Alkmaar twenty-five days later when some activists entered the Great Church of St. Lawrence and began hurling holy images and relics to the ground. Although the activists spared the choir organ and artistic treasures that pre-dated Calvin's reformation, the damage had been done. Philip II, the devout Catholic lord of the seventeen provinces that comprised the Nederlanden (Low Countries) (see figure 3), could not abide such civil and religious dissent.

This work analyzes the impact of the Dutch Reformation upon the cross-cultural relations between the Indians and Europeans living in the early modern Northeastern Woodlands.These interactions took place between several different Indian, African, and European peoples. Counted among the Native North Americans were autonomous Muhhekunneuw (Mahican) and Lunaapeew (Lenape) communities along the Muhheakantuck (Hudson River) and Lenapewihittuck (Delaware River); Narragansetts, Mohegan-Pequots, and other groups living in southern New England and Suanhacky (Long Island); and the Susquehannock and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples of the interior. Among the Africans were free and enslaved Creole, Wolof, Mandika, Bamana (Bambara), Ausa (Hausa), Akan, Aja, Yoruba, Igbo, Bisi Kongo (Kongo), Ambundu (Mbundu), Ovimbundu, and Malagasy peoples while the Europeans included Walloon, Dutch, English, Scottish, Irish, Huguenot, Jewish, German, Swedish, Italian, and Croat peoples who occupied settlements along the Lenapewihittuck, Muhheakantuck, and Kwenitegw (Connecticut River).

The Muhhekunneuw were Eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples who occupied lands on both sides of the Muhheakantuck from Papscanee Island south to about northern Dutchess County, and from the eastern edge of the Catskill Mountains in the west to the Housatonic Valley and the Sankhannek (Roeliff Jansen Kill) in the east.The Lunaapeew were linguistically and culturally similar groups that occupied the Lenapewihittuck river valley and certain adjacent areas at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Lunaapeew who spoke Munsee inhabited the northern part of Lenapehoking (homelands of the Lenape), which included what is now northern New Jersey and southeastern New York. These Munsee-speaking bands included the Navesinks, Raritans, Hackensacks, Tappans, Minisinks, Esopus, Wappingers Kichtawanks, Sinsinks, Rechgawawanks, and Wiechquaeskecks. As they migrated west in the 1700s, many of these Lunaapeew came to be known as either Delawares or Munsees.The Lunaapeew groups who spoke Unami occupied the southern part of Lenapehoking, which included present-day southern New Jersey and a small portion of eastern Pennsylvania and northeastern Delaware.

At the time of earliest contact with Europeans in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Indians of southern New England and Suanhacky shared a single cultural pattern. According to Bert Salwen, they “all spoke closely related Algonquian languages, obtained their food by combining maize-beans-squash horticulture with the collecting of land and sea fauna and wild plants, and engaged in very similar social, political, and religious practices centered on the village as the basic social unit.”

When the Western Roman Empire came to its political end, societies went through a long-lasting process of transformation, allowing the changes of late Roman society to consolidate. The barbarian kingdoms were not mere observers of the process and had to play a leading role in forming new post-Roman identities.

Recent scholarship has placed ‘identity’ in a leading position in the theoretical frameworks which deal with the study of Late Antiquity and the most controversial debates on the period (transformation, breakdown, continuity, etc.). Scholars have already stressed the value of ‘identity’, when used in the broad sense, as a complex of new and varied perspectives with which to work. To what extent factors such as origin, status, confession, ethnicity, or sense of belonging can contribute to a better understanding of multi-defining identities, rather than historiographical constructed identities, is something that only more particular research can help to elucidate.

This chapter examines the construction of an Iberian Visigothic society in the territories of Hispania Tarraconensis through the evidence provided by bishops and their role in defining a new social elite in post-Roman Iberia. Bishops became real social leaders throughout the late Roman period. This is especially seen in the provincial capitals, where metropolitan bishops were able to spread their power and influence to the fringes of the provinces, working hand in hand with the Roman Empire’s public representatives.

Introduction

In 475, Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop of Clermont, wrote a letter to his colleague Basilius of Aix, who was part of an imperial embassy sent to the Visigothic king Euric (466–484) by the Roman emperor Julius Nepos (474–475). The embassy’s mission was to negotiate a peace treaty with Euric. In his letter, Sidonius paints a bleak picture of the Catholic Church in the Visigothic kingdom, which at this time stretched from the banks of the Loire and the Rhone to the Atlantic Ocean and across the Pyrenees. Sidonius writes that the bishoprics of various civitates – he mentions Bordeaux, Périgueux, Rodez, Limoges, Javols, Eauze, Bazas, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, and Auch – were vacant because their bishops had passed away and no successors had been appointed. Sidonius mentions a ban on the consecration of new bishops that had been introduced by King Euric. Furthermore, he states that a number of bishops – Sidonius mentions Crocus and Simplicius – had been exiled. As Sidonius points out, these sanctions had a disastrous effect on the Catholic Church: Since so many bishoprics were vacant, lower clergymen could not be ordained. Consequently, the aforementioned cities fell prey to a spiritual devastation (‘spiritalis ruinae’), particularly because more clergymen were dying every day and their positions could not be filled. The Catholic parishes had thus been cut off from faith; desperation was taking hold.

In order to assess how Nieuw Nederlanders (New Netherlanders) perceived Indians, it is essential to determine what terms the Dutch used to refer to them. The purpose of tables A.1–A.4 is to provide a sense of how their views of Indians persisted and evolved over time. The data gathered here is summarized in graphs 4.1–4, which can be found on pages 13, 71, 116, and 129. The data was gleaned from a comprehensive cross-section of sources written by Dutch individuals on both sides of the Atlantic who either had first-hand experiences with Indians living in the Northeastern Woodlands or had read first-hand accounts written by those with first-hand experiences. The bulk of the data comes from the original Registers of the Provincial Secretary, Council Minutes, Correspondence, and Patents housed in the New York State Archives. Finally, to determine whether social status and/or place had any influence on how individuals characterized Indians, the occupation and location of each individual is, when possible, identified.

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.

Introduction

The dismantling of imperial power in the West and its replacement with new political realities did not imply a change in the status of cities, which continued to play a pre-eminent role throughout the entire post-imperial period, albeit with regional variations. Not in vain did Visigoths turned them into their main administrative centres once they settled in Gaul. Consequently, cities were the rooting centres for the main territorial power agents delegated by the Gothic monarchy to rule urban areas and their respective territoria. However, they had to coexist with other urban leaders – particularly bishops – in the exercise of their duties whose authority had originated prior to Visigothic domination. The civic authority of the bishops was by no means trivial, to the point that cities and episcopal sees became practically synonyms from the fifth century.

Our aim in this work is to view the urban leaderships that took root in the cities integrated into the Visigothic kingdom from their Tolosan phase to their definitive fall following the Muslim invasion of 711. We will identify them, evaluate their influence on cities, and delve into the different modes of interrelation between the different agents involved. We therefore start from the premise that political and social interactions between them could vary from cooperation to confrontation, or even both at the same time.