Perhaps it's that I just moved to France, where adultery seems to be the national pastime, but the subject of infidelity has been on my mind lately. Here, people still wonder why Monica Lewinsky was a big deal — after all, the current president's wife, whom he met when he officiated at her first wedding, spent most of 2005 living in New York with her lover. Infidelity is a touchier subject in Anglophone culture, paradoxically both less publicly accepted and more subject to neurotic analysis. Ergo, where the French have the civilized cinq à sept, we have binge drinking and two varieties of football.
evolutionary psychologists seem to be swingers trying to use research money to justify their predilections), but it does go to show that sleeping with people other than your ostensible mate is a cross-cultural phenomenon.
So perhaps we should ask about the origins of our attitudes to non-monogamy. What's the historical basis between the different way that les Anglo-Saxos and les français view extra-marital, extra-curricular activities?
The king had his official mistress, and everyone else followed suit.
The most apparent difference is the influence of the Catholic Church. France didn't allow divorce, this theory goes, so people who couldn't stand each other any more made a tacit agreement to go their own ways while sharing the same house. The idea is appealing in its simplicity, but it's only half right: the Church's regulations on marriage, divorce, and the disposition of property were certainly influential, but they were more of an effect than a cause. Marriage in aristocratic circles was always for reasons of property and family alliance. Just so long as the business of producing an heir was taken care of, it didn't matter what you did in your spare time.
What aristocrats did in their spare time was play the game of courtly love. The king had his official mistress, and everyone else followed suit. Fidelity was bourgeois, something for change-counters and the nouveau riche who had just bought their titles; in contrast, being a good romancer was a sign of belonging to the old-boys' club. Though coveting other men's wives may have been a sin, by the late eighteenth century, any aristocrat worth his salt maintained a stable of opera singers, prostitutes and ballet dancers. (And if a few wives happened to be thrown into the mix, well, that could be forgiven, too.)
The Revolutions of 1789 and 1830 displaced the old aristocracy of birth with a slightly more open aristocracy of money. However, rather than inventing a new style, the new millionaire elite aped the old. Thus, the chefs de cuisine formerly working in noble châteaux found themselves cooking dinners that cost a worker's yearly wages in the kitchens of elite restaurants, the fencing masters that had trained young men to spill each others' blue blood now prepared radical journalists to duel over newspaper editorials — and the piece on the side likewise became democratized.
With the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, the tacit acceptance of the extramarital affair climbed further down the social ladder. As it had for the aristocrats of old, taking a lover was more than a sign of social capital — it demonstrated that you had the good taste to ignore conventional morality. In France, republicanism meant libertinism for all.
Even the style you cheated in said something about you: A petit bourgeois might lecherously grope every pretty young thing to come into his store, but a man of affairs would discreetly keep a ballet dancer or actress in her own apartment.
