The Revolutionary Temper by Robert Darnton

Author:Robert Darnton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

29

Despotism in the Marriage Bed

SOON AFTER the arrival of Mirabeau’s pamphlet, the Notables received another denunciation, one that caused an even greater storm but came from a surprising source. In a case before a Parisian court, an obscure citizen accused the authorities of complicity in an adulterous affair of his wife. He had the unfortunate name of Kornmann, which exposed him to puns about horns and the derision usually attached to cuckoldry. Yet Parisians did not laugh at his plight when they, too, received the printed account of his story. They reacted with a surge of moral indignation, and the Kornmann Affair turned into an indictment of the sociopolitical order at the very time when its legitimacy was threatening to unravel.1

After the Calas, Goezman, and Diamond Necklace Affairs, court cases had become established as the most effective way to mobilize public sentiment. They often featured innocent victims—“la fille Salmon,” “les trois roués,” “le Comte de Sanois”—who were threatened by being broken on the wheel or buried in prison. They were set pieces, similar to plays (particularly the sentimental melodramas known as drames or comédies larmoyantes), because they stirred emotions and conformed to histrionic patterns: an eloquent lawyer denounced an abuse; a judicial memoir translated it into a story of victimization and suffering; and the public reacted according to script, by outrage and “sweet tears,” as innocence triumphed, if not juridically, at least in the court of public opinion. The Kornmann Affair represented the genre at the peak of its popularity.

Guillaume Kornmann was a wealthy banker from Strasbourg who took up residence in Paris, where he became one of the two leading disciples of Mesmer. The other was his close friend, Nicolas Bergasse, a lawyer from a family of merchants in Lyon. Kornmann’s wife, born into a Protestant family in Basel, married him at age fifteen. Her relatives considered him a good match, although, according to the mémoires printed in her defense, she found him unattractive. In 1780, six years after their wedding and the birth of two children, she was seduced by Daudet de Jossan, a dashing man of the world and municipal official in Strasbourg with important connections in Versailles, notably the Prince and Princesse de Nassau and the Prince de Montbarrey, then war minister.

Kornmann told his version of the story in the form of a judicial mémoire, accusing his wife of adultery, Daudet of seduction, and two public figures, Beaumarchais and the former lieutenant general of police Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir, of complicity.2 Mme Kornmann had no voice of her own throughout the affair. Everyone involved in it treated her as an easily manipulable object, and no one questioned the assumption that Kornmann held unrestricted authority over her, including the right to have her confined by a lettre de cachet. Bergasse wrote the text of the memoir, although he lacked the authority to make it legal, because he was not a member of the Paris bar. He fashioned it as a narrative of perfidy and intrigue, recounted by Kornmann himself in the first person.

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