At face value, René de Cordouan was a lucky man: born into French nobility as the Marquis de Langey, rich without effort, pleasant to look at. By generic, century-spanning sort of standards he was a catch, as endearing to unwed Catholics of the early 1600s (those seeking a deep-pocketed partner with bucolic property to share) as to manicured women with manicured nails browsing EliteSingles.com. The actual minutiae of the Marquis de Langey’s appearance remains a mystery—the size of his feet, the straightness of teeth, the presence or absence of dimples—but one part of his anatomy was so meticulously discussed it secured him a minor place in European history. Inside the nobleman’s underpants, between his upper thighs, was an intromittent organ that would be leered at and prodded before a court of law. To put it plainly, in 1657 the Marquis’s penis was subject to public trial.
In Roman Catholic France, long before the revolution, human bodies were not quite considered private property. Intimate parts of the citizenry’s flesh could be policed and questioned, limbs and organs regulated by external forces. The procreative couple—married, of course—were required, not just or even to love each other, but to perform their conjugal duty by law, each submitting to intercourse at the other’s request. For the sexually impotent, it was an impossible task. In fact, the impotent husband, even if he’d entered into marriage unaware of his condition, was considered to have committed a larcenous act.
By most accounts, divorce was not permitted in France from the early twelfth century. And yet, in 1426, a strange thing appeared in the departmental archives of the Aube region, a quick note concerning a marriage dissolved on account of an “impotent.” (That impotent, according to the historian Pierre Darmon, later took a second wife who bore several children.) It was an anomalous thing, but there it was, in ink or stone or whatever: a divorce willingly and legally granted for an unconsummated union.
It’s hard to know exactly how the impotence trials developed from here, but by the sixteenth century they had reached a kind of carnivalesque zenith, had hardened into a real and rather labyrinthine process that was, even in its attempts to be restorative, very humiliating. The legal process was messy and unreliable, medically dubious at best (no one quite knew the difference between impotence and sterility). It was funny and sad. It was lamentably public. With the release of private medical records, the infirmity of strangers quickly spread beyond the court, their reputations dissected in noisy salons.
Proceedings almost always began with a disgruntled wife. She approached the ecclesiastical court for myriad reasons—both sincere and disingenuous—requesting an annulment of her marriage via the only means possible: clear evidence of her partner’s debilitated loins. She was likely to be wealthy. Trials in themselves were not expensive, but decent lawyers were, and whichever partner was “proved” impotent bore full legal costs of the proceedings. One-fifth of recorded annulment requests originated from the nobility, who represented only 3 percent of the population. (This is drawn from the research of Darmon, whose 1979 book, Trial by Impotence: Virility and Marriage in pre-Revolutionary France, has the aesthetic trappings of a cheap romance pulp. The cover of its English translation sports a genre painting by Dutch Jacob, and on the spine, the title appears in salmon-colored serif.)
The unhappy couple would then be subject to separate examinations—to speculative groping by surgeons, physicians, and midwives. A husband’s natural parts were scrutinized for color, shape, and number—the best thing he could hope for were inspectors of delicate demeanor. Various hypotheses were tested. Could he muster an erection? Expel reproductive fluids on demand? Was he capable of healthy performance, or had he been forcing his partner into lascivious positions without the promise of coming children?
As could be expected, many wilted under pressure.
by Laura Bannister , Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Jörg Bittner Unna.
In Roman Catholic France, long before the revolution, human bodies were not quite considered private property. Intimate parts of the citizenry’s flesh could be policed and questioned, limbs and organs regulated by external forces. The procreative couple—married, of course—were required, not just or even to love each other, but to perform their conjugal duty by law, each submitting to intercourse at the other’s request. For the sexually impotent, it was an impossible task. In fact, the impotent husband, even if he’d entered into marriage unaware of his condition, was considered to have committed a larcenous act.By most accounts, divorce was not permitted in France from the early twelfth century. And yet, in 1426, a strange thing appeared in the departmental archives of the Aube region, a quick note concerning a marriage dissolved on account of an “impotent.” (That impotent, according to the historian Pierre Darmon, later took a second wife who bore several children.) It was an anomalous thing, but there it was, in ink or stone or whatever: a divorce willingly and legally granted for an unconsummated union.
It’s hard to know exactly how the impotence trials developed from here, but by the sixteenth century they had reached a kind of carnivalesque zenith, had hardened into a real and rather labyrinthine process that was, even in its attempts to be restorative, very humiliating. The legal process was messy and unreliable, medically dubious at best (no one quite knew the difference between impotence and sterility). It was funny and sad. It was lamentably public. With the release of private medical records, the infirmity of strangers quickly spread beyond the court, their reputations dissected in noisy salons.
Proceedings almost always began with a disgruntled wife. She approached the ecclesiastical court for myriad reasons—both sincere and disingenuous—requesting an annulment of her marriage via the only means possible: clear evidence of her partner’s debilitated loins. She was likely to be wealthy. Trials in themselves were not expensive, but decent lawyers were, and whichever partner was “proved” impotent bore full legal costs of the proceedings. One-fifth of recorded annulment requests originated from the nobility, who represented only 3 percent of the population. (This is drawn from the research of Darmon, whose 1979 book, Trial by Impotence: Virility and Marriage in pre-Revolutionary France, has the aesthetic trappings of a cheap romance pulp. The cover of its English translation sports a genre painting by Dutch Jacob, and on the spine, the title appears in salmon-colored serif.)
The unhappy couple would then be subject to separate examinations—to speculative groping by surgeons, physicians, and midwives. A husband’s natural parts were scrutinized for color, shape, and number—the best thing he could hope for were inspectors of delicate demeanor. Various hypotheses were tested. Could he muster an erection? Expel reproductive fluids on demand? Was he capable of healthy performance, or had he been forcing his partner into lascivious positions without the promise of coming children?
As could be expected, many wilted under pressure.
by Laura Bannister , Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Jörg Bittner Unna.
