| Summary: | Marriage and household customs of the past interest us today because they help us understand social relations at every level and dispel the prejudices and common places inspired by the proudly optimistic world we live in.We know quite a lot about the strategies of noble families to maintain or increase their privileges, but much less about common people, whom we assume did not have the same interests, having nothing to preserve. The statistical analysis of marriages announced during the last decades of the eighteenth century shows the tendency to establish family bonds according to professional affinity, geographical proximity, or socioeconomic level. Quality seems to have been a secondary issue, included among other social considerations.Observed trends reveal the flexibility of an open society in which the aristocratic minority defended norms of distinction and segregation that affected only them.
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