Quick Take: How the French Invented Love

Love was invented by people like Don Draper to rebel against religious and social imposition

(This post is in response to a question by a paying subscriber, Jason Harrison. As he astutely wrote, “I’ve read the Mad Men-like quips to the effect that romantic love (as opposed to youthful lust) was not a strong cultural concept until recently. This is difficult to believe though,… at least as a concept true/romantic love seems to have been a storytelling device and therefore a cultural concept throughout history and across the world starting at least from Greek and Indian myths onward.”)

The modern idea of romantic love is a specifically European twist on older ideas of love that were commonplace not just in Graeco-Roman antiquity but also, in particular, in Chinese, Iranian, Arabic and Indian literature.

Crazy love stories in which characters act somewhat irrationally as a result of their attachment to their beloved have nothing specifically European about them: over the 1st millennium AD, they were a staple in particular of Tang Dynasty and Tamil Indian literature; the same idea was sublimated into mystical Chinese poetry and the semi-practical advice for men about town in the Indian Kamasutra, which is a lot more about seduction than it is about sexual positions.

The modern idea of love, as we would recognize it, first appeared as courtly love from the late 11^th century in France, a place ideally located to combine two separate traditions: the Nordic-Germanic notion of the unattainable maiden with full agency to either reject or select their ideal mate, the legend of Brynhild/Brunhild the Valkyrie; and the the more verbose, whinier Mediterranean tradition of crazy unrequited love in the style of Catullus and Ovid.

I’ve written recently about Ovid and Catullus. In particular, the latter is exemplary of a departure in the Graeco-Roman poetry tradition, from the Sapphist tradition to a more populist tone. One could say this new approach is both more radical and more sentimental: on one hand, Catullus is sugary and needy, demanding kisses like a little boy; on the other, he’s harsher than any gentleman should be.

Rejected, in his Poem 11 Catullus reacts with previously unheard-of fury. He wishes his previous mistress not just a life of whoredom, but a life of whoredom with clients whose balls explode during the act. Quite literally:

The First Men of Rome (II)

The later Nordic-Germanic love tradition — as depicted in multiple sagas — was crystallized, weirdly enough, around one historical person, a Spanish princess who moved to France in the 6th century to marry and there became a virago embroiled in a series of complex and murderous political conflicts.

Brunhilda of Toledo, once a young princess and for decades a scheming Franco-Spanish matron, was transformed over the centuries into Brynhild, Icelandic warrior-queen/shield-maiden starring in multiple Nordic sagas. Having circulated across northern Europe well before 1000 AD, her legend would eventually coalesce into a recognizable Wagnerian shape in the 13th century Volsunga Saga, but by that time the ideal of the icy blonde heart-breaker was already drilled into Western consciousness via France.

Peter Abelard’s (1079-1142) relationship with the much younger Heloise d’Argenteuil (1100-1163) in the early 12^th century did much to popularize the new idea of love. Since both had scholarly inclinations, the couple left behind letters they wrote each other in Latin, as well as Abelard’s autobiography, “Historia calamitatum” (The Story of My Misfortunes), more famous than any of Abelard’s numerous works on philosophy and theology, where he develops the Catholic concept of limbo.

A good-looking intellectual who founded an urban school in Paris for his followers, it was in that city that Abelard met Heloise, the niece and ward of a church canon living in Paris, renowned in her teens for her brilliant mind and advanced learning. They became lovers in the winter of 1115-1116, and Heloise soon gave birth to a son, whom they, charmingly, called “Astrolabe.”

The love story ended rather tragically for Abelard, castrated by thugs hired by Heloise’s uncle, a denouement that may have contributed to the dominant tone of courtly love literature ever since: whereas Abelard’s own writings about his relationship with the hot, erudite youngster are filled (pre-castration) with expressions of delight, other authors from the mid-12^th century preferred to describe love as an illness, love-sickness, an incurable affection under which the power of passion causes the lover terrible pain, metaphorically speaking.

Given this pain, the man thus afflicted becomes the humble servant of a lady to make himself worth of her love; and then he describes the affliction in florid language with metaphors that frequently present his passion as an all-consuming fire or something along those lines, seeking extreme effects¹.

Such descriptions often were best left to professionals in the art of telling tales in lyric poetry accompanied by music, “troubadours” in Old Occitan (Southern) French, that spread like wildfire after the castrated Abelard sought refuge in the Abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, in the 1120s. Bernart de Ventadorn (1130-1190) soon became an early master of the new style, through his oft-repeated, Homer Simpson-like² trick of portraying women both as the solution to, and cause of, all of men’s problems. In his most famous verse, Ventadorn sang:

“In my opinion, a person is not worth anything if her or she does not desire love.”

Yes, Tang Dynasty students lost their wealth and wits to courtesans, and King David sinned hard to get in bed with Bathsheba. Greek mythology and poetry was filled with love stories and Catullus certainly would have shared Ventadorn’s general outlook on women. But Ventadorn’s (and Abelard’s) tone is something else: what is new in the history of love that emerged in France during the 1100s was the proclamation of the rights of lovers to live out their passion despite all the objections mustered by society and religion³.

In the love stories sang by troubadours, and later written by medieval European writers, ardent lovers find themselves caught in a web of uncontrollable desire, only made stronger by the growing opposition of priests, parents and neighbors. Betrayed husbands, mostly perceived as heroic victims of wrongdoing in Graeco-Roman antiquity, become the enemy of the true love that arises when their wives become attracted to other, worthier men.

This is a kind of literature that would have been, and was indeed, unthinkable anywhere else. All love stories in Arabic and Iranian literature involve virginal youngsters, and no author writing in the Ummah would have got away with writing stories about women breaking loose of the chains of matrimony to elope with their paramours; even in China there are no real counterparts to European courtly love stories, and it’s only in India that some stories may be found with similar themes, although they are much tamer and careful not to break social taboos.

From the 12^th century on, European literature is taken over by husbands enraged by wives attracted to other men, women making false accusations against the men who reject them, reasonable men bewitched by women, home-wreckers. Love itself becomes a revolutionary weapon that threatens to upend social conventions and arrangements. Men typically did not fight duels over women anywhere else.

The much-publicized, scandalous story of Abelard and Heloise was only the spark that lit the fire. It’s not a coincidence that troubadour songs appeared in France at a time when the rising, more overt social role of the Christian Church as arbiter of morals and sexual relations was becoming more noticeable in particular by the upper, more literate classes.

Successive popes had railed against priestly marriage, which is the exact reason that Abelard alleged when he preferred to keep his marriage with Heloise secret and, fatefully, when he sent Heloise to a convent so that the secret marriage wouldn’t hurt his chances of promotion within the Church – the very move that led to Heloise’s uncle hiring of the thugs who did their thing.

The fight against divorce, still practiced by the aristocracy at the time despite multiple papal proclamations, was another cause celebre for the Church. It’s remarkable that the earliest surviving troubadour poetry was written not by a professional writer but by a professional brute, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine – roughly Abelard’s contemporary – who was the son of the previous duke by his third wife.

William had a good claim to perceive himself as the fruit of untamed, unstoppable love with law-breaking elements: his mother was fifteen, and his twice-divorced father forty-six when William was born, and they were distant cousins to boot⁴.

William IX, a violent Crusader, wrote about love only, with an obsessive focus on the beloved woman, the “domna,”⁵ granted power over the man because of her capacity to ensnare him romantically. Much of the history of troubadour poetry is encapsulated within William’s production: women are at first desired objects to be ridden, much as horses (William had a reputation for rape, at war or without even that excuse) and yet they evolve in later poems into rulers of the man’s heart who must be served and obeyed.

Like a true poet, William IX also lived the life he extolled. He fell in love with the wife of one of his vassals, a viscount, and he abducted her and took her as mistress, causing a scandal that led to the duke’s excommunication. The lady, however, appears to have been more than a willing participant in the abduction: she was such a “femme fatale” – a typically French expression with likely roots in this era – that she went by Dangereuse (“Dangerous”) rather than her baptismal name.

Only in France, am I right?

When the duke’s wife tried to expel her from court, the wife was instead forced into a nunnery; in what would become another typically French way to deal with the family conflict, the duke’s legitimate heir, and son of the nun, eventually married a daughter of Dangereuse by the cuckolded Viscount – and their first daughter was the later celebrated, politically powerful and influential Eleanor of Aquitaine, perhaps the most famous femme fatale of Medieval France, celebrated in song by the troubadour Ventadorn.

The undertone of female agency and empowerment evident in courtly poetry, even when written by serial rapists like William IX, is remarkably distinct from anything seen in non-European cultures. Islamic women were expected to be modest, discreet and chaste; Chinese women were expected to be meddlesome and chastity was an ideal known to be not always attainable, but still Chinese culture put the stress on keeping at least some sort of lid over female autonomy; the long, fertile tradition of Indian love stories has a genteel aspect that eschews references to suffering for love and, even when celebrating out-of-wedlock affairs, puts the maintenance of social proprieties above all.

It’s only in the new, post-1000 European love story that women are not prizes to be gained or treasures to be protected, but active players in a hide-and-seek game of sexual innuendo. Think of Westley, having to go all over the world and back to be worthy of Buttercup in “The Princess Bride” (1987), and Buttercup having to scheme madly, like Brunhilda in 6th century France, to save Westley and ensure a happy ending for the couple.

Mad Men is one of the best TV shows ever, and I think this line by Don Draper is fantastic, but I don’t believe it was quite right:

What you call love was invented by people like Abelard and William of Aquitaine, to rebel against religious and social imposition, and make French life spicier. Make of that what you will.

1. See for example Daniel Savborg’s “The Sagas and Courtly Love” in “The Viking Age: lreland and the West: Papers from the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Viking Congress, Cork, 18-27 August 2005,” ed. by John Sheehan & Ðonnchadh O’Corrain, p. 362. A psychoanalytical reading of this approach is provided by Slavoj Zizek in various works dealing with the evolution from courtly to romantic love; in his 1996 book “The indivisible remainder,” for example, he writes that “courtly love appears as simply the most radical strategy for elevating the value of the object by putting up conventional obstacles to its attainability.”

2. Of course, Homer was speaking about beer, not women.

3. I owe this point to Marilyn Yalom, from whose book "How the French Invented Love" (Harper, 2012) I also borrowed the title for this essay.

4. William VIII, like many other similar law breakers, had to travel to Rome and spend freely to ensure his heir’s legitimacy. This was a particularly French thing to do: the second Capet king, Robert II (r. 996-1031), married three times, having two of these marriages annulled and also attempted to have the third annulled. It’s important to note that French aristocrats didn’t have uniquely complex domestic arrangements: rather, their uniqueness was that they tried to have the Roman papacy legalize such arrangements, unlike – for example – Robert II’s contemporary Cnut of England, who was openly married to two women, traveled to Rome for Conrad II’s imperial coronation and still didn’t bother to get his affairs in order during the occasion; or Catalonia’s Count Ramon Berenguer I, who divorced his barren second wife in 1052 and was duly excommunicated by the pope, whose permission wasn’t requested. Over time, the Church took a more proactive approach to polygamy and kin marriages, and the Norman knight Robert Guiscard in 1058 (warlord supreme, conqueror of Sicily, near-emperor of Byzantium and father of Bohemond the hero of the First Crusade) had his first marriage annulled because of consanguinity. For upper-class European men, this only enhanced the appeal of finding the exact, perfect, unattainable woman.

5. He wrote in Old Occitan/Provencal, not standard (northern) French. In both Italian and Catalan, “donna” remains the preferred word for “woman,” as opposed to “femme” in French.