How did one cope with divorce during the French Revolution? By attending a musical comedy about it, of course! This play by French playwright Desfontaines (1733-1825) was first presented in 1793, a year after divorce was first legalized in France. In this play, young Isabelle and the local priest fall in love, and Isabelle seeks to divorce her husband.
After acknowledging her feelings for the priest, Isabelle cheekily confides to the incredulous house servant Cécile, “Just until now I condemned divorce; today I find it charming, and I’m going to divorce.” Flippant as the comment may be, legal divorce was a newfound right which many women lobbied for during the French Revolution.
Read the entire one-act comedy and nearly 40,000 other plays, songs, laws, rants, and other pamphlets in our Internet Archive collection!
