Mary Trouille's Wife Abuse in Eighteenth-Century France brings a legal-literary approach to understanding domestic abuse and marital separation cases in pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary France, an area, she asserts, that has received little attention from literary critics. Trouille uses court documents and fictional portrayals of abuse to “gain insight into the attitudes, practices and law of the period concerning marital separation and spousal abuse” (1). With this approach, she examines interconnections between lived experience and fiction in order to flesh out how the legal system and novelists understood the dynamics of dysfunctional households and how they proposed to deal with domestic abuse. Trouille also shows how notions of gender roles and married life were questioned within the context of separation and abuse cases.

In juxtaposing separation cases and novels, Trouille finds connections between the ways French families lived and how those lives were represented in literature. The structure of her book follows her sources. Part I provides an overview of eighteenth-century French society and culture. There Trouille establishes, based on secondary sources, the prevalence of wife abuse. Significant for the cases she examines, Trouille emphasizes that while elite women composed nearly the entire cohort of those filing separations, most working women also dealt with violence in the home. This claim is crucial in dealing with the issue of how representative Trouille's cases are for the situation of women in old regime France. While she presents in detail only four cases, causes célèbres, of women seeking separations, and analyzes three works of fiction in depth, her synthesis of the secondary historical literature convincingly shows how these issues touched most marriages in the period.

Part II of the book focuses on separation cases, all chosen because they illuminate varied questions about how unbreakable a marriage bond should be. All of the stories are wrenching, presenting the reader with a litany of beatings, confinements, and psychological abuse that create a vivid image of how difficult married life could be when physical separation was so inaccessible. Trouille supplements her consideration of her four separation cases with consideration of records of other abused wives. In these cases women grappled with venereal disease, daily beatings, profligate and cruel husbands, and a torrent of verbal cruelty. Yet they were obliged to fight before a court to gain the right to leave such wretched circumstances. Her evidence for the details of these separation hearings are drawn from Nicolas Des Essarts's imposing multivolume work Causes Célèbres. The cases she chose featured important figures of the eighteenth-century French legal world, Turpin and Bellart, as the lawyers charged with writing the memoirs. In her comments on these lawyers, Trouille shows how their attitudes toward marital violence shifted over their careers. She characterizes Des Essarts in his assessment of separation pleas as advocating “a balanced approach—a middle ground between excessive lenience and excessive rigour” (62). This search for the harmonious middle marked the attitudes of eighteenth-century lawyers, a change from earlier hard attitudes about marital separations. In showing how prominent and well-regarded lawyers moved in their opinions about the acceptability of marital violence, Trouille also buttresses her argument about a broader shift in understanding of wife abuse.

Trouille analyzes the languages of legal memoirs in her discussion of specific separation cases, but it is in Part III of her book that she engages in literary study. Here Trouille examines three novels with the theme of marital violence. The authors' gothic portrayals of abuse go beyond any evidence presented in separation cases, but Trouille shows how these literary works pushed back against a romantic view of companionable family life promoted in sentimentalist literature. Drawing from real-life events, the Marquis de Sade, Stéphanie de Genlis, and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne show the hidden and dangerous side of married life, revealing the grotesque level of violence husbands could inflict on their wives. Trouille uses these portrayals to make two points: first, that violence was woven into the fabric of married life in this period, and two, that looking at abuse can also shed light on appropriate spousal relations.

In her conclusion, Trouille reasserts her claim that considering the legal and the literary together show how married life evolved at this time. Trouille is largely effective at making her argument, although her small body of source material renders her particularly beholden to the work of social historians. That said, her close and sensitive readings of sources provides depth and nuance to her conclusions, although readers who do not read French may struggle with some of the extended quotes Trouille analyzes. By juxtaposing legal and literary sources, Trouille succeeds in demonstrating how much social and legal historians can learn from each other.