• Introduction. Scorned, battered and bruised: marriage and wife-abuse in eighteenth-century French fiction and societyI. Socio-historical and legal contexts1. Moderate correction, rule of thumb: the norms of spousal abuse in eighteenth-century FranceII. Wife-abuse in the courts: separation cases from Des Essarts’s Causes celebres and Bellart’s Mémoires2. For better or worse? Venereal disease as grounds for marital separation in the case of Mme Blé (Reims, 1757 and Paris, 1771)3. A victim of her own naivety? The separation suit of the marquise de Mézières (Paris, 1775)4. Battered wife or clever opportunist? The separation case of Mme Rouches (Toulouse, 1782)5. Challenging male violence and the double standard in the courts: the separation case of Mme6. Bellart’s critique of the 1792 divorce law in his defence of Mme de L’Orme (Paris, 1803) and M.III. Wife-abuse in eighteenth-century French fiction7. ‘Until death do us part’: fact and fiction in Sade’s Marquise de Gange8. Buried alive: Genlis’s Gothic tale of marital violence in ‘Histoire de la duchesse de C***’9. Truth stranger than fiction: wife-abuse in Rétif de La Bretonne’s IngénueConclusion: Intersections of literature, law and life experience in accounts of wife-abuseBibliographyIndex

'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. […] By juxtaposing legal and literary sources, Trouille succeeds in demonstrating how much social and legal historians can learn from each other.'The Journal of Law and History Review, Volume 28/3