Bruid laat twee duiven los uit een kooi 1851 - 1865

Célestin Nanteuil made this print, "Bride Releasing Two Doves from a Cage," sometime in the mid-19th century. It depicts a newly married couple releasing doves, symbols of peace and fidelity, into the sky above a small European town. The image speaks to a very specific bourgeois fantasy of domestic bliss. The rising middle class, empowered by the industrial revolution and newly visible in the public sphere, developed a powerful ideology of marriage and family life. We see this in sentimental genre paintings, popular novels, and in etiquette manuals instructing women in the art of running a household. But social historians also use sources like census data, parish records, and court archives to better understand these images. How many people actually lived up to this ideal? How did the working classes, or the poor, experience love, marriage, and family? What role did institutions like the church and state play in enforcing these norms?