The popular French farce Divorçons! (Let’s Divorce), a collaboraton by dramatist and librettist Victorien Sardou and Émile de Najac, was first performed in Paris in 1880.[1] Film scholar Billy Budd Vermillion persuasively argues in a 2001 article that the play “constitutes a direct link between the high point of French farce in the 1880s and [American] cinema of the 1910s and beyond.”[2] Vermillion notes that there were numerous American productions of the play, beginning with its 1882 American premiere, leading to an early twentieth-century boom in theatrical farce that was an important source for the comedy of divorce and remarriage in film.
Indeed, Divorçons! has been the basis for six American films, most of them lost: Divorçons (a 1912 short, lost); Divorçons (1915, lost); Let’s Get A Divorce (1918, screenplay by Anita Loos and John Emerson, starring Billie Burke, lost); Kiss Me Again (a 1925 Warner Bros. production directed by Ernst Lubitsch and with Clara Bow in the cast, lost); Don’t Tell The Wife (1927); and Lubitsch’s return to the plot in 1941, That Uncertain Feeling.[3]
The play itself was written when France was debating new legislation that would allow divorce for the first time since the divorce laws of revolutionary France had been rolled back in 1816.[4] Beginning in 1876, versions of a divorce bill were taken up in the French senate, and a milder version was finally passed in 1884, four years after the premiere of Divorçons!
This legislation is central to the play. Cyprienne, the young wife of the wealthy gentleman Henri des Prunelles, is being wooed by the handsome young Adhémar but has not yet given in to his desires, apart from a few kisses. While the characters in the play are wondering how the French senate will vote, Adhémar fabricates a telegram announcing that the divorce bill has passed, and which he tries to use to fool Cyprienne into sleeping with him.
Divorce is much discussed throughout the play. While waiting to hear how the senate will vote, the characters argue about the effect a liberalized divorce legislation will have on the institution of marriage. Often, it is the more promiscuous characters (such as the Madame de Valfontaine) who oppose the divorce bill while the most faithful are in favor of it.
Madame de Valfontaine [sitting, while Cyprienne pours her tea]. Oh really, it’s the height of abomination, your divorce! Married for life, one resigns oneself, one makes concessions. With the hope of divorce one would make the worst of everything in order to break it up. It will be the end of marriage. […]
Bafourdin [rising in place]. I beg madam’s pardon, but I believe that, far from discouraging marriage, divorce will encourage it: it offers the possibility of escape.
Clavignac. Ye gods! Marriage is an impasse: divorce opens an exit.
Mademoiselle de Lusignan. Who wouldn’t avoid a dead end?
Bafourdin. Who wouldn’t prefer a busy intersection?[5]
In these witty exchanges, some characters argue that divorce will strengthen marital fidelity, since one can always divorce if one takes a fancy to a new partner. Others worry that it will encourage infidelity since there is less of a penalty for engaging in it.
Cyprienne, meanwhile, offers a bitterly humorous protest against the double standard of traditional married life, in which the husband is able, prior to marriage at least, to have a range of sexual experience, while the wife is expected to remain innocent of any man except for her husband.
Oh, you have certainly arranged things well for yourselves, you men! It’s delightful, this society you’ve created—delightful for you! You’re young. You paw the ground. You jump for joy. The mama says, “Have fun, my child, it’s proper at your age.” The papa says, “Sow a few wild oats, my boy, it’s good for you. So you skip and dance from blonde to brunette to redhead! Then, when you’ve had enough of it, when your back is broken and you’re foundering, spent, and there’s nothing left—it’s “Whew, time to get married!”[6]
No wonder, she tells her husband, that she is tempted by extramarital romance. While he got to experience a variety of passionate relationships, the sum total of her erotic experience is her marriage, which she now finds to be “a dreary solitude, a swamp, a pool of flat and stagnant water. . . . Just the regular tic-toc of the domestic cuckoo clock, the monotonous bubbling of the family stew. No spice, no tang.”[7]
Des Prunelles, however, discovers that the telegram shown to everyone by Adhémar is a fake—and thereby figures out how to give his wife the “spice and tang” she says she wants. Without revealing that he knows that divorce is still illegal, he pretends to respond with perfect equanimity to his wife’s request for one. He even congratulates her and Adhémar on their future wedded bliss.
This tactic soon causes Cyprienne to lose interest in the suddenly all-too-available Adhémar. She “cheats” on Adhémar by going to a furtive, sexy rendezvous with her husband. The outraged Adhémar, finding himself in the role of the cuckolded “husband,” calls the police to break up Des Prunelles’s “immoral” tryst, forgetting that Des Prunelles is Cyprienne’s legal husband. The curtain falls on Adhémar’s humiliation and on Des Prunelles’s and Cyprienne’s happiness in their now reinvigorated marriage.
While claiming the influence of Divorçons! and French farce more generally on American film comedy, Vermillion nevertheless also contrasts the attitudes of the former with those of the latter. He argues that American films, from Cecil B. Demille’s divorce comedies of the 1910s to the 1930s comedies of remarriage, display an optimism about marriage not seen in French farce. The latter, writes Vermillion, posits that ultimately there is no way to circumvent “the pleasure of illicit as opposed to licit coupling.”[8]
Perhaps. Yet the “date night” of Des Prunelles and Cyprienne suggests that married couples can revive the spark of their passion—at least, if they pretend that they are having an affair.
Sources:
[1] Bentley 1958, 347.
[2] Vermillion 2001, 360.
[3] Vermillion 2001 lists all of these except the 1912 film, which is listed on IMDB and described on other websites as presumably lost.
[4] See Phillips 1988, 422-28. The new divorce legislation became known as the Naquet law, after its champion, the radical left politician Alfred Naquet. That Naquet was Jewish was grist for the mill of French antisemities who saw divorce as a Jewish conspiracy against the family and the nation (Phillips 1988, 493).
[5] Sardou 1958, 128-29.
[6] Sardou 1958, 136.
[7] Sardou 1958, 137.
[8] Ibid.