Madame Right for Monsieur Wrong: Prisoner Marriage Petitions and State Surveillance of Women in Post‐War France, 1946–1959

Abstract Before 1975, prisoners in France could only marry if they successfully petitioned the state for permission. This article examines how local, regional and national officials dealt with marriage requests submitted by male inmates of the Camps de Mauzac in the Dordogne between 1946 and 1959. It reveals that they consistently adjudicated the petitions according to a standard of sexual morality focused on female behaviour: prisoners were permitted to wed only if police investigations could confirm the virtuous private lives of their un‐incarcerated fiancées. State actors justified this mode of judgment by invoking the rehabilitative power of good wives to heal male degeneracy. Through the Mauzac cases, this article illustrates that traditionalist ideals of heterosexual matrimony and anxieties over female promiscuity remained central to negotiations of state power over the lives of marginalised people in post‐1945 France.