Manzoni’s first marriage

Manzoni’s first marriage took place when he was just over twenty years old and was encouraged by Giulia Beccaria, who wanted her son to have a caring and modest wife who would love him and bear children, but who would detract as little as possible from her own command of his future family. After a couple of possible marriages had fallen through (with Luigina, the sister of Ermes Visconti, and with a French girl, the daughter of De Tracy), the ideal wife was found in Henriette Blondel, the daughter of a well-to-do Swiss protestant family. Although she had been baptized along with her siblings, Henriette had been brought up as a strict protestant. Her religious upbringing, as well as her attractiveness and non noble class, appealed immediately to Alessandro, who expressed his eagerness in a letter to Fauriel from Italy in October 1807. Alessandro and Henriette were married at a registry office in Milan on 6 February 1808, and on the same day their marriage was blessed by an Evangelical minister. In June 1808, after a period in Milan and at Brusuglio, the Manzonis returned to Paris, leaving behind them the criticisms of their marriage by the Catholic conformists. In December, two days before Christmas, their first child was born, Giulia (called “Giulietta” within the family). Manzoni had his daughter baptized in April 1809, with Claude Fauriel as the child’s godfather. The official baptism certificate created some embarrassment to the Manzoni couple, for while the Catholic Church baptized their daughter, it considered their marriage illegitimate. After petitioning Pope Pius VII to allow their marriage to be recognized, a new Catholic ceremony took place on 15 February 1810.