Hi! I'm reading Adam Zamoyski's Phantom Terror, and on page 81, he makes a reference to counter-revolutionaries' changing of identities thusly:
Many people had more than one passport, sometimes a pocketful, stolen or forged. It was not unknown for men to dress up as women in order to go through with a marriage to another man which would provide them with a new legal identity.
Obviously, this second sentence is pretty incredible (and very interesting) if true, but Zamoyski's citation (he footnotes at the end of each paragraph, rather than mid-sentence) leads to page 41 of Richard Cobb's Reactions to the French Revolution.
There, Cobb discusses (and sources) the use of multiple passports by counter-revolutionaries, but not the fake marriage practice. Does anyone know of any sources for Zamoyski's latter statement?
(I would prefer one in English-language historiography, but am willing to dust off my GCSE french/take someone's word for it if necessary.)
I think it's unlikely that there is an actual source for this happening. Getting fake-married to get a fake passport only makes sense if getting fake-married is easier than getting a passport when unmarried.
Successfully being fake-married would actually be very difficult. To be able to get married at all, both spouses would have to live in the same area for 6 months, which means establishing an identity ahead of time, and then maintaining it without being caught. An official would have to make a publication with the names, jobs, and addresses of the fiances and their parents, and post it by the door of the city hall (and the headquarters of their section, if they live in a big city) where it would have to remain for 8 days. So not only do you already have to have a fake identity long before getting fake-married, but there are a lot of opportunities for someone to realize that something doesn't sound right about it. After that, you would need four witnesses, and a public official to marry you.
(The source for that paragraph is a law passed September 20 1792. It reduced the required time spent living in one place to six months, from one year. I'm not 100% sure if any of the other problems would have been easier to overcome before that date.)
By comparison, to get a passport all you would need is a signature from a public official and a clerk in whatever municipality you happen to be in at the time. You also don't need fake identities for your fake parents!
I've tried to find a source alleging this, because it does sound like something people would have accused counterrevolutionaries of doing, but I haven't found anything. What were the sources Cobb referenced?