In his Dictionnaire universel (1690; a French dictionary that preceded the one produced by the Académie Française in 1694), Antoine Furetière claims that a marital separation is when “wives take actions against their husbands to separate, to live a life of debauchery.” His evidence for such a claim seems not to have been drawn from real life, but rather from examples in the theater, where such women proliferated and where dramatists punished them with character assassination for their supposed promiscuity. These depictions, in turn, informed how contemporaries viewed real-life women and their reasons for leaving their husbands. Even women of the highest reputations were not spared condemnation. When the German princess, Marie-Anne von Hohenzollern, fled a homicidal husband and sought refuge in France, hurtful gossip greeted her. Some accused her of leaving her husband in search of material gain, and others alleged she committed adultery. Contemporaries worried that such women were not isolated examples and threatened the social and political fabric of the nation.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers blamed independent women for social ills not only because of early modern misogyny, but also because jurists modeled the state upon conventional family structure. Late Renaissance jurists appropriated the language of marriage and the family to explain the origins and nature of royal sovereignty, and legal scholars continued to adapt these metaphors throughout the eighteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, depictions of the king's relationship with his subjects became less authoritarian and more affectionate with the rise of sentimental family values. Yet, even as the family model evolved in the eighteenth century, jurists persisted in deploying these long-standing metaphors. Indeed, marriage and the family remained the standard language to describe royal sovereignty until the Revolution. Whether authoritarian or affectionate, both father and king were supposed to look after and provide for their families and subjects but neither tolerated serious challenges to their authority, which was perceived to be both natural and divinely ordained.

Literature and theater of the seventeenth century reveal increasing anxiety about the perceived likelihood that separated women would undermine political stability as writers began to imagine that the trend toward independence would begin by infecting individual families, spreading to the monarchy itself.