mésalliance

plural mésalliances · alternative mesalliance

1. Marriage with a person of inferior social position.

   To a mésalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition.

   1907, Ambrose Bierce, Beyond the Walls

   5 more examples

   The case is very different in England, where a grocer's daughter would think she made a mésalliance by marrying a painter […]

   1840, M. A. Titmarsh [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], “On the French School of Painting”, in The Paris Sketch Book, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: John Macrone, […], →OCLC

   He had been revolving in his mind the marriage question pending between Jos and Rebecca, and was not over well pleased that a member of a family into which he, George Osborne, of the —th, was going to marry, should make a mésalliance with a little nobody–a little upstart governess.

   1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 6, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC

   But this is too sanguine a belief. Instances of such mésalliance would be as rare as those of intermarriage between the Anglo-Saxon emigrants and the Red Indians.

   1871, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (published anonymously), The Coming Race, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, page 272

   It was an abominable thing that my grandmother should have been disinherited because she made what they called a mésalliance, though there was nothing to be said against her husband except that he was a Polish refugee who gave lessons for his bread.

   1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter XXXVII, in Middlemarch […], volume II, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book IV, page 260

   But if you marry the old count you will make his last days happy, and as widow of the Grand...the prince would no longer be making a mésalliance by marrying you.

   1941, Aylmer and Louise Maude translation of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace