We are thrilled to welcome Charlotte Faucher, co-convenor of this seminar, to discuss her new book, which shows how women shaped policies from the margins, and bridged diplomatic worlds in France, its colonial home fronts and Britain across two centuries. Her book redefines the narrative that diplomacy was a male-dominated world centred around Foreign Offices and embassies. You can watch an introductory video from Charlotte below and then join us online for the live launch on 6 June, when specialists in diplomatic and Franco-British history Debra Kelly and Anne Simonin will join us to discuss the significance of Faucher’s work.
Attendance is free, though registration is essential. Please follow this link to register via the IHR website: https://www.history.ac.uk/events/book-launch-propaganda-gender-and-cultural-power-projections-and-perceptions-france-britain .
Below you can view a video blurb of Faucher’s book, and we look forward to a lively discussion.
About the speakers:
Charlotte Faucher is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow (University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2022-2024). She was previously a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manchester where she also taught in 2017-2018. Her first monograph Propaganda, Gender, and Cultural Power: Projections and Perceptions of France in Britain c. 1880–1944 is just out with Oxford University Press. She has published several articles on women in diplomacy including an article on gender and French soft power during the Liberation of France in Historical Journal (2021), and ‘Women, Gender and the Professionalisation of French Cultural Diplomacy in Britain, 1900–1940’ in English Historical Review (2022). Her piece on the French institute in London and anti-Gaullism appeared in Journal of Contemporary History (2019). Her next book-length project is a transnational history of European cultural diplomacy (1870-1940).
Debra Kelly is Professor Emerita of French and Francophone Studies at University of Westminster, London. In 2005 she was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Government in recognition of her services to French language, literature and culture. Her current research interests include the cultural history of the French and Francophone presence in London from the seventeenth century to the present day (A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, 2013) and her latest book Fishes with Funny French Names: The French Restaurant in London from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Liverpool University Press, 2021). Debra is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking at King’s College London.
Anne Simonin is senior researcher at the French National Scientific Research Center (CESPRA-EHESS). She works on the French Revolution in a “longue durée” perspective through the lens of the negative citizenship, the conquest and the deprivation of rights embodied in the moral, judicial, literary notion of unworthiness that she applies in XVIIIe and XXe context. She has recently published : ‘Du bénéfice de l’indignité : portrait du bourreau en citoyen parfait (1789-1793)’, La Révolution française, 20/2021 and ‘La face cachée du Silence de la mer : les refusés des Éditions de Minuit sous l’Occupation’, Littératures, 2020.
