Shady Quakers, or How Second Empire France Turned Against the Friends

In mid-1800’s France, idealized stereotypes about Anglo-American Quakers shifted. The honest, peace-loving farmer became a corrupt hypocrite, a swindling businessman, or even – in one case – the spawn of Satan himself! Why? How, in the French popular imagination of the nineteenth century, did the Good Quaker become the Bad Quaker? Taking as its material the serial novels, vaudeville plays, fashion magazines, and newspaper columns of the Second Empire, this talk proposes the fictional Quaker as a screen onto which the French projected their own ambivalence about “liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

This event has been organised by the Centre for French and Francophone Research. The centre provides a showcase for the diversity of French and Francophone studies in a global context across many disciplines at UCL, including literary studies, history, philosophy, art history, anthropology, global health, and the physical sciences. The goal is to create a space for researchers and students from across the university broadly interested in the French-speaking world to share their work and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.

Photo: Victor Marie Hugo and two unknown men, by Honore Daumier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Andrea Goulet

Professor of French and Francophone Studies at University of Pennsylvania

Her research interests include the 19th-21st-century French novel; science and literature; visual studies; spatial theory; urbanism; popular crime fiction and the detective novel; and literatures of the anthropocene. She is the author of Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (2016) and co-editor of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (2018). She is currently writing a book, Shady Quakers, on representations of the Society of Friends in the popular culture of 19th-century France.

More about Andrea Goulet

Host or Publisher UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)