Research Charris De Smet

Abstract

This research proposal aims to revisit political agency in the conservative Parisian women's press, and questions how fashion journals functioned as a forum for women editors and writers and their female readership to engage with politics between 1815 and 1851. Current research into the 19th-century women's press tends to focus on a handful of progressive women writers and periodical editors. Moreover, reproducing the self-fashioning strategies adopted by the periodical press to avoid censorship, conservative women's magazines are often mistakenly seen as apolitical and conformist within existing scholarship. This proposal's first objective is to pinpoint the identities of female editors, journalists and authors, who were involved in the French women's press and to retrace the complex gendered networks behind these journals. As a second and main objective, this research will reconstruct the myriad ways in which women's magazines used the innocent cover of French fashion periodicals to more or less subtly "meddle in politics" during the Restoration, July Monarchy and Second Republic. Through an in-depth and comparative historical discourse analysis of the most popular women's magazines, this research will provide a comprehensive oversight of the different types of political interventions in the conservative women's press. Given their hegemony within 19th-century fashion journalism, Parisian magazines will prove to be the ideal test case for this study.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Beyen Marnix
• Co-promoter: de Smaele Henk
• Fellow: De Smet Charris

Research team(s)

• Power in History - Centre for Political History

Project type(s)

• Research Project

Abstract

This research proposal aims to study the political embedding of French consumption (i.e. 'French consumerism'), and questions how political debates have shaped commercial parlor in an age of regime change (c.1780-c.1870). Heavily indebted by the idea that the shift from an absolutist state to a modern liberal nation caused a general 'depoliticisation' of emerging French consumer society, historians have, in general, refrained from analysing how consumption was actually embedded in political discourses. This proposal's first objective is to reconstruct and analyse emerging political visions on the relationship between the French consumer and society. Through discursively analysing discussions about consumerism in parliamentary sources, this research will show how competing political ideologies (i.e. liberalism, republicanism and conservatism) have tried to frame consumption as a political-ideological project. Our second objective is to test whether these political reimaginings of consumption had a concrete influence on commercial discourse, more in particular on advertising language. By a serial and long-term discursive analysis of a varied range of commercial advertisements, the particular political framing of consumer choice and advertisement parlor will become clear. Given its unique position as both centre of political change and prime consumer market of the nation, Paris – capital of fashion, luxury and politics – will prove to be the ideal test case for this study.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Van Damme Ilja
• Co-promoter: Beyen Marnix
• Fellow: De Smet Charris

Research team(s)

• Centre for Urban History

Project type(s)

• Research Project