Did the French Like the Friends? A Brief Cultural History

Hear from Andrea Goulet, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who will present materials from the Library of the Society of Friends related to her upcoming book on representations of Quakers in the popular culture of 19th-century France.

The book argues that vaudeville plays, serial novels, caricatures, fashion magazines, and newspaper columns from the period used stereotypes of the Anglo-American Friends in order to work through France’s own internal debates about pacifism vs. military glory, honesty vs. hypocrisy, modesty vs. glamour, and egalitarianism vs. social hierarchy — well after the French Revolution had supposedly established the republican values of "liberté, égalité, and fraternité".