On Tuesday April 16, join Anne Higonnet and Caroline Weber as they discuss Higonnet’s latest book, Liberty Equality Fashion, The Women Who Styled The French Revolution, just published by WW Norton.
Higonnet and Weber will delve into the lives of Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, who was considered, at the time, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, who had nothing left to lose. Our speakers will analyze how, after surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, these three women, together, led a fashion revolution and turned themselves into international style celebrities.

This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

The talk will be in English. This event is free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.

ANNE HIGONNET is professor of art history at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches a course called “Clothing.” She has received many awards, including Guggenheim and Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowships.

CAROLINE WEBER is a Professor of French specialized in the literature and history of the 17th- and 18th-century royal court, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution at Barnard.
She is the author of Fragments of Revolution (Yale UP 2002); Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Holt 2006/Picador 2007), a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Knopf 2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biographie, the American Library of Paris Book Prize and the winner of the French Heritage Society Literary Award.