Catherine Pangonis (1:59)

Yeah, it was actually quite a journey to choose the women for this book. So I had this idea that I wanted to revisit French history, looking at it through the lives of women, not who were necessarily the most famous, but who through an exploration of their lives, you could explore pivotal moments of change in French history. So I wanted to pick a woman whose experiences encapsulated or shed new light on the Enlightenment or on the French Revolution, events that we think we know very well, but usually through very male centric lenses. And there's a good reason for the male centric lenses is that it was a deeply patriarchal society. It was deeply unequal. There were fewer opportunities for women. So men, you know, more often than not were occupying positions of power and better positioned to be change makers. But that doesn't actually mean that women were not in these roles as well, and that certain women's lives and experience did not shape French history. And I just don't think it's emphasised enough. So that was what led, and that was the key mission in mind when selecting the women that I included in this book. So I chose Olympe de Gouges for the Revolution and I chose her over Marie Antoinette. I mean, if you think about the French Revolution, most people think of Marie Antoinette and she's a fascinating historic figure and her story is very well known. She was sort of emblematic of the wealth and extravagance and the inequality of pre revolutionary France. And then she was the most famous victim of the guillotine, perhaps, and we've seen her story told many times on screen. Whereas Alain de Gouges, I felt, was arguably a more interesting woman in terms of her own personal agency in the Revolution. And I think the fact that she started off as very pro revolution and ended up on the block of the guillotine herself, I thought that was a very interesting reversal of fortune, if you like. And I felt that by looking at Olympe de Gouges rather than Marie Antoinette, I could give readers a very fresh and different look at the Revolution and focus more on how the revolutionary movement itself changed radically while it was in progress, rather than the perhaps the most well known element of it, which is down with the aristocracy, down with the royal family. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that the women who played roles in these great moments of change in French history weren't just footnotes or exceptions, but their lives actively shaped politics, culture, religion and identity over centuries. And by following the lives of the women I chose, I hope I can help readers see the history of France a bit differently.

Charlotte Vosper (4:30)

One of the things you mentioned there about a kind of male centric lens of history, I just want to talk about that a little bit more, because in your book you start with the fact that women have been systematically excluded from the national narrative of French history. Can you kind of expand on that for us? In what way do you think that these women have been deliberately removed from the French historical narrative?

Catherine Pangonis (4:51)

Well, I think it's a combination of both deliberate exclusion and inadvertent exclusion, actually. Because I think this brings us to sort of a bigger question of the representation of women in history and in literature, which just comes down to a very, very basic fact that throughout most of history, firstly, the majority of the population were illiterate, and the small number of the population that were educated in reading and writing tended to be male in more modern France. We do have this issue of museums and books often prefer to stick to the established narrative and the established sources they have, rather than sort of looking at them critically and re evaluating and wondering if there's a gap to be filled. So something I draw attention to in my book is that this book kind of started with long walks in the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris, where we have these statues of women who are sort of the queens and illustrious women of France. There are these great statues of, I think, 20 women, but none of them have information about their lives attached. So we sort of see their faces, we see their historical costumes, but there's no information with these statues about who they were or what they did. So they're not erased, but there's no real information given to the public. It is, I think, just about, in many cases. It's a reluctance in the sort of big institutions to go below the surface and sort of existing, widely available information. But I think it's changing. And there is a big movement by both male and female historians today to sort of redress this balance. And I'd like my book to be a contribution to that and part of this bigger movement to give a more balanced view of women's roles in French history.

Charlotte Vosper (6:27)

Yeah, absolutely. I think when we're talking about French history from, you know, early medieval period to now, it's important to ask, what do we mean by France? The boundaries of France changed during this period. So what area or areas are we talking about in your history of France in 21 women?

Catherine Pangonis (6:44)

It's a really good question, because France is a relatively modern concept. I mean, some people would say France as we know it today really, really began with the Revolution. So as late as that. And the history of territory and borders is really interesting. And borders over history as we think of them today have been very malleable, very changeable. But broadly speaking, it is more or less the same region that we think of when we think of the fren in the earliest chapters, when I'm looking at the life of Saint Bathilde, who was a queen of France during the Frankish period. So sort of what we consider the Dark Ages. France was divided into two kingdoms, Neustria and Westria, and these were very different boundaries and included part of Germany. But the area that I'm looking at really does sort of stick to the traditional hexagon and the overseas territories that are now parts of France that have taken over in the course of colonialism and exploration.

Charlotte Vosper (7:35)

I think that helps us kind of get a sense of the scale of the book because it is pretty massive, the amount of women that you cover, the time periods that you cover. I'd like to chat a little bit more about some of the particular women in the book, though, now. So starting with Christine de Pizan, a prolific medieval writer. Can you tell us a little bit about her?

Catherine Pangonis (7:52)

Yeah. So Christine de Pizan is, she's really interesting, the first female writer to earn her living from writing and she's just this trailblazing figure in women's literature. As a female writer, she is one of my favourites in this book. You're not meant to have favourites, but I do have a few. They do tend to be the right. She was born in Venice, actually, not France, in 1364 or around then, as far as we can tell, to a very educated and influential father. He was an astrologer and a scientist and he was very successful as an academic at these times. And at this time, Charles V of France, also known as Charles the Wise, was beginning this movement to sort of try and create his kingdom of France, make it one of the intellectual powerhouses of Europe. And Christine's father, Tommaso di Pisano, was invited to the French court and he accepted. And he went over first on his own, as many immigrants do. He went over first solo and left his wife and children in Italy. And then he sent, once he was established, had set everything up, he sent for them. And so Christine becomes one of this tradition of women coming from abroad to live in Paris and really make a name for herself. And her father made a great effort to educate her. And she writes very beautifully about her relationship with her father in her later work. And she talks about, you know, her education was the crumbs from his table, but really he made a consistent and deliberate effort to educate his daughter far beyond what was expected at the time. But her life still followed a fairly standard course. She was married very young to an older man. It wasn't as bad as you think, you know, it was a guy, his name was Etienne de Castel and he, I think, was about 26 when he married Christine, who was 15 or 16. So it is a big difference. But it's not like she's married off to a 50 year old or something. And it seems to have been a real love match, actually. He was a courtier, he had a good career, everything was stable and they really loved each other. Certainly by what Christine. Christine writes about how affected she was by his death and how very sincerely she mourned his loss when he did die, because that's exactly what happened. He gave her some children. They lived together for a few years, but then he died in his, I think, his late 20s or early 30s. And Christine was left a widow. And her father had been an intellectual, but he was not a rich man. You know, he lived on his income, the money and the accommodations given to him at the French court. He didn't have extensive property and a huge fortune that he could leave to his daughter. And nor does it seem she inherited much from her husband. And also, the small inheritance she had wasn't easily won. There were court cases. So she really found herself in real crisis when her husband died, because her father was also dead. And she suddenly found herself in France. Her brothers had returned to Italy. She was in France with young children and an aging mother, and she found herself the only breadwinner. And she sort of had three options, just give up and either die in poverty or go back to Italy, marry again as quickly as she could, a man who had money. And. And the third was to try and somehow shift for herself and make it on her own. And she chose the third. She dedicated herself to building a career as a writer, which in those days wasn't necessarily securing publishing contracts, and they were before the printing press at this stage. So writing is very much creating individual artworks of a literary nature. So writing these beautiful, meticulously, painstakingly handwritten manuscripts and working with artists to illuminate them and decorate them, but they're really a combination of books and real art objects. And she has this favorite collaborator, collaboratrice, Anastasia, who she mentions by name, who creates these beautiful illuminations which she thinks are the best she's ever seen by man or woman. But it's also about securing patronage. So she's well positioned to find wealthy patrons and find wealthy courtiers to sell her works to. So she manages to make a career out of this. She manages to support her children, educate them, broker them good marriages, and she manages to support herself through her writing. And not only is she writing about popular themes of the day, she also dedicates herself to writing about women. And we can call her a proto feminist. She wouldn't conform to sort of the ideals of feminism of the modern day, because she actually doesn't argue that women should be placed equal to men, but she does contextualize the roles of women and defend women from slander. So she's a very interesting female figure and a trailblazer till the end of her life. She doesn't marry again, and she eventually retires to a convent in her final years.

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Charlotte Vosper (14:17)

As you say, she is a hugely impressive medieval figure. You describe her as a proto feminist writer. I think that's really interesting. To what extent do you think we can read modern identities back into the past?

Catherine Pangonis (14:30)

I don't think we can. It's simply the ways of seeing the world and the frameworks of different time periods are so dramatically different. But I think we can definitely see the beginnings of modern ideas and comparable ideas in the Middle Ages that reflect how we're beginning to think now. There are obviously huge points of connection between humans between centuries, between millennia. You know, you read the Iliad and you feel the emotion of some of these heroes just as you feel today. So we do have these philosophical and emotional and human threads linking us. There's a huge amount of shared experience, but at the same time, I think projecting modern values onto the past is very risky. Christine, some of what she says about women, you might say, is problematic by modern feminist standards. The way she writes about sex workers. Although she's very progressive her day, she is not progressive enough to be called, you know, a good feminist in the 21st century. But nevertheless, her work did lay the foundations, I think, of modern feminism to an extent. You know, I mean, not in a direct way, not as directly as Simone de Beauvoir and women writing centuries later, but the fact that in what she did, you know, she built a career for herself as a woman in a time when this was not done in arenas that were usually the sole preserves of men. And she wrote whole tracts in defence of women, sort of rehabilitating women and challenging harsh critical stereotyping of women in other medieval works of literature. We can definitely see her as a key figure in the very early phases of the feminist movement, even if her personal values and the framework in which she operated were very different to how feminism functions today.

Charlotte Vosper (16:13)

You talk about Christine de Pizan's impact there, but in some of the stories you tell throughout the book, it is really clear how these women have shaped France. Like Joan of Arc, who raises the siege Orleans, or Olympe de Gouges, who set the stage for reform, as you've said. But are there any women in your book whose influence it's kind of harder to quantify? In the case of Joan Josephine Bonaparte, in the book, you talk of soft power. I wonder if this is the case in any of the other women's lives.

Catherine Pangonis (16:38)

Yes, I think soft power plays a critical role throughout. And I think, as I mentioned at the beginning, in the selection of the women, I was motivated by two things. One was choosing women who were really active political agents. And in that category I would include Christine de Pizan. I would also include certainly Louise Michel, this incredible activist during the Paris Commune and often hailed as the Mother of Anarchy. I would include Olympe de Gouges, certainly Josephine Baker as well. So very diverse array of women. But there are also women who. Their influence is less tangible. I wanted women who, through looking at their lives, stories and their experiences, we could shed light on less well known parts of French history. And in that category, I would include really interesting women like Saint Bathilde. We mentioned her already, Beatrice de Planysol. She was a not very wealthy woman, not a very powerful woman who lived during the Cathar heresy in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade and the sort of birth of Inquisition in Europe. And we have these amazing records about how she spoke, how she lived her life and what she thought and felt and her love life, actually. And then of course, you mentioned Josephine, the Empress, the wife of Napoleon. She had a combination of soft and hard power, actually, but most of her power came through her influence as a cultural icon and as a cultural change maker. And her profound influence on her husband, Napoleon, who needs no introduction. There are other women who follow in that vein in the book. Bert Morisot, you know, changes how women's lives are viewed in art. And Bert Morisot's ways of seeing women in domestic scenes, we still look at those images and they still influence the way we think. The way HPF wrote about love and tragedy and emotional trauma. That the power in her voice, it's still. We still hear it all the time and it still affects us. So there is this soft and artistic power that I think reverberates throughout history from these women. And I've tried to capture that in the book as well.

Charlotte Vosper (18:38)

That's a really interesting way of understanding female power. I want to kind of talk about female roots to power a little bit more, actually. Do you think there is a relationship between female roots to power and gender expression in the lives of women covered in your book? In your book, you talk about the cross dressing of George sand, the 19th century writer, and of Missy, who has a relationship with the 20th century actress Colette. In the lives of the women covered in your book, do you see a link between power and gender expression?

Catherine Pangonis (19:06)

Yes. And it's actually, it's very hard with some of these women to quantify their gender expression because these are times when the terminology we might use today to discuss this issue didn't really exist. And also, we have to remember, this was a time both in the time of Missy and George sand and some of the other women discussed in this book, this was a time where actually wearing men's clothes was illegal for women and they had to apply for special permission to wear trousers in public and often cite men medical or practicality reasons to do so. Now, this in many cases was formality. And actually the law was actually only repealed in the 21st century. It was still officially on the books all this time, which is mad when we think about it. I think there's certainly evidence to suggest they were fluid in their sexuality, even if it isn't written explicitly for all of them, such as George sand, you know, and also for Sarah Bernhardt, one of the most interesting women in this book, this amazing actress and icon of the Belle Epoque. Her relationships with women are, I think, think implicit rather than explicit. And as with George sand, whether or not her decision to wear trousers and men's clothes amounts to gender fluidity or a particular type of gender identity, it is hard to say specifically. But I do think the wearing of men's clothes and fluidity of sexuality is part of their empowerment. It's part of how they want to say they will not be oppressed, they will not be controlled, they will not adhere to the social norms and they want to live their own lives on their own terms. And it's actually very interesting if you think about how influential and celebrated these women are in the society of their day. It actually makes you question, was there some sort of regression in terms of acceptance of gender identity and fluidity between then and now? I mean, for. Although it was illegal for women to wear men's clothes at that time, and homosexuality was illegal for a long time, although generally targeted men rather than women in terms of prosecution, these women were still very much accepted by society, even in their trousers. And I do think that their decision to present themselves exactly as they wish to and not care what was expected of them was a major statement about empowerment and taking control of their lives and their identities into their own hands.

Charlotte Vosper (21:21)

I think it's also important to recognise that some of the women in your book have particularly complex legacies. As you suggest in the book, not all of these women were morally upstanding. I'm thinking of the likes of Coco Chanel. Perhaps you could tell us about their stories and how you dealt with trying to recognise their historical impact, while also kind of giving due attention to the less deserving aspects of their life stories.

Catherine Pangonis (21:44)

Yeah, thank you. That was an interesting question. It was a tough one to navigate. It was a fine line to tread in evaluating how to acknowledge their contributions and their status as important icons of French history, while also contextualizing that these are not necessarily women that we should look up to, certainly not across all aspects of their lives, but they are an important part of the historical record. As I've said already, I think projecting moral values onto figures of the past is just tricky and not very rewarding because they just don't fit well. These were women who lived in more or less the same society we live in now. Although there have been seismic changes, the value systems are still similar. They're not so far removed that we say, oh, well, they lived in a different time. Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathiser. You know, she stayed in Paris during the Occupation, lived in a lavish suite at the Ritz with her Nazi lover, who was a serving officer in the ss, I believe. And she did offer her services as a spy on behalf of the Nazi regime. So she liberated women from corsets. She was an amazing figure for female fashion and for modernizing how women dressed to make things more comfortable, more practical, more minimalistic. This is iconic, but we cannot divorce this from the fact that her personal conduct was terrible. And at the same time, can we judge someone who was a French person living through Nazi occupied through the war? Many people would argue that the punishment of collaborators, so women who did have Nazi lovers during the occupation, women who did collaborate with the Nazis, many people argue, and I'm inclined to agree with them in some ways, that the punishments were too harsh. You know, women had their head shaved and published. They were whipped, they were shamed terribly. After the liberation, perhaps these were poor women who had no one else to protect them, had very little choices. But I would argue that Chanel did have choices. You know, in the aftermath of the war, she retreated to Switzerland, Iceland. In addition, she tried to capitalize on the anti Jewish laws that were passed by the Nazis to get more control of her perfume business, which she'd sort of outsourced to Jewish businessmen, and realized that she didn't have a very favorable share of the profit. So she tried to capitalize on anti Jewish laws to have their share of the business confiscated from them. So her conduct during the war is really reprehensible. And I think this is important to think about. You can love Chanel designs. Certainly the modern fashion house is very far removed from. From the original woman. But, you know, this is something that's important to think about. And I have fully acknowledged that in this book, at the same time, women like Josephine Baker, who's the direct parallel to Coco Chanel, at this time, she's living in Paris at the same time, during the same war, she chose to offer her services to the French Resistance at great personal risk and to help Jewish families flee France and protect Jews. Rather than Coco Chanel, who, as I said, perhaps could have found ways to keep herself safe without cozying up so very closely to the Nazi regime.

Charlotte Vosper (24:35)

Zooming out now from the individual women, but still talking a little bit about the method behind your book. How did you use your sources to understand the mindsets, thoughts and feelings of the women you included in your book? Do you think we can access the kind of core lived experience of women who didn't leave their own written records?

Catherine Pangonis (24:54)

It's a radically different question whether you're talking about women of the 20th centuries and women from. From the Middle Ages. But we see the evolution, change in source material over the book, actually. It's why this was a really interesting project. It was a very difficult project because of the breadth of the time periods talked about and the sheer number of women from different periods and regions. The source work was radically different from one chapter to another. So with Saint Balthild, you're relying on archaeological evidence and a core document, a saint's life, the life of Saint Balthilde, which was written not long after her death. But the actual original manuscript doesn't survive, and we're looking at later copies of it. And it's hard for Saint Bathild, really hard to construct her real identity and really tangible details about her life. But every century that passes, it becomes a bit easier. So with Joan of Arc, we have a wealth of sources. She didn't write for herself. She was famously illiterate. But the incredible story of this peasant girl who rose to become one of the leaders of the French army for a short period has been very well recorded. And we have her trial records, which are fantastic. I mean, the trial of Joan of Arc is horrible. Reading this poor girl, she's a teenager, potentially with some mental illness or with religious inspiration and vision. You know, it depends on your perspective on that. But she's a very earnest person, and her voice really comes through in the trial records. It's the same for Beatrice de Planisol. I mentioned her briefly. She was sort of a nobody. She was a woman from a small community in the Ariage in southern France who was caught up in the Cathar heresy and underwent probably the first inquisition in Europe. And she spoke just with this disarming frankness about key moments and events and relationships in her life. And because she happened to be being interviewed by a particularly meticulous inquisitor who had become a pope. In fact, we have these really detailed accounts which really do seem to capture her voice in many ways. So the trial documents of Joan of Arc and the Inquisition documents of Beatrice of Planisol do give this really amazing insight into the mindset and the voice of these women, even though they couldn't write for themselves. To what extent we can take these documents at face value is unclear. You know, to what extent these documents are performative. It's a question of how much can you tell from someone's life and mindset by looking at their Instagram feed, Even if they post every day, it's carefully curated. It's not necessarily an accurate look at who they are and how they're feeling. We see this down the ages. I mean, I mean, Sarah Bernhardt wrote this, an autobiography, as did George sand, but they chose to emphasise certain periods and certain relationships and completely exclude others. So to what extent these documents can be taken at face value is kind of spurious, but they definitely give an insight into how the women want to be presented. When women start writing autobiographies. But I think as we get later, I think actually when we have letters, that's where the real insight comes. When we have personal letters and letters written about them by their friends, as we have in the case of George sand, of Sarah Bernhardt, of Coco Chanel, of Josephine Baker. This is, I think, when we start to see more clearly. And then of course, with later women like Edith Piaf, Brigitte Bardot, we have journalistic coverage, we do start to get a much fuller picture. So we have so many different windows into these women's lives and tastes and visions. And it certainly becomes easier the later we are in history because we just have more to go.

Charlotte Vosper (28:18)

So kind of taking a step back from those individual windows, what is the big picture? What continuities do you see across the book and across the women's experiences through time?

Catherine Pangonis (28:28)

On the one hand, what connection can there really be between an Anglo Saxon slave girl who's trafficked from Britain to the Kingdom of Frankia and marries the King of the Franks and becomes Queen? This is Saint Berthold and Brigitte Bardot, sort of screen icon and, and political provocateur and activist. But on the other hand, that there are huge points of connection because most of the women in this book are actually self made, which is really interesting. What I think unites all the women in this book, with maybe a couple of exceptions, is that they did not follow the paths that were laid out for them at birth. You know, Saint Beltilde becoming Queen of the Franks. No one would have seen that coming. Christine de Pisan being an unmarried woman generating her own income from writing, no one would have seen that coming. Joan of Arc, a peasant girl from Domremy, becoming the leader of the French army and one of the most important women in France and this cultural icon over centuries, no one would have seen that. George sand, from a very wealthy and aristocratic family, certainly on one side, you know, to become this trouser wearing, cigar smoking linchpin of the Parisian literary scene in avant garde of the time. Again, this was her controlling her own destiny. Destiny. Most of these women have been trailblazers and I think it's that the thread that we see linking the vast majority of the Women in this book is that whether they're heroines or villains or something in between, they are all refusing to take a life they are unhappy with and take it lying down. They are all trailblazers and change makers and they all manage to take control of their lives and their destinies and position themselves as active agents in their historical period and in their own lives. And I think that's amazing and I think that is what has stood out about all of these women.

Charlotte Vosper (30:15)

That's something I wanted to ask you about, actually, because in the book you write that the piece is a testament to and an acknowledgement of the countless women who are not included in the book. So do you think we can use the extraordinary women that you feature in the book to understand the lives of ordinary women?

Catherine Pangonis (30:31)

I think we can certainly use them to understand the struggles of ordinary women. I mean, a good example is George Sand. There's this moment where the young George sand, she's begging her mother to run away with her from the aristocratic family that they live with, you know, with her grandmother's family, and let's stay together and go and start a hat shop in Orleans. And her mother sits her down and says to her, like, darling, you haven't got a clue. It would be impossible for us to do this. You have no idea how dangerous it is for women without money and protection. And it's this shattering of this illusion that anything is possible. And I think in moments like that, you can see just how difficult life has been for ordinary women in France over the centuries. You look at Beatrice de Planisol, this medieval woman who was subjected to the Inquisition. She's married off at a young age to an older man. She's raped by someone in the village, someone else attempts to rape her. There's no punishment for these people. These women suffer horrible fates. Despite their ability. I think they do draw attention to deep seated misogyny and racial prejudice that has existed in French society for a very long time, and not French society more than any other. In fact, these are ubiquitous issues in women's lives. Even in looking at these women who have in many cases, arguably been very successful and from many perspectives have led charmed lives, they've all been subjected to powerlessness and oppression. And whether or not, you know, these women's lives can really give us insight into the lives of ordinary women, I think what they do show is that some of these pervasive issues, such as racism and misogyny, are present for women, no matter who you are. And they do exist still today. You know, so much progress is being made all the time, and I think many women live freer lives than they would have done 50 or 100 years ago. But there is still work to be done.

Charlotte Vosper (32:16)

Now, talking of moments of change and looking to the future, what do you hope will come of your female focused history of France?

Catherine Pangonis (32:24)

I hope that this book will show readers that French history is much more two dimensional than they might previously have thought and introduce them to some women who perhaps they hadn't heard of before. So I think people will have heard of Joan of Arc, they will have heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine, they will have heard of Brigitte Bardot. But I'm not sure how many of my readers, particularly English readers, have heard of Louise Michel or Paulette Nardal. Paulette Nardal is a really interesting figure who we haven't actually covered yet. She's a black Martinican woman writer who comes to Paris to study. She's one of the first black female students at the Sorbonne. She founds the first black literary salon in Paris and she sort of lays the foundations of the Negritude movement, which is very close to the Harlem Renaissance. There's so much more to be read about the Negritude movement, about her experiences, her own writing. And I just hope that these small glimpses I give of these women's lives and achievements will encourage readers to read more widely and to find out more about different bits of French history that they perhaps they hadn't encountered in the classroom or in mainstream texts. So I hope that what my book can do is plant seeds in readers minds because it's by no means a comprehensive and exhaustive work on the roles of women in French history. But I hope it will just sort of whet the appetite, pique the interest, and show readers that there's perhaps much more to French history than they might have originally thought.

Charlotte Vosper (33:46)

Well, that's a very exciting and interesting vision for your book. Thank you very much for spending the time to talk to me about it today.

Catherine Pangonis (33:53)

Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to be on the podcast.

History Extra / Expedition Unknown Podcast Host (33:57)

That was Catherine Pangonis speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Catherine is a historian specializing in the medieval period and the author of A History of France in 21 women. And for more of Catherine's thoughts on change making historical women, you can read all about the formidable queens who ruled in medieval Jerusalem in her History Extra article, which is linked in the description of this episode.

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