Niklaus Cartwright French Lecture: Clandestine Correspondence at Court, Exeter

Visiting speaker Professor Catriona Seth from the University of Oxford will talk on: ‘Clandestine Correspondence at Court’ - Marie Antoinette’s exchanged notes and letters with the Imperial Ambassador to France.

The lecture commences at 5.30pm on Thursday 29 November in Lecture Theatre 1, Queen’s Building. Attendance is free of charge but you will need to reserve your place by booking online here. 

Guests are warmly welcome to stay for refreshments afterwards.

The lecture will appeal to students and alumni with an interest in the Humanities, particularly 18th Century France.

The Niklaus-Cartwright lecture is named after two eminent French academics, Professor Robert Niklaus, former Head of French at Exeter and his student Michael Cartwright who went on to become an eminent academic in his own right and generously bequeathed funding for French at Exeter.  Both Niklaus and Cartwright were experts in 18th century French.

Lecture Abstract from Professor Seth:

During over 20 years Marie Antoinette exchanged notes and letters with the Imperial Ambassador to France, count Mercy. Was she a naive puppet of the Habsburgs, betraying French secrets? Is there any foundation to the accusations of political scheming made at her trial? The more than 100 letters and notes, many of them unpublished, which she wrote to the diplomat during her time in Versailles and at the Tuileries give answers to these and to many other questions.

Speaker

Catriona Seth was appointed to the Marshal Foch Chair at Oxford three years ago after a career spent in France. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and a membre associé of the Académie Royale de Belgique. She has worked extensively on French literature, editing Les Liaisons dangereuses and the works of Germaine de Staël for the Pléiade. She has published autobiographical texts by women along with a book-length study of inoculation and an intellectual biography of the poet Parny.