In September 1969, Gabrielle Russier, a French schoolteacher in her 30s, committed suicide. Almost immediately her death, and the reasons behind it, came to dominate the news cycle in France and beyond. Kept alive by an enormous volume of books, films, chart-topping songs, and coverage in print and electronic media, the episode engaged the attention of a wide spectrum of European and North American intellectual, feminist, and cultural opinion during the years that followed. To the present day, the Russier case remains embedded in French consciousness as a symbol of the student revolt of 1968 and the status of women in modern society—a story that has gone unchanged, and unchallenged, for more than half a century.

What accounts for the extraordinary fixity of the image of Gabrielle Russier since the 1960s, even as social, cultural, and legal norms have dramatically changed during the same period? In this talk with Ray Douglas, the Russell Colgate Distinguished University Professor of History, we'll examine some of the reasons for the appearance of a massive consensus on the Russier case, a phenomenon that yields valuable and surprising insights into the ways in which memory and meaning are constructed and preserved.

Lunch provided while supplies last.