Emmanuelle Retaillaud
Emmanuelle Retaillaud has been a full professor in contemporary history at the Institut politique de Lyon since 2020, where she teaches the history of contemporary France since 1945 and leads the seminar ‘Gender and Sexualities: Historical Approaches, 19th–21st Centuries’. She is affiliated with the Rhône-Alpes Historical Research Laboratory (LARHRA-UMR 5190), within the ‘Gender and Society’ research area.
Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of 20th-century France, initially centring on the history of drug use in interwar France, and more recently in the fields of gender history, women’s history and the history of sexualities.
She has focused more specifically on the history of lesbians and ‘flappers’ during the interwar period, studying the life and work of the writer Mireille Havet (1898–1932), as well as on the comparative history of homosexuality from the 19th century to the present day in France, UK, Germany and the United States.
She has also explored the construction of social imaginaries and gender stereotypes through the figure of ‘la Parisienne’ (from the 18th century to the present day), prompting reflection on the status and image of women in contemporary French society. This analysis of social representations also concerned the chrononym ‘années folles’ in the collective work Les noms d’époque, edited by the historian Dominique Kalifa.
Her current research focuses on the history of sexualities and, more specifically, on the interrelationships between intimacy, sexualities and the political sphere, within the context of the French republican regime since the 1880s, with the aim of shedding light on the intimate and carnal underbelly of an androcentric political world, which has long been built upon the rejection or denial of the body, emotions and their effects.
In this perspective, she is co-organising the multidisciplinary symposium ‘Politics Gripped by Eros ’, to be held in January 2027 in Lyon, and is currently preparing an article on the murder of Pierre Chevallier, the UDSR deputy and mayor of Orléans, by his wife in August 1952, which forms a key milestone in her planned book on the relationship between Eros and politics.
The aim of the visit to the MFO is to study the repercussions of this case in England, and at the same time to research British cases involving similar issues, notably the Profumo affair in 1963.
SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS
- « Un septennat qui finit comme un roman : le mariage de Gaston Doumergue à l’Élysée », Rétronews, à paraître courant 2027.
- « La trouble identité de Pierre Chevallier, ministre assassiné par sa femme », Rétronews, 10 septembre 2025.
- « Un amour de jeunesse d’Aristide Briand », Rétronews, février 2025.
- « Mars 1892 : le divorce en catimini de Georges Clemenceau », Rétronews, 17 septembre 2024.
- Sylvie Chaperon, Catherine Deschamps, Emmanuelle Retaillaud, Christelle Taraud, Histoire des sexualités en France. XIXe-XXIe siècle, Paris, Armand Colin, 2024
- « Le Paris des années folles, un espace de liberté pour les femmes ? » dans Camille Morineau et Lucia Pesapane (dir.), Pionnières. Artistes dans le Paris des années folles, Paris, Éditions de la réunion des musées nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris, 2022.
- La Parisienne, histoire d’un mythe, du siècle des Lumières à nos jours, Paris, Seuil, collection « L’univers historique », 2020, 419 p.
- « Les drogues dans La Garçonne, transgression ou convention ? », actes du colloque « Itinéraires de La Garçonne », 16 et 17 septembre 2022, Université d’Angers, sous la direction de Christine Bard, Marine Chaleroux et Bruna Holderbaum, à paraître en 2025.
- « Années folles, rugissantes ou dorées ? Nommer les années vingt », dans Dominique Kalifa (dir.), Les noms d’époque, Paris, Gallimard, « Bibliothèque des histoires », 2020.
