Charris De Smet

Charris De Smet is a postdoctoral fellow at the Research Foundation Flanders and affiliated with the Centre for Political History (PoHis) at UAntwerp, Belgium. She specialises in parliamentary cultures, politics of consumption and female-authored political writings in nineteenth-century Europe with a special focus on France. She obtained her joint PhD degree in History from the University of Antwerp and the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in 2024. As a Sofina Boël fellowship holder, she conducted research at the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine in Paris in 2022.

The project

Title: Female Editors and Their Engagement with 'the Political' in the Nineteenth-Century Parisian Fashion Press

"This research project aims to revisit female political agency in the mainstream, non-militant Parisian women's press, and questions how fashion journals functioned as a forum for women editors and writers as well as a disenfranchised female readership to engage with politics between 1815 and 1851. Current research into the nineteenth-century women's press has tended to focus on a handful of progressive women writers and periodical editors. Reproducing the self-fashioning strategies adopted by the periodical press to avoid censorship, mainstream women's magazines are often mistakenly seen as apolitical and conformist within existing scholarship. However, as my research will show, 'conformist' cover pages did not exclude subtle political discourses. Through an in-depth and comparative discourse analysis of a representative corpus of Parisian women's magazines, I will examine how they engaged in 'political communication' under the innocent cover offered by the French fashion magazine during the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, on topics as diverse as citizenship, the nature of political authority and women's access to the public sphere. Moreover, I will analyse these political discourses in their context through a network analysis of the female editors and journalists involved. Given the unparalleled popularity of French fashion journalism in nineteenth-century Europe, Parisian magazines will prove to be the ideal test case for this study."

Hosting institution: Université Paris Cité

Selective Bibliography

• De Smet Charris, Van Damme Ilja and Beyen Marnix (ed.), The politics of consumption in the Modern Age: discourse, regulation and material practices, London: Routledge, 2025.
• Charris De Smet, “Marketing the French Revolution? Revolutionary auction advertisements in comparative perspective (Paris, 1778–1793)”, French History, 26(1), 2022, 68–99,
• De Smet, Charris, “‘The people, too, can be consumers’: debating French consumer citizenship in the ‘Age of Revolution’ (c. 1830–c. 1848)”, History of Retailing and Consumption, 8(1), 2023, 14–30.
• De Smet, Charris, “Towards a bourgeois public sphere of consumption: the language of consumption as found in auction advertisements in late eighteenth-century Paris (1760–1778)”, History of Retailing and Consumption, 9(2), 2023, 116–140.
• De Smet, Charris, “French parliamentary debates about luxury and consumption in the Estates General and the National (Constituent) Assembly of 1789”, in: Dinacci, Marcello et al. (ed.), Il mondo in subbuglio: Ricerche sull’età delle rivoluzioni (1789-1849), Napels: FedOAPress, 2022, p. 345-358.