Emancipating Marianne: Gendering French Diplomacy and the Quai d'Orsay in European Context, 1944-1950

This study challenges the assertion that there existed few women in the Quai d'Orsay, with none in influential positions throughout the twentieth century. Unlike other European foreign ministries, French women were admitted to the diplomatic service throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and as early as 1928, were able to apply for diplomatic posts despite not gaining the vote until 1944. Albeit remaining legally subordinate to men until the Matrimonial Bill of 1965, this dissertation tells the story of the French female civil servant, who has hitherto been written out of academic writing and of popular memory on French diplomacy. Despite their slow transgression of numerous borders and overseas diplomatic ranks in the aftermath of the First World War, the Nazi occupation of France throughout the Second World War facilitated a gendered imbalance that precipitated women's demotion from previously-held positions to mere secretarial roles in Paris. An examination of the Annuaire Consulaire et Diplomatique, the official annual register of diplomatic staff, reveals that women were in fact admitted to overseas embassies and consulates on equitable terms with men until 1946. Drawing on a partial-prosopographical approach in examining French and British diplomatic archives and deposited oral history interviews, this thesis asserts that whilst Marianne, symbol of the Republic, was emancipated from the chains of wartime occupation in the late 1940s, the French female diplomat was not.