Illegitimacy and Abandonment in the Age of Napoleon

Location: The Foundling Museum, London

Postcode: WC1N 1AZ

Start Date: 22/01/2017

End Date: 22/01/2017

Details: Join author Deborah Jay and historian Kate Gibson for an enlightening talk on the treatment of illegitimacy and child abandonment in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe.

How did illegitimacy affect the emotional and physical welfare of children? What prejudices did they suffer? Comparing British and European attitudes towards illegitimacy and child abandonment, Kate Gibson and Deborah Jay discuss the situation in Britain, France and Italy, before and after the French Revolution and implementation of the Napoleonic Code. Followed by a Q&A from the audience.

14:00, free with Museum admission

Deborah Jay is an historian focusing on France and Italy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following a Masters in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction at the University of East Anglia, she published her first biography, Napoleon’s Other Wife, on Marie-Louise Bonaparte, the second and lesser-known wife of Napoleon.

Kate Gibson is a writer and PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of illegitimacy, alongside a wider interest in the history of gender, sexuality and the body in eighteenth-century Europe.