Enfilade

From The Lewis Walpole Library:

Emma Rothschild | The Counter-Revolution of 1776 in France

29th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, New Haven, 29 October 2026, 5.30pm

1776 began with the promise of reform in France, which was abandoned after the dismissal of the economist and finance minister A.R.J.Turgot in May 1776. The lecture will be about rumors—that Turgot was planning to sell Saint-Domingue (the modern Haiti) and to abolish slavery in the French empire—and about the counter-revolution that followed Turgot’s fall, with enduring consequences across the Atlantic world.

Emma Rothschild is Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard, affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School, and professeur invitée at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, Paris. She is the author of An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries (2021), The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (2011), and Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (2001).

Poster draws on Coiffure en médaillon, coiffure à la zodiaque, ca. 1776. The image appears in the 1777 volume of the The Lady’s Magazine.