I had my first meeting with my PhD supervisor two days ago and it looks like I'll have to continue working on Rouen 😔✌️
I will still be working on republican culture across different social demographics... but only in Rouen and its sourrouding localities. He was very impressed with the manuscrit d'Horcholle that I had resdiscovered last year, after laying in wait for over a hundred years first at the municipal archives of Rouen, then at the departamental archives of the Seine-Maritime, only to find its way at some point to the Patrimoine Library in Rouen. I guess it is tru, that I've managed to accumulate a lot of knowledge and sources of the city, and that positioning my analysis on the national scale would be too broad and too long even for a PhD. Eh.
What made me look at it positively was my supervisor saying: "If you do this correctly, then by the end of your resesech you will have known every inhabitant of Rouen by name, and not a single one of them would have been able to even sneeze without you knowing." Lmao.
From other things, I will be probably doing (paid) seminars about the Frev for undergraduates, starting in September. So that's pretty cool, too.
In the meantime, I will be applying for a scholarship and trying to work out how to approach my research. The prons and cons of doing social history of the Frev:
Pros: Hardly anyone has been doing it since the 50s.
Cons: Hardly anyone has been doing it since the 50s.














