In Conversation with Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador

Ferdie Rous | 26th April 2021 | Uncategorised

"International Women's Day", Foreign and Commonwealth Office. CC BY 2.0

Sylvie Bermann was France’s ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2017, the first woman to hold the role.

Sylvie Bermann is a career diplomat who was France’s ambassador to the United Kingdom from 2014 to 2017, the first woman to hold the role. Earlier this year she published a book, Goodbye Britannia, in which she examines British identity and the reasons for Brexit.

When Sylvie Bermann was appointed French ambassador to the Court of St James in 2014, the first French woman to be so, numerous Brits warned her that the UK would be a tad “boring” compared to her previous posting in China.

“I did not expect then to witness a revolution or live through a historic moment,” the diplomat of 40 years writes in her latest book, Goodbye Britannia, about Brexit. Bermann, who now chairs the prestigious Institute of Advanced Studies in National Defence in Paris, pulls no punches in her book’s damning critique of Britain’s decision to leave the EU. She presents the UK’s exit from the EU as an irrational pursuit of an ideological goal, rooted in a mythologised sense of British superiority, in part...

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