HIS 520SEM - History of France

The History of France seminar means to acquaint you with major historiographical trends (past and present) in the study of French history. We will be covering a vast time period from the Middle Ages to the post-war through social history, cultural history, political history perspectives. The thrust of the course is therefore on variations starting with a Marxisant Annales-School analysis of the concept of Three Orders governing society, which emerged around the year 1000. We will then continue with a biographical analysis of a famous court case in the sixteenth century also made into a very successful film, the history of emotions follows through a series of historical conflicts animated by imagery, then a socio-cultural study of Enlightenment France leading up to the French Revolution where we will encounter Georges Lefebvre’s classic study of the outbreak of the Revolution, a narrative approach to events through Timothy Tackett’s retelling of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s flight to Varennes –a turning point in the French Revolution– and Katie Jarvis’s gender-based analysis of market women in Revolutionary Paris. We then read a very recent study of French imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century, T.J. Clark’s analysis of Impressionism and Robert Hughes on Cubism; Vanessa Schwartz on popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Finally we will look at historian Marc Bloch’s experience of the defeat of France in 1940 and Julian Jackson’s portrait of De Gaulle through his role in WWII and the Algerian conflict. It is Algeria that will close the course with Ethan Katz’s study of Jewish and Muslim relations.

Credits: 3