COURSE DESCRIPTION

France has fascinated and puzzled visitors for more than two hundred years now. For good reasons. It has been the “first daughter of the Catholic Church” and a hotbed of secularism, a country with a deep-rooted revolutionary tradition and a tradition of authoritarianism, the proud home of a human rights tradition and the breeding ground of virulent racism, a hothouse of modern art and a protector of tradition. In this course we will set out to understand France in historical perspective.

We will examine the history of France through the tumultuous experience of revolution, war, and empire. We will study several episodes of crisis in close detail—from the French Revolution to contemporary struggles over identity and integration. We will analyze long-running developments in French society and culture—the emergence of class society, industrialization, the survival of the peasantry, movements in high culture, changing roles for women, colonialism and decolonization, immigration. We will ask how French men and women of various social positions experienced this history. And we will look to the ways in which this history has been reflected in art, literature, film, and music.

Readings include a textbook of French history and a lively mix of important primary & secondary sources. We’ll watch a series of films that dramatize this history. The course will include lectures, frequent discussions, and class activities. There are no prerequisites. No familiarity with French or French history is assumed.

LEARNING GOALS

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Identify and describe the main events, personalities and developments in modern French history;
• Identify and describe how this history was experienced by people of various social positions;
• Identify and describe some of the ways in which historians have approached the history of modern France (their methods, their arguments, their sources).